The mountain within

If it doesn’t come roaring out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. – Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), German-American writer

To write this column, I have to empty my brain.

I mean empty it even more than its usual echoing, empty state.

Let me explain.

Modern life has clogged my skull to the limit. Technology has delivered an avalanche of options to preoccupy me at any hour; the notion of idle time that can’t be filled with some form of digital distraction is foreign to me and almost unnerving.

If you’re reading this column on a phone, or any computer, you’re seconds away from all kinds of diversions—social media, games, the state of your savings, the latest celebrity embarrassment or political mess.

If you hang around, the Tribune will offer you any number of interesting stories to grab your attention next.

Last night, after months of racking my brain, I finally wrapped up a hefty 51-page rebuttal on the common currency proposal that Russian and Chinese specialists are pushing for at next week’s BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia.

I sent it off to the Moscow office already.

Since I wrote a thesis on capital and interest in the Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk tradition, this subject is well within my expertise.

The presentation is set for one of the summit’s breakout sessions, where things will get raw for the third time.

The same blunt honesty carried over into my thoughts on Budget 2025, coming up on Oct 18 after a recent sit-down with the Ministry of Finance (MoF).

So yeah, there’s plenty of material for my upcoming business columns.

Or maybe I’ll switch things up and reflect on my time in St. Petersburg, chasing down Grisha—the mathematician who solved the Poincaré Conjecture.

We spent a month there; even enrolling my daughter in a local school, all while I juggled my final-year project.

There’s no shortage of stories to tell from those days. It looks like the next few weeks are going to be busy!

Now, the problem comes when I need to put it all down in a way that flows smoothly.

If you’ve been reading my columns, you know that any kind of complicated back-and-forth of narrative style is hard for me and perhaps impossible.

My brain’s interior is not a series of deep thoughts and grand ideas dancing around balletically as it does for beautiful-minded writers.

Mine’s more like a well-oiled machine, cranking out equations in a logical, step-by-step way. It’s not exactly glamorous, but it gets the job done.

Still, I’ve got to come up with something.

Several times a week, I receive WhatsApp messages from my wife Jillian and friends: What are you planning to write about? Do you have an idea?

On most days, my head is nothing more than a dull fog of box scores, ‘Billions’ recaps and Instagram stories for Alpinestars gear I want to buy. Ideas aren’t at the ready. There’s just a pair of Duncan riding denim in olive. Or the dark navy, I can’t even decide that.

As I get older, I realise I need to unplug utterly. My ideas will not come from my phone, a Facebook post or the latest hot babes on Threads.

For me, they come from distance, from oxygen and exercise and especially from time spent outdoors.

During a road trip with Jillian in 2009, reeling from rejections in my writing assignment on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, we met a hunched, elderly shopkeeper at Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, who winced with pain as she rubbed her neck.

Jillian offered her a massage.

Her dark eyes twinkled as she nodded and led Jillian to her small back room.

The warm air smelled of earth and wood smoke.

She sat on a chair in front of a stove. Jillian set her hands on the woman’s shoulders and kneaded lumpy knots.

The woman closed her eyes and moaned softly.

When Jillian stopped, the woman sat quietly gazing into the fire.

The room was sparse:  a wood chair, a table, a lamp, and a tiny bed draped with a red blanket.

“Wait here.” She rose to the storefront, returning with a beaded necklace made of stone-carved birds: sandstone, rose quartz, crystal, chert, and alabaster.

“My son carved these,” she said in Spanish, holding it out to Jillian.

She shook her head, trying to refuse but the woman insisted.

“Do not refuse my gift,” she said. “It is our way. You gave to me, and now you must let me give to you.”

Jillian finally accepted and put the strand over her head.
 
“Funny, when I was a child, my nickname was ‘Birdie.’”

“I know,” the shopkeeper replied, praising Jillian’s fluency.

Later, as we were leaving, we paused at the front door.

The woman pointed to the Sangre de Cristos. “Do you see those mountains?”

Jillian nodded.

“Take in their strength,” she said.

I stared at the range— higher ground.

“Don’t forget,” the woman said.

“Take it in. Now fly, little bird, fly.”

Fifteen years later, having alternately flown and fallen, literally and metaphorically, we haven’t forgotten the old woman’s words.

I consider them whenever Jillian wears her necklace, stands in the presence of a mountain, or encourages me to keep flying, fighting ‘injustice’ using every ounce of resource I’ve got.

Just yesterday, I sat at a bland airport bar, half-listening to a mother complaining about her son’s school troubles.

I felt she had abruptly taken me away from a world and a life where I was content, only to pull me back forcefully into a different reality.

Those rebellious days when I ditched school myself and sneaked off to the villages near the mountains, stealing chickens and fruit to get by.

I suppose part of me—maybe part of us all—is the mountain.

In those wild years, there was strength, the courage to live on my terms, in my mind and not in someone else’s.

We each have inner fortitude that is mightier than we realise.

Of course, it doesn’t always feel this way.

Storms may obscure mountains, but this doesn’t mean the mountain isn’t there.

Life throws its challenges — writer’s block, naysayers, rejection — that doesn’t mean our strength has vanished.

There once was a time when I could get ideas from staring at websites, but not anymore.

These days, I get them by looking back at those silent, simple interactions from the past.

I know I’m not alone.

Science is vast on the value of boredom and the stimulus of fresh air—it’s what opens the brain to sparks of creativity and inspiration.

This is why child psychologists want parents to strip away the
iPads and help their children get comfortable offline.

Hearing “I’m bored!” should not be a parenting emergency. (Except on an aeroplane; I’ll give a kid 15 iPads on an aeroplane.)

The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.