his Sunday is different. It remains as tranquil as my Sundays tend to be. Equally pleasant, equally slow, equally mine. Or at least, it was. Until the moment my afternoon writing was interrupted by a telephone call. Today’s draft, an article I have been looking forward to for weeks, will remain unfinished for a while longer. I hung up the phone and closed the file that began with the title: “My PhD lasted a full twenty-three years…”
I open a new, blank white page; from beneath its surface emerges such a deluge of thoughts that I can scarcely sort through them. They race through my mind, jostling to settle. They are disrupted by emotion. I cannot continue with the original text. This Sunday has demanded a different tone—less stylised, less edited, simply less. It is a confession of a moment that took precedence over a plan. For life does not always unfold as envisioned. It is a matter of priorities, and my hierarchy of values is arranged into clearly defined compartments.
A friend called me. Her husband has suffered a stroke. He is in hospital. A friend, a man whose vitality seemed invincible—an athlete, with the fitness of someone not even forty—and yet, in the course of one nameless night, his world has contracted into the rhythmic bleeping of hospital monitors.
I sit here at my desk, staring at the vacant cursor on the screen. How curiously we humans are wired. We construct our small worlds with such precision that we succumb to the illusion of our own invulnerability. We are capable of conducting fervent internal dialogues about whether the beige hue of the new curtains in the drawing room is precisely the one we dreamed of, or whether it clashes by half a tone with the texture of the sofa—my own morning today. At times, we waste precious breath lamenting the imperfections of our days, scurrying from point A to point B in a constant fear of missing out, while that which is most essential frequently slips through our fingers. We document the aesthetics of our lives as though the beauty of things could serve as a shield against transience.
And then comes the silence. That silence following a phone call which informs you that someone dear is fighting for breath. In that instant, the aesthetic dissolves. In that split second, those curtains could be purple with gold stars, they could be the greatest of visual sins, and we would be profoundly indifferent. All that beige perfection becomes kitsch in the presence of genuine pain. We realise that we are but guests in this time and space, and that our “problems” are often merely a luxurious veil with which we obscure the view of our own mortality. A generic phrase? If only it were. To say nothing of those situations where we ourselves are the protagonists.
Time has moved on, and I have returned to my desk. I look out into the garden. April is still parsimonious with its warmth here; the air is sharp and the earth cold, even though the sun shines beautifully. Nevertheless, yesterday, with an almost childlike persistence, I planted the first flowers on the terrace and on my windowsill. To the eye, it now appears quite splendidly warm. As if that north wind weren’t blowing at all.
To the eye, this Sunday is perfectly fine. Yet today, beneath the surface, I feel something entirely different. A profound reverence for life.
With love,
Nicolette xx