When a fly is not a fly

I am free.

It was something that Jane Goodall said once that helped me capture an idea I was trying to understand, but had no words for at the time.

There is a moment, or many small moments, in a human life when you realise that maybe it’s all a bit of game. That this thing we are doing on earth, living, isn’t what we have all been led to believe it is. Rather, like a scene in the Truman show, we’re living inside a bubble and none of it really matters, we’re just playing out a series of predetermined events. Don’t get me wrong, at the time of these thoughts, yes my 20s existentialism had been in full swing, but this wasn’t what I was trying to find language for. It was something else.

Getting sick was the best thing that could have happened to me. I was forced to face life as it was and not live as I had been: in perpetual fear that things would go wrong. When what could go wrong, does, it allows for a kind of freedom from that dread. No longer did I feel like I had to avoid all the mistakes that a young life brings, instead there was nothing left to lose – I felt as if I had lost it all. I lay around for long periods of time, often in pain, and wondered about what it all meant. For a few years, I was angry. I couldn’t believe the world was moving at pace outside my bedroom door and I couldn’t participate. I didn’t finish uni, didn’t find a good job and didn’t go out much with my friends. And I was thinking about death more than is healthy for gal in her early 20’s.

But those hours of solitude, soon became precious. I wondered about the human body and the extent of pain it could manage. How might I mentally contort myself to accomodate it. All that time alone allowed me to slowly, but surely, find myself. Underneath all the sickness and pain, I was there. I had always been there.

So it had begun in me – this sense that I was beyond this body and that I belonged to the world in a way that, without those long hours of enforced silence and isolation, you don’t really get a chance to understand. But, I hadn’t quite grasped it. Only smelt its sweetness.

And then Jane Goodall found her way to me somehow and I heard something that she said that hit me just at the time I needed it most. I don’t even know if I can find the exact quote that I heard back then, but it was something along the lines of - when we call a fly a ‘fly’ we become blind to it. Basically, she was talking about how language deadens our innate knowing. We become blind to beauty. We carry the burden of the word ‘fly’ when we are in its company. An annoying fly that we swat.

Somehow, this moment unlocked something inside me and Jane Goodall completed the sentence that I had started. She taught me, through her understanding of the natural world, that like the fly, I too was free.

Hearing of Jane’s death this week, reminded me of that time in my life, thirty years ago, when I remembered that I didn’t belong to this world of busyness and hurry. And that nothing that I thought mattered, actually did. It was the beginning of the change in how I experienced illness and the beginning of one of the most important experiences of my life. This time of long hours in bed and all the rest of it - was golden, and one of the most precious of my life.

Since then, over the thirty years since, I have been sucked back into the hub and bub of life, of the hurry and the absurd things we do that we think are somehow important. But thank you Jane Goodall, for all the love of this world, and for helping me put it all together when I was a sick kid in bed - so I could know for sure, that I was the fly, and I was free.