by Fiona Wright
That day, the day before the conference started, my friends met me near the café, and we walked for several hours through the town, crossing underneath the freeway to a forested park on its outskirts, talking the whole time of books and films and writing and ideas and wondering if we might see a bear. (There are no bears in Iceland.) When we got back to the house that afternoon we read and worked and wrote and I felt comfortable and properly present and in time in a way that I so rarely do.
Each day I did this: rose early, dressed, walked to a café and wrote quietly and by myself, even (or especially) once the conference started and I needed to be at the university by 8:30 a.m. Each day in this wildly unfamiliar place, where every time I headed to a new place on my map I would instinctively turn first in the wrong direction, where I hadn’t yet learnt to pronounce the long and thickly consonanted street names, or to handle my money quickly or appropriately, I kept to a morning ritual almost identical to the one I have at home.
For a long time, I have been embarrassed by my rituals, or more precisely, by how fervently I cling to my routines. I know this used to be because I saw my repetitions as inflexibility, the same kind of pathological inflexibility I had been taught to recognise as part and parcel of my illness. It still makes me anxious to eat earlier than my regular meal times, to eat ingredients that aren’t part of my usual repertoire – and these two things, at least, are inevitable when I travel. I still feel jittery and unsettled if I have to change plans quickly, have to rethink the regular patterning of my day. But I also know that when I’m doing well, it is routine and ritual that keep me on track, that keep me eating afternoon tea while reading in my favourite armchair, making supper even though I really do not want to, having breakfast while I write. When I’m doing well, it’s structure that keeps me from inventing reasons to walk the hour from my house into the city for chores that aren’t really necessary, or skipping meals because I’m busy, or reorganising my kitchen so that my spices are in alphabetical order (for all the myths of the intensity and extremity of mental illness, the reality is exceptionally dull). But I also know that my embarrassment stems from the way that we are taught to devalue this repetition, this immanent time, to see it as something that limits us, as something static, boring, immobile and immobilising too.
In Reykjavik, in summer, I was amazed to see so many people still on the streets and in the parks each weeknight, at close to midnight – adults and awkward gangling teenagers alike – wearing shift dresses and short sleeves despite what felt to me like unbearably low temperatures; these people picnicking, or sitting outside bars, or simply walking, chatting. I mentioned this to an Icelandic writer, Svanna, who I’d recently befriended and she laughed and said, oh, we all go a bit crazy in summer, we sleep again in September, in winter we become normal again. I loved the idea of this, this six-week summer of abandon, of course I did – it’s romantic, and exciting, and sounds like a surrender to happenstance and chance encounters, all of those things that make good narratives, good (or at least not terrible) romantic comedies, that make transcendent time. But at the same time, I knew that I simply wouldn’t cope. That my body would fatigue, grow less resilient; that anchorless, my mind would slowly but surely unmoor.
Recent research suggests that habits and routines – repeated actions which are generally undertaken in what psychologists call ‘stable contexts’, times of day or spaces that are unchanging – make up at least forty per cent, and perhaps as much as sixty per cent, of our daily activities; and that when we act habitually, we do so without being fully cognisant of our movements. But this is precisely why routines are important: because of this repetition, this muscle memory, we don’t have to make decisions or stay alert, and our conscious minds are freed for other things – for remembering and planning, certainly, but also for rest and restoration, and for imagination, creativity, dream. Without habit, that is, we can’t reflect: I know that it’s often while I’m running errands, or showering, or baking biscuits for my friends, or walking my habitual routes, that I somehow unravel problems in my writing, or stumble upon phrases or images that might be the beginning of a poem. I know I’m not alone in this; so many of my writer friends so often say the same. I often think it has to do with rhythm – that when we move habitually we move according to a regular choreography, and the brain responds by dancing too. What this means, though, is that we need this kind of immanent time in order to function fully and, especially, to access our higher functions. We need immanent time in order to be able to transcend.
