Buddhism#now: Big Questions. Inner Peace. LOL

1. MONDAY

Happiness

MONKFISH Everybody wants to be happy, that seems pretty obvious, but if you look around people are unhappy, miserable, stressed-out…

DVD …hacked off…

MONKFISH …and so on. There seems to be a lot of unhappiness about and really everybody just wants happiness. It’s a mad, mad world.

DVD So, clever-clogs, explain it all. You’re the brain. You’ve been meditating for months and going to those freaky classes, so you explain it—I’m all ears.

MONKFISH OK, well the first thing to consider is that although everybody wants happiness, the weird thing is, we don’t actually know what happiness is.

DVD I do. Man, it’s a smart set of wheels, loads of dosh, sexy girl, X Factor finals, iPad, pecs like a weightlifter and a great tan. It’s not that hard to figure out.

MONKFISH That’s the kind of list everybody comes up with…

DVD …apart from the girls…

MONKFISH …and the funny thing is, these don’t bring happiness.

DVD Come on you’re joking! Get me down the pub with a couple of lads and six pints of lager, I’m well pleased.

MONKFISH Yeah I agree, lots of things bring us pleasure like chocolate, beer, new cars, money…

DVD …girls…

MONKFISH …and so on and so on. But then we get confused, because we think pleasure is the same as long-term happiness. But it’s not.

DVD I don’t follow this, I’m a bit confused. More than a bit confused. Totally clouded up. Which isn’t unusual, talking to you.

MONKFISH You remember the volcano that blew up in Iceland in 2010, stopped all the planes.

DVD Yeah, my boss was stuck in an airport for ages, he was well dis-chuffed.

MONKFISH Did you remember seeing headlines in the papers about ‘trapped in paradise’ and ‘bored with chips’.

DVD There was lots of that sort of stuff. People were totally fed up.

MONKFISH There they were, in their minds ‘trapped in paradise’. They were on some beautiful tropical island but all they wanted to do was to get home. So the tropical island which had been a source of great pleasure up till then, with pina coladas on the beach and scuba diving and whatever, suddenly lost its appeal.

DVD Yeah, well, you’d be peed off if you wanted to get home.

MONKFISH That’s the point you see. The island hadn’t changed, that was still the same: the beach was there, the sun was there, the pina coladas were there…

DVD …and the girls…

MONKFISH …and everything else! So nothing had changed, but everything had changed.

DVD I’m losing you again.

MONKFISH OK—you assume a tropical island and beautiful girls and lots of money and sunshine and pina coladas and all that, make you happy. Well they bring you some pleasure, but with a change of mind suddenly they stop bringing you any pleasure. When you want to get home but you’re stuck there, in an instant these things just fall flat. It’s like that with everything: you’re chomping down on a bar of chocolate and you hear the news that a leaking drain has been polluting the chocolate factory—straight away you feel sick. All the evidence...

DVD … there you go again, you and your science. I bet you’ve been reading New Scientist, what a geek…

MONKFISH …all the evidence points to the fact that things like winning the Lottery make people deliriously happy, but only for a short time. The strange thing is that after a year or so, they usually go back to being exactly what they were before they won the Lottery. [1] So if they were happy originally they go back to being as happy as they were before, if they were miserable originally, they go back to being as miserable as they were…

DVD I can feel this grey cloud of misery starting to fall all over me right now…

MONKFISH …although the good news is that meditation can change this effect. We’ll maybe talk about this on Friday. Billionaires in the end often find their only pleasure is in giving money away [2]

DVD So you’re saying things that make me happy, don’t make me happy. You’re crazy!

MONKFISH That’s not respectful to people with mental health problems.

DVD I’m talking about you, you big chicken tikka, not them.

MONKFISH Anyway, it’s not quite like that. Certain things bring you pleasure and that pleasure can last for a short time or a long time or whatever, and it can be different kinds of pleasure—it can be music, ice cream…

DVD …girls…

MONKFISH …smart cars, celebrity magazines, sharp clothes, flat screen HD 3D television, lots of money—but after a while the pleasure wears off.[3] Anyway, even if you’ve got lots of money, you might spend your life worrying about somebody stealing it, or thinking you’ve got no real friends.

DVD I’d be surrounded with bosom buddies.

