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Fair Isle
is a lyrical reminder to break the momentum of busyness that fuels the sadness of never understanding ourselves.
It makes a place to sit down. So: Sit down. Be quiet…The impulse to create
begins… in a tunnel of silence. Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous
seems to me, to be busy. It’s worth remembering, here, that “busy is a
decision” — one we constantly make, and often to our own detriment. Travel is
an activity not an accomplishment, yet lately, because of the global pandemic,
one of the great cruelties and great glories of
traveling nowadays is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision
and execution. When we dream up an itinerary , we invariably underestimate the
amount of time and effort required to make it a reality. Our Fair Isle return took 6 months! Rather than
a cognitive bug, perhaps this is the supreme coping mechanism of the pandemic
mind — if we could see clearly the toil ahead at the outset of any travel
plans, we might be too dispirited to begin, too reluctant to gamble between the
heroic and the foolish, too paralyzed to walk the long and tenuous tightrope of
hope and fear by which any worthwhile destination is reached. Set in the middle of the North Atlantic, 38km (23mi) from Shetland and 43km (27mi) from Orkney, Fair Isle is as far away from civilization as it’s possible to get in the British Isles. Measuring barely five kilometers across and two kilometers wide, the island is home to a tiny permanent population of just 45 people. In fact, it’s the most remote inhabited place in the UK. |
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