Leonard and Hungry Paul

🌠🌠🌠🌠🌠

I loved this book. Leonard, Hungry Paul and almost everyone else in the book, are decent people just living their lives. That's a trick that more of us need to learn. In doing so they also impart life lessons on one another and many of those are lessons that people are desperately need of.

There's a lot to be learned from this book.

Spoilers ahead, though I think that if you care about spoilers then you must not know how to enjoy the ride.

In almost every case below there's more goodness around the bits I've quoted, I just highlighted the part I wanted to comment on.

Hungry Paul disappeared back ino the cubby hole and removed a die from another set, the board game equivalent of cannibalism.

Not one of the wise bits, just humor that I hadn't considered. Sadly they don't play decent games, just old crap-games that muggles would know.

“Maybe it's not just the universe that expands and contracts” …and continuing for several pages until ending at… “Even among close friends, there are still some thoughts that ought to be allowed to ripen in private”.

An interesting discussion about the ways our lives expand and contract. Mine was always pretty small and has contracted about as far as it can unless I move to the wilderness and become a hermit. And yet, it's also expanded as I learned to meditate, and to see false stories, and so expanded my tribe. Of course, it's a one way expansion in that humanity is in my tribe but they don't think I'm in theirs. 🤷

“Improving books” is a term I hadn't heard before, much better than self-help.

An 'improving book' is an old description, maybe from Victorian times, of a book that leaves you more informed, rather than just entertained. Someone on Twitter

If you don't finish a book more informed then it might have been a waste of time.

He had barely enough maleness to get him through his own life, never mind imparting it to a son.

I get that sentiment but it comes from bullshit definitions of maleness. If you're male then any way that you behave is a form of maleness. The most flamboyantly feminine gay man exhibits maleness in his every move because maleness is a spectrum that runs from super butch assholes who are afraid of their feelings to ultra feminine queers who cry at the drop of a hat. Why would you limit maleness, especially if you're male? The answer is, because you're trying to fit in with a tribe that believes stupid things.

The relationship advice that Helen gives Grace.

'Well, if you only want serious answers,' began Helen, 'I think you have to put your relationship first. I mean really first, not just say that it's No.1 in Valentine's cards and things like that. I mean, you even have to put it ahead of your kids. Otherwise, you get sucked into being a parent and forget to prioritize your husband or wife and before you know it, you find yourself in the worst situation of all: married with children, but deeply lonely. As you both change, you will periodically lose each other. You need to find each other again and–here's the trick–instead of trying to rekindle what you had, you need to reinvent yourselves and your relationship. You have to keep starting new relationships with the same person. This won't make any sense to you now, but at some stage in your marriage to Andrew this may become very important.'

Though we may be a species that prizes great minds, we are also terrified of and by our thoughts.

This is very true, and very sad.

Just below that is this bit.

But Hungry Paul seemed to be able to maintain his peace where another man might have declared war on themselves and those around him. What did he think about? The answer is, quite simply, nothing. Hungry Paul had been blessed with a mental stillness which had become his natural state over the years. His mind worked perfectly fine and he had all the faculties of a healthy, if slightly unorthodox, man of his age. He just had no interest in, or capacity for, mental chatter. He had no internal narrator. When he saw a dog he just saw a dog, without his mind adding that it should be on a lead or that its tongue was hanging out like a rasher. When he heard an ambulance siren he just heard an ambulance siren, without noting its Doppler effect or wondering if it was a real emergency or just the driver running late for dinner. And it is in this way that Hungry Paul maintained a natural clarity throughout his day, and stayed apart from the trouble that the world will undoubtedly make for those who look for it.

This is the opposite of my, and I think most people's, mental state. When left to it's own ends my brain maintains a constant running dialog on anything and everything. Meditation has taught me about Hungry Paul's mental state, and it's a very superior one. Now days my brain still runs at the mouth but I see it happening and I'm not caught in it. It's not MY thoughts, my story, it's just brain noise and I can let it go at any time. It might be back in five minutes but I'll notice and let it go again. Watching your brain make the noise is a wholly different experience from being caught in it and thinking it's real. That's what I call auto-pilot, where you're not awake to what's happening so you can't really say that you're in charge.

Hungry Paul was good at this: just sitting, not fidgeting, not thinking particularly, and simply listening to the room. He never minded time. It neither dragged nor slipped away for him. He always felt in time. Just here, just being around.

This and the bit made me think that Hungry Paul is a natural Zen master. It feels really good when you can hit that state of equanimity, of. Of calm and balance where you're just not caught up in the noise of the world. It's a rare thing for me, but possibly becoming less rare.

Their friendship was not just one of convenience between two quiet, solitary men with few other options, it was a pact. A pact to resist the vortex of busyness and insensitivity that had engulfed the rest of the world. It was a pact of simplicity, which stood against the forces of competitiveness and noise.

