Older, but no wiser

The days go by, and still nothing. I had such hopes for this time, too. A rare handful of days with no pressure, no commitments; freedom to take my mind wherever it fancied. I thought that I'd be able to give time and space to those thoughts and feelings which for weeks have been pushed to one side whilst the matters of the moment took precedence. I thought perhaps I'd invite them in, those thoughts; befriend them, engage them in dialogue and maybe tell their story here. But now I've finally given in to their knocking at the door it seems they've given up and run off elsewhere.

Yesterday I went for a stroll by the fields at the edge of town to try and clear my head:



I failed miserably in that endeavour. Most of the photos weren't up to much either; although one or two did provide the raw material for further playing around with image manipulation software.



Photoshopping. Even though the software I use isn't actually the pukka Adobe thing, it seems that "photoshopping" has entered 21st century vocabulary as a generic activity descriptor in the same way as "hoovering" did in the last century.


African Dawn?

Playing around. Maybe that touches on the edge of the issue. Most of what I do comes under that heading - this blog, the photographs, music, even my work. They're all just playing around, with little sense of purpose, no ambition, little meaning, little lasting value. Perhaps that's why it's been hard to fill these few days usefully. Whilst the contents of almost every minute was prescribed, there was no requirement to have any deeper purpose behind those minutes; the days filled themselves to the brim without any need for anything as thought-out as a purpose or a strategy. The only purpose was to take action to reduce the immediate pressure of things-to-be-done. So when that pressure is removed, all of a sudden there's no motive, no purpose, no incentive - and no action.