It’s only by being alone that you realise that you’re never alone.

I love all of Pico Iyer’s books. His writing is like poetry. These are a few beautiful sentences I liked.

His most recent books to me tackle the question how to live with ‘joyful participation in a world of sorrow’.

“I wonder if beauty always has to carry a trace of mortality” I try, and my two friends are wise enough not to say a word, looking out over the charred hills to the promise all around

Sound, now and then, of surf, sidling in and receding among the rocks below. Flows the colour of blueberry icecream along the way. Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the centre of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the centre of me

She smiles in recognition. The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing

And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head

How to put words to it? As easy to catch sunlight inside a jar

My house burned down, I can now see better, the rising moon (Masahide)

Anyone can sit in a Zendo, a monk down the road as written. The trick is to sit in the world

He clings “like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things”

Now I’ve been coming back for eighteen years. ‘You’re a Catholic?", “I wasn’t then. Now-” Ree pauses - “Now I’m a Roman Catholic Buddhist. But I’m beginning to think that’s not broad enough’”

AS SOON AS I’M SAFELY in my cell, I’m an impulsive child again, stepping out into the starlit quiet and spinning myself round till I feel dizzy. Nothing feels forbidden here because there’s no one I’m supposed to be. Then I walk up towards the chapel, following the small beam of my flashlight, and shiver as I see a dark figure, approaching from the other side: myself, I realize, reflected in the flashlight’s glow. Inside, the place is shriven, chaste; on the floor, I spot a tiny scrap of paper. I bend down and make out words scribbled in a very small hand: “I wish to know and be kinder.”

“HOW ARE YOU TODAY, PICO?” the prior had asked me at lunch. “Well. Too well.” “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling broadly. “We can fix that.”

SOMETIMES I WONDER—and friends keep asking—how spending all this time in silence has changed me. I can hardly count the ways, now that joy seems the opposite of pleasure and freedom arises out of an embrace of limits; it’s impossible to take so seriously the self that huffs and puffs along the highway. When I find myself in a crowded airport terminal, I’m drawn, as if magnetically now, to a quiet corner in the sun; as I wait for Hiroko to come back from work—will it be twenty minutes or ninety?—I turn off the lights and listen to Bach. Some nights, of course, I still wake up in the dark, unable to sleep. I worry about that cough nearby, fear for Hiroko if I should go before she does. Chaos and suffering seem endless. Then I recall the sun burning on the water far below and feel part of something larger in which nothing is absolute or final.

Almost as soon as I enter his simple room, he asks me, as on every visit, whether I’m married. I am, I say, as always, and he shakes his head. “That’s the real training. Sitting on top of a mountain in a meditation hall is easy by comparison.”

I spend time with monks and nuns, I realise, because they’re giving themselves full-time to the essential practices: learning how to love in the midst of loss. And how to hope in the face of death.

At night, sitting alone in our small apartment in the dark, waiting for Hiroko to come back from work, I turn more often to Leonard Cohen. His dense, unsparing songs refuse to believe that the world is soluble or any transport permanent; they push, unflinchingly, into bafflement and betrayal, even sin, the order of punishment he never shies away from. Here, I think, is Buddhist practice: simply, systematically picking apart every inconstancy to remind us that we cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all that it cannot control.

“You can’t dwell on things,” Fu agrees. “That’s the heart of Zen practice. Not dwelling.” She cites a line from the thirteenth-century teacher Dogen: all he knows is the sound of black rain on the tiles of the roof. “And even that doesn’t last,” I say.

“Do you have a definition of God?” the host suddenly inquires. “Reality,” I say, not thinking.

Every kind of certainty is dissolved.

I wish I was a better storyteller.

I remember during our recent trip to Hawaii, we spent 3 hours with our eccentric American driver as we drove through the winding road to Hana (after landing on the wrong side of the island). I was captured by his monologues cataloguing his life in Hawaii, including meeting the Top Gear crew, his encyclopaedic knowledge of Axis deer and his belief in Aliens. It was the best ’live podcast’ episode I’ve listened to.

I thought, this is why I love Americans. They are some of the most extroverted, engaging people. I also thought ‘God I wish I could tell stories like that’.

This is my attempt to write some advice to myself on how to do this.

Write down your stories

I feel like the best stories have been told multiple times. They are not off the cuff, even though they seem to be. They’ve been forged in the furnace of ’trial and error'.

One of my university flatmates was a terrific storyteller. During a house party, I remember him telling the same story to 3 different groups of people (and he had them captured). Intentionally or unintentionally, a good story is usually good because it’s been told multiple times and refined.

This is where writing about your life (diaries) is useful; not only in remembering your own life, but in cataloguing all the funny, extreme and insightful stories one inevitably ends up in.

The hook

Start off with the hook. A hook is a sentence that introduces an unsolved mystery into the listener’s mind ; something that makes them want to know the answer.

