[HD-6] The end of thought
Yesterday we hit the halfway mark in the conference. Last night, we finished at 21:30. Today, I feel like an old sponge you’ve left for too long in the sink, half-dry and covered with little bits of oatmeal. Oooh, the metaphors are coming thick and inappropriate, friends: it must be Hofgarten Days, and I must be your crusty sponge, Bernard Soubry. This is your sixth email.
Fuzzy-brained. 20 degrees at six in the morning today. Woke up twice in the night with the panicked thought of I should check the schedule in case the Adaptation Fund got moved. Reader, things are bad-bad-not-good in the world of work/life balance. I think about the conference all the time. I wonder if there’s going to be a last-minute presidency stocktake this evening, and tell potential drinks buddies not to wait up in case I work til nine on a Saturday. My off-time involves ten minutes of embouchure practice on my new flute and falling unconscious reading Son of a Trickster. Yeah, it’s not ideal.
So when I woke up this morning and my reflex was to grab my phone and open up the UNFCCC app, I threw the thing across the bed instead, and grabbed my shoes and went running.
Out of my room and down the stairs, onto the near-empty street with its solitary cyclist and buzzing pharmacy light, warm day on my skin. Smell of gasoline, hot metal, something riparian.
Over the Kennedy Bridge, a woman running with a child in a pram stops, pulls the buggy back, twists it south, wriggles back. Weird. I look up and understand: hot air balloons, seven of them, hanging still in the sky like someone’s put big red and yellow stickers against the grey.
Down the steps, north, off the path and along the river. The Rhine is almost metallic. There’s a long grey barge cutting through the depths, carrying unknown containers. The grass here is long, brushing against my shorts with every step. Smell of old campfires, half-buried beer bottles glinting in the sand. I make it to the next bridge, a big suspension overhanging and smearing truck-sound over me. I turn around. I go home.
I used to hate running because of how much I got injured. I hated the weird bit of not being sweaty and feeling my skin prickle open to let out the sweat. I hated picking places to go running, worrying about how long and how far to go; I mostly, mostly, hated going running with other people who go running and who breathed a lot less heavily than I did.
And then I realized, slowly, surely, that it is not about the state of my knees or the amount of sweat or where or when or how long. It is about step-step-step-step, breathe-breathe, blood pumping in the old way it pumped somewhere way back in the genetic memory. It is about what-agenda, look-at-that-sky. About the end of thought and the beginning of feeling.
One day left until we get a one-day break. Hoo boy, our brains could all use it.
Til then,
B