At the end of the conference, I left Reykjavik to travel around the countryside, and I did it by joining a tour. When I had booked this, months beforehand, I kept explaining the decision away: I was extremely busy and couldn’t find the space or time to properly research how and where I might get around on my own; it’s not how I normally travel but I’ll give it a go; if the people are terrible (they weren’t) it will make for good material. But what I was really trying to excuse, I know, was the idea that I was doing this the easy way, the lazy way, the inauthentic, touristy way, the way that wasn’t clever or adventurous or brave. I was trying to excuse my own bald fear. Much later, I realised that even when I travelled like this I still had to work and plan so much – and so much more than most people – to organise my food and keep myself well, and joining a tour simply relieved me of one layer of decision-making. This is true – and became even more true as the tour progressed, and I realised we’d be stopping every day for lunch at service stations or supermarkets, from which the others would bound back happily with packets of licorice (Icelanders love licorice, and sell it everywhere), savoury biscuits, chips, the occasional banana grown in the geothermal greenhouses we kept passing on the highway, but which left me too overwhelmed and panicky to choose anything at all; this became more true when I tried to explain my dietary needs to a guesthouse restaurant, and the waitress returned to serve me a plate of three grilled asparagus spears for dinner. This was true, but it still felt like an excuse.
On the tour, though, I loved listening to our guide rattle off Icelandic place names, which sound complicated and ornate, but are actually bluntly pragmatic: waterfalls named Hengifoss and Litlanesfoss and Dettifoss (or Hanging Waterfall, Little Waterfall, Falling Waterfall); towns named Borgarfjöður, Akueyri, Dalvík (Fjord City, Shoal Field, Valley Bay) even the famous volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which shrouded most of Europe in flight-delaying ash in 2010, and whose name confounded newsreaders but simply means Forest Mountain Glacier (it’s a glacier, on a mountain, in a forest). On the tour, I loved the way our guide, who introduced himself as Biggie (saying that his real name, Birgir, with its doubled, rolled r’s, was too difficult to pronounce) would occasionally tell Icelandic jokes: driving past a pocket of stunted birches growing sideways against the wind, he stated, what do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? You stand up; after most of the tour had eaten fresh seafood from a roadside barbecue and then climbed back onto the bus with the smell of fish strong on their hands and clothes, he said: In Iceland, we call that the smell of money (until the recent tourist boom, fishing made up seventy per cent of Iceland’s economy). I was the only person in the group travelling alone, and so I sat most days in the single front passenger seat, next to Birgir, singing along to the Icelandic music that he played through a Spotify list on his phone – Of Monsters and Men, Sigur Rós, Emilíana Torrini, Björk – or chatting about his hobbies, which included ice-climbing, apparently something of a national pastime, in which people scale frozen waterfalls in winter with hooked icepicks in hand and steel spikes strapped over their shoes. It was relaxing to not have to make arrangements, to float along on that single highway, according to predetermined plans. Each time we stopped, Birgir would say, we will be here for forty-five minutes, the track to the left is the more interesting one, these are the last toilets for about an hour and a half; he’d frequently phone ahead while we explored these places, confirming logistics and timings and menus. I wasn’t used to this, not at all, b
ut I liked it.
And some of the things we saw were spectacular: a lagoon at the foot of a volcano, with cobalt-blue water and huge bobbing icebergs calved from nearby glaciers, some streaked black with granite, some teeming with Arctic terns, some clanking and groaning as they bumped against each other; a nearby beach with icebergs stranded on the sand. Bulbous lava fields, miles and miles of solid rock that still looked fluid, bubbling, and that was covered in lichens which take a century to grow. A steeply angled glacier that we walked on, kitted out in waterproof pants and hired crampons – the staff had laughed when I told them my size, in both shoes and clothes, and handed me their smallest options, two sizes too big. The ice was crunchy at the surface, smooth and strangely luminescent in its depths.
