Meetings with Remarkable Men

I've been finalising the details for the trip.

Overland, public transport only, minimum budget, through about thirty countries before I even think about turning round and doing something similar in the other direction. I posted the route on Facebook the other day and got the usual mix of "you're mad" and "take me with you." Both fair responses.

But I want to talk about something else here, something that sits underneath the whole thing.

The title of this post is a nod to Gurdjieff, and if you know the book, you'll know why. I've had a soft spot for him since I was young, not because I ever fancied trying his more extreme practices (I like my joints where they are, thanks), but because of that persistent question he kept circling: what's actually in here, behind the person we perform every day?

I came at this sideways, the way I come at most things. It wasn't a philosophy lecturer who put Gurdjieff in front of me, it was Jonah Barrington, the squash player. He talked about "breaking through the pain barrier," and something about that phrase lodged itself in me long before I understood what it was really pointing at. Not pain for its own sake. The idea that there's a wall most of us never lean on, because we've never had to.

That's really what this whole journey is testing. It's the practical, on-the-road version of what's in the book.

There's a more prosaic, less mystical way of looking at all this too, and I like to keep a foot in both camps. A fair bit of what we experience as "the pain barrier" is really just dopamine doing its ordinary job, badly managed. Dopamine isn't the pleasure chemical people think it is, not really. It's more of a prediction and motivation signal, it fires on the anticipation of reward, and it drives us towards the easy, familiar hit rather than the harder, more uncertain one. Left unchecked, it quietly steers most of our daily choices towards comfort and away from anything that looks like effort, which is a very efficient system for a species trying to survive winter, and a fairly useless one for a species trying to grow. Suppress it entirely and you get flatness, no drive at all. Understand it, though, and work with its actual mechanics rather than against them, and something shifts. The pain barrier stops being a wall and starts being a signal you can read and use, same as an athlete learns to read fatigue instead of just being flattened by it. I go into this properly in the book, it's not just a nice metaphor, there's real biology sat underneath the philosophy.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to when people tell me the trip sounds "brave," which is a word I'm deeply suspicious of. Picture yourself dropped, by some accident of fate, into any one of the places on that route. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, some dusty junction town in Pakistan you've never heard of. Your first instinct is probably panic. But hang about a minute. There's water. There's food somewhere. There's shelter, and there are people who will, more often than statistics on the news would have you believe, help you find it. Humans are mostly decent, most of the time, in most places. The infrastructure of survival is more available than we think.

And underneath that outer infrastructure, there's an inner one, and that's the one nobody points a documentary camera at. We carry around this idea of "self" like it's a fixed, finished object, when actually it's closer to a shallow puddle sitting on top of something much deeper we've simply never had cause to draw on. Most of us go a whole lifetime without finding out what's down there, because our routines are gentle enough that we never need to.

I'm not romanticising hardship. I've done enough taxi shifts in Totnes at three in the morning to know that hardship on its own teaches you nothing except how to be tired. But hardship paired with attention, that's different. That's where the interesting stuff lives.

While I'm passing through Istanbul, I'm planning to stop at the Galata Mevlevi lodge, the home of the whirling dervishes, which is one of the sites that shaped Gurdjieff's own thinking. There'll be other stops too, in Georgia and Armenia, places tied into that same thread of his life and work. I won't pretend I'm on a pilgrimage exactly. I'm more of a curious tourist with a long-standing intrigue, ambling past the edges of something serious without claiming to fully understand it. But I think there's honesty in that too. Not everyone needs to become a disciple to take something useful from a tradition.

Here's my actual point, and it's a simple one. The remarkable man, or woman, or whoever you are regardless of how you'd label it, is already in there. Waiting. You don't need Kyrgyzstan for it. You don't need a rucksack and a bad back and a fondness for cheap overnight buses. Most people will never need to test themselves against a mountain pass or a language they don't speak, and that's fine, that's not a failure of nerve.

But it would be a shame to go through this whole life and never even poke at the door. You don't have to walk through it. Just enough of a nudge to know it's there.

I'll miss the Ship Inn- but I’ll save a fortune! I'll miss a lot of small, ordinary comforts, if I'm honest. But I've a feeling what's on the other side of the discomfort is worth more than what I'm leaving behind, at least for a while.

I’m minded of another great influence in my life: Khalil Gibran, author of ‘The Prophet’. I paraphrase a section of his chapter ‘On Houses’;

‘Beware of comfort, who enters your house as an honoured guest, but is soon marching, gaily, at the head of your funeral procession’.

It’s a bit of a hard hit, I know - and maybe I paraphrase too stridently, but as I have said already, at least some awareness of this realm of thought is essential if we want to have full ownership of our lives, and not relax too much into the ‘norms’ that flatten our spirit.

More soon, from wherever the buses and/or my mind take me.

Link to my Book: https:://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1837097097