What is a Good Life? #170
Recovering Right Relationship with Ally Kingston
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters.
This week, I’m reflecting on a beautiful conversation with Ally Kingston - creative strategist, trained death doula, and one of Forbes' 43 People Changing Advertising for the Climate - about what it means to come home to yourself, your community, and the living world.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
During lockdown, Ally had bought some seeds and began to grow some plants. After seeing two tomatoes grow, she was thrilled, experiencing a clear sense that this is something we are supposed to be doing.
The courtyard next to her flat had become somewhat of a pigeon sanctuary during Covid, and so she instinctively left them out for the pigeons as a gift.
After checking each morning, on the third day they were gone. And she found herself bursting into tears.
“I’d had this first glimpse after 30 years of life, of being in some very very humble reciprocal relationship with the world. Just like a cycle had happened.”
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“Western civilisation is three days deep”
When Ally participates in a four-day wilderness vigil she cites this sentiment from the mythologist Martin Shaw. That after three days you’ve run out of civilisation, that you’re just scrabbling around and quite feral.
And that the initial boredom from being unplugged from everything was much more to contend with than not eating for four days. How long a day can feel when you watch the sun go all the way over your head. However, beyond that initial boredom is something else.
“It’s such a relief sometimes to return yourself to the loop, to be back in the entanglement that you’re meant to be in. And in fact you always were in, you just pretended you weren’t, or you believed the story that you weren’t.”
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Hearing this made me think of an experience.
I am lying on a bed which comprises a sheet of wood and a thin cushion as a mattress. The room is cold at night, there is no heating.
I am in a deep state of discomfort that has nothing to do with my surroundings.
I am into my second night of my first 10-day silent retreat, it is amongst some farmland, a short drive from the city of Lucknow, India.
My mind is excruciating to be with.
It runs through a loop of recently getting ripped off when booking a trip here, to me staying in India for another few months with no plan, and having no idea what I will do on the other side of this trip.
I indulged in distractions, both healthy and unhealthy, before this trip, now there is no escaping myself.
It briefly fantasises about fleeing the Vipassana on night two, aware that all my valuables - passport, wallet, and phone - are locked in a box at reception. My mind drifts towards jumping the fence and roaming the surrounding countryside for eternity with some white bed sheets wrapped around me.
I find peace and distraction, briefly, with the thought of roaming the countryside for a time and being well known as a wandering, foreign, madman who occasionally wails out loud.
Before I loop back into the turmoil.
I am lying there silently. Or so I think, until the seventy-year-old Indian man I am sharing this room with hovers over me in the middle of the night.
He gestures towards me with a blanket, assuming I am cold.
We can’t speak so I just nod and smile at his moonlight eyes, as if that is what is causing the chattering of my teeth.
And with it, the tension comes to an end.
And I fall asleep.
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Like me, Ally is researching what it means to live a good life. Her particular interest is in our faculty for imagination. And she has been noticing something that is concerning her:
“What I’ve noticed over the last few years is that that vision, the scale and the colour of that vision seems to be shrinking. People used to say bigger things. And then a few years later it was suddenly as if the good life was an absence of decline rather than anything bigger and dreamier.”
And then:
“There is something in our system at the moment which is causing anxiety, unprocessed trauma, grief, all kinds of stuff are getting stuck in us and it is shrinking our capacity to dream. Just at the moment where we really need to hold on to that deep vision.”
Can a good life exist, can we participate in this life, without access to our own imagination?
2. This Week’s Questions
What in your life do you need to let go of to find your way back to healthier relationships - be it with yourself, another, the world around you?
How would you describe your relationship with boredom?
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Recovering Right Relationship with Ally Kingston - What is a Good Life? #170
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Ally Kingston below.
About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.