Lapland

Presently, the main goal is to type up everything written in my notebooks, since they are an unstructured mess. This entry in the diary was written in Abisko as the trip was winding down. It is interesting that some of these reflections were taken on board, whereas others are yet to be implemented.

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Three months of absent inaction, an overdriven mind and a decisive change of lifestyle are felt in the bones, if not in the heart. Joints creak, stretch and only begrudgingly flex into movement as the mind finally wrests control from the clutches of cold. Splotches of purple have been branded under milky eyes, whose blood seems to have drained into the skin beneath. Yet, the recharging of the body is not the priority. Enough energy is directed to function; the rest is used to explore and understand a life apart from the reaches of civilisation. No wonder or concern for the future gnaws away at the enjoyment of the present.

The bindings of stress, too, have come under a union of directed thought and emotion. Comfort remains unfazed by anxiety. Trivial concerns crawl in the recesses of the subconscious: the haphazard weather, the schedule’s small margin for delay, and paranoia about not finding the connecting train platform – a fear based entirely on an ineptitude for navigation. Even these are repressed by simple logic: though the fate of my plans is dependent upon the train’s punctuality, the train’s punctuality is not dependent upon my plans. Investing emotion is pointless. Secondly, resolutions can always be found to counter an errant train journey. Nothing and everything is under control. Nerves still feel fraught and emotions fickle after months of intensity, yet they continue to mend. The present union of body and mind seems to provide a little respite.

Truly, the suffering of the body is negligible. The demands of travel continue to be met through vigorous application. Recuperation awaits when home, for at home there are no auroras, no Samis, no frozen lakes or waterfalls. This the body bows to with understanding, if not grace. Indeed, there is none in the snow-shoe hiking upon – and, more frequently, through – powder playfully but painfully collapsing into socks and trousers. Metres of snow are pressed and kneaded for all its pleasure and value. Afterwards, legs pulse and quake in their need for a seat. Food is devoured by the bag load as the mind screams for deliverance from its drained state. A desire to rest, though, must yield to a desire for experience.

Senses simmer in the frayed nerves of the skin, a touch or stretch being enough to send the whole network into an electric spasm. From the buffeting humidity and pulsing heat of South America, where it drowns in a cocktail of repellent, sunscreen and sweat, to the numbing freeze of Lapland, where all fluid is teased out by its cold and cracking breath, the skin has endured much. Eventually, it has begun to resemble ice: the blue-white tendrils of snowflakes spread across pallid heels, palms, fingers and toes. Vulnerability is imparted through jittering feet, folded arms and clenched fists, first with their thumbs on the outside, before taking their place in the penguin huddle. Anything to convince the mind of its fleeting control is welcomed; a few moments to be unaware of the body’s needs are a few moments to stave off depravity. Dad and I once agreed that we would prefer very cold temperatures over the simmering; you can always add extra layers. We were wrong. Here, the cold pierces through everything. I await the relief of a temperate home.

Hunger also awaits this relief. Thawed bread and whimpering cornflakes crunch without resistance, the mash of wheat, saliva and soy milk ceasing to satiate a worn appetite. Salami and ham are thinner than the grimace of dissatisfied lips. Complementing such pathetic protein are the weeping tomatoes, whose acidic grazes only freeze in a fungal glacier. Searing tea shears the tongue of taste, yet even this quickly and pitifully abates until lukewarm fluid no longer quenches. Such is the feast of cavemen. In a land demanding warmth and cooked food, I embrace neither. Desires tempt the mind to insanity, wrapping fat, boiled lips around the roasted lambs and steamed rice of Eden or Inferno. Only the beckons of reunion deflect these attacks on the pink and tender underbelly of control.

Yet striding across the lake and ploughing through meals has preserved all balance, and thus all improvement, through acknowledgement of these inadequacies. Tautness ripples in the muscles and joints awakened from seven years of dormancy. Explosions of purpose rattle the sloth from its high perch among the trees. Bubbles of satisfied and realised physicality grow heavy and pop, only to rebuild their worldly spheres when energy returns. The shivers of cold, fatigue and malaise have become the tremors of action soon to be engaged: stimulation where only stagnancy was known. There is no discomfort, only challenge. The process of my lifestyle has realised such potential that I urgently pursue it, and in this urgency find purpose. Future plans and aims are meaningless when compared with present exertions.

