Believe me, I am trying to hang on. Time has assumed a different quality, especially the finding of it. Normally at this time (whatever normal is) I will have had my swim at 6, followed by breakfast, be dressed and ready for a quick nap before I start work. Of course, before I swam, I will have checked the email and my lists, as i planned the day. Some days I even wrote my blog before swimming, depending on when I got up, between 4 and 5 a.m. Now the bad/good news is I am sleeping more. But I don’t seem to have more energy, less in fact, much less. I don’t seem to have the energy - or the interest—to take advantage of the wonderful cultural and intellectual treats available on all our techie services. I save them to refer to “later’ but I dont’ get around to them.
A friend tells me I can get an opera every evening. My head hurts too much constantly to focus on it nor on the weekly viewings of (filmed) Stratford Festival productions. Apart from my head, what would my son Matt do while I isolated myself from him for 3 or 4 hours? He has a limited attention span and a low threshold of boredom. I must keep him occupied, at my cost. In the past when he lived with me, I spent a lot of time teaching him (see The Book of Matthew (date) We were both younger, and my energy lasted longer than his did, so I could work around him, up to a point. He is the main reason I used to go on retreats to find unbroken time to read, think and write. I think if he had continued to live with me I would not have lived as long as I have and i would not have written much at all, except maybe a suicide note!
I was reconciled to it, I thought, because I had some control of my life and work. Art is not forgiving. If you produce, fine; if you don’t, who cares? Not that I could claim to be an artist, but I enjoyed being creative and there were ideas I wanted to play with. In my spare time.
I am guilty of a dreadful deadly sin.
Acedia (Latin, acedia "without care" (from Greek ἀκηδία) is the neglect to take care of something that one should do. It is translated to apathetic listlessness; depression without joy. It is related to melancholy: acedia describes the behaviour and melancholy suggests the emotion producing it. In early Christian thought, the lack of joy was regarded as a willful refusal to enjoy the goodness of God; by contrast, apathy was considered a refusal to help others in time of need.
(Acedia is currently defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as spiritual sloth, which would be believing spiritual tasks to be too difficult. In the fourth century, Christian monks believed acedia was not primarily caused by laziness, but by a state of depression that caused spiritual detachment.)