The Seeker and the Sage by Brigid Delaney Extract

Read an extract from The Seeker and the Sage by Brigid Delaney.

A traumatised journalist is given a dream assignment - track down the mayor of a remote and mysterious town whose citizens are reported to be the happiest people on Earth.

Journeying into a harsh and inhospitable landscape, she overcomes many obstacles before arriving in Silver Springs, whose citizens live according to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and where she has been granted three days to interview the mayor.

The journalist wants to know how to live a good life and be a good person when she returns to the chaos outside the valley. The mayor wants to protect his dominion from being tainted by the modern world.

In her bestseller, Reasons Not to Worry, Brigid Delaney explores the foundations of Stoicism and how you can apply them to your life. Now, in The Seeker and the Sage, she asks: how can the wisdom of this ancient philosophy apply to communities, and how can we create our own utopias in an increasingly troubled world?

The following is an extract from The Seeker and the Sage: A Stoic conversation to hold you together in a fractured world.

---

Once upon a time, I was shot in the head. It was the side of my head— the skull above the ear, a whisker away from the brain. I was lucky, I suppose, but it was my head, nonetheless. And I was unhappy it had happened.

If there was an upside it was philosophical only. I was suddenly able to appreciate the shortness of life, how it can end at any time. For me, the reckoning happened on an ordinary day. At work, seated at my terminal with my three monitors, one hand on the mouse, the other half-raised to my mouth— a corn chip between my fingers— eating, typing, eye constantly flicking to the clock on the wall where the seconds ticked down to the 4 pm print deadline.

I’d been out all day with the staff photographer, Pete, who was clocking up his sixth job for the day and waiting for the right light. We were investigating a school classroom asbestos scandal and now, back in the newsroom, on deadline, I was hastily transcribing interviews and inserting the best quotes into my piece.

But after I’d put in months of legwork— making calls, getting samples tested in labs— the piece was shaping up well and was now a contender for page one. I’d briefed my editor, Lou, on our return from the school and he said, ‘Good story, kid,’ which is strong praise from him. As the deadline approached, I could see his cursor moving swiftly through the shared doc, editing almost as quickly as I was writing.

A newsroom on deadline is hushed and focused except for the sound of fingers tapping on keys, and the occasional exhale from someone trying to work a tricky sentence. It was in this hush that a sudden carnage erupted, a thicket of bullets ploughing through everything in their way.

I looked up.

Have you ever heard all your colleagues scream? It’s like nothing I had ever heard: primal, strange, horrific, bizarre. I almost started laughing.

Later I was told that a man with a gun had managed to get through security (to be fair there was very little security, just Mel downstairs with his bad leg that made standing quickly difficult) and by the time I could clock there was a gunman, a bullet was whizzing past my head.

More screams and the sound of Joe, the paper’s sportswriter, hitting the floor.

The clocks on the wall, each with a different time zone, were splintered into shards.

Daryl hid under a desk. Pete fell to the floor, head slumped back at an unnatural angle, blood running down his face, glasses smashed up against his eyes, blood pouring from the sockets. Julie frighteningly exposed— seemingly frozen in terror— a pen midair, as if correcting the trajectory of the flying bullet instead of one of our sentences.

It is as all shooting survivors describe it: time slows down; there’s even room to think, reflect and experience a range of emotions. Fear, panic, terror, anger, sadness, grief, rage, regret, nostalgia coursed through me all at once, like these things do in a dream.

Yet despite the lengthening moment, there was so much to register in that instant: my colleagues falling from their chairs, the bullets moving fast like bees from a disturbed hive, the spraying of blood and shattering of bone, the now lone clock on the wall showing Greenwich Mean Time (United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Portugal) and the blinking green light of the gunman’s GoPro attached to his helmet.

So much going on that I didn’t have time to duck.

However, this story is not about that— it’s about what happened in the aftermath, and how it changed me.

____

In the hospital, I regressed to a state that felt infantile, and even, at certain times, embryonic. I had little or no awareness of what was happening around me, just a strange sensation of being underwater and close to the source of all things. I was comforted by the presence of my mother, who most nights slept curled in the chair beside me, her arm across my bed, touching my arm. I wish I could have talked to her— told her how strange things were in my head right now. (And how I wish I could have comforted her when I heard her cry.)

Day brought fractals of light, filtered through a curtain of hospital green, motes of dust tumbling through the air, long corridors of sunlight across the bed, the pressure of the bandage on my head, a deep feeling of exhaustion.

