My guest has finally arrived; a charming, sweet, small man, very elegant and friendly. And although he has dramatic stories about the various and confusing mistravels (new word!) of the past three days, he is quite relaxed and un-stressed about it. (Caracas, Madrid, Paris, here – does that sound like a direct or convenient route to you? No, me neither.) I did feel distracted at first by his presence, in the face of the presentation I'm still writing – but it's already calmer.
(Of course, given my concerns about time to myself to write in the next forty-eight hours, why on earth did I invite various Latin Americans back to my apartment last night, and agree to their bringing Dominican rum, guitars and mandolins?... I had to kick them out at 1 am, feeling like a terrible host. But my father would have loved their music, they even played some of his favorites.)
But still I am rather scattered: drying clothes, cleaning up, doing bits of the presentation. As so often in my life, it feels as though the important things are happening in the interstices of trivial things or things I haven't quite got a handle on. And what's even sillier about this is that I know that my life is relatively under my control – as an academic, I don't have to show up some place at 9 am every weekday, nor do I have to do work that others dictate; living alone, I don't have a barrage of complex problems with children, partners, etc. Yet focusing still seems hard. Just a bit confused, diffuse, exasperated by the business of living, and by focusing on other people and events....
Ironic, for someone working on a presentation about awareness and being.
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