MONKFISH Actually there was a story about a chap who had won the Lottery. He bought this enormous house, he had a snooker room and a swimming pool and his own bar and everything. But he just sat in the house. If he went out he had to have a couple of minders with him. Everywhere he went, people wanted to muscle in. They acted like they wanted to be friends, but actually they were just after his money. Or at least he never knew whether they were genuine friends or just money grabbers. He claimed he was happy, but it seemed a sad story. [4]

DVD Wouldn’t happen to me!

MONKFISH No I’m not saying it would, but there’s a lesson here.

DVD You and your lessons—just like a teacher!

MONKFISH The argument is that happiness isn’t really caused by external events or winning the Lottery. One winner with a potentially fatal medical condition said he would swap all his £19 million fortune for the peace of mind of knowing he had good health.[5]

DVD Well, obviously. So?

MONKFISH Happiness isn’t caused by other people or whatever—happiness seems to come and go with your state of mind. Think about going out for the night with your mates and it’s all fun in a bun, but then someone makes a snotty comment about your clothes or your girlfriend or your football skills…

DVD … last Friday, Bazza said I kicked the ball like a pregnant camel. I was going to sort him out big time, I was fuming...

MONKFISH …so, your state of mind changed dramatically, and all it took was a couple of words, then everything became miserable. So, rather than using the term ‘happiness’, because that leads to lots of confusion to do with pleasure and so on, I’m going to say that what we really want, what we really need, what gives us long-lasting, true happiness is actually ‘inner peace’.

DVD Aw, monk-y-man, now you sound like a preacher.

HAPPY OR LUCKY?

The root of happy is the Viking word ‘happ’ meaning chance or good luck. Today we still have some of this shade of meaning in words such as happen, hapless, happenstance, mishap and haphazard. By the sixteenth century, ‘happy’ came to have a meaning based on this idea of good luck: ‘having a feeling of… content of mind, arising from satisfaction with one’s circumstances or condition’ (Oxford English Dictionary). This meaning is nearer to the focus of the present book: inner peace. In later centuries, the word gradually became more associated with simply ‘pleasure’.

MONKFISH Stay with it for a while, just stay with me. Inner peace is the only long-lasting happiness that you can actually count on. The other stuff, the pleasures, come and go…

DVD …I’d just like some of them to come round a bit more often…

MONKFISH It’s perfectly OK to want things, if they meet a genuine need, but I was managing quite nicely with my old telly until someone dreamed up flat screen, then I became discontented with it. So I got a flat screen. Then somebody dreamed up High Definition. Then 3D. Next it’ll be smelly-vision. The manufacturers constantly want me to be unhappy with what I’ve got, so I’ll buy something new.

DVD But that’s progress, Marxist-Mickey. Anyway, I’m not sure about this—I feel as though you’re leading me up the garden path, but never mind, I’ll stick with it for a while. Just to humour you. Sad Billy-no-mates.

MONKFISH I’m not trying to make a point about economics and ‘evil businesses’ here. Of course we benefit in many ways from advance and inventions, and no-one wants to go back to a time of absolute destitution and rampant disease. Terribly deprived people can be helped immensely by improving their material circumstances [6] …

DVD …You wouldn’t like to bung a few quid my way ? …

MONKFISH …No, the point I was trying to make is how easily our attitudes shift—my old telly didn’t actually change, it was just my feelings about it. The best example is probably fashion. Last year’s fashionable grey colour clothes may have been hardly worn once when some guru decides black is this season’s colour, or maybe leather, then all the old colours go in the recycle bin. And it is difficult to know what our ‘true’ level of desire for things would be if advertising was completely eliminated.[7]

DVD So no ITV. I quite like the adverts if you must know.

MONKFISH Apart from struggling with endless choices, we often feel flooded with anxiety. Of course we may have serious, legitimate concerns, but when you think about it, many of our ‘problems’ are ‘First World problems’. People in very poor countries don’t need to worry about their iPads and expensive cars and smart TVs…

DVD …But they will, pretty soon.

INNER PEACE

Inner peace refers to a mind that is CALM, CLEAR and COMPASSIONATE.

Calm, because it isn’t constantly disturbed by grasping after ‘pleasurable’ external things and clinging onto them as a source of happiness, or avoiding ‘unpleasant’ things as a source of unhappiness. This mind also focuses on what is happening now.

It is clear. It sees through superficial attractions and irritations to the neutral nature of things and their changeability and connectedness. It also appreciates the illusory quality of the ‘I’.

