peace and quiet

I'm sitting on a rock, on a hillside in Hampi. Around me there are a few shrubs, and many more rocks, boulders. This place feels far from the trappings of humanity, far from the cities, far from civilisation. And sitting here, allowing the warmth of the sun to touch me, I feel myself relaxing.

It's amazing how most of us go through life with a chronic tension. It might be subtle, but it's as if we're always holding our breath a little. Our muscles are a little bit tensed. And living in the modern world, particularly in the urban situation, that is more or less inevitable. There's so much going on, so much commotion, and in a subtle way it puts us on edge.

Being in nature allows us to let go of that edginess. It's simply not needed. In fact, there's nothing to induce it, here in nature. And this natural surrounding is enough to melt that tension away, especially feeling the warmth of the sun on the skin. It seeps into one. It softens the muscles. Ahh.

And feeling this, is just another reminder of how neurotic we, as a species, have become. We tend to think of ourselves – homo sapiens – as the pinnacle of evolution. But in moments like this I see it quite the opposite. More than any other species, homo sapiens has gone astray. The wild animals and plants are all living such a natural life. It may not be easy, of course. It will have its challenges. But I don't think wild animals have this neurotic tension, a stress that comes from the way of living that they've adopted.

We humans, in our civilised form, have created our own unique environment full of stress, and the bizarre thing is we keep adding to it. We keep bombarding ourselves more and more, with faster and faster visual images, brighter and brighter colours splashed across our visual field, sound everywhere we go – there's never any peace and quiet, always the noise of machines, and then to add to that, loudspeakers blaring out music, although it's a travesty to use the word music for most of the modern noise that is created electronically.

So coming away from all that, there's a chance to remember what it is to be silent, a chance to remember what it is to be still. Here one can afford to really feel what is around one. Sitting here, once more feeling life, feeling what is around me, it makes it so clear that our human problems are created by us. Our modern mind demands problems, demands stress. And yet our life is made rather miserable by all the stress.

So, I'm very thankful to have times like this, in nature, feeling the warmth of the sun de-stressing me.