Older, but no wiser

Who’d have thought four hours sitting in a chilly, near-deserted airport arrivals lounge waiting for a delayed flight to come in could be so good? The lad’s flight back from Afghanistan (by good fortune his 2 weeks leave spans Christmas) was diverted to Birmingham because of fog at RAF Brize Norton, and they came on the last leg by coach. That left me with four hours to fill; I reckon I managed to put it to good use.

When else do I get that much free time to try and get my head around anything? With no pressure, and nothing else to do, for the first time in months I could do my ‘morning pages’ – about two hours worth of scribbling down whatever came into my head; no judgement, no editing, no fine words, just whatever ideas came – and to my surprise, ideas did come. Useful ideas, helpful ideas, insights which brought with them an unexpected optimism and peace of mind.

It probably wont sound so earth-shattering if I try and explain, and to be fair these insights aren’t new, they’re simply things I once knew and had forgotten for quite a while, but to which I found myself waking up again. Things like: “‘why?’ is a dangerous question”; things like “now is all there is”.

I covered 8 or 10 sides of notebook in all; I’ll see if there’s anything I can extract from that which would make any sense to anyone else; probably not for a day or three though.