This is a mind of quiet confidence and a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose arises from compassion, a concern for others rather than for the self. Warmth and closeness develop when the giant ‘I’ is put in its place—we develop a ‘good heart’.

All this will be explored in due course.

MONKFISH Sadly, that’s probably true. But just to add to your confusion, let’s look at pain.

DVD You’re a pain. Or when I hit my thumb with a hammer, that’s a pain. I lost my wallet last week, what a misery that was! I was on for hours chasing round to sort it. I went demented.

MONKFISH OK, lots of things cause us pain, like a bang on the thumb, losing your wallet, whatever. So we tend to think things out there, like a bang on the thumb, losing the wallet, getting the car scratched are what make us unhappy…

DVD …when I catch the little squit that scratched my car I’ll make sure he’s unhappy…

MONKFISH … in one sense they do bring unhappiness. They bring us pain. It may be physical pain or mental stress or whatever. But pain doesn’t mean that we always have to lose our ‘inner peace’.[8] In other words we don’t have to be ‘unhappy’ in the sense I’ve been trying to explain. [9]

DVD You’re mental. Look when I hit my thumb it hurts. End of!

MONKFISH Yes, I agree. There’s not much you can do about physical pain. It hurts and after a while the hurt goes away. But during that time, you don’t have to lose your inner peace.

DVD Look, you scream like a howler monkey if I twist your arm. It hurts! You get unhappy. Have you been taking some illegal substances? I know you meditate at that class you go to but I’m sure I’ve smelt some strange...

MONKFISH … OK, here’s one or two examples…

DVD …there you are—back in Professor Brainbox mode again.

MONKFISH You play a bit of footie don’t you?

DVD I’m the man, and with Ronaldo’s looks.

MONKFISH And are there times that you’ve had a kick on the shins in the middle of a game?

DVD Yeah that big, fat ugly defender from the...

MONKFISH … but often what you find is you get a kick or something and you just carry on and maybe you don’t notice it. Maybe it’s partly a biological thing—perhaps it’s down to the adrenalin or whatever, but people even break legs and carry on playing.

DVD I read about that—some guy in a match in...[10]

MONKFISH …the whole point of the story is that your attitude makes a difference. Did I tell you the story about the wasps?

GRATITUDE

A powerful exercise harks back to the idea of happiness as contentment arising from good luck. Just before going to sleep, think about the pleasures of the day, but with a particular slant: instead of emphasising ‘Wasn’t that wonderful (driving that car, eating that meal, seeing that film, talking to that friend…)’ try saying to yourself ‘I’m very lucky (that I was able to drive that car, eat that meal, see that film, talk to that friend…)’. Gratitude journals—if you can bring yourself to write such thoughts down—are actually found to be very powerful in improving your physical and mental health.[11]

DVD I’ve got this horrible idea that you’re going to.

MONKFISH Remember, we got wasps in the shed down on the allotment. I said I would go down and sort it out and Sarah said, ‘Don’t, you’ll get stung, it’s dangerous’ and I just said, ‘No problem, I’ll sort it’…

DVD …I’ve got a sad feeling about this…

MONKFISH …So I went down and I looked and I couldn’t find where the wasps were coming from. Then I saw this big lump of wood which was joining the shed to the greenhouse and they seemed to be coming from behind that. So I pulled and pulled and I couldn’t get it out. And I pulled and pulled some more, and meanwhile more and more wasps were flying around. And I kept on pulling, and it bent and bent and bent and finally the thing sprang out and hit me right on the side of the head…

DVD …So some good came of it…

MONKFISH …My ear swelled up straight away. It was throbbing. I was in such pain. And at that point all the wasps came out. I must have disturbed them at the bottom somewhere, and they started attacking me. You’ve got to admire them, they were totally kamikaze, no fear at all, they went straight for me all over. They were stinging me everywhere, even stinging my ear which was even more painful. They went inside my shirt, down my pants…

DVD …Not down the pants. No, that’s too awful to think about…

MONKFISH …I started to run! I was in such pain, but I was laughing so hard I was choking. I’d done exactly what I said I wouldn’t do, and exactly what Sarah predicted. I was running down the allotments, waving my hands, being attacked by a crowd of suicidal wasps and they wouldn’t stop. They’d been trained over a billion years to fly at the big stupid animal running away, waving its hands around, after their nest gets disturbed. I ran and ran and laughed and laughed and was in such pain.

