Sunday 17 December 2017

Eggshells

Only five more days of work, then ten days off (messed up by xmas occurring in the middle), then back at work for four days, then two weeks off. (Then an unbroken stretch of teaching children about the true cost of war for as far as the eye can see, but let's not worry about that now.) I need this holiday. I need a change, more than anything. My everyday life feels and is minutely repetitive - routine, routine - same people in same places having same interactions with me.

The little boy needs his routine, so a lot of it has to do with providing that for him. But above and beyond what being his mother entails, the universe is working hard to make sure that I know my place, and that place is ricocheting to and fro in a small but very well-worn groove. A rut, I guess. I know I've written about this already but I don't think you were paying attention, or at least you didn't take it as seriously as you ought to have done, so I'm having another bout.

The epitome of ruttedness takes place every weekday morning between ten and five minutes to seven, when I'm riding my bike citywards across a little local park. There's an old lady who walks there in the mornings. She pushes her walking frame along and as we approach each other we always say good morning to each other. To have a tiny encounter with the same person in the same place every day is a blunt and unwelcome reminder that I'm pinned into this seemingly unalterable daily sequence. And yet she always smiles and waves now, and I think sometimes I smile too; I hope the exchange of good mornings gives her a little bit of enjoyment. When I first enter the park I look around to see where on the circuit path she is; when I spot her I feel mingled satisfaction and annoyance. It's a good interaction, I know that, good for me and for her, and it's one tile in the mosaic of what I also know is on the whole a pretty pleasant existence (mine is, I mean.) What's annoying about it is not that it happens but that I think the exact same sorts of things every time I see her - it takes less than a minute to cross the park and so there's no time to think a step further or to think in a different direction. And that's really what I find so troubling, so very, very troubling, so disturbing, about feeling stuck in a rut; I wouldn't be bothered about the outward routine if I could feel confident that I'm not also stuck in a mental circuit that is closed and repetitive.

I recently had occasion to, let's say, research a handful of different individuals of roughly my age and mainly of my gender. I wasn't stalking them but my activity did involve the internet in general and facebook in particular. I came out of this exercise feeling depressed about myself, as one narcissistically does at these moments, because these people had done such different things than I have, and they appeared to have done them so well. Of course I know that the effect of looking at all of someone's accumulated works and achievements in one hit was to magnify them relative to my own, but even allowing for that, I feel I have not done very much with my life of the kind of activity that I value and respect above all in the lives of others. I'm not saying I wish I had made things that had my name on them. Intellectually I understand the appeal of this but it doesn't personally appeal to me very much. What I think I might well be in danger of regretting, on my deathbed some six or seven hundred years hence, is that I have allowed the diminishment of the spaces in my life which were reserved for serious and strong and adventurous engagement with thinking and ideas. Parenthood has taken some of the time I had for thinking, and time is limited. It has also taken a significant chunk of mental and emotional energy, and while there's not a finite supply of those things to be drawn on, there is less urgency to deploy them for their own sakes when they're being engaged in the maternal aspect of my life. Therapy has without doubt absorbed time and attention that might have been available for thinking, but at the same time it has made me infinitely more aware of how my own mind works and infinitely more capable of approaching thought as work to be worked through, advanced, developed and completed.

It's late and I must get some sleep to carry me through the week. When the break arrives I want to make the most of it; taste some freedom and fill up my mind with fresh material.

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