The Unified Theory of Happiness - Part Two

I would like to share a thought experiment of mine on the subject of happiness. It goes like this. Let's say we imagine you in a year's time. In fact, let us imagine tomorrow your life takes one of two possible paths, both of which end up with you in exactly the same situation a year down the track. In both these possible lives, you are a half million dollars richer in a year than you are today. But in one scenario, you are miserable; in the other, you are happy. In every external respect, your life is identical in these two variations, but emotionally the results are completely opposed. What explains the difference? Surely, if your life is the same, you should be equally happy. But consider: in one life version, you win $500K in a lottery. In the other, you win ten million dollars in the lottery, and, through a bad investment, lose all but the last half million of it. In the former situation, you're overjoyed because you perceive an expansion of your life's possibilities. In the latter, you're shattered by the contraction, even though your situation is significantly better than it was a year before.

It's not hard to imagine variations of this thought experiment. For example,you lose the use of your legs, but a miraculous new medical procedure restores your mobility. Now the mere fact of being able to walk brings you untold joy. It's all about the set point of 'normality' and the movement of our circumstances in relation to that point. It's about the story we tell ourselves about where we should be - the dynamic tension of having, desiring and losing - that determines our satisfaction, not the actuality of what we have. Consider the successful business men who commit suicide when their businesses collapse. They may still be far richer than you or I, but the massive readjustment of their set point and, more significantly, the attachment of their identity to this wealth, is more than they can take.

It seems to be the movements up and down the snakes and ladders of life that make us happy or miserable much of the time, not how far advanced we are on the board. Because wherever we are on the board we want to be further on, and fear falling back. For this reason, even though we kind of know that those with more than us aren't necessarily any happier, we still aspire to be in their shoes. We mistake the thrill of going up for the thrill of being high. And we always tend to focus on what we don't have than what we do. If you are the number two tennis player in the world, you don't lie awake at night thinking about the six and a half billion people you play tennis better than. No, you think about the one guy who still beats you.

I sometimes think about the wealth I possess today and take for granted as a person of average means in modern Australia: iPhone, flat screen TV, modern car. Any one of these items would be considered a miracle to a person of fifty years ago and would be beyond price, if somehow one could fall through a worm-hole to that earlier era. Yet it's precisely because these things are available to everybody that we take them for granted and don't recognise how truly extraordinary they are. What we consider wealth is a completely relative, social construct. It's all about the comparison with others, not the actual, intrinsic value of what we have. (For argument's sake, I'm deliberately overlooking the question of what constitutes poverty and lack - there is a real, absolute point of hardship).

Can we really talk about things having an 'intrinsic value'? I'd like to argue that we can. Otherwise we are forced to the conclusion that the value of a thing is merely the value we consciously place upon it, which runs counter to our frequent experience that 'you don't know what you have until you lose it.' It may be impossible to quantify, but I believe there is a value in everything we have, and this value is often best measured by what we experience when we lose it. Sometimes it turns out that a thing we valued highly leaves us merely relieved when it is taken away. Other times, something we didn't recognise as being of any value at all turns out to be of the deepest importance when we face the risk or the reality of its loss. Grief is the truest measure of value.

What I'm arguing is our moods and our feeling of satisfaction with our lot is generally tied to fluctuations around our 'set point', our 'normal', when we should be attuned to the real value of everything we have. An analogy that has occurred to me is ice in Antarctica. This ice seems cold to us, but in fact it contains a huge amount of heat energy. On average, this ice is -17 degrees Celsius, or approximately 260 degrees above absolute zero. Consider the difference between zero and 260 degrees Celsius - it's a lot of heat! Analogously, when we feel like we have lost everything, when we feel completely empty and like nothing we have is of any value, we still possess a huge amount. In fact, what we possess by merely being alive: our senses, our minds, our capacity for love and wonder - all these things carry a huge unseen value that dwarfs the difference between being rich and being poor.

This is the insight that many people have reported achieving in the act of unsuccessful suicide. People who have survived leaps from bridges invariably report that in the moment of certain death, the value of everything they have becomes clear to them, and they regret the jump. Almost as if the act of suicide reflects a kind of spiritual immaturity - a throwing away of what we have because of the hurt of losing something else. We all remember having done that, and how terrible it felt afterwards.

