Simon Loughlin

By 35 years old, I had given up and run away from almost everything. Travelling in India and having time to kill I went to see a famed Ayurvedic consultant who was in the town I happened to be. Ayurvedic consultants are known for their dietary and exercise advice. I was vaguely curious if drinking less coffee or eating more fruit would be advantageous to my health, but no sooner had I sat down in her dispatch than she began to observe me silently with an intensity that made me distinctly uncomfortable. Looking me up and down and then directly in the eyes, for some 20 seconds she managed to see right through me.

“You need to express”, came her diagnosis, followed by an awkward silence on my part, a silence broken by her thundering command: “Express Simon, express!”

Suddenly I was in a panic, she was pushing my most sensitive spot. I wanted to obey her, but the only thing that came to mind was that I found her attractive. Instead of expressing that, I stood up from my chair, stuttered a thank you and reeled for the door like a drunkard.

Three months later, living alone in a cabin in the mountains and more or less forgotten to the world, I began to express, writing like a madman all the feeling I had disciplined myself to repress. It came in an unbroken torrent, all that I had carried inside through a broken marriage and general disillusion pouring out onto paper. The catharsis was enormous and resulted in my first novel, ‘In Darkness the Seed of Light.’

That deeply personal story was read only by a handful of friends and my mother. It left her obviously disturbed.

“You can write”, she commented bitterly, “you could have written fiction!”

Through my youth, family and society had prepared me as a computer programmer and would-be a money machine. By the time I’d graduated with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, I had set up a commercial website that was to go on to be the biggest of its kind in the world. But inside my future course of life felt like spiritual suicide. In crisis, I jumped off the wagon and onto a bicycle. With a tent and a sleeping bag strapped to the frame, I began to pedal south-eastward from my home doorstep in Ireland. I pedalled across Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Thus began unfolded 9 months of endless adventure and contemplation, nine months of gestation, nine months until the birth of a glimmer of sense in life.

That journey was the book I always wanted to write. If I could somehow transmit in written language what I experienced at the deepest level what a book that would be! But how? I knew how it had felt, but each time I sat down to write, I could describe all the superficialities, but I couldn’t get to the essence of it. The more I contemplated that, the more I was drawn to Eastern Spiritual practices, which seemed to embrace that unmanifest state of being, and that usually resulted in a preference for direct experience. In short, I would get on my bike and set off again

The Tao Teh Ching, begins “The Eternal Tao is not the Tao that can be named”

Understanding those lines, I finally made peace with the limitations of language and chose to dance with it all the same. In 2017, 16 years after that life-changing journey, I finally published ‘Turning the Wheel’.