Too much ‘me’. I’m so centred around what I want and what I feel, and (whether I get what I want or not) it’s oppressive. This has nothing to do with a kind of nursery virtuousness, like ‘share your toys’, or the quid pro quo ‘do unto others ...’, which are just other attitudes of the ego. This is a more radical internal shift. In this culture, me-ness is so normative that my own has been almost transparent, but it’s starting to thicken and darken and become visible to me: the ego curdling. There’s a kind of pursuit that appears ‘spiritual’, and maybe it’s appropriate when you’re young, but if it doesn’t exhaust itself, you never wind down into stillness, equanimity. Everything is contained in the grain of this moment. More and more, I experience this directly.

I’m reading Thomas Merton’s journals. He gets good as he reaches middle years. Before that, he’s a bit histrionic and florid – which is really only what I would expect. I expect it because it’s just what I see in myself. To find it in someone else’s journey, at a point where I’m starting to let go of some of the internal melodrama, is clarifying. His struggle around the desire (is it?) or vocation (is it?) for hermitage resonates with me. I understand the need to whittle everything down to the absolute minimum, and then also the doubt whether this isn’t just a new form of self-indulgence – literally, the indulging of the self rather than its whittling down, which is what I really ought to be about.

Actually, this clarified something else for me. There’s talk around me at the moment about ways of living in community, and I’ve wondered why I don’t feel the attraction. Now I see that it’s because I’m moving in the opposite direction. People come into community usually in order to simplify, but what generally happens is that a new layer of complication gets added. And then I can’t help experiencing community as institution, which always turns my blood cold. I began adulthood in a kind of aloneness that was actually alienation. It was a product of fear and incapacity. I was so lonely I didn’t even know to call it that. The intervening years have been like living in a bag of pebbles. All kinds of sharp edges got knocked off and rough surfaces were rubbed smooth. I learnt to relate to people in deeper and deeper ways. Now, if I think of solitude, it feels like a place not just of peace and silence but also of deep connection. Hermitage? I don’t know. But definitely as I move out of the child-rearing phase I’m looking to make more space for practising, contemplating, being. Already I’m eliminating as much activity and stimulation as I can bear to be without. Sometimes I feel like that artist who stitched his eyelids together, because he said that by the age of 30 he’d already seen more than he could process in the entire rest of his life.

Because I didn’t have Rowan until I was 36, I feel, in a way, a bit out of synch with myself. I’m of an age where I might otherwise be moving into the third asrama, whereas actually Rowan is only nine, and it will be a while before I can head for the forest. Really, though, it’s impossible to be out of synch with yourself. Everything is unfolding in the only possible way. To say it’s the ‘best’ way or the ‘perfect’ way would be to miss the point. It’s just the way it’s unfolding.

Found myself on the Circle Line today. Suddenly, just an undertone, the old smell of the Underground, jolting me back 20 years, to the city I lived in then, which is a completely different city from the one I live in now. That one was ... How to nail it? It was so urban, and I was so out on all my surfaces, without a centre. Now there’s a lot more grass, and so much that seemed to matter then – because it was holding me together like a battery of steel pins – really doesn’t matter at all.