Yesterday, reeling from a family illness, I couldn’t work. I read. Surely it’s healthy to read homegrown fiction when challenged?
July 4, 2022
Reading not working
04July
June 30, 2022
Tales of why
30June
Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom feels like the kind of book you only read when desperate. Why are we here? Why go on? And truth be told, I’ve had it prescribed (gently) to me. I’m a tenth of the way through and can relate that it is riveting.
June 24, 2022
Does music help?
24June
During my corporate career, every day threatened to engulf me. So I was assiduous in carrying around a Sony Discman tethered to noise-cancelling headphone, plus half a dozen CDs. Listening boosted me. These past few years, music seems to have been a hindrance rather than a help. I’ve decided to have a fresh go. Now it’s an iPhone plus Spotify. Now it’s an older person’s…
June 11, 2022
Where to be
11June
For my first couple of decades, I barely moved beyond my suburb. Then came a period of travel mostly based around corporate work, travel in fine hotels. Finally there was a post-corporate time, the time of Big Years, when travel was an adventure. Now puzzlement bugs me. We have just returned from a demanding fortnight: a few days with kin in Darwin, much joy with a granddaughter; a full-on…
May 3, 2022
Crumpled mind
03May
What happened to the mind I used to take pride in? The mind that could concentrate all day, all day on complex stuff in a complex world? Lately, as part of a more general malaise, I’ve had the sense of being as able as ever, but vulnerable to softness, lassitude. In other words, I can concentrate and analyze and express as well as ever (of course that’s my judgment, who knows what…
March 30, 2022
Emotional confusion
30March
Climate crisis … Ukraine invasion … nuclear war threats reprised … Australia’s woeful government (and opposition) … an aging body. We’ve been here many times before. And I’m working so well, my book heaving out of the deep dark sea, taking shape. Surely this is no worse than a slow fadeout from life. If only I could be wise, definitive, and purposeful. If…
March 22, 2022
12:59 PM
22March
In Finders Keepers Cafe, my daily workstation, as I have been since 10:11 AM. Yesterday was a grandparenting day, another sublime experience that managed, nonetheless, to drain me of energy, and last night I hosted a book club (hosting is traumatic, I’d chosen Richard Powers’s sublime Bewilderment and every critical comment infuriated me), and this morning when I rose, stretched, read aloud on…
March 21, 2022
Journaling
21March
The intent behind this blog was to set out some form of record of the half decade from age 65. A “slow glow” meant I was no longer smashing demons by setting tough challenges; instead I would be mainly at this desk while staying attentive to a dozen or so aspects of my life that I treasure. Glowing not glowering. I chose a blog format that didn’t require the ubiquitous…
June 16, 2021
Epitaph as way of life
16June
Without any guiding religion or dogma, committed to rationalism and humanism, you try to orient your life with clear purpose. But it’s not straightforward. At age 60, an impulse led me to throw significant life energy into yearly day-by-day challenges, major or minor. I called it my Big Decade and it was just that, a planned decade of daily obsessions. In some ways, it was my “bucket…
March 26, 2021
Nine-month reckoning
26March
Afternoon. A tram trundles past my hunkered-down world. I’m home alone for the next ten days and can expect to both work really well and feel exposed. It occurs to me that it’s seven months since I turned 65 and shifted from a “Big Decade,” day-by-day challenge mode of living, to a deeper “slow glow” five-year perspective. The trouble is, glowing slowly can…