I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Flames lick the base of my neck, knives prick the skin of my lower back, and gravity tugs at the sockets of my aching knees. The very thought of another hour sitting like this, cross-legged on the floor with nothing but the sensations randomly occurring on my upper lip to focus on, is sheer torture. I allow my mind to wander, opening my right eye just a fraction to look around me. The girl sitting in front of me has one arm up in the air at an awkward gibbon-like angle, as if possessed. The lady to my right is definitely asleep.
I am four days into my Vipassana course – a ten-day silent meditation retreat in Hereford – and my commitment to sitting for eleven hours a day with an empty mind is beginning to waver. I fancied something different this year, you see – a change from the usual summer beach holiday – a challenge perhaps, like running a marathon or driving a tuk-tuk across India or something. So my friend recommended this course on the promise that it was the most challenging thing she had ever done. And that was that. I signed up. No questions asked.
In the lead-up to the course, I pictured myself meditating serenely for its entirety, the answers to life’s questions flowing through my mind like a gently ambling stream. Instead, I’m locked in a state of perpetual frustration, my comfort zone a mere speck on the horizon.
I take the opportunity to think about a question I probably should know the answer to by now: what the bloody hell do I want to do with my life? The problem is, I am not really exceptional at anything. There are lots of things that I am pretty good at – closing overstuffed suitcases, fixing things with unconventional tools, retaining obscure 1960s song lyrics – but none of these jump out as potential career options. So if I’m going to be mediocre at something, I may as well enjoy it, right? I switch to looking back over the last twelve months of my life, searching for the time I was at my happiest. My mind settles on a memory, a game my best friend Kate and I had been playing, arranging weekly outings with one another, each inspired by a different letter of the alphabet.
For ‘A’ I chose art. Specifically, a life-drawing class, using charcoal to recreate the exposed contours of a young, self-conscious model.
‘B’ was Kate’s choice, and in response to her ‘Can we come and ring with you?’ email, the bell-ringers of St Dunstan’s Church in Stepney invited us along to one of their rehearsals to teach us the ropes. Yup. I went there, and I’m not even sorry.
We met outside the church at 5.30 and followed the group as they snaked around the spiral staircase and up into the icy bell tower, where we were welcomed like old friends with steaming cups of tea. The ringers warmed up around us, a perfectly choreographed dance of rising and falling arms, before Kate and I were called up to have a go ourselves. Our first surprise was how heavy the ropes were, requiring the strength of our whole bodies to bring them down, and our second was the depth of concentration it took to time each exhausting pull in rhythm with the group, who seemed to operate as one holistic unit to create the beautifully timed peal, like the hand-cranked wheel of a music box. The chaos of not knowing what we were doing and the deafening sounds of our mistimed ‘dongs’ was kindly overlooked by our ever-patient hosts, complete strangers to us until a couple of hours before. After our lesson, we were invited to the local pub, the Prospect of Whitby, for a post-ringing pint, and were regaled with stories about the campanology community, populated by thousands of eager participants across the breadth of the country, many of whom had followed in the footsteps of the generations before them, as daughters, sons, grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren in a long line of bell-ringers. From the London bankers who meet during their lunch breaks to ring in the old City churches, to the engineers who travel for work, wandering into local churches and volunteering their skills for the week they are due to be in town. It felt as if we had propped open the lid of a hidden subculture, a secret world, a buried treasure chest waiting to be discovered.
I remember walking home that night beaming from ear to ear, my entire body warm and vibrating as if I had electricity in my veins.
The memory sparks something in me, a sense of inexplicable euphoria. I don’t believe in eureka moments, just as I don’t believe in miracles, or love at first sight. But I can honestly say that, for the first time in my life, I was certain that this was my purpose. Not the bell-ringing – sadly you’re not about to read an entire book about bell-ringing – my purpose was to discover and infiltrate the fascinating communities of Great Britain; to demystify its subcultures and lift the lid on its treasure troves, sharing its hidden gems with the rest of the world. I would chase this euphoric feeling and devote an entire year of my life to this project, working my way through an alphabetical romp of lifestyles and subcultures, investigating each community and immersing myself in their rituals and customs.
The idea comes to me in a whirlwind before I realise that I am still surrounded by 130 tie-dyed tops and enormous pairs of trousers. Fidgeting uncontrollably, I run through options for each of the letters in my head, desperate to get out of the room and release all of this dammed-up energy.
Three days later – or at least that’s what twenty minutes felt like – I erupt through the doors of the meditation hall like a bargain hunter on Black Friday and head back to my room, scanning the surfaces for a pen or pencil to capture the ideas that are desperate to escape my head. No luck. One of the ‘precepts’ I had signed up to for the duration of this course was ‘I will not read or write’, so I had handed in all of this stuff, including my iPhone, during the gadget and pen amnesty at the start of the course. Shit.
