Las night I sat and knitted, contented in this place of safety, this place that is still my home even though it is now just a temporary place. The photographer was here, the real estate listing will be live early next week, and I, at last, was able to settle contentedly into some handwork. I've not been particularly observant lately, nor had time to really reflect, which I suppose means I have also had little time to overthink and worry ideas to death. Work also starts on the new house next week. I just need to watch and wait, and keep moving forward. At last I have time to slow back into myself.
I've been reading Outline by Rachel Cusk. In one sense it is odd I picked it up, as I was not immensely happy with her previous novels, but I am glad I did. I am reading the book slowly, as it reveals itself slowly, and I pause to admire beautiful passages or passages that simply lead me down my own meandering mental paths. Following is one such passage, one that I copied out earlier in the week.
When I think back to the time before, … it seems as if (we) looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discovered the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them; we peered at them, at people and places, like people on a ship peer at the passing mainland, and should we have seen them in any kind of trouble, or they us, there would have been nothing whatever either one of us could have done about it.
I've left out a few words to suit my own purposes, as I think this applies to so much of the early part of our adult lives, when we are building our place in the world. If we are lucky we begin to open up and throw off our blinders, to grow in grace. Feel free to discuss..