Storytelling is about strategically withholding information

For example (benign to more and more deranged). The questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’ are introduced in each :

• “I had the worst day yesterday”.
• You’re not going to believe who I ran into at the gym…"
• I think I just witnessed the most awkward first date in history
• Today I learned why you should never try to be helpful at airport security.
• “It turns out you can accidentally become a cult leader.”

This is in contrast to just stating the facts of the story : “I punctured my car tire yesterday 10 minutes from my house and had to call a £50 tow to move my car up the road” (happened a few months ago, it was at the bottom of a giant hill in all fairness).

Stating everything upfront, takes away all of the mystery from the story.

The best storytellers tend to introduce many hooks throughout the narrative by raising questions without immediately answering them.

Elaborate

After the hook, comes the elaboration. This is where you delve into the details of the story. It is slowly colouring in the black and white pencil sketch you’ve introduced with your hook.

Short and sweet is better in general. Introducing too much irrelevant detail takes away from the narrative. Remember, the core of story telling is about withholding information ; introducing questions and dragging out the reveal of the answer.

It’s probably therefore best to tell stories chronologically. This keeps an air of suspense because then you aren’t spoiling what happens later. Tell the story as you experienced it during the time.

Over the course of the story, you should answer the question/s introduced by your hook/s.

Reflect

The very last few sentences should answer your hook.

Generally the best stories, then have some takeaway or reflection. They may be formative moments (heroes journey), painful moments (tragic) or plain bizarre and funny (’the punchline’).

Examples:

• Humorous twist : “thats why I always carry a rubber chicken in my glove compartment”
• Life lesson : “sometimes the most memorable conversations happen when your plans go completely wrong”
• Character growth : “It made me realise I’m not as introverted as I thought - just selective about my audience”
• Full circle : connecting back to your opening hook in a satisfying way

Going back to the initial story I told about our American driver. I could say " I wonder if he tells the same stories to every tourist, perfectly refined over years of practice. But then I realise - isn’t that exactly what makes them so good? We’re all just practicing for our own live podcast episode."

Writing

I was listening to a talk with Pico Iyer (after reading his most recent book), and someone asked him how he remembers all these stories and details. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small notebook. He just writes it down there and then, when the details are not clouded by fading memory.

In my last solo trip abroad, I decided to do this and ended up with a whole notebook full of observations and details that I would have otherwise been lost. In an age where we can record video and take photos of wherever we go, what we miss out on is the subtle internal dialogue that can only be captured by writing it down there and then.

iPhone notes is probably the easier way.

Conclusion

This is a process. I want to become a better storyteller for myself, so I can make sense of all the beautiful memories and trips I’m privileged to be able to experience.

TLDR : More people should write/vlog/document their lives.

Every time I write, I’m having a conversation across time - with my past self who lived these experiences, and my future self who will one day rediscover them. Recently, this idea has been on my mind as I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of reading personal blogs and watching YouTube vlogs

There’s been a backlash against influencer culture. No-one wants to watch the 1000th vlog of a person’s morning routine and their day in the life of a insert corporate job here. No-one wants to scroll through the same feed of curated photos of the highlight reels of someone’s life.

But I’d argue that you should go ahead make these.

Primarily because the person doing the writing or filming gains a few invaluable things in the process.

The first, is that you get to exercise your creative muscles and actually put something out into the world, rather than just consume. The second is that, you’re future self will thank you. It’s a snapshot of ‘you’ at that time, place and mindset. Something you can look back on.

I used to have a video gaming channel as a teenager where I played through minecraft. I had a regular audience of 1000’s of viewers, with one video blowing upto 1 million views. I deleted them out of self consciousness after a friend made a comment (and I regret it to this day). Since that day, I’ve vowed to keep every project/photo/video/writing that I create (not always putting them out publicly).

Lastly, the act of writing, filming, document is ultimately about crafting a narrative. These narratives are inherently flexible. They’re upto your interpretation. By actively engaging in the process of looking at that narrative, you can decide which bits are worth keeping and which are not.

I like the analogy of a drawer. As you go about your day, the various experiences, conversations, observations, feelings, fantasies accumulate within the drawer. But they are thrown in at random, haphazardly.

Writing to me, is taking out each piece, one by one, looking at it deeply, seeing what it means to you, where it fits in and then rearranging it neatly within the drawer (or getting rid of it entirely).

Living a rich, interesting and varied life is valuable, but only as valuable as the stillness and sense we bring to it. Through looking back at your experiences, you can see where it fits into the broader perspective.

In the process you might discover hidden insights and new ways of seeing that one would have never thought about before.

I think you will live more curiously if you write (or film yourself, or take photos, or make any art) because you become a scientist of your inner landscape. You are inspecting each passing thought or story, welcoming it, observing it curiously and ultimately letting it go.

And sometimes, when you read back your own words months or years later, you might find that past-you left exactly the wisdom that future-you needed to hear.