Shopping day disrupts my routine. I had breakfast when I got home, in the garden, trying not to think about the fact that I hadn’t done my yoga/tai chi routine or my writing. Well, does it matter, when these routines are self imposed? That’s the slippery slope, you let yourself off for one day and then down and down you go till suddenly you’re back to… well what? Formless chaos, a sense of emptiness, hopelessness, pointlessness… are there any positive words that end in ‘ness’? Goodness me, I can’t think of any.
There are the things I know need doing, and the tasks I’ve set for myself, and the overwhelming temptation not to do any of them… Just to sit in the sunshine, making another scarf, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, ignoring the weeds pushing up through the gravel and these thoughts popping up into my awareness (oh, note to self, that one’s fairly neutral). Kindness, hopefulness, carefulness, busyness – I wonder why business is spelt the way it is? Or should that be: pronounced the way it is? English is wonderful, actually all languages are wonderful, and fascinating. In some ways I wish I’d followed the path from mathematics into linguistics, rather than into statistics, when I chose my first university course. Maybe if my sixth form had been able to accommodate my wishes to do double maths and German at A level, instead of having to compromise on double maths and economics, I would have done it – though I considered applying for a maths and linguistics course anyway – I can’t remember where that was, but it wasn’t Southampton. The road not taken – I would probably still have ended up going into computer programming after graduation, but I would be in a different place, with different people – and that would have made all the difference – I assume. But how much of what I’ve done in my life has been down to the inherent personality and characteristics that were laid down in those first eighteen years of life? Maybe things wouldn’t be as different now as I think – different places, different people, yes, but thinking about the last fifteen years or so, the different places and different people don’t seem to make that much difference to the inner me.
Ooh, this a bit deep, and it’s starting to give me vertigo. It goes back to my ideas of the Crystal Space, the paths we take and the ways through the mirrored labyrinth, the network of possibilities, probabilities and improbabilities, the book that I’ll probably never write but that haunts every now and again.
Well, I came back from my shopping expedition and now I seem to have written quite a lot after all.
I’ve even got a poem, of sorts, which I cobbled together yesterday from a cluster of little poems or ideas which had popped up at different times, each too long to be haikus, loosely connected but all a bit rough and ready – as my poetry often is.