Here's the challenge then: to stay always mindful of the true depth of what we have rather than being hitched to the endless ups and downs of fortune. Not that it's easy. My initial thought experiment overlooks the significance of grief. To make it clear, imagine we hadn't won and lost the lottery, but found and lost a lover, or birthed a still-born child. Our different reaction to those scenarios reflects a recognition of the reality of loss, and our intrinsic awareness of what is of real value in life - not money or things but people, love. How do we becomes large enough in our hearts for the losses we will have to bear? Jonathon Safron-Foer's searingly memorable quote comes to mind: 'In the end, everyone loses everyone'. Everyone and everything, except perhaps our souls.

I'm going to come back to that in my next post - the remainder that is left when everything else is cancelled out - but for now let us acknowledge that life and everything in it is ephemeral. We can't, if we acknowledge the deep value of life in all its particularities, avoid the fact and necessity of grief. The project of happiness cannot deny sadness. But we can - and I know this because it is increasingly, if not always, in my grasp - live in gratitude for and awareness of the beauty of what is: this granted, extraordinary moment and all that it contains.

The Unified Theory of Happiness - Part One

After several days of mild pre-winter funk, I dream I am holed up in some Antarctic bunker, prepared for six months of blizzard and darkness, when I open the ceiling and find a bright and beautiful, icy blue day. Happiness floods in with the light. Ah yes! I now remember how days in Antarctica can last for weeks, months - eternal sunshine in my spotless dreaming mind... I wake up knowing the meaning as clearly as if my unconscious had casually chatted to me in English: the funk is over, happiness is back. It's no longer the scarce resource it was in days of yore, when I squandered my youth gnawing the bones of melancholy and doubt, following the well-trod footsteps of the best Gen-X role models for the creative soul: suicidal and addicted rock musicians (Cobain, Waters, Kilbey, Morrissey, on they go). Today I'm sitting in a cafe eating pan-fried sardines and chat potatoes and reading, of all the soulless things, a Microsoft paper on updates to the .NET framework (never mind), and there it is again: a radiant gratitude for the preposterous fact of my existence and a cheerful knowledge of being a Fine Person Overall. No conceit. I just like me. I look out the window at the mild street, people about their business and I want to:

• do a little Charleston (more on this later)


• kiss the waitress (not for being sexy or anything, just nice, human)


• write a blog entry about happiness (and voila!)

It's not a manic high, not like the two happy weeks I had once back in my twenties while living in St Kilda, unemployed and writing some crazy theory about the reality of qualities in the world, a fortnight of delirium somehow dislodged from my interior by an LSD trip that had me wandering out on the beach off Beaconsfield Parade, exclaiming to a passer-by, 'Isn't it a beautiful morning!' only for him to stop and, regarding me skeptically, reply, 'Well forgive me if I hadn't noticed.' Only then did I notice that it was, in fact, a pretty crap day - flat, grey and insipidly mild, perfect weather for the worms that shat up their little sand-turds all over the dun, wet expanse where the tide had shallowly retreated. The man kept standing there uncertainly as if the morning might be about to significantly improve, and I realised I'd just successfully, if inadvertently, picked up on St Kilda foreshore. Alas I had to throw the fish back however - not my kinda sardine. But I digress...

There's a story my mother likes to tell about my saying, as a very young child, that I was going to be a God of Happiness. Some boys aim to spend their adult years sliding down poles in fire-stations over and over, no doubt driving around in the big red truck a fair bit too. Others dream of being astronauts, policemen, 'engine drivers', pilots... Normal children. My aspiration, on the other hand, was to nothing less than apotheosis, it seems. Later I became a psychotherapist, evidently having traded down 'God of Happiness' for the more alliterative but less refulgent 'Mitigator of Misery'.

