A Narrowing Path
Goldstein meets Le Guin
As a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower, until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.
The Master Summoner of Roke, Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin.
In my early twenties, I found myself WWOOFing on a farm in Buckfast, Devon. Buckfast is known for its Abbey, one of England’s last working Christian monasteries1. As a student, I heard a choir sing Mozart’s Requiem there. I heard that Mendel made his discoveries about genetics there, but that’s not true, although some prominent beekeepers were associated with the Abbey.
Not having a car, and this being Devon, I couldn’t get to the monastery easily, but the farm was on the edge of Dartmoor, and a Celtic hill fort was within walking distance.
While there, autumn set in. I spent most mornings dragging a wheelbarrow around the fields, picking up horse shit. In the afternoons, I was tasked with the apple harvest. Horse shit and apples have a remarkably similar weight and feel, especially in a gloved hand.
A few months earlier, I was in Berlin for a summer school. Whilst on the farm, I had a dream. In it, I was back in Berlin to make it as an artist. A few months later, this time awake, I arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof with a few hundred euros in my pocket and a dream of making it as an artist.
I would love to tell you that I landed on my feet, found and was recognised by my people, found a nice place to stay, then a nicer place and things flowed. But things did not flow. It did not take long for the city, which seemed so welcoming in the summer, to chew me up and spit me back out.
I returned to the UK, tail between my legs, my parents picking me up at Gatwick airport, and I, sheepish and embarrassed at how badly it all went.
I took my dream of being a successful dance artist in Berlin literally and in too much haste. My impatience led me to misunderstand the teaching that when you follow what you are called to do, providence moves to support you.
Now, with some years behind me, I feel softly sorry for my twenty-something-year-old self, who thought the language of dreams was so simple to understand. Now, at 35, I have not abandoned much of what I believed then, but I see it with, I hope, a little more nuance.
Another migration
2018, the year I moved to Vienna, started as a rough year. I was in London, and let’s just say I was very lost. I no longer lived in Devon, where I had spent the previous three years, and was staying on various friends’ sofas and in spare rooms, and not very much was working out.
I had a particularly odd side gig as an astrologer and an I Ching reader, a job I got through a psychic agency. My clients weren’t particularly up for the tough-love readings I gave them, preferring other readers who had Angel Cards and told them what they wanted to hear (which is that everything will be OK).
Perhaps I should have had one of those readings myself.
One evening, on the London Overground, another migration from one friend’s sofa to another, I remember the feeling of the Earth shifting. The ground, which had previously been solid, was now the wrong shape. I knew I could no longer reside on British soil.
I felt very calm. I knew I would be leaving as plainly as I could tell you I had two hands, two feet and a nose. It was not complicated and did not need explaining.
A few weeks later, I learned that an English-speaking summer camp in Vienna was missing a dance teacher. When the boss, a foul-mouthed and good-humoured Australian who had studied Theatre in Education, offered me the gig over the phone, I was not surprised.
I arrived on a flight with precisely one piece of hand luggage, my little snail shell (whose handle has since broken and zips fallen apart and now rests in peace).
Other Brits were at that summer camp, escapees from the Island. For a time, Vienna was good to me. Surviving materially was never luxurious, but it was always possible enough, and I was able to get into therapy and reestablish an artistic identity for myself.
Being Called
Neither of the migrations was driven by any semblance of sensible decision-making. Yet I can say that looking back, one was far more willful, driven by an idea of “following my path” than the other. Moving to Vienna, I had almost no preconception that the place even existed, except for once having visited my first, and at the time, only Austrian friend who came from the Austro-Hungarian borderlands to England to study choreography and with whom I lived in a student flat on Totnes High Street.
As I have alluded to, I now feel a similar migratory call. A few nights ago, I was with a friend who told me she believes it’s a mistake when people approach “family planning” too rationally.
“In the end,” she said, “we’re animals. There is instinct behind it, too.”
When she said that, I thought of Charles Darwin watching Artic Terns bloody themselves against the bars of their cages rather than miss their annual migration.
But in truth, I can not tell you clearly where my call calls me. I have thought about Spain to be closer to my daughter, back to the UK to be closer to my roots, and to Holland to pick up again on an MA I once thought of doing.
For each of these directions and others, including staying put, I can give you good reasons why each is a brilliant or a terrible idea. I have no problem rationalising any of them in whichever way. And so I know the final way will not be found by reasoning it out. It will follow a far more mysterious and probably more emotional process.
When I talk about this, some people are horrified — how can you give up such agency?
I have no good answer to this. I have a partial belief in free will, but I don’t think this is the whole story. When push comes to shove, I believe in something close to what people call the soul—something mysterious, numinous even—which resides somewhere within and perhaps beyond the body-mind and has an intelligence more profound than what my “small-I” can perceive.
At best, the “me” I usually think of as me can be curious about this intelligence and try to be receptive to it, but who is actually steering the boat? It’s hard to say.
I say this with no particular cosmology or theology. I do not care much for theories that attempt to structure the kinds of perceptions I am talking about (except perhaps the parallels in Psychoanalytical thinking and Humanistic Psychology).
All I know is this: I have a flat full of stuff I no longer want or need. The only clear thing now is that I want to reduce my material footprint to a point where I feel lighter and less bound.
For a time, especially as a parent, I felt an obligation to homemaking, and now the last thing I want is to have more than the absolute bare minimum. I don’t exactly know what “bare minimum” means right now. That I intend to live out of a suitcase isn’t precisely what I mean to say, even if the fantasy of that holds a pull.
As I grow older, more and more of the choices in my life seem to make themselves, seem to carry a certain inevitability.
One view is that freedom means having lots of options. However, I suspect, more and more, that freedom can also be about aligning with something that doesn’t feel like a “choice” at all.
Here is the humanist in me who believes in Goldstein’s Self-Actualisation principle: Trees don’t agonise over whether they’re growing in the right shape. A river doesn’t doubt the course it takes but simply follows gravity and the contours of the land. Arctic Terns fly thousands of miles without wondering if they are better off choosing a settled existence.
For us, the human animal, some part of us knows how to navigate even when the lights go out.
As I confront my belongings and do one of the few things that is clear, I pray, in my way, that another step will make itself known. And another. And another. Until I choose nothing but do only and wholly what I must do.
Most didn’t survive the reformation.