The Universal Man

For a time in my twenties, I was fascinated by the Renaissance idea of the Universal Man.

Leon Battista Alberti was said to believe that “a man can do all things if he will.” I doubt I ever took that quite literally, but the idea appealed to me enormously. It suggested that a life did not have to be confined to one discipline, one profession or even one way of understanding the world. A person could remain curious, keep learning, develop different capacities and move freely between ideas.

That suited me.

I had never been particularly comfortable with the idea of becoming one thing and remaining that thing for the rest of my life. Even as a young man, my interests sprawled in different directions. Wildlife and animal behaviour were central for a time, but they were only part of it.

I read voraciously. Books on mysticism sat beside books on physics and quantum physics. I read about Buddhism, meditation, reincarnation, clairvoyance, philosophy, spirituality, ancient history and human consciousness. I became interested in the idea of enlightenment as it appeared in Eastern traditions and wondered whether there were levels of understanding that lay beyond ordinary experience.

Some of what I read was serious. Some of it, I would later realise, was not.

Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality fascinated me. At the time, I read them much as they were presented—as glimpses into another way of seeing reality. Years later, I came to understand how questionable much of their claimed anthropology was. But I don’t regret reading them. They were intriguing, imaginative and, for a young man already looking beyond the obvious, they opened another window. And I was looking through every window I could find.

My curiosity was never confined to books.

Mum was already an accomplished artist, and for a while I joined her in painting classes. I became deeply interested in photography and pursued it seriously. I was already a reasonably good horse rider. I learned to scuba dive. I took up Transcendental Meditation. At QIT, I discovered a particular love of Ancient History and classical architecture.

Travel became another form of education. I wanted to see places for myself rather than know them only through books. I wanted to experience different landscapes, cultures and ways of living. I wanted to stand in deserts, dive on reefs, walk through forests, visit old cities and see animals in the places where they belonged.

Looking back, I don’t think I was consciously assembling a list of skills or trying to prove that I could do many things. It was more instinctive than that. I was testing the boundaries of my own life.

There was also something more personal underneath it.

When I was younger, I carried a quiet feeling that I might have something worthwhile to contribute. At the same time, another part of me suspected that this was simply youthful daydreaming. I never had a clear picture of what that contribution might be. I only knew that I wanted to keep expanding my experience and understanding.

Perhaps that was why the idea of the Universal Man appealed to me.

It gave some shape to the belief that breadth was not necessarily distraction. That a life could contain science and art, reason and intuition, physical experience and contemplation. That learning one thing did not require abandoning another.

For a while, I also imagined that all this searching might eventually lead somewhere.

I wondered whether, through meditation, study and experience, a person might arrive at some deeper level of understanding. The word enlightenment held a certain attraction. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but I sensed that there might be a way of seeing life more clearly—of stepping beyond the constant noise of thought and everyday concerns.

I never found a dramatic answer. Life intervened, as it usually does.

Careers developed. Relationships formed. Children arrived. Responsibilities accumulated. There were bills to pay and problems to solve. The grand questions did not disappear, but they had to coexist with the ordinary demands of living.

My working life eventually became almost as varied as my reading.

I completed my degree and became involved in design and construction. I worked briefly as a commercial photographer. I moved into animal behaviour and management, magazine production, concert promotion, tourism and marketing. At different times I was an abseil instructor, a Marketing Manager, a National Promotions Manager and an International Operations Manager. Eventually, I moved into education and became a Business Manager in a private school.

From the outside, those changes may have looked unrelated. They never felt that way to me. Each new direction offered another world to understand. New people. New systems. New problems. New things to learn.

I was rarely frightened by starting again. If anything, the unfamiliar interested me.

Much later, when I began writing Learning to Lean Back, I started to recognise this pattern more clearly. I had once thought that I was searching for an identity, but the identity may have been present all along. It was not any particular occupation or interest. It was the curiosity itself—the willingness to move towards something unfamiliar and see where it led.

Even my interest in the spiritual world gradually changed.

I became less interested in systems that promised secret knowledge or extraordinary revelation. Over time, I grew more sceptical of people who combined fragments of different traditions—shamanism, Tarot, Wicca, Eastern philosophy and New Age ideas—and presented them as though they formed some ancient, unified truth.

That kind of certainty no longer appealed to me.

The older I became, the more I felt that whatever we call spiritual growth is probably quieter than that. It may simply be attention.

Learning to observe your own thoughts without being ruled by them. Learning to accept uncertainty. Learning to live with what is rather than constantly wishing for what might have been. Meditation remained useful to me, not because it transported me somewhere else, but because it brought me back to where I already was.

The idea of enlightenment gradually became less important. Or perhaps my understanding of it changed.

When I was young, I imagined enlightenment as something that might be reached—a point somewhere ahead, after enough reading, enough meditation, enough experience. I no longer think of it that way. There was no summit. No moment when everything suddenly made sense.

Instead, life became increasingly ordinary and, in some ways, increasingly difficult.

Adrenomyeloneuropathy gradually altered what I could physically do. Things I once performed without thought became complicated. Some became impossible. My world narrowed in certain practical ways.

But the person looking out from inside it did not feel particularly different.

I have never thought of myself primarily as sick or disabled. AMN is something I live with. It affects how I move through the world, but it does not define the person doing the moving.

If anything, the narrowing of physical possibilities made the inward questions more interesting.

What remains when the things you once did easily are taken away?

What part of you actually changes?

And what part does not?

I don’t pretend to have found definitive answers. I am probably still too grounded, too analytical and perhaps too fond of questioning everything to make a convincing mystic.

That no longer troubles me.

I have come to value something simpler: a degree of peace with myself, an ability to live more in the present, and less interest in judging my life against what might have been. The past is fixed. You can learn from it, but you cannot rearrange it.

The future remains uncertain.

The only place life actually occurs is here.

That sounds obvious. It took me a remarkably long time to understand it.

I still read. I still question. I still find myself drawn to ideas that sit at the edges of what we know. I remain fascinated by consciousness, by the natural world, by history, by science, by people and by the strange paths individual lives take.

The curiosity has never left.

What has changed is my need for it to lead somewhere.

When I was younger, I thought that perhaps I was searching for enlightenment.

Later, I thought I was searching for myself.

Now I suspect neither was quite true.

Perhaps I was simply learning how to remain interested in the world.

And perhaps, in the end, that has been enough.