One Chair, Many Worlds

One Chair, Many Worlds

I often sit in the back garden when the weather is nice and have done so for many years. I have sat in the same chair and, and yet, I have sat in many different worlds.

In one world, I felt the sun and the breeze and the warmth of the stone on the bottom of my feet. I heard birds and a neighbour’s windchime. Occasionally, the sound of a car arose and then faded, passing on the street. I watched the clematis, hundreds of purple flowers, bobbing in and out of the sunlight. I felt very quiet and at peace.

In another world, the garden completely disappears. I am in the same chair, but I am experiencing almost nothing of my physical environment. I am reliving an earlier difficult event. I see co workers. I hear the conversation. I feel frustrated and indignant. I am entirely disconnected from the present and what it contains, passing the moments in a world of dreams.

The next time I sit down in the chair, I find myself once again in the beautiful world of the garden, present to the impressions and to myself in the chair. Peacefully quiet. Then someone starts up a lawn mower. The world changes. All the outside elements are there but seem somehow stained or spoiled by the unnatural sound of the lawnmower. A disturbance is felt, a conviction that things were better before the lawnmower started and will not be suitable again until it stops.

And sometimes, very rarely, when the lawnmower starts, I am sitting in a world where ‘better’ or ‘suitable’ do not even exist. There is only what is, and it is perfect.

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