At times recently I’ve been tempted to see my previous years of practice, stretches of time I spent as a Christian contemplative in the world – rather than as a monastic of any kind – as perhaps wasted years; years I could have spent in some more fruitful way, such as the kind of practice to which I’m now committed. But gradually, it has come clear to me that it has all worked together, astonishingly seamlessly. There is no right or wrong way: there is only practice. The “story of my life,” disjointed though it has often appeared to me, is actually all of a piece. There is nothing to regret. There is no need to start over with anything.

I have mentioned before here my profound gratitude for occasions in my life when I have been injured or unwell, and the insights they have afforded me. These too, though, aren’t isolated occurrences in a life of somehow lesser significance; they are merely currants in a bun whose sugar and spice, and very ordinary flour, have been just as essential to the overall flavour.

I don’t mean to attribute any of this to some species of external cause, in the sense of acting under the control of some supernatural puppet-master; everything I have mentioned has merely been composed of natural events in a largely unremarkable life. Any sense of their fitting together, of their working towards some overarching purpose, is retrospective: the pattern only emerges as it nears completion. Perhaps it could even be suggested that without its later elements the earlier would be meaningless, or at least have an entirely different meaning; but perhaps “meaning” is too loaded a term altogether. A pattern, after all, only describes what has happened, what events have become; even if like one of Daniel Dennett’s real  patterns it does have significance beyond simple human interpretation!

There is a kind of peace here that I hadn’t perhaps foreseen. In one sense, nothing has changed – practice goes on from day to day just as before; and yet something is different in a way I find difficult to explain even to myself without falling into linguistic pits. Maybe nothing more needs to be said: what is being described here is a still-evolving process, not a destination. If there is indeed a pattern, it is probably much more like a vortex street than a snowflake, to misappropriate a metaphor. The practice remains. Nothing else is needed; there is nothing else we need to remember.