A parade of doctors and friends and relatives filed past my bed. There was Lou, my sister Caroline with Hannie, her new baby, sleeping in her arms. Old friends from school swept in with arms full of flowers. People I had thought were long lost. A colleague from a long-ago internship on the other side of the country, arrived with a vial of holy water from Lourdes and glass rosary beads. I was touched to see so many former co-workers from the deep past, Noel, my regular barista, and even Mr Patch, my grumpy neighbour. They said they missed my dry, often dark sense of humour, the time I made for them when they needed a friendly ear, my idealism and strong sense of justice, and my elaborate coffee order (triple shot latte with soy milk). All reassured me that I was loved, looked after, and would be home soon.

I waited for my father, but just when I thought I sensed him near, I would be gone again into a dark and dreamless place that was entirely without content or sensation. It was not unpleasant; it was just nothing.

It was in this timeless other realm that sometimes I saw Mel— the security guard— leg healed, charging down the corridors, strong and purposeful. I saw Pete, with his head thrown back at that unnatural angle (just an hour before he had been photographing schoolchildren in the golden hour), Julie correcting a page proof, and then the gunman himself— walking towards me, this time— as if through a mist.

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked him, genuinely curious. ‘You ruined everything.’

‘You can read my manifesto on the internet,’ he replied.

I turned away.

If I had emotions, they were faint. I felt detached.

The phrase ‘life is cheap’ seemed to hang in the air, like a billboard advertising an interest-free period on a credit card.

My colleagues Joe, Rachel, Sonya, Mel, Pat, Alex, Vin, Pete and Julie were killed.

‘It’s not cheap— it’s more precious than . . . more precious than . . .’ I struggled to find the words.

From my hospital bed, it felt as if to be here, in the world, with all its suffering, pain and problems and violence— well, I could take it or leave it. How easy would it be just to slip away, with my ticket to board the Crystal Ship? At the 2 am shift change between nurses or at the midpoint in the afternoon when my mother would go to the vending machine, or my drowsy sister would stir to nurse the baby, I could slip out, ghosting everyone.

But at other times to die seemed unbearable, impossible, an intolerable notion. Beauty, mystery and a miraculous sort of order seemed to coexist everywhere— even in the coloured bulbs of the machines, attached to me and keeping me alive. In their flashing sequence, I could see music.

For a long time, I hovered in this strange, liminal space.

At night, my mother’s body close to mine, the radio harmonies tender and sad, I was back there— in the town where I grew up. It was cold, by the sea, and our apartment was too small, and the stairwell smelt of sweet, rotting garbage, and our neighbours were mostly misfits— but now I recalled sunny days. It may have been the drugs they gave me in hospital or it may have been my near-death experience, but everything that had once seemed mean, shabby, harshly lit and unromantic was transformed into memories that unfurled elegiacally, infused with sacredness. Still a child, I was barefoot and walking on the soft grass with my sister, her plump baby hand in mine, the light in columns of pale gold shining through the slats of the fences we walked past, the air scented with brine. Then older— in our best dresses, walking through the seagrass, and beyond, the trees a vivid green, deep and alive, humming with birds, insects, cicadas . . . life . . . And it all seemed so achingly beautiful that to depart would be unbearable— and I would do anything, make any promise, to stay for just a little bit longer. One more day, please. Just one more day.

In that time, orderlies turned me over, I was sponged and changed (hoisted and lowered, rising and falling, like a Mayan princess on a throne), I could hear fragments of human voices.

‘Attach a line . . . Just there . . . schedule for tomorrow . . . the team is ready . . . Okay, yes . . .’

Look around, look around, the radio told me. I saw the linoleum floor sliding nightmarishly through my unstable vision, nurses’ hands moving about my body, my sister on one side of the bed, my mother on the other— their faces lined with fatigue and stress.

Then one morning Lou’s voice cut through my aquatic world. He was sitting by my bed, just talking, as if time wasn’t important and he didn’t have a newspaper to edit.

///

‘I’m sad you didn’t get to travel much. You always worked too hard,’ he said, moving his chair closer to the bed.

‘You need to have a life outside work. I know you love what you do, but what about boyfriends? What about friends? I worry about you. You seem so alone sometimes . . .

When I was young, we didn’t work so hard. There were years and years of just hanging out. They were the best years. That’s the secret you never hear. That time doing nothing with your friends is the best time. That, and travelling. Did I ever tell you about Silver Springs? It’s paradise.’

He sighed. His voice softened, and he leaned back in his chair as if settling in to tell a long story. It was fine— I wasn’t going anywhere.

Extracted from The Seeker and the Sage by Brigid Delaney available 30 September in all good bookstores.

---

The Seeker and the Sage

by Brigid Delaney

How Stoic principles can help us navigate the challenges of our divided, unstable world. Can the principles of Stoicism lead us to a peaceful, 'good' life?

FIND OUT MORE