It’s been a difficult couple of weeks. Weeks that had no right to be difficult, but ended up being so anyway. There is something reassuring in the busy, overworked periods of the academic semesters. Running from lecture rooms to Zoom calls to administrative meetings. Coffee breaks filled with complaints about the stressful rush of it all. Being the never-ending busy bee. Then the planned vacation comes as a sudden relief. Pausa. That dreamed of escape from the flow of pressure and measure. For a brief moment, we distract ourselves with the exotic exploration of a new place, the food, the sights, and the internal conversation that all that hard work is so that this period of exciting peace can take place. All that hard work is worth it… And then the trip ends, and there is a moment in which everything stops. Pausa. No excitement. No distractions. No deadlines. No meetings. No obligations, only opportunities. … and the whole world falls apart.

What is left when the mind is suddenly left to its own devices? It is appalingly self-revealing to realise that without that distracting struggle in any direction and no direction in particular is protecting you from the truth that there is no sense in the silent existence, in the pausa. No purpose, no connection, no reason.

It is like the path before me is so cluttered with all the things that I’ve done, should do, haven’t done and wouldn’t do. A mind without direction, as though a messy office of a compulsive hoarder who saved old receipts, used single-use coffee mugs and thrifted trophies. In the mess of all that was, is and could be beneath all that rubbish, I cannot see where I am supposed to go next. There is nothing new, nothing interesting, only the piles of my own gathered junk of old ideas. I’m tired. I don’t feel enough because all that I have leads nowhere but backwards.