Psychotherapy is not the art of joy. And when I started studying it, back at age twenty-five or so, becoming a Supreme Being was honestly no longer part of my ten-year plan. I just wanted to work out why I was always so miserable. The only truly 'clinically significant' depression I ever suffered ended when I was twenty-one and threw in science-law to go roam the subcontinent for six months in search of God (of whom I found few unambiguous traces, though I had plenty of fun looking for Him inside various pipes) - but long after the depression ended I was still gripped by regular bouts of subclinical gloom. Now I realise I was unhappy because I was, in some ways, a bit of a jerk. Well, perhaps that's harsh. I couldn't help it. One's jerk-like aspects and one's unhappiness are really all part of the same dizzily whirling unmerry-go-round. The unhappiness makes you a jerk, and the more you jerk, the more miserable you make others, who in turn feed their misery back into the whole vicious cycle.

Perhaps it takes a new form of melancholy to stop being a jerk to yourself and the people around you. The kind of melancholy that comes when the egotistical illusions of youth begin to turn yellow and brittle and fall from the tree, and you're no longer full of angst and Weltschmerz and rage against the dying of the light, or against the machine, or whatever flavour of designer unhappiness you prefer to wear along with your torn jeans, and instead you're just plain sad, just plain lost, just plain you. Your misery don't make you special, sunshine. It's not an effective form of protest, not a form of creativity, not the secret brand of destiny.

Or maybe it is - the secret brand of destiny I mean. Maybe it's the calling of the Self, the keening of the lost You, the song that guides you Home. Because without the suffering, how would you know you weren't happy yet, how would you know to seek? Ah, paradox!

I have, I believe, a few things/people to thank for the unexpected blessing of being happy these days. Firstly, ironically, the women who've broken my heart - who, by tearing so many gaping holes in the fabric of my neuroses, actually left them in so many tatters it was impossible to keep holding them together any more. Unconventional therapy - and fucking painful I might add - but highly effective. Also I can thank the Bolivian Altiplano, for curing me of the fear of loneliness. That wild, transcendantly harsh and beautiful desert, that wind-scoured, planetary, salt-crusted, fuming flamingo-world leaves no place for the personal. You can slough it off into the rarefied wind, leave it behind like a rattlesnake skin, like you know life will leave you behind one day, your skin and bones the discarded husks of the vein of life that once animated you. There is nothing to fear in solitude - it inhabits you always anyway, like the starry sky obscured by the blue one.

I'm not going to try to trace all the tributaries of happiness back to their respective springs. But I will mention one other contributor: swing dancing, a pastime that occupies me increasingly these days, in spite of my lack of grace, aptitude, or co-ordination. I'm crap, but I freaking well love doing it anyway, and this love does somehow translate into something that could be described as a weird kind of ability. In spite of myself I think I may one day not only love it, but also be good at it. It's kind of daggy, not at all a Cobain or Kilbey thing, but it just makes you, well, happy, goddamn it.

Anyway, enough. I'm running out of steam. I have more to say on all this, but for now I'm done. Perhaps tomorrow I will return to write more about it. I have a theory, you see, which I'd like to share...

Crime and punishment

Back in the mid 2000s I was working as a counsellor for an organisation that supported offenders and their families. I ran anger management programs for wife beaters and pub brawlers, tried to teach the inmates of a women's prison to understand their dreams, listened to the torturous denial of child rapists' wives. Looking back, what's surprising is not that I burnt out, but that I lasted as log as I did handling every day the currency of human misery. Recently, while trying to finish off my short story collection, I wrote a story based on one of my clients from those days, a young girl who'd fallen in unknowingly with a serial rapist. My editor rejected the story as just too preposterously horrific, too extreme, too unbelievable. Ironically it was the parts I'd added for fictional effect that she accepted without question. The truth is though that as a fiction editor she was right. Reality sometimes lacks plausibility - to make it digestible as fiction you have to dress it up in the trappings of the expected to get the reader to swallow it.

In the true story, the girl told her rapist partner/abuser about visiting a single mother friend of hers who lived alone in a nearby suburb and the partner, having noted the details, went around to her place, broke in and raped her. My client learned about the rape and was sure he was responsible (and therefore that she was responsible) but could never be sure. She was tormented by the guilt. She prayed to forget the trauma of her experiences, and managed to acquire a brain injury in a car accident that had the effect of destroying her memory - though not of the experiences she longed to obliterate.

We dealt with the walking wounded. Men and women so damaged by brutality it was scarcely comprehensible that they could have survived. Looking into their faces was a curious experience: something was profoundly wrong, like a terrible deformity, but it was not always easy to pin the sense of wrongness down to anything tangible - it was not just the missing teeth or the physical scars. It was as if they had been smashed into pieces and badly glued back together - everything in its right place but somehow fragmented, the unity lost.

Some of these people were deeply toxic and almost intolerable to be near. Once I picked up a call from Barwon Prison and the cold, arrogant voice of the man on the line sent instant shivers of revulsion down my spine. Sex offender, I thought. It turned out to be Robert Arthur Lowe, the man who raped and murdered Sheree Beazley and stuffed her body into a culvert under a bridge. Barely more tolerable to me was the woman who used to come in for travel assistance to visit the man she'd recently married in the same prison. He had raped and killed a sixteen year old girl and buried her in a shallow grave, but when we asked his new wife what she knew of his offences, she insisted that he was an armed robber - a respectable criminal in other words! Thinking that she had been misled, we confronted her with an entry in a book of notorious sex offenders that detailed his appalling crimes, she was horrified - not by the truth of what he'd done, but by the fact that the book was publicly available for anyone to read! For some reason, though I worked with murderers and criminals of all stripes every day, I could not suffer that woman's presence for more than a minute and always had to pass her on to a colleague when she came in. It wasn't evil in her case, but a sort claustrophobic atmosphere of pain, need, and oppression that clung to her, a horrible lack of any spiritual light in her being at all.

If you don't believe humans possess an aura, some sort of tangible psychic information field, that place would have to convince you of it. There was an old Italian guy who used to come in to talk to me while he was on bail awaiting trial for sex offences against a four-year-old boy who had lived next door. Not out of moral judgement of his crimes, appalling as they were, but out of a visceral repulsion at the man's physical presence, I used to dread the handshake with which he'd greet me when he stepped out of the lift. I'd want to wash my hand. Reviled by his community and his family, cast out on the street with nothing, he'd show up several times a week in his filthy, crumpled suit and his lank, matted hair and tell me the story of his life. As a child he'd been raped by his brother and his brother's friends on a regular basis back in his home village in rural Italy. He suffered a condition known as 'micropenis' ( yes, it's what you think) which he'd kept a shameful secret all his life. In Italy he'd been to visit a prostitute, who had laughed at him. In Australia he married a woman who was happy not to have sex, and to keep his secret for him. It doesn't take a psychologist to see how the story of his life led to the crime he eventually committed - indeed lent it a sort of awful inevitability.

My grandfather, who was a war correspondent on the Kokoda Track, once wrote about the nausea he felt upon seeing a man go to pieces with fear upon sighting an enemy plane for the first time in Port Moresby - he went to jelly as if literally spineless. I always found that a harsh reaction - until I thought of that old Italian paedophile. For as much as I could understand how he got to the point he did, I was still repelled by the cowardice of the man. 'Cowardice' may seem like an odd word, and yet it's the one that comes irresistibly to mind. He stank of the failure to shoulder the burdens of his life with courage. That was the aura of shame I wanted to wash from my hand whenever he shook it. Which isn't to say I didn't pity him. I pitied him greatly, but pity is not an emotion that the courageous inspire.

Mostly though, your average offender was a likeable fellow. I wouldn't want to encounter him strung out for heroin in my living room at two a.m., but my colleague's description of the average prisoner as a 'loveable rogue' always struck me as apt. These prisoners weren't the demons of tabloid imagination, but three-year-olds inflated into adult bodies. In them, the emotional self-regulation of toddlers was dangerously allied to the strength of full-grown men. Their psychological development stunted at a young age by trauma, they were disarmingly child-like in their responses, and often responded with great warmth and gratitude when offered the simple human gesture of respect. However much the outer vessel of their psyche had been warped, the light of a good heart still shone out of them, oftentimes with greater clarity for their emotional simplicity. It was this unaffected warmth that you lived for in that job - without it, the harshness of the environment would have been intolerable.

My blood still boils occasionally when the Herald-Sun recycles one of its lock-up-the-monsters, cheap outrage front-pagers that are always good to sell a few papers. The truth is so much more complex and morally ambiguous. So complex in fact that after five years in the system I left feeling far less certain of my notions of good, evil and justice than when I started. To know a man's crime is to know almost nothing of him, only a single act that, like an iceberg, projects above the surface but reveals nothing of the great mass of circumstances, choices and emotions that lies beneath, invisibly supporting it - and that, even when revealed, remains a mystery, impenetrable perhaps even to the person who experienced it.

