Tag: rush

Saturday Morning

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I’ve noticed that people love to hurry. Meals are always quick, coffees are never savoured, glances are fleeting, conversations brief and it feels like this is becoming normal, that people only expect surface level and they only strive for surface level in all aspects of life. Mediocre coffee. Luke-warm love. Convenience. Because life is scary and when you sit with it long enough, and really listen to the silence, you notice what you’re missing, and some of what we miss, we know we will never be able to find again.

—  Seyda Noir (seydanoirwords @ Instagram, April 28, 2022) (via balancedhuman)

Photo: Pixaby

Walking. With #1 Son.

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383 consecutive days. Like in a Row. Morning Walk to Cove Island Park. You’ll say, impossible. I’m telling you, you don’t understand the Wiring. Only 1 day during the streak that put it in jeopardy, and that’s a story for another day.

Back to this morning’s walk.  Eric’s on My Mind.

We set up a makeshift office for him in the attic.  A white IKEA desk. A desk chair from Staples. A floor mat under the chair from Amazon. A small single bed against the wall.  And there he hibernates. 

Late night, he shifts in the chair, the floorboards creak, his office directly above the Master bedroom. His chair directly on top of me, sleeping. He’ll be editing his photos, the same photos for hours. Days. The penguin from South Africa, that one up top, took weeks. Deliberate. Meticulous. Punctilious. Like a Professional.

He crawls into bed at ~3 a.m. About the time when his Dad, me, stirs, getting ready for his Daybreak walk. Continue reading “Walking. With #1 Son.” →

Truth…

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Source: free them all

I am always on the edge of what I am doing

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“I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing – which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn’t something else I should be getting on with. … When I’m working, I’m wishing I was doing nothing and when I’m doing nothing I’m wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I’ve got to do and then, when I’ve got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I’m out, I’m wondering how long it will be before I’m back home.”

—  Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Inspired by: I picked up the book after reading “Vivian Gornick: ‘I Couldn’t Finish Michelle Obama’s Becoming‘: (The Guardian, March 26, 2021): “The last book that made me laugh Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer is a brilliant book. For me, the best thing he ever wrote. A little bit of genius, it made me laugh, and laugh, and laugh.”

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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I started listening to this book on Audible during my morning walk last week. I had just completed the introduction and told Self: “This is a book you’ll never forget.” And YOU will likely say, why should I bother. Or as a line from Nestor’s intro says: “But why do I need to learn how to breathe? I’ve been breathing my whole life.” Exactly what I said. Now, I can’t get this book out of my head. Every breath, a gift.
Excerpts from the Introduction: “90 percent of us—very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know—is breathing incorrectly and that this failure is either causing or aggravating a laundry list of chronic diseases… This work was upending long-held beliefs in Western medical science. Yes, breathing in different patterns really can influence our body weight and overall health. Yes, how we breathe… This book is a scientific adventure into the lost art and science of breathing. It explores the transformation that occurs inside our bodies every 3.3 seconds, the time it takes the average person to inhale and exhale… It will take the average reader about 10,000 breaths to read from here to the end of the book. If I’ve done my job correctly, starting now, with every breath you take, you’ll have a deeper understanding of breathing and how best to do it. Twenty times a minute, ten times, through the mouth, nose, tracheostomy, or breathing tube, it’s not all the same. How we breathe really matters… By your 3,000th breath, you’ll know the basics of restorative breathing… By your 6,000th breath, you will have moved into the land of serious, conscious breathing… By your 8,000th breath, you’ll have pushed even deeper into the body to tap, of all things, the nervous system… By your 10,000th breath, and the close of this book, you and I will know how the air that enters your lungs affects every moment of your life and how to harness it to its full potential until your final breath… By the law of averages, you will take 670 million breaths in your lifetime. Maybe you’ve already taken half of those. Maybe you’re on breath 669,000,000. Maybe you’d like to take a few million more.” — James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (Riverhead Books, May 26, 2020)
Notes: