my day off

Haven’t written for some time. Way too busy. And then W. questioned the whole phenomenon of blogging. Who’s going to read all that stuff? Well it turned out that she’d read it herself… But indeed the question why, much more than who, is relevant. I thought it should work to arrest thoughts that spring up at unexpected moments -connections, short-circuits of the mind- before they sink into oblivion, eclipsed by the undertow of the normal. A sort of interim report of the development of my consciousness, as Salman Rushdie described it somewhere.

But it seems not to work for now. A man in the paper called for a reevaluation of slow time. Life today, with the unavoidable instant communication even causes my day off to be a whirlwind ride. My brother called just a few minutes ago to cancel an appointment we made weeks ago(!) because he feels he is near to a burnout (speaking about a sign of the times). Ing texts me to check whether I’m coming tomorrow, I’m desperately trying to get hold of W, I have to catch a train in less than an hour (and still have to shave and have dinner), and only just now F. mails to inform me that G. has texted him that W.’s waters have broken. If that’s not news that stops you in the midst of things, then I don’t know what is. But then again it means I don’t want to turn of my mobile, or disconnect from the internet… In the midst of this all little time remains for reflection that might transcend the day-to-day chatter that surrounds us. Allain de Botton wrote somewhere that he'd be the kind of Buddhist monk whose enlightenment comes by way of the experience of life itself as opposed to the awakeing-by-seclusion. I on the other hand could use some isolation.