Inner exploration.

John Wayne on-screen tough guy:

“What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture? Spell it out? Don't ever ask me! Long as you live, don't ever ask me more.”

The Searchers.

There is a special Ray Mears programme.  He goes into the jungle with a very eager Ewan McGregor.  I am not sure if it was a pilot concept, but it seems never to have been expanded on.

This was no “I’m a celebrity get me out of here".  Here being a hotel carpark somewhere leafy by the looks of it.  Knee deep mud and if you want a nights rest you better get your camp in order, nobody else is doing it.

The programme charts Ewan from enthusiastic ignorance to knowledgeable misery.  At the end of the programme, the helicopter lifts skyward, Ewan is glad it is over.  But, it gave him the opportunity to work out “issues” he has left a lot of mental baggage in the jungle.

This seems to be a common theme, while out in the “wilderness” inner exploration is going on, you get in touch with your inner being.  Things become clearer, mental knots untie, surplus weight shed.  It is all a bit new age, smacking of rebirth and touchy feely.  Ethan, as portrayed by John Wayne would not be having any of it.

At the age of 11, eager young students, legally obliged to attend students with nowhere else to go, were set an essay.  What is heaven, what is hell.

My effort boiled down to, hell is the repetition of your life for eternity with the sure knowledge of what happens next, it runs on rails, a journey you know.  Heaven is new experience.  Personal growth does not seem to be a priority for me, I’ve not really changed this attitude.

While walking I do plenty of thinking, but it is usually a forward projection from the point of now.

I suspect the “walking cure” is an extension of the “talking cure” concept.  Healthy mind, healthy body.  Talk about it and it gets better.

It cannot be very contentious to assert a persons inner landscape is at least as complex as the landscape of the natural world.  There are many places in the natural world having been mapped that clearly would be a bad idea to go and visit.  The core of a nuclear reactor would be an extreme example.  Not much good is going to come of popping in and giving it a look-see.

Why then is there the idea that exploring your inner landscape is a good idea.  There is much danger to be uncovered and harmful materials locked away.  “Get it out in the open” seems to be the consensus for these thoughts, but people are not so keen to open up plague pits or anthrax dumps.

If you are skilled enough at handling these toxic thoughts and are able to jettison them into the rainforest then by all means do so.  If you are not, medalling might be a very bad idea.

Introspection must be doomed to failure.  There are people that profess if they had their time again they would not change a single thing.  Either they are totally devoid of imagination, incapable of introspection, or lying.

Finish this sentence in seven words or less : “I would like to be reincarnated because…”

I would hope those that write “to do it all the same again” would be eternally damned to wander the earth as shades.

Introspection finds the cracks, the fracture, and like an old gramophone needle gets stuck in it.  “What if….” begins and it never ends.

Even if you divine the correct path, the one you should have taken, the phrase you should have used, you cannot be sure how it would affect the next instant.  Even in the movies, the most controlled of lives, you only have alternate endings, they don’t do alternate beginnings or middles, it makes no sense, the complexity is total.

Imagine the horror if you could plot your alternate life from that crossroads, the result would drive you mad.  It’s a path never travelled however beautiful it will be eternally denied you.

Travelling the backwaters of memory is a bad plan, you could very easily get lost.

The advice “Don’t look back” has never been more apposite.  I think there is a simple truth.  Those that do not wish to be lost realise it is not worth travelling back, the surest way to avoid the backward glance is to forget or by sheer strength of will never return to it. 

It is as simple as that, like so much excess weight, the memories are not untied, made coherent, understood.  They are simply dropped as the complex tangle of unexplainable, unchangeable clutter they are revealed to be.  There is no resolution just an understanding, the past has past.