Stress. Lots of it. It fills all of the corners of life and clutters the walking spaces.
It’s not my stress, mind you.
Pretty much everyone with a daily presence in my life has bombs dropping all over their personal landscapes. I’ve successfully not taken on anyone else’s problems (listen, sure, offer advice, noodle things out with them, but the problems are their problems), but I’ve been finding that the constant awareness of strain is wearing. Clearly I should be a hermit … but then I’d have to take breaks to the local pub to get my social fix, and where would my hermitage be then? Besides, so few Edwardian gardens have openings for a good hermit anymore.
Anyway. Naught to be done on that score but hold the course and continue to try to divorce my energy levels from everyone else’s. I may or may not be able to do that, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been.
In other news, Libby, you were oddly passive in my dream last night.
Crossposted from Epinephrine & Sophistry
I know what this is like. Boundaries are good things, but hard.
And you don’t want an Edwardian garden, you want a good 18th century one, late Georgian I think, and if I ever have one you’re welcome to be an Occasional Hermit.
have you seen or read Tom Stoppard’s _Arcadia_?
I’ve not, but I know bits about and from it. I know, for instance, that jam spreads when stirred into oatmeal, but cannot be unstirred. I know that gazebos are excellent places to tryst, but not to tryst unseen. And I know how to translate important Latinate phrases.
Et in porrus ego; “Even in oatmeal, there am I”
I read it long before I saw it (and many times since), but I’ve seen it twice (or maybe three times), and it benefits muchly from being performed onstage, the last act in particular. So perhaps someday you and I and our persons might be lucky enough to all go see it together — I suspect it would generate many interesting conversations over choice beverages afterwards.
…and I find you’re correct; if I’d found a Georgian garden in which to indulge my solitude I would have had to wait nearly a century before there was a hermitage there to house me while I idled and mulled.
I would have gotten wet. Not good.
Er. “Edwardian”.
Very damp indeed.
Which reminds me of the computer game I play which is all about building families to go out and conquer early medieval Europe (the game starts in 1066) and how one of the random unfortunate events is ‘Pneumonia’ which gives you a pop-up box saying ‘So and so’s Illness has developed into Pneumonia!’ and only button to click says ‘Intense Coughing’.
So no, don’t do that!
I do think you would have been at home in the c18th, though.
Oh? Remember any details?
You arrived for a visit on a bright and warm day. We thought to go out for (food drink entertainment because it’s what you do) and, preparatory to that, disrobed in a fashion so entirely failing to be erotic that I am convinced that somewhere my libido is weeping. We three (Shannon was present, offering useful suggestions concerning bouncing in public) donned large fluffy towels and went forth.
I imagine that we found what we sought. You were present, but entirely without affect. I was considering that this was odd and disappointing, and was considering as well how to change that. Then things happened that I cannot remember at all.
Nice towels. You have pretty shoulders, daughter dear.
Yikes. Too late to cultivate autism, and besides, you would probably miss the lifts from the positive times. Our garden is more Gaelian, whilst my Edwardian forest is already hermited.
You could come help me bottle cider, I suppose.
No, no rocking for me, nor a Gaelian garden. And I truly suck at bottling.
Clearly, I’m just going to have to learn to cope with other people having lives that have things happening in them. Which is not to say that I won’t come help spill the cider….