My computer rebuild projects continue—I’m writing this from my laptop instead of my phone—so progress is being made! My email has been down for the last couple of days. That’s got me stumped for the time being… and also behind in my many emails. Another week of work is complete, and in a few more I’ll have the sneaking suspicion I’ll feel very much like the summer is suddenly over—because it will be. Wow…
The past few weeks have not gone well. My positive attitude is challenged daily. I wish to move forward, yet forces remain bent on pulling me back—pulling me down. I want to understand them, but I believe now it’s part of the gravity of the past. The only thing I need to understand is I’ll risk being forever caught in its pull if I pause for too long trying to understand. Push the throttle forward, as one of my favourite books says.
I’m almost finished reading another book—this one about Einstein. He wrote once how “failure and deprivation are the best educators and purifiers.” Now—in this case he was referring to German society in 1919, but I am struck by this concept now as I walk the battlefields of the many lives I’ve lived. I’m starting to understand why he understood relativity the way he did. Suddenly the notes from my little books of crazy don’t read so crazy anymore. There is no perfect perspective. Everything is relative. Bias is unavoidable.
I don’t have access to any of my image editing tools at the moment, so I’m having to do everything I can in‐camera for these posts. And I’m loving it. I have to do all my cropping before I take the picture. I need do colour correction via the white balance settings. It reminds me of shooting film—I have to be aware of the picture I’m taking. I have to take the picture before I take it, but I still have to remember: take the picture.
Reading some of my earlier posts I can see my words are not the same as they used to be. There’s an element of pace I find a little different and, to be honest, I’m upset by its absence in later posts. I’m going to attribute it to the recent upheaval and acclimatizing to my new living and working routines. I still see the words in my head, the ones I saw myself writing at my old apartment, so I know they’re not lost. And as luck would have it, the room I’m in now is painted the same colour as the last room I was going to write in—at my old house by the ravine—before it was destroyed. The roof slants in this room, just like it did in my old bedroom. The floor is the same faux wood sticky plastic tiles I had in another bedroom. The windows are open all the time. The stairs creek. It’s too humid in the living room. A window air conditioner rumbles in the background while I work. All these different elements all together at once—past and future overlap…
See—it’s the house at the end of the universe.