DVD So you’re an idiot, a total clown, in pain and laughing at it, but that doesn’t prove anything.

MONKFISH It’s the attitude that counts. Remember those friends of mine, Chris and Sam, who went on holiday last year. They were going by train, got as far as Paris and couldn’t get on the TGV to wherever they were going…

DVD …me, I just fly QueasyJet. Dirt cheap. Burn those carbons. I mean, all this train business is just too middle class, save the whale...

MONKFISH …anyway, there they were in Paris, couldn’t get on the train, had to wait till the next day. Now they could have been totally fed up, ‘stuck in Paris for the night’ -actually what they thought was: ‘Brilliant, we’ve got a night in Paris’ …

DVD … wouldn’t work in Grimsby …

MONKFISH …So, their situation hadn’t changed—they were still ‘stuck in Paris’—but their attitude was totally different.

DVD Just like waiting for a bus when you’re soaking wet, in the wind and you’re rushing to get to an appointment. I’m not impressed.

HAPPINESS AND THE MIND

‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ (Hamlet act 2 scene 2).

More on this in chapter 2

MONKFISH I know it’s hard and I’m not saying I can do it all the time, but, strange you should mention it, the other night me and Sarah were coming home and it was raining buckets—somebody emptied the bath. We were out in the boondocks but on a busy road. Outside the bus stop there was this giant puddle. Anyway, there was an old fashioned shelter at the stop. If you stood back in the shelter, out of the rain, you couldn’t see the bus coming because you couldn’t see through the sides. Who designed those things?...

DVD ...Bus drivers with a sense of humour?...

MONKFISH ... If you went outside the shelter to look for the bus, you got soaked by the traffic. So we kept going in, then coming out, then going in again. We got drenched. And we just laughed and laughed and laughed…

DVD All right you two love-birds, try that when you’re late for work.

MONKFISH I won’t go on about it. The point is that some things bring you pain but they don’t have to alter your long-term inner peace. Some things bring you short-term pleasure like chocolate, or six pints of lager or new cars, but they don’t give you long-term inner peace. The pleasure wears off, or you can worry about losing them or whatever.

DVD So you’re saying when I’m happy, I’m not happy. And when I’m not happy, I’m actually happy. And nice things don’t make me happy. You’re a dingbat.

MONKFISH No, and I’ll talk a bit more about the strange, illusory nature of objects tomorrow, but for now, what I’m trying to say is that certain things give us pleasure and certain things give us pain…

DVD …I can think of one big one right now…

MONKFISH …But when we’re talking about what really counts in the long run, what really matters for what you think of as ‘long-term happiness’, we’ve got to look at inner peace. That’s what works, that’s what cuts the mustard…

DVD … ‘Cuts the mustard’—where did you get that from? You are such a...

MONKFISH …Inner peace is what we need to aim for. But most of the time we spend dashing around, chasing after pleasures or avoiding pain, thinking that that’s what we want. In one sense of course it is—for the moment—but in the long run it’s not. So, instead of long-term ‘happiness’ I’m going to talk about ‘inner peace’.

DVD Isn’t this all just a bit boring? I don’t just mean you’re boring. You are. Without a doubt. You’re always boring. No, what I mean is, isn’t all that inner peace stuff boring? It just sounds too goody-two-shoes. And a bit like those smiling, floating-around dorks I’ve seen you with at that meditation place. They need a hard slap—they’d better learn to levitate, they really get up my nose.

MONKFISH I know what you mean. That has happened in the past. Sometimes a very, very small number of people have started meditation and gone to classes and then come across as some kind of mysterious saint. They were trying…

DVD …very trying…

MONKFISH …They wanted to help others, but ended up beaming beatific, holier-than-thou smiles and goodness all round them, and basically just irritated people. They hadn’t really ‘got it’. They were just showing off. People with true peace of mind aren’t like that. Yes, they may smile a bit, but if they are making you feel uncomfortable, they’re not doing it right. All that’s needed is a genuine, open smile—a big friendly heart. Think Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

DVD Remember when Bazza had a trip to India, and went all hocus-pocus for a bit. Read a book about transcendental something or other. Drifted around like nothing mattered. Seemed detached from the world. When I started telling him I was really cut up about failing my driving test, he told me to rise above it and that it didn’t bother him. Well no, it didn’t bother him, but it sure as hell bothered me.

