Thinking in Bits (Bursts)
In which I find myself running out of time to think, and delighting in the joy of a plain old notebook...
The Two L’s… Cartoonified with a Nano Banana assist…
Between chasing after a feisty four year old and preventing an increasingly inquisitive eleven month old from chomping on every loose cable within reach, I am finding I am getting no time to think. Thoughts being what they are, and words with a mind of their own will sometimes wend their ways into my head, only to vanish like a puff of smoke before I have had the time to properly digest it. In all of that, I am increasingly grateful for the one window of calm I sometimes get - a silver lining from having to attend a physical office three times a week - the train. When I get on, usually at some time past 6.30am, I am barely lucid, running as I am on less than five hours of sleep from the night before. Twenty-two minutes later, by the time the train goes past Ashford, I am usually awake enough to start assimilating lines from whatever podcast or audiobook I am listening to. What thinking I do is therefore in bursts, in the few moments of sanity that can be snatched from the hustle and bustle of life.
Between them, my parents and parents-in-law (OG pro-Natalists by all accounts) raised ten children whilst managing to be active in church and para-church spaces with twelve degrees between them (including three PhDs). The irony of struggling with the enterprise of raising two children is thus not lost on me. In our defense, we are beset by that pesky downside of being prodigal; the absence of a community of nearby parents, in-laws, cousins and barely related folk - the Village - that raises a child. There were also no interminable lists of after school clubs, multiplied emails and announcements from the school, inset days and themed school days that I recall. We just got on with the business of living - occupying ourselves with books, physical play or whatever else we could. Of course, we have choice and agency here and are not mere victims of circumstance but the facts are what they are :)
It is not all doom and gloom though. Pretending to derive meaning from babbles (did L the Younger just say Daddy, Dada or da da da da), basking in the glow of her smile (if indeed it was a smile, not some facial contortion) or just being able to breath a sigh of relief when they have all dropped off by midnight are all highlights of the day. With L the Elder, night time reading is a joy, as is the odd occasion when she deigns to take a break from paw patrol to watch the odd Liverpool FC game!
My trusty little B5 sized 400-page Zequenz is the closest thing to a comfort blanket I have these days. It has been drooled on, fallen from the top of the stairs, had milk spilled all over it and yet survives. The pen though is yet another thing which needs to be rescued now and again from being chewed on incessantly. I will never reach the heights of artistry that passes for bullet journaling these days but its heft as I lug it around the day is a reminder that one can still think, and great thoughts need not get lost to the vicissitudes of life..