There is a little village near where I live which goes by the name of “Henley On Klip”. It is an idyllic little village which straddles the Klip river and started out its life as a little holiday town a short distance outside of Johannesburg. I have been driving into this town for many years and have always mused at a sign that they put up on the roads entering the town which read “You are now entering tranquility”. On the other side of the road and facing the opposite direction are similar signs reminding those unfortunate enough to be leaving tranquility, in case they had forgotten, that “You are now leaving tranquility behind”.
These signs have always struck me as a bit odd because I know a lot of people who live in Henley. In fact last week I had to chuckle at these signs. I chuckled because most of the people I know who live in Henley are anything but tranquil. It must be admitted, people in Henley do live in a sleepy little hollow of a village, but nevertheless many of them still manage to have stressful and frenetic lives, thanks in no small part to the phenomenon I like to call “small town politics”.
After my little chuckle session at the sign it occurred to me why I have found these signs so odd over the years. The irony is that these signs are in fact not saying anything at all, or at least they can’t be understood to mean what it is truly meant by “you are now entering tranquility”. If the signs read “you are now entering a quiet village that doesn’t have much traffic” I wouldn’t find anything odd about them, they would be factually correct.
But they didn’t say this, they said “you are now entering tranquility”. But this can’t be right. It can’t be right for the simple reason that tranquility is not the sort of thing that you can locate in a place, at least not in the same way in which you can locate “a quite village with little traffic” in a place. Tranquility is something people do. I doesn’t matter how “tranquil” the place, if the person entering it is highly strung, then they will not have an experience of tranquility. Tranquility is a feature of a person in the same way that happiness is. Someone might say “you are now entering happiness”, though this does strike us as a bit of a bizarre thing to say and we would inquire after what they are actually talking about.
This is a very important lesson, especially for anyone who lives in a place which they experience to be highly strung and stressful. There is no such thing as a highly strung place, there is only a highly strung person in a particular place. The thought that the only way to find tranquility is to move to a different place is a confusion about what tranquility actually is. Tranquility is nothing other than a persons orientation towards the world. A tranquil person is one who is able to let go of outcomes and focus on process. It is a matter of returning to the moment and being able to appreciate the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings of the moment as they are presented to you, with pure and un-distracted attention.
The place one occupies only has an indirect impact on this. It is of course true that escaping to a quite place allows us to escape the concerns that prevent from us being tranquil. It would still be wrong to say however that the quite place is tranquil, whilst the noisy place we have come from is highly strung and stressful. The quite place just helps some people do tranquility. If a person is too caught up in their daily concerns though, then it wont matter how quite the place is, they will be the same highly strung and stressed out person, just with less activity going on around them.
Further proof of what I saying, if any is needed, is the fact that frenetic environments can sometimes induce a sense of tranquility in some, whilst quite places can sometimes force people inward into the sort of morass of worry and concern that destroys tranquility. The fact that a place is quite and peaceful is no guarantee that it will help everyone feel tranquility, in fact it can have the opposite effect. I have experienced city people tell me that the farm where I stay is too quite and because of this is unsettling. What is more, one of my own paradigm experiences of tranquility came from watching the bustling and frantic traffic of Karachi, a sight which I found thoroughly fascinating and tranquil. There is no direct causal link between geographical place and the phenomenon called tranquility. Tranquility is a feature of human attention and is, as such, disconnected from geographical place. There is thus no sense in a sign outside a town that tells me that I am “now entering tranquility”. I am only entering tranquility if I wrestle my attention back into the moment, and this has got very little to do with the sleepy town.
I do not want to sound as if I have cracked the code of tranquility and now live a wonderfully tranquil and peaceful life. I have times of being highly strung and stressed out as much as anyone. I just wanted to share the realisation that becoming tranquil is not a matter of relocation, it is a matter of becoming present in the moment.