Hometown blues

Melbourne is rainy. We used to be famous for it, before the drought. Then we had ten years of sunny skies that gradually went from cheerful to relentless. Now it's rainy again. I sit at my computer at work and stare wistfully through the glass as it pelts down on the street outside, pedestrians with umbrellas scampering for doorways. The whole country is underwater, as if to match the mood of my homecoming - granted, a rather solipsistic take on the latest climate catastrophe.

Rewind five days: I'm sitting up at one in the morning downing bottles of German Pilsner with my couch-surfing host Tom (who I've incidentally trained to chill his beer to Australian subzero temperatures) and talking about conspiracy theories, the nature of truth and objectivity, the awkwardness of German's reliance on relative clauses - and getting steadily drunker, steadily less concerned with nailing the niceties of German grammar. As the alcohol prises me loose of the rocks of rationality to which I habitually cling, I find myself launching ever more boldly into the linguistic unknown, abandoning caution and just riffing away, surprised myself at how the sentences just form where I'm about to tread, the instant before I'm about to plummet into inarticulacy. Tom tells amusing stories about trucking in Germany in wall days, the futile bureaucratic attempts to stop him speeding, the secret routes he found to bypass border controls between east and west. Outside, another heavy snowfall outside is slowly, softly smothering the courtyard.

I love this immersion in my German alter-ego, but the truth is, there's not much more for me to do in Berlin. I've about exhausted the city's touristic value, the pleasures you can skim off a place without any effort other than that required to show up. If I wanted to get more from this place I'd have to give it more too. Work, involvement, commitment. Tom asks me if I've considered living here - the language wouldn't be an issue, I could do translation work... And of course I have. I'd love to spend a year or two here, enough time to close the gap between my current fluency and the thoughtless ease of a native speaker. Enough time to develop the internal riches of biculturalism. But there's the matter of that small, beautiful anchor by the name of Jude. In some ways being a separated dad gives you more freedom - like this trip for instance. In other ways it is more binding, since you can't make grand plans with the mother any more. When you're bound at the ankle you move and plan together, you go where you like, as one. Bound by a long chain, you run about freely without thinking, then you trip over the chain. Now I've reached the end of the chain, and it's time to come home.

Jude at the airport, his eyes red from crying because it's taken an hour and a half between my landing and getting through the arrival gates - my baggage has been left in Berlin or somewhere. Jude giving me raspberries, grapes and nectarines in the car because he knows how I'll have missed these beloved fruits in snowy Europe. Now I'm the one with red eyes. Jude romping in the pool in the preternaturally bright Australian sunlight, everything suffused with a quality of dreams from 48 hours with no sleep, from the shock of the unfamiliar familiar. I wake up in the middle of the night because Jude has turned on the light and is wandering about. Was machst du? I say, completely bewildered, drawing an equally bewildered response.

And then the work desk, the rain, the all-too-familiar trivial frustrations of trying to get computers to do what you want them to. Like dealing with a person with Asperger's, only worse: Why must you do what I say instead of what I mean?? My sails, recently so full of the winds of inspiration, are already hanging slack on their masts. The astonishing part is not so much how I forgot this life, what it feels like, as the fact that it feels like I never left it. It absorbs me back into it without a ripple. As if everything that still vividly fills me - the wild unbreathable winds of the altiplano, the sound of the organ in the Notre Dame, Kafka's marvellous German, the lustrous pebble of my own solitary soul - as if all these things aren't and never were.

In The End Is My Beginning, a record of journalist Tiziano Terzani's dying conversations with his son, Terzani spoke of work and the importance of a "life in which one can recognize oneself." This, he believed, was more important than happiness - whatever that is. Lying in bed in a state of hallucinatory jetlagged half-sleep, I saw a sort of groove stretching out in front of me. This groove was my character, the self that solitude and the world have revealed. It was as palpable, as certain as conscience. Stay within this groove, the vision seemed to say, and you cannot go wrong. For you will live a life in which you recognize yourself, and such a life cannot possibly be regretted. But it seems to me that loyalty to this truth is a form of great courage, a courage that cannot be taught - or perhaps only by the rarest of men, like Terzani. The functioning of the great machine that is this modern world demands inauthenticity on a vast scale, and offers many anodyne rewards for the conforming. The demands, and the costs, of being true to the groove of our inner nature may be higher than we dreamed. But the cost of the alternative? Thoreau's "quiet desperation."

