Newsletter Number Six
Diego Maradona, staying active in lockdown, meditation on a motorbike and driving to Achill
Hi all,
(It’s come to my attention that my article linking mightn’t be as clear as I’d assumed. Please click the pink text to get through to the articles I’m referring to! Or feel free to visit gavinbrennan.substack.com any time for the full list. Also, check your spam folders if you’re not getting the emails, though I think most of you are)
Hope you’re all well as ever. We are nearly out of our level five lockdown, and I hope by this time next week ye will have allowed yourselves some respite from the last few weeks and a small bit of adventure to somewhere you’ve been deprived of. It seems from anyone I’ve been in contact with that the last six weeks have been a lot quieter than March and April, and as I expected beforehand the enthusiasm for Zooming and phone calls has inevitably waned, perhaps necessarily so. Ironically, it seems that the spatial restrictions restrict our souls, and although we’ve more time to reach out to people we feel less compelled to do so when it’s not in person. I expect the next few weeks to see us open up mentally again as we near Christmas.
Mind yourselves though, as I noticed the first ‘opening up’ that people seemed to be taking to socialising again as if they were doing it for the first time, and I don’t mean with regards to slobbery drinking sessions. You might just need to ground yourself a bit before this unprecedented Christmas period. Spend as much time in nature as possible, all the better if it’s cold out. Appreciate re-integrating whatever’s been missing from your routine – people, places, events and so on – bit by bit. And take the time to prepare in whatever way you need for Christmas. I’m sure there’ll be plenty to talk about at the Christmas dinner table, perhaps in ways we’ve never expected from ourselves.
Now, onto this week’s articles: I promised you some news for last week but it never materialised for me, and I never acknowledged its absence either, though thankfully it has arrived this week. It’s a piece about staying active in lockdown that I’m delighted to have had the chance to write for the mental health organisation A Lust for Life. They do a lot of great advocacy work and to my mind are one of the most progressive (in the good way) voices talking about mental health in Ireland right now, particularly for young people. The piece is not a list of top 10 exercises or reasons why you need to run, walk or take up jiu-jitsu. It’s about trusting your own intuition with regards to the activity your body needs. Exercising also happens to be a great way of improving your intuition, thus creating a positive loop whereby you can trust your own judgement over the barrage of noise coming from the news, friends and the media at large about what you need to do or know. And ultimately, that’s what this newsletter is about.
I’ll let you read it (and check out the rest of the site) for yourselves:
· Staying Active in Lockdown (A Lust for Life)
I sat down this morning to write this newsletter and it ended up containing so much content about the passing of Diego Maradona that I’ve just decided to post it as a separate article on the site. You can read it here:
So anyway. I digressed a bit on the topic of Maradona and transcendence, and I haven’t even watched the documentary yet. Funnily enough, for the rest of what’s supposed to be my day off I’m going to ignore the Premier League football to watch a documentary about football instead. Although only a charlatan would talk about sports he never watches (I wouldn’t do that to you), as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, following sport is about much more than just what happens on the pitch. And this week I think there is more to be gained in your understanding of the world by watching what is by all accounts an incredible movie about Diego Maradona, than watching Chelsea play Spurs (though I’m watching the hurling right now over my laptop!).
This week we reach the apex of my bike trip around the north of Vietnam. Although it was the day before my adventures around Ba Be Lake, where I consciously practiced meditation for the first time, it was here the day before that really I started to appreciate the power of letting go and just embracing whatever came in front of me, whether thoughts or roads. As I’ve delved into before, the external world serves as a reflection of what happens inside our heads, and it is through countless hundreds of hours of driving around on a motorbike where I first really learned the power of just letting thoughts flow through the mind.
It helps when you’re in a place of awe-inspiring (or ‘Maradona-esque’) natural beauty, embellished by a rich and thoughtful culture (though one of the lessons of this – and all my travel pieces – is that we don’t need to travel and far and wide to experience the new, the novel, or the things that change how we see the world). The simplest way, for example, is by reading someone else’s account of their experience – whether through fiction, poetry, essay or any other form of writing or art. Though I suppose it helps if you’ve got a motorbike.
Although that week in my actual life began and ended in Hanoi, and this third day of driving happened the day before I got to Ba Be, the story has begun in Ba Be and worked its way cyclically around to here, a day prior in linear time. Ba Be was a destination in reality, but on a different level the bike itself and the road was the destination. The stories in our heads don’t fit neatly into chronological order, and so it’s made sense – part planned, part just how it’s turned out – to order the stories in this way.
I’m sure you’ve all heard the cliché that the journey is the destination, or some form of it, but it’s one of those clichés that is true beyond our comprehension, for it sums up life itself. We may have goals in life but we really don’t know why or where we’re going, and if you’re not enjoying the day-to-day process (I use the word ‘enjoyment’ loosely, perhaps something related to meaning is more appropriate) then you must ask yourself “What am I at, like?”
It's a long piece, and I don’t know if anyone else bar me is paying attention to the titles of these stories, but the setting for this one is simply ‘Vietnam’. Partly set on the road from Cao Bang, partly in Hanoi, but it captures what was such an intrinsic part of life there – or anyone’s visit – that it’s impossible to separate the whole thing from it. It is, of course, about motorbikes.
It’s as much an ode to traffic as it is to open-ended road trips, as such is life that you can’t separate the good from the bad. I hope if you’ve been to Vietnam you might be able to relate to the chaos of its cities. As I’ve said before, beauty is not in the perfect, it’s a celebration of life itself. It’s not just about motorbikes, or road trips, or Vietnam. Mostly – as with most of my writing, or perhaps as with most of life itself – it’s about awareness, and how once we have that awareness of the world around us, the possibilities of life are endless. I hope you enjoy it.
I’ve also included a ‘bonus’ article this week, as it was looking until today like I wouldn’t have time to work on anything but the Vietnam article (though I’ve gotten a mysterious burst of productivity today, hence the slightly delayed release of this newsletter). I put this up on gavisgone.com a couple of months ago but have added it here for anyone who missed it. It’s also about driving, this time to somewhere more familiar – Achill Island – and it’s also a ponderance on the nature of our memories and attachments to places and the past.
So savour your journeys, wherever they take you over the next few weeks. And stay safe on the roads, even if you’re not driving a Taiwanese knock-off Honda Win around the hills of South-East Asia.
And as always, all comments and feedback are much appreciated along the way.
Go n-éirí an bóthar libh,
Gav