New shoots

My life-long companion insomnia visited me last night and I woke up early feeling rattled. So I took the dog for a long walk, at least as much for my benefit as his.

A beautiful morning, no-one around except the pigeons wheeling away from the bird scarers in the fields and four horses munching lazily on a pile of hay. The sky was brightest spring blue, the first waking shoots of the crops starting to push through the earth towards the light. The hazy optical illusion of the mud and the baby crops is as if the whole landscape was of brown taffeta shot through with brilliant green.

For many years, I realise now, I operated chiefly from the logical reasoning side of my brain. The process of pulling the pieces of my psyche back together in the wake of the break up with D has resulted in my brain re-wiring itself it seems. The result is that I am now primarily driven (and sometimes buffeted) by emotion rather than reason. If these emotional antennae are new to the world like the tender crop shoots, they are equally sensitive to climate.

My feeling is that something has happened; some subtle shift in dynamic has taken place. I don’t know what it is or why – perhaps it is the re-opening of my heart which I acknowledged in Egypt? In any event and whatever it is, it is, I think, the source of my rattled feeling. I also know that I just have to roll with it, let time reveal it when the moment is right. For someone who had always been governed by logic, always sought practical solutions, that’s a big ask.

I find myself driving to a quiet place, a location that held great significance for me in a long-ago relationship. I haven’t been here for many years but I find it unchanged.

A strange thing happens to me in places with strong emotional attachments. I always have the most compelling feeling that if I just looked quickly enough I’d catch a glimpse of the ‘me’ that occupied that space or place in the past. I’m not sure what I’d say to the younger version of myself if I had the chance. Keep believing in time travel and understand that the palette containing shades of grey is the most colourful and surprising in the spectrum, perhaps?

I sit in the car, eating jelly beans and smoking and looking at the magnificent view until the rattle subsides.

Time in three parts

There’s something inherently metamorphic about time and our perception of it. We all know that time spent enjoying ourselves - Christmas say, or a week’s holiday, or an evening in the company of good friends – seems to be gobbled up and swallowed whole before we’ve had the chance to catch our breath. And yet when we are waiting for news, working when we’d rather be elsewhere, or perhaps feeling dislocated or lonely, our experience is quite the opposite; the minutes and seconds appear almost to peel away from the face of the clock and slough into drifts at our feet. That we know logically and intellectually that all hours are created equal makes absolutely no difference to our experience.

A third kind of time metamorphosis is waiting for those of us who frequently find ourselves awake when most others are sleeping. The hours that make the transition from night through to daytime are quite unlike those that precede or follow. Their flow is simultaneously fast and slow, at once encompassing and isolating, life-affirming and desolate, creative and yet frustratingly bleak. The frequency with which you stalk the corridors of night-time wakefulness will determine your familiarity with and response to this experience.

I’ve long since ceased resenting my insomnia and have come to appreciate that it is part of the bundle of traits and attributes that makes up my character. Not good, not bad, just neutral. In the spirit of all good self-help books, if you stop defining something as a problem then it stops being a problem.

And so it was that my first night back at the barn saw me making tea, reading, surfing the net and generally entertaining myself as those hours passed by. That the dog was similarly afflicted was a surprise and most out of character, him being a creature that tends to snooze most of the time. The clacking of his claws on the stairs and the floorboards made him a very unsubtle no-sleep walker. He also managed to get himself stuck three times – twice in the same room. What’s that about learning from experience...?

I’ve brought his bed over here today and hope that having somewhere to properly settle down tonight will do the trick. As for me, well, time will tell.