The only question is: what now?

Picasso, Michelangelo, Kentridge

Today, having visited Sigmund Freud's former house and office, I was blundering aimlessly about Vienna when I stumbled upon a gallery which was exhibiting both Picasso and Michelangelo. That's the kind of thing that happens in cultural capitals such as this. You walk around a corner and, hey, Picasso and Michelangelo! Well, why not pop in? Nothing better to do! Both exhibitions were excellent and extensive, but the real surprise, the show-stealer, was an exhibition of works by South African artist William Kentridge.

Kentridge is a combination of artist, filmmaker, animator and illusionist. On display were numerous of his stop-motion animated films, as well as traditional paintings, drawings and various 'multimedia' installations. I can only describe his work as brilliant.

It was interesting to compare Kentridge's political engagement - his works reflect on war, oppression and apartheid - with Picasso's. Picasso painted doves and bunches of flowers to express pacificist sentiment, or a lobster fighting a cat to allegorize the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which I applaud. There should be more feline-crustacean battles in our art. But whilst no-one can deny the power of 'Guernica', I can't help feeling that his later work slips into sentimentality. And allegory is not the most subtle way of interrogating political realities. Kentridge's work on the other hand, has all the power and mystery of dreaming about it. One of my favourite pieces was an animation projected from the ceiling onto a circular table in the middle of which was a steel cylinder. The projected image on the table was radically distorted, but the reflection in the cylinder reconstituted the image back into its correct proportions. The effect was stunning and mesmerising, as Kentridge's disturbing, surreal renderings of war seemed to glow from within the metal cylinder, like terrible dreams captured in a glass.

Viewing this art filled me with creative longing, and as I wandered through the seemingly endless exhibition space, new ideas for stories started popping in my head. I also saw in a flash how to fix my most recent story, which has caused me no end of pain. This in turn made me reflect on the importance of cultural 'food' for creative life. We have no shortage of cultural activity in Melbourne, but there is a qualitative difference to have these rich, deep wellsprings so close at hand, as one does in Europe. It helps. Connection to these traditions is immensely nourishing. Picasso 'fed' on other artists such as Velazquez and Manet, repainting and reimagining their works. But we don't need to be Picasso, or even European, to draw on the great inheritance that is the sum of human cultural endeavour. As artists we often, perhaps necessarily, believe ourselves alone, like Gods in miniature pressing out our own Adams from our own separate lumps of clay, but we never truly are. It is not only helpful and revitalising to draw sustenance from this great collective placenta of human culture, I think it is a flat out necessity if we're to avoid exhaustion, burn-out and the crippling effect of work in isolation.

Der rote Faden

Whilst there have been times here in Europe when I have asked myself why I ever left South America, there have also been moments of sheer bliss. I was snowed in in Paris for three days, meaning that I ended up spending Christmas day there instead of in Vienna as I'd planned. But ironically, the bad weather turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because after days of bitter cold, I woke up on Christmas morning to a miraculously beautiful day. The air was crystal clear and the sky a perfect blue vault. There were bright patches of snow on the ground, the streets were glassy with ice, and everything shone in a pale topaz sunlight. The streets were nearly empty of traffic - it was almost like having Paris to myself, though there were a few other foreigners wandering about, everyone it seemed in the same quiet delirium of delight as me.

I wandered along the Seine, which ran high and swift, lapping over its banks. And then as I walked under the arches of one of the many picturesque bridges that cross the river, my breath was snatched by the sight of the two towers of what I assumed had to be the Notre Dame. Funny - a week later I saw the same scene, the same angle, in a Picasso painting. There's a little park at the back of the Notre Dame, and the rear view of the cathedral is just as beautiful in its own way as the spectacular front. The garden was covered in snow, and here for the first time I came across people in some numbers: wandering in the little fenced-in garden or drinking steaming cappuccinos in the crisp, bright air at a cafe on the corner.