MONKFISH Yup, that’s a state some people get into where they think being detached from the world is solving all their problems, and they think they don’t have to engage with anybody else’s problems. They’re frankly just selfish and annoying. The true approach is to be genuinely caring and compassionate. They need to listen carefully, and to understand that even though something’s not a problem for them, it’s a real problem for the other person.

DVD ‘Each man’s problems are mountain size to him’. I read that somewhere.

MONKFISH That kind of sums it up. For women as well…

DVD …PC alert!...

MONKFISH … and in practice, inner peace actually goes along with caring deeply about others. But we’ll talk about that on Saturday if there’s time.

DVD Anyway getting back to where we were. What you’re saying is I shouldn’t go out and enjoy myself. I shouldn’t listen to music. You like art, but you’re saying I shouldn’t go to art galleries—not that I would. You mean I should just sit around and do nothing.

MONKFISH No, that’s not what I’m saying. By all means go to football, art galleries, party all night, go out with your mates, do whatever you normally do. Get pleasure out of everything around you, even a walk in the country, the rain and clouds as well as the sun …

DVD …you’re sounding like a Sunday School teacher now. I’m going to be sick…

MONKFISH …or music or sport or art or reading or digging the garden or whatever. Develop your skills. Get better at it. Learn to read the game and anticipate the ball.

DVD Look, Yoda, you’re hopeless. You haven’t got a clue about football. That’s why I won’t take you to the match—Bazza would choke on his meat pie. You haven’t got the first idea.

HAPPINESS or INNER PEACE?

‘Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not’.

Eckhart Tolle (2001) The Power of Now, Hodder and Stoughton, p. 147.

MONKFISH I know. I know. Forget football. What I’m saying is, do all the fun things, but don’t grasp onto them as if they are the source of eternal happiness. They aren’t. Of course we chase after these things. It’s quite natural, it’s a habit we’ve developed over decades. Nice things bring us pleasure, unpleasant things give us pain, so we have a very understandable desire for those things that we believe will bring us long-lasting happiness. It’s quite understandable, but it’s an illusion.

DVD Are you saying I’m deluded? Are you saying I’m nuts?

MONKFISH No, it’s an illusion. [12] And sometimes, even when you understand the illusion, it’s still there and hard not to be fooled by it. Like looking in a mirror. You know very well that the thing you see in the mirror isn’t really behind the mirror, it’s just a swindle caused by the way light travels and the way your eyes and brain work. Although you perfectly understand the illusion, at least you did at school…

DVD … Just for the record, I got C in Science and I never understood a word…

MONKFISH … you still can’t help seeing things as ‘behind the mirror’. This argument I’ve been going on about here is just the same sort of thing: being convinced that pleasure causes long-lasting happiness is a long-standing idea, and it’s a very powerful illusion. And even when you understand it is only an illusion, the appearance doesn’t very easily go away. Like knowing the sun doesn’t really go round the earth, but it still looks like it does.

DVD All right, don’t go on about it, I get the point. You do lay it on pretty heavy—I got the message about an hour ago.

MONKFISH Yes, but you’ll still go out tomorrow to buy a pair of designer jeans and feel really good about yourself.

DVD Actually, funny you should mention that. I’ve had my eye on a pair…

MONKFISH …the issue is simple, really. It’s accepting it at a gut level that’s tricky. Anyway, that’s about all for today, so…

DVD …please don’t say ‘so to sum it all up’ otherwise I will hit you very hard. And what about cancer? You haven’t mentioned that once, and that really hurts…

MONKFISH …so we’ll leave it there for now. Tomorrow we’ll have a look at how inner peace is achieved and we’ll get round to talking about cancer on Wednesday.

INTERLUDE 1

Beauty and Joy

Don’t run barefoot

Who can fail to be uplifted by a fresh spring day, a sparkling starlit night, the song of the skylark, the leap of a dolphin, the majesty of a giant redwood? Who can fail to be moved by outstanding art, ballet, music, theatre and literature? Although as Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman points out not everyone appreciates instructions from gurus to ‘run barefoot through grass’.[13] We all know our own sources of joy.

Keep the pleasures...

It would be a sad world if thinking about meditation and the true nature of happiness and so on led everyone to retreat from the beautiful things of life—the music, the art, the humour, the friendship, the food… It would be an even sadder day for humankind if we stopped taking an interest in sex—no more humans is a bad plan by anybody’s reckoning.

