Irony

Here is the fundamental irony of writing: when things are happening there is no time to write it, and when there is plenty of time to write it, nothing is happening. It's the essential paradox of creativity: in order to be active you have to be inactive. Even war poets have to sit away from the bombs if they're going to get anything down worth reading, otherwise their poetry would get blown up.

I don't like travelling. I need travelling, but I don't actually like it. I think about it all the time, I dream about it, I research it, I look at photos, I save money obsessively. The thought of going to Nepal, or India, or Thailand, or Mexico, or Russia, excites the very bones of me, and at no point in any of my life plans do I intend to stop. It gives my life a meaning I can't find through anything else: seeing new things, new cultures, new adventures. It's fuel, in the most basic, fundamental way, because without it I dry up and shrivel. But do I like it? Not particularly. I often get bored, and I often get frustrated. I get annoyed with the people I'm travelling with, and when I'm on my own I get annoyed with myself, and I get annoyed at public transport, and at getting lost all the time. I am spectacularly bad at travelling - can land in a tiny, three person village and still manage to miss the main tourist spot - and indecisive, which means that I spend a large proportion of my time staring at a map and at the sky and then at a map, and then at the sky again, continuously, until I throw my backpack on the floor and sit on it, sulking. I pack the wrong clothes, I get grumpy because everything smells within two minutes, and I get tired looking at all of the things I'm supposed to be looking at. And - regularly - I skip looking at the things I'm looking at so that I can go and sit in a cafe and read a book, which I could do at home. And do do at home. So essentially the highlights of my trips are very often the things I do for free when I'm not travelling anywhere.

But the point is: none of that is the point of travelling. Travelling is about testing yourself. It's about seeing who you are away from your comfort zones, and pushing yourself out of the habits you fall into more and more easily as you get older. And it's about those tiny, fleeting moments - the sunrise, or the mountain, the wave, the shrine or the person - that you wouldn't have found anywhere else. The ones you can save up and store for a day when fleeting moments are the only things you have left.

I've just come back from ten days in Kyoto, Nara and Osaka: three of the most exciting places in Japan that failed, spectacularly, to particularly excite me. In all honesty, this is probably because Japan feels like a home, now: I understand the food, I'm starting to understand the language, and I understand the culture. I couldn't see any of the cities as I would have done a year and a half ago, when temples and huge shopping malls and karaoke and fried octopus balls would have shaken me to the core. This time it was: oh. Osaka is like Tokyo but smaller. Or: oh. Kyoto is like Hamamatsu but bigger with some nice shrines. Or oh: Nara is kind of cute, but my God the rain is heavy and ooh - is that a shop that sells falafel? There are fantastic things about living in a different country - becoming part of another culture, rather than just bobbing along on top of it - but the downsides are: travelling inside the country doesn't really feel like travelling anymore. It's like going to Norfolk for a holiday if you're a Brit: nice, and pretty, but that's about it.

There were, of course, the moments that made it all worth it. There almost always are. Sunlight pouring through the thousands and thousands of red shrines at Funishimi Inari in Kyoto; making mochi with a group of cheering men and talking to them all in Japanese; Todai-ji, the world's largest wooden building and buddha; standing on top of a mountain as the sun went down on Christmas eve; wandering the streets of Gion; watching a big black car pull up outside a large old house in Kyoto and seeing a real Geisha bow to a man through the swinging curtains; smelling the Octopus in Namba, Osaka, which seems to fill everything and everyone. The snow on New Year's eve in Kyoto; ringing the temple bell on New Year's day. Drunk and giggling with one of my old girlfriends from Tokyo in a Purikura at 2am. Taking a public bath on a 14 hour ferry with the water moving up and down and trying to drown me. All amazing and worth every single minute of the infinitely long hours spent listening to strangers fart in the capsule next to me.

But here's the truth: the moment that made it all worth the most was the moment when I landed back in Miyazaki, in the blazing sunshine, and smelt the rice fields and trees and fresh air. The train journey back to my house, with the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. And my house, filled with the computer I needed to start writing again, and my beloved books for me to carry on reading. And there's the crux of the irony. For those who truly love creating - who breathe through it, and live for it, and can't really function without it - living life is always going to come second to processing it. And yet nothing can be processed unless it is lived first.

Some people create things around the things they do, and some people do so that they can create around it. And my trip to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara - as expensive as it was, and as fun (and often as lonely) - was the latter for me, because everything always is. And I only really realised that as I sat on the train home and knew that I had gone away purely so that I could come back again and write about it. Because all of that fuel was needed to keep me going. Because all of those moments have been stored away to use, as I need them, in creating.

Because here's the truth: if creativity can only come from the inactivity of activity, then one has to be active first. In order to write poetry about bombs, you have to see and feel them to start with. In order to create, you have to live in a way that makes it almost impossible. In order to make anything, you have to start by pulling it apart, and prodding at it, and working out what made it work to start with.

And if you want to process the world, you have to be a part of it first.