I am no
different from anyone else, I get caught up in the news cycles and then spin
out, I follow the wave and when the spin stops I stop too. Sometimes I am the last one to know when the
cycle has finished, people follow the story’s life span and there is this
amazing collective pulse where souls synchronize and move on to other less
volatile cycles, something calmer, more personal.
Islam got me
riled up this week, Beijing always riles me up, working in the middle east can
rile me up though I know I shouldn’t take any of it personally. Why do I get caught up in volatile
cycles? Well, I live alone, I have time
on my hands, I am on the grid. Sometimes
I wish for the hermetic life, silence is desirable when the world turns away in
a different direction. And when it does, all I want to do is listen to my own breathing.
Three of my students ended their lessons today, next week they will continue their education in colleges closer to home. Next week I expect a small number of mine to come on Sunday but with examinations scheduled the following day I am done teaching.
I started
reading Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel. The first four chapters have been character
development and I have to be completely awake to keep up. It’s fast, most of it conversations, and how
much do I need to understand fraud claims early on, I don’t know. And it is very New York. It makes me feel how long I’ve been out of
the American loop and how uncomfortable I am when I’m there. And returning at this time in my life, I
wonder if I missed the chance.
I come up with a lot of
great ideas but I lose steam and they remain just ideas or I give them to
other people and they run with it and create something from it. Why is it so hard to take an idea and nurture it, build on it, test it and make it become reality? Maybe it goes back to the nurturing part. I don't know.
The movie
Shadowlands came on and I didn’t want to leave.
A colleague mis-rang and I had to meet him in front of the
building. A dozen years ago I saw this movie about C.S Lewis
and the American woman once and it was so good I’ve looked to buy it or
download it to no avail and here, shockingly it’s on and I have to leave. Why did you leave?
The
department’s secretary’s sister got married and teachers were invited. My colleague and I arrived at the Al Massa
hotel and sat in the lobby along with a few dozen men and the Bangladeshi
waitstaff offered dishes of halwa and Arabic coffee in tiny cups and then it
was time to eat and we were led upstairs to thirty round tables of eight and we
ate fresh baby lamb on a bed of rice and when we had our full we exited and
there met the groom, who is from Muscat, with a sword on his side and his khanjar
tucked in his waist, and we took photos with him and that was it and then
we walked to another colleague's home and who once had cats but he also had eight year old rum and
we talked until I couldn’t breathe anymore and that was it.
In that time
of enjoying Bahaman rum and losing my ability to breathe I shared some ideas
which my host thought were great. I told
him if it were possible, to include me as a source of inspiration in his next
article.
Why can’t I
take some of the ideas I come up with and do something about them, flush them
out, write about the ideas which are original and could have huge implications
in the way we see our world. Yeah
right. A new new testament sounds like
an incredible idea, am I just putting it up here for someone to ‘borrow’?
Are there
jobs out there for people who just create ideas?
Ideas are free and they come easy.
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