I long to master this energy. It is an energy which is intertwined with discipline. Without discipline, exertion existed as a chaotic and aimless struggle, barrelling my will from one hastily-determined judgement to another. Within this realisation lies the faint whisperings of the answers to several questions about life; the abandonment of dreams, passions, friends and responsibilities is most pertinent. Despair pointed to the tower of Babel, its spire towering above the range of my sight, and sneered: Concede, for it is all unattainable. Never was the unity of passion, fulfilment and happiness sought; never could it be, for there was not the realisation that discipline, patience and purpose formed the unifying construct.

That this can be written even in the grip of hungering, fatigued malaise echoes the truth of this. Creativity does not call to me now, its sleep undisturbed by my hand and the pen’s function at only a basic level. The mind narrates only what it knows and not what it imagines. Yet everything turns full circle. In fatigue, we learn the greatest boundaries of our exertion. Creation, perseverance and discipline grapple with tiredness, and are victorious. To hone these skills is a strong objective, for when they can be united with a freshness of mind, body and fervour, then the pursuit of greater ambitions will be made possible.

Stagnancy

Malaise creeps into the subconscious mind like mildew into the corners of a squalid room. Intent is devoid of initiative. That which must be acted upon can be perceived, yet is left to lie stagnant. No, it is not procrastination; distracting whims and gratifying pastimes are rarely indulged. Instead, it is reliving Joseph and I’s climb of El Misti: lumbering bodies heaving one leg ahead of the other up a slippery scree slope, while the mind struggles against its own mountain of exhaustion and oxygen deprivation. Mist blankets the shingly volcano, lathered in snow for the solitary day of the year. It is a day of forlornly trying to usurp the sloth of both mind and body. Left foot, right foot. Being unable to see our objective itches away at contentment. This hazy existence, where the confused mind takes longer to respond and where the journey has no apparent direction, portrays the general feeling of stagnancy.

Stagnancy is when an environment or a mindset no longer allows growth to flourish. Fresh experiences, together with the insights stirred up by reflection, form the strongest stimuli for this growth. To begin conveying the past year’s changes in both mindset and the opportunity for experience, and with this the lifestyle of stagnancy, several impressions from the trip must be covered. Challenge, fulfilment, isolation, wonder: our experience grew with every aspect of the trip, whether negative or positive. Cooking a meal might have involved the logistics of buying food, exchanging simple words in broken tongues, and either meeting other travellers in the hostel kitchen, or dining alone and wishing that the family was there for company. In the merest task lurked challenge, achievement, segregation or immersion, and even fulfilment. Travelling may well be the antithesis of stagnancy.

Complementing this world of invigoration and growth is a mind prepared to explore, to digest and to reflect. It is the willingness to extract insight from experience that accelerates growth so rapidly, rather than experience itself. Crucially, insight links sensation with application. For character to be strengthened, the lessons of experience must be applied throughout everyday life. As significant as insight is, provided that there is an effective platform for it such as discourse or writing, its only real limitation is memory. New impressions of old experiences only require a conversation or the discovery of a significant passage in a book. Anything which transmits fresh perspective of a shared experience can be inspiring. For this reason, second-hand books of poetry and prose are now piled upon my desk. Tapping into the wisdom of others could, with the right mindset, begin to inspire in a way that life currently cannot.

Yet of the last five books I have read, four have been teen fantasy. The mind slavers for instant gratification. Shelley, Yeats and even the beloved Keats idle forlornly, wondering if they will ever be called upon both to gratify and for immersive study. Present circumstance cannot be blamed for this neglect. Instead, the fault lies with a  mind cultivated by a renewed appreciation of comfort. From this ease has spawned lethargy. In a way, this progression is natural: travelling heightens awareness for the amenities of home, for the stress of managing money, and for the absence of personal connections. However, these concepts are rarely seen in a balanced light. Microwaving leftover mince to eat while lounging upon a cosy and familiar couch, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants as ragged as they are snug, enjoying that ever-quoted movie stretching across the widescreen TV... travelling makes the trivial appear unbearably alluring. As expected and as required, home would fail to indulge such nostalgia. Imagination only blurred what is of true value to a satisfying life.

The struggle between the desire for the new and the satisfaction with the old is a function of how each is valued. At various times, different values rise to greater heights. Usually, this occurs when their absence feels pronounced. While vomiting throughout an eighteen hour bus ride across the Andes, you can be sure that health and comfort were valued very highly. In France, however, there was a much less tangible feeling of neglect. A poignant sense of failure had descended upon me. Discipline, friendship, reason, direction: I had deserted every one of these, and more. From the despondency through Rennes, Vannes and Carnac crept an opportunity for reflection. In order to repel the stagnancy of the soul, all that was required was to verbalise my values, then act upon them. At Carnac, the second day was spent writing. Fulfilment slowly began to surface as creativity and work ethic were tested. Discipline wove its way into the plans for the future; three hours per day were budgeted for writing. Not only was this maintained, but sightseeing became enjoyable and rewarding again. Finally, a productive and balanced mindset was attained, and it owed to the understanding of value.

