So this is Thursday, then? Bin night? How time flies.
It has been another exciting day, the highlights of which were putting the first coat of paint on the outside bannister, waiting a few hours, then sanding it and applying a second coat. Between coats, I paid a socially distanced visit to a neighbour’s garden to look at her greenhouse and discuss rain-water harvesting.
As it happens, for anyone worried about my having contracted cabin fever and rambling on about inanities, I enjoyed today. Maybe that was because there were no pressures or expectations, just taking things as they came without paying attention to the clock or anything else except the task in hand. ‘Zen’ is an overused metaphor and adjective, but there was an element of it about today. It helped, too, that my phone was on silent almost all day.
found on the internet, don’t know who to credit
A decent New Zealand pinot noir at tea time helped as well, and put me into an even more ‘relaxed’ frame of mind to listen to some 1974 Grateful Dead (including a particularly good, exploratory Dark Star segueing into Spanish Jam then US Blues) and write this.
I wrote here three years ago about spending time without my phone. Ever since I’ve been meaning to turn it off completely for a while. It’s strange how (relatively) rapidly that has come to sound like a screw-ball notion. Whatever, I haven’t actually done the ‘no phone day’ thing. To some extent, this is because my tendency now is to give out my mobile number rather than our house landline, which is rarely used. But it’s also because I’ve got used to the convenience of having the thing in my back pocket all day, of getting things instantly, trapped in the inertia of connectivity.
The next, logical step in deliberately entering a liminal existence for a while, is clearly to leave the phone in the bedside drawer in the morning and take everything as it happens in slower time, checking messages when I’m ready to rather than when the device buzzes and chirps to demand attention. I might even do it tomorrow.
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Music: Shall we go out there? Why not. Paddy McAloon/Prefab Sprout and the voice of Yvonne Connors.
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