...just look out for the trap

The manoeuvre is to experience the wonderful things around us, but not to be trapped into needing them in order to ‘be happy’. A powerful antidote is not to glorify the things we value, or to revel in their luxury, but to approach them with a sense of gratitude. And you can perhaps try this as a kind of meditation, for example, as you wash in the morning, paying attention to the warm water, scented soap and dry towels, feeling grateful for your good luck. In addition, without being morbid, you might find an attitude of ‘this could be the last time…’ to be helpful. You can even make the event a small ritual. But don’t hold up the rest of the family.

The 'I’ disappears

Karen Armstrong, writer on religious matters, explains that one of the benefits of great music, for instance, is that it can put you in touch not just with your own personal joy or sadness. It allows you to go beyond the ‘I’ and get a glimpse of an essence of a feeling that others can experience. She goes on to explain that, even with quite unimpressive material, ‘As the I disappears, the most humdrum objects reveal wholly unexpected qualities, since they are no longer viewed through the distorting filter of one’s own egotistic needs and desires’.[14]

Refresh your jaded eye

Temporarily putting to one side the initially rather curious Buddhist ideas on beauty and pleasure discussed earlier—just to help move the argument on a notch—in ordinary terms it is still vital to appreciate that we are actually surrounded by beauty. Richard Layard, the economist, writes ‘life is not a dress rehearsal… cultivate the sense of awe and wonder; savour the things of today; and look about you with the same interest as if you were watching a movie… engage with the world and the people around you’.[15] Which is easier said than done. A good ploy to re-new your jaded vision is to visit any foreign country. The houses, people and trees all look slightly, strangely different. Even the street names can catch your eye. Or try looking at dull British colours through the crystal clear light of Cornwall or the Scottish isles. Or see old industrial towns through the filter of a Lowry painting. Or view a ramshackle countryside through Stanley Spencer’s Rickett’s Farm (try Google Image searches). Or… (And, by the way, while we’re thinking about artists, curing the mental suffering of creative people does not seem to reduce their creativity).[16]

The catch

But there is a catch. Actually, several catches. Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And yes, it would be a poorer world if all things of beauty were reduced to drab tones of grey. And yes, appreciating beauty does not necessarily make you a better person (some dictators have loved classical music). And yes, fighting to rid yourself of beautiful things can be as much an obsession as desiring them. But even discounting such points for now, there is still one major catch left: we need to walk a tightrope.

The tightrope

On the tightrope we balance precariously between falling to one side in rejecting all beauty because it’s a mere illusion of our senses (a kind of extreme philosophical position where there is not much joy in the world), and falling to the other side where we cannot be happy at all unless we grasp beautiful things around us (an extreme pleasure-seeking position).

Dragon clouds…

Getting back (very roughly) to Buddhism, the balancing act is to appreciate great beauty (which may of course still be an illusion) but not to become dependent on it for your reason for living, your source of happiness. We need a ‘peaceful joy’—a ‘grateful pleasure’. Beauty in any case can be found everywhere, from a fashion model to a wrinkled old-timer (think Rembrandt): there can be great beauty in imperfections. Old boots can be beautiful (think Van Gogh). Weeds can be beautiful. Derelict Irish farmhouse kitchens, strange sounds under water, can be beautiful. Even a virus can be beautiful. Auntie Joan once saw an enormous, ancient Chinese painting of clouds. They were boiling up all over the sky in one of those dramatic winter days. But leaping out between them, in them, over them, under them, fighting and flying, were hordes of fire-breathing dragons. Auntie Joan said she could never look at storm clouds the same way again. To her they would always be ‘dragon clouds’. [17]

…crumbly stone walls…

By all means celebrate the glorious June day, but bring your inner peace and gratitude along with you to photograph stark winter fields and snow-covered trees with a pink sunset tinge. Love the rainforest, and draw on your inner peace to find inspiration in a crumbly old stone wall. Take your inner peace to the babbling brook and also to the empty moors, where it’s so silent it hurts. Find delight in your baby, and let your inner peace smile kindly upon the resentful, unreasonable teenager who’s having trouble with the world right now, but will get there in the end.

…and Elvis

Be grateful for the silky touch and fragrance of good clothes, but soak up the intense aroma of the insignificant little plant, night-scented stock; and remember the rough feel of your mother’s big towel at bath time. Don’t let your