Day 109

Yesterday seemed incomplete somehow. I even started writing a poem about it but it petered out in the sand, and with my attention distracted by a TV programme about home midwives in Bradford. There were tears, of course, for M and I, remembering the births of the children, worrying about them now as adults, and M’s unfulfilled dream of being a midwife or a doula, a dream which somehow seems unattainable now. Why the incompleteness of the day? Perhaps it was because M had to work, because I worked for four hours or so, and finished when she finished instead of dragging my hours at the work desk beyond what’s reasonable as I sometimes do. Perhaps because A, and M, and I went for a walk across the heath at 5pm and the light seemed so bright, and people so happy, and life somehow unburdened for a few short minutes. And then we thought it was 10pm at 9pm, and found something else to watch after the intensity of the midwives, and then watched the news, shortened on one channel, and propaganda-ised on the other. And then it was time for bed unless we wanted to be exhausted again this morning. And we are exhausted again this morning.

R wrote about lost days yesterday, and it seems to be something that’s a constant for the two of us, intertwined souls that we seem to be, although always thousands of miles apart. I often think this intertwining is that of all creative souls who question their own creativity in one way or another, who are constantly aware that there is really actually only a finite time they have to put together bodies of work that might withstand the probing of posterity, aware of the fact that we only have a fraction of a moment to make something that might last until the sun finally goes out in four billion years time, and that might somehow have escaped this galaxy and out into the universe before then, and perhaps (and hopefully) out into different universes before then. Thought and art can’t be bounded by the paper, the media, it’s made on. It’s an essence of the soul, and the soul has no physical barriers, can fly beyond the borders of the physical, beyond the borders of whatever this place is that we inhabit, and explore all those things we can’t see, and do it at a speed faster than light.

Sometimes this soul existence beyond death worries me, because it’s so unphysical. For a man who is very physical, there’s always the question of how fulfilment and peace can be achieved in a state of floating soul nirvana. Perhaps my priorities will change when I reach that state of being able to rush from one end of the universe to the next, when I can delve into any number of universes in the blink of an eye, and back again. Thinking of it like that, thinking of being able to be in a multitude of places at almost the same time, in some form or another, makes me realise that physicality will probably be the last thing on my soul’s mind as it whizzes around the vacuum.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 66