Questions

Tuesday morning, a quarter to eight. I need a car today so have dropped Nicola off to swim before work and now I am in Starbucks waiting for the shops to open at nine. It’s quiet, peaceful, grey. Distant, distracted people pass the window absorbed inside their own worlds. I am here with it all, calm, relaxed.

I think about work and the feeling changes. MY heart beats, butterflies flutter inside and I become anxious, slightly rushed, edgy . . . Why?

It could be the coffee but it’s not. I sit still but cannot pin down the cause. It could be the unknown, the uncertainty. It could be the closeness to other people, being within their personal space and mine. I am suddenly uncomfortable and cannot settle.

So I think about a couple of friends of ours, Dave and Carol. They seem to have this open calmness about them, receptive, ready to observe things, think and then act. To act without uncertainty, or to accept uncertainty as part of it all. As I picture the two of them I see myself being the same way. The butterflies suddenly multiply and swarm through me along with a voice from deep within.

“What if I am wrong? Just like I am always wrong. How will I explain that?”

“What will people say?”

“More likely they’ll say nothing won’t they? - I am not worth it, who would want to talk to me, to risk being associated with a strange one like myself?”

I stick with it and the feeling subsides to a nervous emptiness.

The feeling I have at work.

The Comfort of Rain

Unusually, it has been raining now for two days here in New Zealand, this is the third day. Approaching the hottest part of the year the sun should be shining and the ground should be baked hard and dry, brown. Instead it is raining, and the view is much more British, all green trees and fields and a grey sky.

Inside in the dry, the sound of the constant rain surrounds me. There is a constant background hiss of the rain in the trees, overlaid by the rising and falling drumming sound from the roof. The occasional dripping splash of water onto gravel from the fig trees close outside and a distant bird call evry now and then add a randomness to the whole thing that is well . . . comforting.

It is like sitting with an old friend. Someone older that has known me forever. Someone who has watched my successes and failures, who knows my good points and bad and yet accepts them all without comment or judgement. The rain and I can sit together comfortably in silence, nothing needs to be said for we both accept things as they are and as they have been without comment.

Right now, at this moment all things are as they should be.