[a]
Friday. I am upset.
No, that's not quite true: I am not pleased, but... it is as though the negative emotions are at least partly in brackets. I can see myself panicking a bit, angry and disoriented – but, perhaps because this is how psychoanalysis can work, the emotions are understandable but don't quite drive my actions, and don't quite hit me at the core.
It's simple enough, really – trivial I suppose – I returned from Zürich, elated and a bit tired, went to a nice dinner with Michael, Andrew and the gang, and...
and caught a really nasty summer flu. Which lasted about five days. Which is still fading in bursts of misery, tiredness – illness – to the point where I've essentially lost nearly two weeks...
two weeks of beautiful weather, of piles of things to do, of what had felt like a more direct, more easy-going relation to doing things.
As though I was thinking: yes, I'll have to fight my way through all of this – editing Gerhard's book, clearing junk off the floor of the middle room, setting up to start having clients – sending out an abstract, finding exchange universities for students who had lost out, connecting with various HIV patient groups over our counselling service... but whatever difficulties come up, I'll just handle them.
But now it doesn't feel like that – or, more accurately, in brackets as it were, I remember it not feeling like that: compare the terrible summer feelings that I tried to focus in Augusts, which I don't want to re-experience...
[b]
Monday. Calm... a connected sense of season and space. There is still too much to do; but I am coughing less...
the day is quiet, outside; this neighborhood tends to be somnolent in summer, occasional sounds of working (hammering, moving things in vans).
Sunny and hot some days, now cooler but still brightly lit – and bursts of rain that clear the air; the plants are, as you might think, ecstatic.
Trying to focus on big projects: to the detriment, of course, of scattered e-mails... but that can be borne.
An amazing glow of North Sea light, between the clouds... beautiful.
Comments