Leonard and Hungry Paul

To think that so much has been written and said about flowers over the centuries, and yet it took someone as special as Hungry Paul to notice how quiet they are.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hungry Paul stared at the stippled ceiling and bathed in the quiet all around him. He tuned his ears to listen to the ever-present silence itself, rather than the bubbles of noise that floated in it. He began to appreciate its profound scale. All major spiritual and philosophical traditions throughout history had emphasised the value of silence. Th

perquisite.

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.’

Watch him the next time you spill something. His whole attitude is that it has already happened, and he just moves on to cleaning it up. He’s all about what’s going on now.