For The Sunday Muse Prompt #234. Image source: Rosie Ann Prosser.: ** Still, in the silent solitude of repose, I survey the face that peers back at me. Three candles flickering in the dark, a space suffused by a mellow, yellow light pushing back against the dark. The ghosts of grief, railing against delight fight the light, their dissonant sounds a constant clang. But in light, there is delight to know this is to rest, here.
The Year of Being 42 went reasonably well, all things considered. I survived another swing around the sun out in the corner of the world I am now, with a sense of acceptance beginning to predominate. There are still days on which I ask myself why / how I ended up here but whatever misgivings I have tend to recede at month end. In this regard Re:Think, which was the theme for last year was useful, aided by the status game lens, picked up from reading the book of the same name by Will Storr. His argument, that we are all (created, evolved?) to play social status games has been useful for clarifying things both in a work and relational context. I now know that my primary game is one of success. I used to think that I was driven by the inner prestige bestowed by being a purveyor of niche, technical subjects in the workspace. The reality , as I am finding, is that the raw numbers at the end of the month are intensely motivating, not least if the costs of diapers, baby milk and toys are anything to go by. I am definitely not a player in the (physical) dominance or (spiritual/ moral) virtue status game. A highlight of the year has got to be having L & S out with me for the greater part of eight months or so. For all the late nights, befuddlement at my inability to contextually interpret tears and the feeling of being run into the ground, the appreciation of just how much effort goes into child care is one that I will go away with. Rethinking is not done by any means though, rather it feels like it will be a recurring decimal in my life for a long time yet. ...
Time as a trickster of sorts is a theme I find myself coming back to again and again, the key motif being how in the moment life and time can seem like drudgery, but when viewed from the vantage point of hindsight it can seem compressed, like a video watched at 2x speed. My thoughts as I packed up my bags and began to prepare for the short hop back were very much in that vein, not helped I suspect by the long hard year I had had. Between L, her boundless energy and various work related niggles, I was running on empty for the final few weeks before I left. Awaiting me on the other side - in addition to reintegrating myself back - were a big house move, and the mother of all Nigerian parties on the other side of town. If there was any anticipation, it was hope that I would finally get to sink my teeth into a juicy burger, indulge in all the bacon and sausages I could manage, and hop along to the odd Parkrun. As it turns out, all of my fears - and none of the things I was looking forward to - materialized.As is its wont, Reality and expectation never quite matched up. ...
Photo by Matthieu Joannon on Unsplash ** The heat hangs heavy on the head, the way a wet blanket only partially wrung dry after being pounded by feet in a washbasin hangs listlessly in a barely-there breeze. The short afternoon walks to the canteen, to grab some combination of a salad, chicken and rice is beginning to feel like a chore, not helped by the sand which has become a permanent fixture it seems. Some days G and I wonder if the haze is from fog or dust but the loud whirl of my air purifier settles it for me; dust it is - that most irritating kind that finds its way through every tiny crinkle in our armour, covering everything with a fine layer of brown. Not far away in their ubiquity are the flies which flit around everything, their persistent buzz the soundtrack to life in these baking summer months. With Ramadan behind us, it is the season of long vacations and every other day it seems someone else in the wider team disappears for a few weeks. My turn to disappear is in about a month, and for the first time in a long time, I am looking forward to kicking back, waking up at my leisure then sticking L in her stroller and grabbing brunch with real bacon. Adding a few more Parkruns to my total - with maybe one push for a new PB - would be a welcome bonus. ...
Photo by Il Vagabiondo on Unsplash ** One day it was wet, slightly windy and the temperature was below 30 degrees C, the next it wasn’t, which is how seemingly out of the blue the semblance of winter bowed out, being replaced by summer in all its fierceness. To be brutally honest, calling ‘it’ winter would be a stretch by all accounts, but for the context of the prospect of 40+ weather over the next few months. Of more personal importance though is that it is the end of Ramadan, and the lengthened hours with little food that was my lot in the period (a quirk of the shift patterns revised for the period was that my work day started an extra hour early, and the food spots at work were all closed). As with last year, I decided it would be a fantastic time to attempt to shift some of the weight, tacking on three morning runs and reduced carbs to the month. The three kilograms which have somehow slid off into the ether suggests there was some value to all that exertion. Whether it was worth it all remains to be seen though. ...
For the Day Four prompt, well, kind of. Photo by Abeer Zaki on Unsplash ** it lingers on the edge of my tongue, its heft hanging heavy, marinating in its moistness, each letter, alive, each syllable yielding to the next, then fading like the morning mists wisps, resplendent, gracing the verdant green but then losing themselves to the rising heat. I count to three and then exhale, each breath a gift from earth, now returned.
A prose poem for the NaPoWriMo Day One prompt, Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash ** Sometimes a breath is not just a breath, not just the rising and the falling of the chest, the slow release of the tension of fretting and of wondering, and of wandering. Sometimes a breath is not just the lungs taking and giving, extending life. Sometimes a breath is the sound of battle, the spoils of the war for tomorrow, won moment by moment, because forever is too short and tomorrow is not promised and this moment, fleeting and vanishing is all that is for sure.
Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash ** It feels somewhat trite, given what is afoot in the world, to be riled up about life in my gilded prison corner of the world. The Ukraine and Russia conflict looms large of course, but for all the outpouring of support - and some might say posturing - it feels more like a cause célèbre, than anything else. As others have pointed out thousands more have lost their lives in Yemen,. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were hardly less gruesome for ordinary civilians. Closer home, it seems like Nigeria teeters more on the edge of imploding, with power, security and the general hardship levels all running away in the wrong direction. Of course, concurrent occurrences of bad things does not make any of them less ‘bad’. One can only hope that the energies expended in mobilizing and blanketing the air waves with the plight of Ukrainians is also extended to other (blacker and browner) bodies. ...
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash ** No sooner than the year begins does it seemingly end, the flight of time - ponderously slow in the moment - somehow seemingly fast when the view is backward, over its long arch. It truly is a trick of time. As 2020 morphed into 2021, what thoughts I had came together around Rebuilding Better, the premise being that 2020 had been a year of significant disruption - and deconstruction - with 2021 a fresh chance to begin again, to put together what was broken in a better way with twelve objectives concretely describing that for me. Now that 2021 has morphed into 2022, it feels like a good time to revisit all that, so here goes. ...
It’s that time of the year again where I reflect on my reading over the course of the year. My previous attempts are linked here. \\\* I have a litany of reasons to give for the paltry return of fourteen books completed this year, as big a drop as could be from the twenty-three I put way with consummate ease last year, chief of which was the welcome disruption L brought to our lives this year and all that came with it. The chief effect of that was a a significant number of unread books, all the free time I had in the latter part of the year being eighty minutes each day on the bus to and from work on work days. The vast majority were thus audiobooks, the experience of which I tried to improve by taking copious notes in Notion. Of the lot, a few stood out for various reasons. I plan on re-reading a few in hard copy in the near future, real life permitting. So here goes: ...