But even here, learning a new gait – wide-legged with a heavy tread – for walking on ice, wearing clothes that weren’t my own, or standing on a cliff edge in the windiest inhabited place in the world, ten time zones and 16,600 kilometres from anything I call home, I could not escape my self, my body. I was always cold, cold to the bone, even though, by the time we hit the south coast, I’d taken to wearing a pair of stockings underneath my jeans and nine layers of shirts (I couldn’t really move my arms, but also didn’t really need to). On the bus, too, I’d keep my down jacket on, zipped right up to the chin, my hands stuffed into its fleecy pockets. One of the group, an older, freckled man from Cape Town, said to me, you cannot really be that cold? and I answered, instinctually, but also feeling censured, it’s just because I’m underweight. He laughed at this, a full and throaty roar, and said, I’ve never heard a woman say she’s underweight before.
Two days later, while hiking up a rocky mountain path towards a waterfall, another man, one half of a couple from Perth I’d befriended (who’d slip me coffee bags in the mornings when we’d stayed somewhere that only served thick and awful American-style brew) turned to me and said, you’ve got a lot of fortitude for somebody so small, how much do you actually weigh? From the very first day, after the first time we stopped to buy lunch at a small town supermarket and I couldn’t find anything to eat, put on the spot like that, this circumstantial skipped meal had become an iron-bound rule within my mind: you don’t need lunch, you’re not allowed. Instead, I’d become flattened and vague by 4 p.m.; one day in particular I remember walking around volcanic rock formations – huge and crooked spires twisting up towards the sky, jagged arches, a hollowed-out dome almost cathedral-like in shape – and feeling my body drag, wanting nothing more than to be back on the bus, done for the day, heading for a guesthouse so I could stand under the shower until my fingers and toes felt mobile and alive again, then boil some vegetables inside the tea-station kettle in my room, be by myself, be quiet. We spent so much time outdoors, walking, hiking, climbing, standing at lookouts in the cold and it was beautiful and it was thrilling but it was also very physical, and my body – so too my brain – couldn’t keep up. This was what I’d feared before I’d left: this shutting down, this feeling of enduring, both because I know it now as a forewarning, but also, always, because it feels like such a waste, and wasting transcendent time seems almost criminal.
But immanent time, we’re taught, the time of ordinary rituals and the mundane, is time that we are always wasting, on chores and acts of maintenance, on menial and mindless tasks. These things seem unimportant, because they’re small and because they are private and largely domestic (and largely the work of women), because they are unspectacular. But so much of our lives are lived in immanent time, so much of what we do is ordinary, and our habits are acts of autonomy and anchoring; they are integral to our sense of self, wherever we may be, and to our sense of normality. Our habits, Rita Felski writes, are ‘intermeshed with’ identity, because the ‘distinctive blend of behavioural and emotional patterns’ that make them up make us up too, and they are the simplest, most effective ways that we can grant ourselves dignity and comfort – two things, I think, that are so often denied to those of us who are unwell. Our habits are homely, but it is for precisely this reason that they are important – because they allow us to rest, to dwell.
I kept thinking about homeliness and about dwelling in Iceland in part because I kept seeing, and being surprised by, how casually and comfortably Icelanders live beside, and occasionally directly underneath, active volcanoes. Reykjavik is built between a harbour and a volcano – the very first thing I’d see when I climbed up the stairs out of our house each morning, dark and spiny on the horizon. As we drove around the island, Birgir would point to the mountains we were passing beneath and say, this volcano erupts every ten years, this one every fifty years, this one every two or three years, this volcano is eight years overdue and could explode any day soon. The coastline that we were ribboning our way around needs to be remapped every fifteen years or so, because the lava that is so frequently deposited makes it bigger, changes its shape and surface area: a fact that seemed all the more remarkable and disconcerting given that I come from a part of the world keenly aware – although not aware enough to act on the knowledge – of how rising sea levels are shrinking entire island nations in close vicinity to our own.