I once wrote a line in a song about waking up to a cold, sunny morning in childhood: I dreamed then I awoke, with your name on my tongue/And the dew shone in the garden, a million tiny suns/Oh, it was so new... I remember that feeling so vividly, I suppose the same one Cat Stevens is talking about in 'Morning has Broken'. The feeling of absolute newness, as if the world had just been made. At 43, one doesn't have that feeling so often any more, sadly. There is always some burden, some distraction, some clouding of one's inner view. But on Christmas morning in Paris, I had that feeling again.

I went inside the Notre Dame and sat and listened to mass in French, and though I'm not religious in any conventional sense, though I couldn't understand a word, I also couldn't have felt more a part of that ritual. Unlike some of the gloriously flamboyant cathedrals I saw in South America and Germany, the Notre Dame inside is magnificent but subdued. Not melancholy - immensely dignified and joyous at the same time. It is just sublime. And I was happy to sit inside on that incomparable day for an hour or so just to be part of of that moment of thanksgiving. I couldn't get over the idea I was at the Notre Dame on Christmas Day! Just too wonderful...

And alone. I've spent more time alone during this journey than I really expected. The company I've had I've enjoyed and appreciated all the more for it. But there's been a lesson in this aloneness. There have been times when I've been on Facebook at every chance to check for messages, comments, even 'likes' - anything to remind me of my connections to people. But then slowly something else has happened, a feeling that I best expressed in that poem 'When there is no harbour' that I posted back in La Paz. 'This is being a man/Knowing you are alone/Not fearing it/Standing, not leaning.' Slowly I've found a centre that lets me do that, stand without leaning, unafraid and never more purely myself. I think it was that part of me that broke open on the altiplano, when I suddenly found myself in inexplicable tears, sad and joyous at the same time, as we crossed that beautiful, lonely desolation. 'I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got' playing in my ears.

Jon Bauer wrote in a comment to this blog that he thinks we travel because we can't change, but changing our context gives us a different experience of ourselves. On the other hand, Alain de Botton argues for travel as transformation, almost as therapy, arguing we travel in order to be changed, and we should choose our destinations accordingly. I think I'm with de Botton (sorry Jon!). I'm more sanguine about the possibility of change, otherwise I could never have been a psychotherapist. That despite the recognition that change is slow, hard, subtle. Drastic and rapid psychological or spiritual transformation is extremely rare. Some of us have might have one such change in us in our entire lifetime. Many of us none at all. On the other hand, slow change, far from being impossible, is inevitable. It's up to us what that change will amount to, growth or decline, opening or closing.

There's an expression in German - 'der rote Faden' or 'the red thread' - which is used to describe the subtle thread of connection or meaning that runs through something. Now that my travels are almost complete, I look back and see the red thread that runs through this journey. The red thread is solitude, solitude as ally and gift. I've always had a nature that drives me towards solitude, that seems to veer away from the collective. And fought against it, hated it, because I also need acceptance and belonging as much as the next person. But now I see the possibility of complete acceptance of my own solitary nature, not in order to turn away from others or be any less connected, but to be grounded in an unshakeable sense of my own solitary completeness. And I suspect that makes it all the more possible to connect wholly with others, because then there is no longer that edge of anxiety, that subtle but ever-present distortion of self for the sake of the other.

I'm in Prague now, another stunningly beautiful city, though the cold is harsh - it's -12 degrees outside, which is taxing the limits of my clothes. Same again tomorrow for New Year's Eve. Hard to imagine the forty degree heat in Melbourne. I'm not sure where I'd rather be...

Fleabitten in Paris

My last day in Paris. I've fulfilled my obligations: been up the Eiffel Tower, visited the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay, consumed coffee and croissants in pretty little street-corner cafes, sampled expensive French cuisine, and bought two bottles of red wine to open among friends at home. It is an incredibly beautiful city, and yet - I can't decide if it's me or something I am picking up in the air - there's a bad mood about the place. Admittedly I'm uncomfortable, tired and ill-at-ease. I'm staying in an awful hostel for the absurd sum of 50 Euros a night. I can't help compare it to the gorgeous villa I stayed at in Sucre, Bolivia, where I paid half as much for a huge room with marble floors, a view over a picturesque terracotta-tiled courtyard, and wooden shutters on the windows so you could siesta on the huge bed in cool darkness. Lights twinkled in the open air restaurant, where you'd be hard pressed to rid yourself of ten dollars, and the staff were exquisitely polite and helpful. Here, the room is cramped and overheated, the toilet is outside, and filthy, and - wait for it - the bed is full of FLEAS. I have huge red welts all over my body, don't know whether to go outside into the bitter cold, where the itching stops, or sit inside in the stifling heat and try not to tear myself apart with my fingernails.

