I can't sleep…
Photo by Geraint Smith Photography: “This week, my favorite cottonwood tree in all the state, and random black and whites on the road in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. I think the colors on this cottonwood peaked this morning (Oct 24, 2023). I never tire of seeing it whenever I commute to or from Taos, in all seasons.” (Thank you Beth)
I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings, and then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed person.
— David Brooks, The Essential Skills for Being Human (nytimes.com, October 19, 2023)
V: (with a cross laugh) ‘You bloody women! You always think you know what a bloke’s thinking!’
H: No we don’t! We have to make it up! You won’t engage with us! You won’t answer when we speak! You present us with a blank face! We have to invent a response, out of loneliness and despair! So we won’t have to live in an emotional vacuum!’
— Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Diaries 1995-1998 (The Text Publishing Company, 2021)
Notes:
4:15 a.m. A rare, deep REM zone disturbed. It’s Wally, giving me kisses, his signal for Dad to take him out. I look up at him, smile, scratch him under his chin. Sigh. An 18.5 lb bundle of pure joy, at any and every hour.
I bring Wally out and back, skooch him under the covers. He nuzzles up to Mom, makes 2 tight loops to find that perfect spot, and he settles in. I slide out of the room, shutting the door gently behind me.
Weather app reads out 98% cloud cover with 70% chance of rain, with more of the same for the rest of the day.. The likelihood of getting any worthy shots this morning are low (very), with gravity pulling me back to bed, the covers, and Wally. Go back to bed. Go back to bed. Go back to bed.
The moment takes me back to the movie Dumb & Dumber when Lloyd (Jeff Daniels) asks Jim Carrey if he’s got any chance to end up with Lauren Holly, and Carrey says he’s got a one-in-a-million shot. Lloyd (aka Dumber), excited, responds with “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”
Continue reading “Walking. So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”
What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.
So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.
— Helen Garner, from “Helen Garner on happiness: ‘It’s taken me 80 years to figure out it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm’” in the Guardian, February 4, 2023