No comment, except I want a friendship like that.

The only problem was that Leonard had discovered a flaw in their way of life. It was fine so long as everything else stayed the same.

And this is why impermanence is a core tenet of Buddhism. Things change, and that's just a fact, and you'll be better prepared for the change if you go in with your eyes open.

Leonard’s natural instinct was to retreat and to create a safe bubble. But the bubble feeds on itself. Solitude and peace lose their specialness when they no longer stand in contrast to anything. In a busy—or at least busier—life, quiet reflection provides resonance to experience. But to deprive life of experiences deliberately and to hide from its realities was not special. It was just another form of fear that led to a life-limiting loneliness that accumulated and accumulated until it became so big that it blocked up the front door, drowned out conversations and put other people behind soundproof glass.

Our social media bubbles are similar. We're afraid of being wrong so we hide in the bubble that big tech provides and we jeer at the people in the other bubble because we're lazy and scared. It's easy to stay in the bubble and if you question the bubble the other occupants can get quite angry. But living in a bubble is unhealthy, whether it's an individual bubble or a social one. They make us fragile and even scarier, they make society more fragile.

And anyway, Leonard was discovering that distancing himself from people didn’t even bring peace. The more he separated himself from others, the more they become unfathomable and perplexing. The distance just made him lose perspective. If he wasn’t careful he could turn vinegary and judgemental, like that man he used to see in the supermarket, muttering to himself with egg down the front of his jumper. In fact, he had discovered that he was less critical of people when he allowed them in. People, it turns out, weren’t so bad. At least that was true of some people. And maybe that was the trick: to find the right people; to be able to recognise them and to know how to appreciate them when you do find them.

This. The vast majority of people just want to live their lives. They want to contribute and be useful but they're afraid of being taken advantage of.

The problem for the mime artist is that life is so noisy now, they are being left behind. We live in an age of cacophony. Everyone talking and thinking out loud, with no space or oxygen left for quiet statements and silence.

It always made him marvel that introverts made the best speakers, perhaps taking themselves less seriously than the showboating businessmen who usually took the ‘appearance fee’ slots at conferences. Peter’s trick was simple: he never made it about himself. He never put his fragile ego or reputation at stake, instead letting the subject be the star. For all his easy-going delivery, he prepared meticulously, and placed great emphasis on maintaining what he called a ‘boxer’s mind’: relaxed enough to deliver what he needed, but alert enough not to get punched in the face.

I don't know that it's true but it wouldn't surprise me at all.

Memories feel real but they’re not.

- some good Buddhism here

One time I was going on about work and how I was overlooked for promotion and how ageist it all was and he just cuts me off and says “That’s just a story.” Nothing more. Just like that. “That’s just a story.” And the thing is he was right. It was just a story I was telling myself. When I stopped telling it, it went away.’

- more buddhism THIS! THIS! THIS! It's all just bullshit stories that we're telling ourselves and the stories make us miserable. But the stories are optional.

Though this was all still quite new to him, he could see that making big decisions was just as consequential as not making them. Either way you were committing to something. We are never entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.

Leonard wore a new feeling of peace. He had always associated peace with the idea of happiness, as if it were some sort of steady state that happiness turned into when it was for real. But now he realised that peace is independent of any one feeling. The deep peace that he now felt was in a minor key. It was not blissful, but melancholy. It was a profound acceptance of things as they were, devoid of superficial preferences. The weight of effort that it took to be happy was lifted from his bones.

I am just sorry it took me so long to realise I was holding you back, but not in the way you think. I have been holding you back by letting you hold onto this precious, fictional version of yourself. You’re addicted to your own competence. I should have tried sooner to help you so that you could discover for yourself how impossible it is to help somebody.’

Yes, our parents will grow old and yes they will get sick and yes they will die, but that will happen to us two as well. Where you’re wrong is that you think that’s a problem in the future. But it’s not. The answer to that problem is to spend time with them now. Be in their lives so that when the worst happens—which we hope is many years away—there will have been ten, twenty, however many years of Scrabble, University Challenge, curries, walks, gardening and whatever else behind us. And then, when the time comes we’ll know what to do. Not because we’ll have it all figured it out but because we will have had the habit, the practice, of loving them and being with them, and the utter clarity that comes with that.

An attack would be fine. An attack was something she was durable enough to withstand and retaliate against. But kind truth, gentle truth, was harder.

But it was the nature of being a parent. The kids’ lives are their own. From day one you are handing it back to them bit by bit, until they move on.

• oxters: armpits
• Adam and Eve areas: privates
• weir: low dam
• chauffeuse: female chauffeur
• perspicacious: having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning
• mews house: A mews is a row or courtyard of stables and carriage houses with living quarters above them, built behind large city houses before motor vehicles replaced horses.