A glorious day – as we name it: yesterday was like this too. The first few days of June, and England seems to have remembered what it has been told by other countries, in those pubs where they all hang out, that in June it is summer, and in summer it is sunny and warm and pleasant.
Given how often it forgets all of this, that's a big deal.
I would compare it to California, but this is a much softer, gentler air – not the sea-chill of San Francisco, nor the desert blast of LA. This is a weather for vicarage parties (I believe this happens more often in the south of England, where vicars used to infest the copses and lanes – before the cull).
I have a lot to do today – there are still sixty-odd essays to mark, and I have to finish turning my erratic and incompetent preparation for the Jung-Institute's development exam into a short paper. The marking is slightly exasperating; and the short paper makes me feel like an idiot. But I can finish both today, I think.
And still it is sunny... which begs the question: how about all those people in their nineties who say, I wish I'd stopped working and gone outside more often? Understood. I get it. And this is an error I've committed repeatedly in my life – anxiously working at something while joy sits waiting somewhere.
Oh well; one justification – perhaps I can eventually end up in a sunnier clime, where it's like this fairly often.
And perhaps I feel more sharply attuned to time, change, awareness today – which makes it slightly hard to act on these immediate projects: yesterday's analysis session in York threw me way off balance, making me lie on the couch and snooze for hours afterwards. Keying into old sorrows – S. wanted to hear entire histories and stories that I'd forgotten I hadn't yet told her (and, frankly, wasn't really in the mood to revisit); we spent so much time on them that my list of dreams was put aside for next session.
Which all means: a subtly layered version of existential uncertainty – the sun and the birds at one level, the anxiety of the paper and exams at another, the comfortableness of the body lower down, the memories of failures and losses and deaths giving off a cloudy pedal point, like the background noises in Inception – seems to keep lurching along, various fragments shimmering to the surface, and fading again.
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