Summer arrives, and something in you finally exhales. However you take your break — a fortnight abroad, a week at home, or simply the lighter rhythm of these months — the promise is the same: rest.
The pool will be beautiful. The weather, gorgeous. You will sleep. You will laugh. Perhaps there will be wine, and long lunches, and a little sightseeing — all the things one is supposed to do on holiday. It is fun. You have earned it.
By the second week you notice something you cannot quite name. You try to ignore it, to push it back out of sight. A low unease, humming beneath the ease. You have left work behind — mostly — and still it feels as though you are performing a role. Even here. The role of someone having a lovely time.
And even worse, the laptop is here with you. Just in case. The phone is in your bag, and it is on, even though you promised yourself a proper detox this time. Your body made the flight. Your mind, somehow, is still circling back home.
If that happens to you this summer, I want to say something to you now, before you go. Not after you are back.
Rest is designed to answer tiredness. It does that job beautifully — which is exactly why the holiday works. For a fortnight, you feel like yourself again.
But tiredness is not always the thing.
Sometimes the tiredness is only the tip. And there is an iceberg beneath it.
You know how an iceberg sits. A little glinting peak above the water — and beneath the surface, unseen and unmeasured, the vast, ominous body of the thing. Nine-tenths of it, out of sight.
Most of what moves us lives below our own waterline. Psychologists have a name for it now — the adaptive unconscious, in Timothy Wilson’s phrase — the enormous, unconscious, capable part of the mind that quietly runs the show while we are busy being reasonable up top.
And the body knows things long before the mind will say them. There is a word for that knowing: interoception, the body’s felt sense of its own inner state. The work of neuroscientists such as Hugo Critchley and Sarah Garfinkel suggests the body registers a shift — a tightening, a heaviness, a quickening — before the thinking mind can put it into words. So there is a niggle. A something. It has been trying to reach you for a while, and you cannot quite bring it up into words.
That is not a fault in you. It is simply the larger part of you, out of sight, waiting to be seen.
For years I have used a quiet way of coaxing what lies below the surface up to where it can be met. It comes from the late David Grove, and it is called Clean Language. Instead of analysing you, or telling you what your feeling means, a guide asks one clean, careful, precise question — and then gets out of the way, so the answer can rise from you. In your words. Your images. Your body.
The question I start with is this:
“And what would you like to have happen?”
I have been leaning on it in these letters, because it does something quietly remarkable. It sounds almost too simple. But watch what it does. It turns you, gently, away from the problem and toward the outcome — out of the loop, and into a direction. People feel the shift in the room.
And here is the part that matters for the iceberg. When you answer a question like that, you are not meant to stay in your head. A good guide invites you down into the felt sense of it — where it sits, whether it is inside you or somewhere just outside, what shape it has, what it is like. Because a feeling held only as an idea stays stuck. A feeling given an image begins to move. In Clean Language they say the metaphor becomes psychoactive — once you have it, it starts, quietly, to work on you.
So you might sit with the tiredness, and simply ask it: And that tiredness — it’s like what?
Then let something arrive. Do not manufacture it. Wait. It may come as a picture, a weight, a colour, a place in the body. Whatever comes, it is information rising from below the surface. That is the unconscious becoming conscious. The invisible, for a moment, made visible.
There is good science beneath this, too. In a well-known study at UCLA, Matthew Lieberman found that simply putting a feeling into words reduced activity in the amygdala — the brain’s alarm bell — and brought the more reflective, prefrontal part of the brain back online. Dan Siegel gave the effect a name that stuck: name it to tame it. Clean Language takes the same principle one step further, into image or metaphor. The feeling you cannot describe tends to run you. The feeling you can picture, you can begin to move.
Now — this is certainly not homework. It is simply a question you can carry, the way you might slip a smooth stone into a pocket. Ask it silently to yourself on the sunlounge. Ask it on the walk after dinner.
Though I will be honest with you. Most of us do not do this on holiday.
A holiday is for resting inside our lives — and thank goodness for it. To go beneath the waterline takes something a holiday is not built to give. A particular quality of quiet. Time that is not busy filling itself. And, more often than not, someone beside you who asks the careful question and then holds the silence while the answer surfaces.
That, if you want it plainly, is the difference between a holiday and a retreat. A holiday rests the tip. A retreat lowers you — safely, and in your own time — to look at the rest of the iceberg. Not to break anything. Not to blow up the good life you have built. Simply to see the whole of it at last. Most people have never been given the conditions to do that. It is quietly astonishing what surfaces when they are.
So enjoy your summer. Truly. Rest, and let it do you good — the tip deserves its sunshine.
And if you come home and the niggle is still there, sitting beside the unpacked case, I would not read that as the holiday having failed. I would read it as the deeper part of you, still waiting to be heard.
“What you seek is seeking you.” — Rumi
It has been seeking you for a while now. Perhaps this is the summer you turn, at last, and look.