When will I catch up with myself? Always running, never getting anywhere. Well, not quite true. I do get somewhere, but I never get to the end. And why would you want to get to the end? Not the end exactly, but a place where I can pause and not think about how much further there is to climb. I can lose myself in the act, but I want to lose myself in nothingness, in inaction. No, not inaction, in non-thought. To do something which will allow my mind to rest, or to wander off into other paths. But that can’t happen until all this is done.
(Hmmm, mixed metaphor in there. Am I climbing, or am I running? Interesting thought).
I had problems with my meditation this morning, technical problems, in that my walkman isn’t working right. Yesterday I thought it was batteries, but I put fresh ones in and I could hear the tape going round, but no sound came out. Maybe it’s the headphones. I have got a spare set, if I find them I can try. So I had an unguided mediation, without even the bell to measure the time. I could have put it on the main stereo. It’s something I need to resolve.
I’m surrounded by things that need to be resolved, stacks and boxes that need to be filed, stuff that needs to be cleaned. All around me life looks at me reproachfully. Yesterday the cat wanted to play, but what could I do? I run from one thing to the next.
I didn’t go to pilates last night, I decided to stay here and work instead. I went to meditation, though part of me wondered whether I should. I think I’m dealing better with the stress than I used to, hanging on to the threads, I feel as though I’m walking several very big dogs on leads, and they all want to run off in different directions, I have to hang on tight and hope that the others will behave themselves while I’m giving my attention to each one at a time.
There is a lady at meditation, an older lady (even older than me), in her 60s I’d say. We were talking about folk music a few weeks back, the old folk scene from the 70s which I had pretty much lost touch with, but she still follows the old bands and artists, like Donovan, Fairport convention, Richard Thompson et al. Her son works in the music business, I don’t know in what way, but he has introduced her to a lot of these people. I was asking her a few weeks ago about a guitarist who was my neighbour when I was a child, he is a year older than me, he’s the one I was caught cuddling with in the street when we were tots, the one I considered my ‘boyfriend’ until he properly discovered girls and joined the ranks of my brother’s friends who teased me. Anyway, I asked if she’d heard of him, and she said she’d ask her son.
Last night she brought a CD for me to borrow. It says on the sleeve notes that he lives in the USA now, but he also talks about Scunthorpe folk club. It has to be him. I haven’t played it yet, but I will. And there’s a web address. Maybe I’ll look him up. I wonder how he remembers me, if at all?