Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I notice something light up in the other student, when I name my own shyness. A mutual recognition. And what he tells me next has stayed with me: knowing how it is to be shy, he worries for his peers for whom the smartphone and the networks to which it connects us provide an omnipresent escape route from the vulnerability of social contact, so that it’s possible to avoid the kind of learning that goes on if you take a job behind a bar for half a year, or just from having to meet new people face-to-face when you start university or walk into the lounge of a backpackers’ hostel. Instead, it sounds like what he’s seeing are patterns of behaviour reinforced by these technologies, whole subcultures and identities, sometimes with accompanying diagnoses, which validate the fear of exposure to each other.

In the weeks since, I’ve been drawn back to that conversation and the memory of the way the guitar was part of my being young. It would be easy to say that I used to hide behind it, and that as I got older I found other things to hide behind, until the identity of author and speaker came to play that role. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.

It’s more like, in the course of life, if we’re lucky, each of us is learning how to show up, to get out of our own way, to be – in Elizabeth Oldfield’s words – “fully alive”. And emerging from the fog of adolescence, one of the first ways I found of doing this was to sling a guitar strap over my neck and sing out.¹ With time, the possibility grows that the thing that happens with the guitar – or in the company of that particular friend – can happen in other ways, and maybe with the years, there comes a point at which that’s just how you show up, who you are, in the high moments and the everyday moments alike.

For me, at least, that’s more and more the question: how do I show up, fully alive, not just under the strangely easier circumstances of singing on a street corner or speaking to a roomful of people, but in the joys and strains of being a neighbour, or (hardest of all) with my family at the breakfast table when my nervous system is still grinding towards wakefulness.’ (from the Writing Home Substack)