"Loneliness is best cured with aloneness, which is to say, a meaningful connection to ourselves."

7 pieces of wisdom from legend Sarah Wilson who I had the pleasure of meeting this week

I was in London this week for Sarah Wilson’s Uk book launch of This One Wildand Precious Life in Audrey Green at the National Portrait Gallery.

[You can buy the book here.]

Sarah is a legend.

Editor of Cosmopolitan Australia at age 29; host of MasterChef Australia, a former journalist who has interviewed two Australian Prime Ministers, Beyonce, Brene Brown, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, ranked as one of the top 200 most influential authors in the world (two years in a row), described as “the climate queen” and “f*cking wild” (by Russell Brand), she now lives a nomadic,  minimalist life writing books and hosting her podcast Wild and writing her Substack newsletter.

It was the first time I’d actually met Sarah in the flesh and she was everything I knew she’d be - smart, wise and inspirational.

Here are 7 wild quotes from the book to inspire you:

1. “Awe is quite a specific experience. It happens when we view beauty amid vastness, predominantly in nature, triggering a deep sense of belonging. Our smallness against a backdrop of immensity reminds us of our insignificance and interconnectedness, which brings about a profound, yet elated, peace.”

2. “Wrestling with the darkness has left me more committed to this path than I could ever have imagined. And with one last beautiful question that guides me in my most personal moments: “What is left if we might lose it all?” My answer gets more beautiful by the hour: nature, humanity, and my wildly alive love of it all.”

3. “Every topic gets to unfurl completely, never forced or rushed. Sometimes I like to sit back in the group and observe the magic of The Group Hiking Conversation. No matter what the mix of ages, sex or backgrounds, everyone in a walking conversation eventually arrives together in the one lovely pool of mutualism. Or perhaps a field, the one beyond right and wrong, is a better metaphor. It generally only takes about an hour or so. But after that initial hour you do adjust to the primitive rhythm, like you’re dialed into our ancestral way of keeping company and bearing mindful witness to each other. It feels like home. A day of walking will dislodge all kinds of deep truths. They will surface through the fatigue as you sink into the couch; after a day of walking off our barky layers, we reveal the trauma rings in our trunks”

4. “It’s a gorgeous oddity of our existence – our loneliness is not caused by being on our own. Indeed, loneliness is best cured with aloneness, which is to say, a meaningful connection to ourselves. Moral loneliness is when the supply cord to connection, caring and doing the right thing by each other and the planet has been severed. We can’t tap into the point of life, to what matters. When you don’t know your true north, the disorientation is terrifying. You are suspended in a vague and directionless vastness.

5. “The Greeks argued that this kind of moral loneliness led to acedia – a state of spiritual apathy or listless sloth. The 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas described it as “the sorrow of the world”, this moral “asleepness.” As I ventured into the early stages of this journey, I quickly realized it was at the root of our disconnect from this one wild and precious life we’d been granted. And that we’d be revisiting it many times over. It’s an evolutionary response to shut down and go numb like this. When we can’t fight or flee from a horrible threat, we lie down and play dead – we freeze.
   
   Of course, freezing or numbing out can work as a survival trick for a while, but if we remain asleep, particularly as a society, we face our collective demise.”

6. “As Nietzsche said, when we have a why we can handle any how.”

7. “You could say we’ve been in a maintenance phase for decades, if not centuries. But now things have gotten destructive, as they have before, and we need to step up from our comfortable lull – our acedia – go to our edge and serve.”

   You can buy the book here.