I close my eyes. Think, Lucy, think. Perhaps I can find a pen just lying around within the boundaries of the course? The trouble with this option is that another precept for this course is ‘I will not steal’.
Fuck it. I begin exploring the cupboards in the course buildings, which is no easy feat, I can tell you. Obviously, I can’t let anybody see me doing this, because then they would discover my plan to break my precepts, so I wait for the cover of darkness to sneak around the buildings, pulse racing as I scan the shelves one by one, flicking my gaze back to the door at the slightest noise.
No luck.
Popping into the loo, where I do most of my good thinking, I am overjoyed to discover a small stash of blue paper towels behind the sinks. Something to write on! I take three and hastily shove them up the front of my jumper.
Now for the pen.
After another stealthy rummage in the cupboards, and close to giving up, I discover a sign-up sheet for chores just inside the meditation hall. Next to it, held by a long piece of string and circling the air like an exotic dancer, is a thick black marker pen.
I can’t steal that, can I? No. I couldn’t. Unless? Oh, sod it! I grab it, feed it up my sleeve and shimmy back out along the wall.
So this was how my adventure was born: an idea scrawled in the dead of night on blotting paper so thirsty it soaked up the black marker pen like a top-of-the-range Dyson. When the job was done, I opened a window to release the inky smells and avoid being discovered by my sleeping roommate. Thankful for the enormous pants my mum persists in buying me every Christmas, I used a pair to waft the final traces of inky rebellion through the open window.
I feel guilty, lulling you in with daring tales of delinquency at meditation camp. The truth is, by most measures, I am pretty damn normal. I enjoyed a happy upbringing in a family that deftly straddles the border between working and middle class. I did well at school, but was never the star pupil. I have only ever been in serious trouble once in my life (for throwing a Stephen Gately rubber at the teacher… for a dare), and within two weeks of graduating university, I began my first job in the company that still pays my wages. Not exactly the best platform for a story, is it?
But don’t give up on me yet. I do have an odd habit. I like to collect things. Not stamps, not novelty erasers, not political teapots from the 1920s. No. I like to collect different versions of myself.
Overwhelmed by a sense of my own mortality – aren’t we all? – and the limitations this puts on how many roles I will get to play in this life, I find myself unable to commit to being one version of myself for too long. As a result of this affliction, my life so far has been a collection of experiments to try and find an identity I am happy to settle into, resulting in a series of distinct chapters. The Wicca chapter – reciting spells through black-painted lips. The fantasy chapter – studying werewolves and collecting model dragons. The Kappa tracksuit chapter – single-handedly keeping the hairspray industry afloat. The cowboy chapter – mustering cattle and riding bulls in the Australian outback. The country-bumpkin chapter – in full Barbour-jacket stereotype. Right up to my current chapter – the bespoke-suited capitalist.
The philosophy geek in me would like to explain this as Carl Jung’s concept of individuation, a process we all go through as we attempt to define our personalities against the concept of ‘other’, trying on various labels and archetypes and integrating them to form a ‘self’. It could be this, yes, but it could also be something as simple as a serious case of FOMO (fear of missing out), characterised by an unwillingness to commit to one version of myself without first experiencing every possible option out there.
Take Glastonbury Festival. I went for the first time recently and it soon became clear that places like this aren’t made for people like me, people with my level of FOMO. I wanted to see everything and spent most of the time thinking about the next thing I needed to see rather than enjoying where I was, worried that I was missing out on something in another tent… something over there. Should I be taking psychedelic drugs in Shangri-La? Watching the comedy in the arts tent? Listening to the bands? Learning circus skills? I found myself almost running from one place to another in an attempt to see absolutely everything on offer, abandoning my friends for the day and heading out alone so I could be more efficient with my time.
Glastonbury Festival is a microcosm of my life. I feel as if I need to experience everything and live every version of myself before my holiday in this world is over. And, although I have thoroughly enjoyed my chapter in the corporate world, I can’t help but feel like I have lingered here too long, to the detriment of experiencing everything else the world has to offer. There is just so much more out there, a terrifying smorgasbord of bountiful opportunity, and the thought of missing out on all of this in exchange for another year of dinner parties, work drinks and skiing holidays scares the shit out of me. I just cannot bear another year of missing out.
And so, in a bid to slay the terror, I will indulge this overwhelming curiosity and live in twenty-six different worlds over the course of one year, experiencing different lifestyles and collecting as many versions of myself as possible. Casting off any narrow-mindedness and putting aside my prejudices, I will take the opportunity to discover which worlds I am happy to cross off my list until I can finally commit to one.
I will indulge my FOMO, and, in so doing, cure it.
Well, that’s the plan anyway…