Values grow, change and are elucidated over time. With this insight came a realisation: much of what appeared to be important was only illusory. Clutter and excess had to be reduced from thought and emotion. The sights of Rouen were sacrificed to stem my stress at not having a thorough itinerary. Independence flourished as my reliance on impersonal connections abated. Nevertheless, a lifetime of indiscipline could not be overturned instantly. An inordinate amount of time was squandered at an internet cafe in Cologne, for instance, and I wrote very little en route from Abisko to Athens. Insecurities prevailed; lacking the killer instinct to sever and restructure my writing was, and is, the worst. Like insight, creativity need not spring from new creations; it may also be harnessed by adopting fresh perspectives for old works. Still, there was a pronounced shift towards ambition in my mentality. While there were new experiences to be both enjoyed and reflected upon, the cogs of initiative continued to turn. Having acclimatised to the needs of life, however, there was to be another shift.

Despite looking forward to the return home, it is clear that Joseph and I were not prepared. Travelling tends to condense everything into a brief window of time: more emotions are felt, more wisdom is garnered, more growth is undertaken than in a comparable time of ordinary existence. Old lifestyles yawned, dusted themselves off, and leapt into our pockets from their place of hibernation. At home, little had changed. Yet the greatest struggle has been expression. Thousands of photos continue to idle on hard drives, experiences remain unshared, and the insights and improvements of the trip lie stagnant. Every aspect relates to one another. What value are hundreds of photos of Iguazu when more significance can be derived from a single shot of the Abisko wilderness? If every photo taken could be a word expressed, I would sacrifice them all. Now, days have stretched into weeks until nine months have passed; still almost all discourse about my and Joseph’s experiences has only been between us. This was almost all that we required, too, due to the abrupt adoption of the old lifestyle by virtue of its ease, its years of familiarity and its home ground advantage over new wisdom.

However, the grace period for this stagnancy has passed. Two strategies are in place, the first of which focuses on removing clutter. Thought and emotion have previously been targeted; the present aim is old habits and pastimes. Watching TV, playing trivia and computer games, designing bridge system, indulging in sweet foods, following current events, and bland conversation for the sake of fulfilling social expectation: all, for the most part, have been tossed into the scrap heap. Anything which is not beneficial or necessary or satisfying will come under fire. Second is the renewed pursuit of passions. Long neglected through sloth, frustration and circumstance, it is difficult to coax the mind into the resumption of, particularly, writing and reading in depth. The disappointment of skills left to stagnate reverberates in every slash of blue biro, discarding words that cannot seem to be moulded into expression. Forlornness echoes in the jarring breaks between keyboard taps. Slow, forced, unnatural. Nothing easier was expected. Nothing easier is desired. Through diligence will come efficiency, a sharpening of the mind which will banish stagnancy for good.

Stagnancy may be the current focus, but it is only a slight obstacle. The pursuit of conditions, both mental and environmental, that allow for each of life’s values to be satisfied, is closer to the ideal. Values will forever evolve depending on circumstance, experience, or simply time; the resulting development of character is, thus, a process that can never be completed. Currently, drawing insight from new experiences is something which I value immensely. Coming to terms with the dearth of new experiences has been difficult, yet there will be many more adventures in the future. Until everything has been extracted from the past, there can be no excuse for stagnancy in the present. As for the severance of clutter and the focus on productivity, these are really based on the same principle: the simplification of life. Through discipline, this may become second nature. If the entire process finally allows some experiences and insights to be shared, then at least some good may come out of stagnancy.

G'bye FB

Hi. Most writing will be current and reflective, though any creative stuff will go here too if I get back into that. Other content will include edited material from the trip once I start working on that again. There may or may not be any bridge content. Probably won’t be playing much bridge over the next couple of months so there would be slim pickings in any case.

The first post took most of two days – running on fumes at the moment. Blog updates can be expected twice per week, perhaps more if I get into the swing of things.

Other notes: deleting facebook in a few days since that’s one big source of stagnancy. Contact details are nickjjacob@gmail.com for email/MSN, phone’s 0212084015. Also, if you want to read my old blog, give me a buzz and you'll be added. All the content from 2009 is still on nickjjacob.blogspot.com.