This is not a regular post - more by way of an apology for the inability to write. I will be back with my weekly schedule in the 3rd week of September.
We’ve been in the US of A for two weeks, in the windy city of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. As this weekend approached, I realised that I just didn’t have the time, or mind space, to write - though there is so much to write about.
I could be guilty of justifying my laziness, but as I came around to accepting that I wouldn’t meet my deadline, I reflected on the difference between a holiday and a vacation. A Swami at the Sivananda ashram once told me that modern man had largely lost the ability to take a vacation. In a vacation, he held, you create the time and space to vacate your being of its normal habits and pre-occupations. You find comfort with the emptiness that results, which allows new impulses to manifest themselves.
Instead, we crowd our holidays with new sights and sounds, new food, new stimuli - beginning the moment we step off the plane.
Guilty, as charged!
A big city like Chicago has allure at every corner - music, art, theater, global food, stunning architecture, and in the narrow window of summer, gorgeous parks, and the bracing blue waters of Lake Michigan, just five blocks from our son’s home.
In a couple of days, we begin to travel, to Montana, back to Chicago, on to New York, and eventually to Boulder, Colorado. Little scope for emptiness, many sights and sounds to internalise.
Till mid-September, when I shall take a vacation in my own home, and find the space to write.