Storms get tired too, so hold on
As Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, powerfully said only a couple of weeks ago, we are “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”; and however you cut it, the first month of 2026 has felt pretty bleak, grim, anxiety-making, and in far too many places, extremely violent and murderous. To borrow an image from the folk-singer Louden Wainwright, it has been a hard month on the planet — it’s getting harder to understand it, things are tough all over on earth.
Frankly, it’s exhausting. Yet exhaustion is also a reminder that the work of helping to create a fairer, more just, more compassionate world has always been extremely hard work, and in times of crises inevitably it becomes acutely exhausting. The plain truth is that this current storm is likely remain strong for a long time yet.
Given this, it’s important to ask what kind of religious or spiritual response do we need to deal with this — one that honestly acknowledges the power of the storm, but does so without draining all joy from our lives.
One response I would caution against, even though it is popular in many circles, is to adopt a re-packaged Stoicism. The political philosopher John Gray suggests this fashion is itself a symptom of our age’s anxiety in which Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations has been revived as a kind of literary psychotherapy—an attempt to resign oneself to fate by suppressing our emotions, mostly through rational thought. Of course, if it helps, fair enough; but, as Gray points out, there is very little joy in it.
Which point brings me to Charlie Mackesy’s illustrated books, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2019) and the follow-up, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm (published in October last year, 2025). They are often described as children’s books but, in truth, the themes of kindness, compassion, vulnerability, hope, love and self-worth he addresses are as relevant for a 60-year-old like me as they are for my 8-year-old grandson. And, in a wonderful review of the second book, John Gray proposes Mackesy as an alternative to Stoic self-management in dark times, one that genuinely leaves room for joy. Gray believes, and I agree with him, that Mackesy does this in a way that is “uniquely delightful” and that these books are “an innovation in children’s books and an event in literature.”
First, Gray points out that, quite deliberately, there is hardly any storyline. The boy and his companions travel on, and their dialogues are the journey. Mackesy presents four unlikely friends who do not know where they are going or what they are seeking. Each embodies a way of being-in-the-world rather than any kind of predetermined theory or doctrine of life. So, for example, the mole delights in simple pleasures (with eating “cake” as his recurring answer); the fox is wary yet insists that love prevents them from ever being truly lost; the horse is serene, convinced that light remains beyond the clouds; and the boy is curious and vulnerable, kept going by his friends’ kindness.
Second, Gray notes that the absence of plot is key. Mackesy is not offering us an epic of heroic victory or a myth in which salvation is secured by some kind of ultimately true doctrine or external saviour. Instead, he offers us a this-worldly succour without any supernatural system. By relieving the reader of the burden of “getting somewhere”, the books suggest a way of living that lets things come and go as they will — in this sense, it’s a very Buddhistic attitude towards life — and he shows how the characters find genuine compassion and gentleness in that acceptance.
Third, although Mackesy is often compared to A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Gray is of the opinion that this misleads. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood is a pastoral refuge: a safe, nostalgic, imagined home that helped numb the feelings of loss after the First World War. By contrast, Mackesy’s characters inhabit something closer to our own age’s feel of being a kind of no-man’s-land — a place that is radically open, uncharted, and never fully secure. The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse do not seek to escape this reality, instead they find ways to make their home within it. Where Milne offers retreat, Mackesy accepts uncertainty and teaches a way of living compassionately and creatively within it.
Anyway, I was so taken with Gray’s review that I bought both books as a Christmas present to myself, and in the dark days following Christmas and the New Year I have found them genuinely helpful. I discovered that they sketch a way of living well amid the present turmoil that speaks the language we have adopted here in Cambridge as our own, namely, the free-religious langauge and philosophy of Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei, with its blend of Buddhism, Shintō, and Sermon-on-the-Mount Christianity, and the “Ten Advices” of Norbert Fabián Čapek.
It is no exaggeration to say that in the journey and conversations of the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse, I see a nascent free-religious community like our own: one not merely surviving the storm, but learning to travel through it in ways that creatively preserve and enlarge love and compassion, and — and this is important — to live in ways that do not extinguish the possibility of experiencing joy in the mystery and miracle of life, in the
In the end, the heart of Gray’s reading of Macksey is simple: when there is no clear way ahead, the counsel is modest: take the next step together with good companions. In other words, it’s a beautiful and accessible illustration of how, in an age of rupture and storms, it is possible to walk a free-religious path that is safer than the known way.
And, although, like the boy, in the coming years we will often have cause to admit that the storm is making us tired, we must listen well to the horse’s reply and remember that, “Storms get tired too, so hold on”, and, in the end, although the wind is strong, “Our love is stronger”.
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