The Louvre? Death by old masters. Art just shouldn't be presented on such a vast and unmanageable scale. Again, I did my duty. I saw the Mona Lisa. More than anything else I was conscious of gazing at what must surely be the most gazed-at 0.3m2 in history. As I approached the hall where the masterpiece is housed, I heard an American father saying to his young adult son, "Hold on to your hat! Get ready!" Oh puh-lease! Then in the admiring crowd someone cried out "The eyes follow you around!" Yuh. Did you ever notice that every painting does that, if the subject is looking at the painter? And then so many crucified Jesuses with eyes turned heavenwards, so many static, artificial arrangements of figures, symbolically gesturing. So many imposing marble men with ten-year-old's penises... Is it the fleas that are making me like this? I'm a bad tempered philistine.

Or maybe not. At the Musee d'Orsay I was overwhelmed by the loveliness. I went round a corner and theVan Goghs made me gasp, their colours, their intensity leaping off the wall, less paintings than light-filled windows. Beauty raised to the nth power, to the edge of tolerance if you could allow yourself to be completely open to them. I'd have cried if that wouldn't have been embarrassing. Other paintings too moved me like this, not always the ones I expected. Some of Sicely's for instance, who I've never really paid much attention to before. It was a feast, sheer aesthetic gluttony, and I didn't leave until I had seen everything.

I've done a lot of walking, despite the cold. Two days ago it was a mild four or so degrees and after Berlin that seemed quite humane. I even left my thermals in the hostel. But yesterday I did the same thing, and froze. I have to say I was taken aback to have to queue for half an hour in the shivering wind to go up the Eiffel Tower, though I shouldn't have been. After all, it's probably the biggest tourist destination in the world. I wandered into a square in the city where there was a huge column with someone or other atop it looking triumphal and composed. The awnings of the shops around the square were all Chanel, Rolex, Dior etc. The place had a stink of unimaginable wealth. I then noticed it was the Ritz. The Euro cent dropped and I realised that this whole high-glam black-and-gold look that you see in Vogue advertisements, or the upmarket shops at Crown Casino, is a Paris creation. Well, duh! I suppose that should be obvious, but I had to visit Paris to realise it. It's not a look that I like - it's high artifice is oppressive to me - but here I can see its original context: these exquisite streets saturated with history, elegance, centuries of style and fashion.

Oh gay Paree! Truth is, I won't cry to leave you. I can only imagine how it must be to walk these streets on a fine spring day, in love, as one is supposed to be. But I'm not in love, and the snow is turning to slush, and my fleabites are tormenting me, and right now I'd give up Paris and everything in it to be playing cricket in the backyard with my son... Or even just wandering down to humble CERES, under its fine electric pylons, and eating their Indonesian eggs in the sun. Foie gras makes my gorge rise.

I've been reading a lovely book by Tiziano Terzani, "Das Ende ist mein Anfang" ("The End is My Beginning" - I suppose there is an English translation, since my book is itself a German translation from the Italian). I read this quote this morning and it spoke to me (my translation):

This world is a miracle! ... And if you manage to feel a part of this miracle - not the 'you' with two eyes and two feet, but the You, your innermost being - what more can you want? Hm? What more can you possibly want? A new car?

And I'd add, Paris? The Eiffel Tower? The Louvre? It is a great privilege to be able to see the world like this, to stand in these famous places, see these famous sights. But if you're alive to this miracle, you know it can't be captured anywhere, can't be crystallised in this monument or city or painting. A tired heart can be left indifferent by all the old masters in the world. And then the strangest, smallest thing can break you open, be more marvellous in that moment than all the masterpieces of the Louvre.