Every bridge we crossed was single-lane, because the bridges on the highway are so often destroyed by lava flows or washed away by the glacial floods that almost always accompany an eruption, and it’s cheaper to keep rebuilding infrastructure that has just one lane. We passed towns beneath mountains that were cross-hatched with huge metal structures designed to divert lava flow, or at least slow it down long enough for the people living there to evacuate by fishing boat, and a half-built mountain tunnel whose construction had been interrupted because the drilling had hit a thermal spring and left ninety-degree water pouring out into the sea, for months now, with no end in sight. We drove through vast and empty flood plains, dusty grey and littered with gibber-like stones, and Birgir would say, there used to be a town here, there used to be a fishing village here; once, my family used to farm sheep here, but it moved, we moved, after the volcano. Each of these things relayed so casually, so factually; it was amazing to me to think of a volcano as being so ordinary, everyday.
(And then there is the language around volcanoes, how many times I heard, they spew lava, they disgorge, they heave. The pressure builds and then they spit. Great, I thought, I’m fucking seismic now.)
But it’s exactly this that fascinates me about the ordinary, the regular, the habitual – that we stop seeing it, or at least, stop seeing it as remarkable when it becomes the stuff of our everyday lives. In the same manner that we only half notice so many of the activities and behaviours we repeat each day, we only half notice the truly extraordinary landscapes, places and situations that we move through, and for the exact same reasons: that we’d quickly become exhausted if we had to apprehend each environment, navigate each decision each time afresh. My family home has been threatened repeatedly by the bushfires that spring up around Sydney almost every summer, we expect these, live alongside them; my friends and I, now living under the flight path in the city’s inner west, stop talking without thinking, mid-sentence, when a plane passes overhead, roaring loudly enough to drown out any speech we might otherwise attempt (we call this the Marrickville Pause). One friend surfs at Coogee every morning close to dawn; Birgir climbs frozen waterfalls in winter. One person’s transcendence, that is, is another’s ordinary immanent.
On my last day in Iceland, we drove back into Reykjavik, cheering when we crossed the intersection that marked the place where we’d started our circumnavigation of the island. Birgir dropped me at the bus station, the same one I’d arrived at from the airport, where I could store my bags for a few hours before heading back there for my midnight flight, and as I walked in towards the city centre I realised that I knew exactly where I was headed: away from the university, along the length of the lake, to the café I’d been writing in each day before the conference (I’d not had a proper coffee in a week); later, up the hill to the bookshop to buy some trinkets for my family, then loo
ping back towards the harbour to a bar I’d not had time to try before but had admired through its huge bay windows. It was a wonderful and lovely feeling, to be coming back to the city and slotting back in to its spaces so easily, to be greeted at the café by a pixie-faced waitress saying, thank you for visiting us again, to not have to backtrack or check my map as I walked – all the more so because this city was not, is not, my own. It was, of course, only a small corner of the city, barely two suburbs, that I’d made familiar like this, but this familiarity (and that low, slow light) made the city feel gentle and dreamy, especially after so long in and beside the elements, on the road.
When I got to the airport, five hours later, the Air Iceland attendant booked my luggage through to Sidney, Nebraska, so unfamiliar was she with my city, the opposite side of the world.
When I arrived home from Iceland – Alex had picked me up at the airport, dressed up in his suit and carrying my puppy under his arm – my housemates had decorated a cardboard box with braid and ribbon and filled it with groceries for me, as well as all of the parcels of books that had arrived on our doorstep while I’d been away. We ordered Thai, watched a Netflix comedy on my bed; I had a long, hot shower to wash the transit from my skin. I had breakfast at my favourite café the next day, ordering my usual, but each of these things, usually so ordinary, usually so easy, felt somehow fraught: I was jittery and strange, glad to be home, but somehow not feeling at home in any way. In the weeks after returning, I struggled to pick up again my old routines; I know this is not unusual, that coming back home, back to work, back to regular, immanent time, is difficult for everyone, but I felt distraught, found myself crying on my bedroom floor, my dog climbing up my chest to lick my tears. Travel is and does so many things, I sometimes think, but so often and in so many ways it wounds. I just didn’t think it could happen in so short a time.