Friday November 22nd 1963 is a day that many people remember. At 12.30pm John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. This event sent shock waves around the world. At 5:20 pm on the same day the English author and respected intellectual Aldous Huxley died quietly, with his wife by his side, in Los Angeles, aged 69. Any news coverage of Huxley’s death was of course overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Aldous Huxley is best known for his novels which include Brave New World, set in a dystopian London, The Doors of Perception, which explores his experiences when taking psychedelic drugs and The Perennial Philosophy, which examines the various teachings of mystics and spirituality in the world.
In Huxley’s last novel Island, published in 1962, he explores the theme of an Utopian society on the island of Pala and its way of life struggling against the expanding surrounding materialism. Huxley uses an image within the novel that I find rather evocative and beautiful. We are told that there are Mynah birds that live on the island that fly about calling out “Attention” repeatedly and “Here and now”. The birds have been trained to do this because “you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now”.
When I first read Island I was struck by this image of the mynah birds calling out to the people of the island to pay attention and be here and now. If, like me, you have ever tried to be present to your experience for any length of time you will notice how hard it is to just be aware and alive in the present moment, mindful of your life as it unfolds. We so easily become absent from ourselves and our experience. Unfortunately we do not live in a society like the inhabitants of Pala, having mynah birds flying around us during our day reminding us to stay aware and pay “Attention” to what is going on in the “Here and Now”.
As we move into springtime and nature gives forth her abundance, I go about my daily life and from the surrounding hedgerows and trees I can hear birdsong. For me this can feel like a calling to pause, connect and come home to myself once again. Maybe when we next hear the birds singing in the trees we could imagine it as an invitation to return home to ourselves. It is easy to be lost in the world, lost in our work, relationships, even our families and forget who we are and what is really important to us. But if we are willing to try and live a conscious life, then we have the potential to live more fully in a congruent and whole way.
“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.'”
Aldous Huxley