I’ve lost my life.
The implications cut deep. Even now, 24 hours later, I’m still being pulled around, dodging avalanches of warm despair over there, trying to stay beneath the waterfalls of ice-cold relief over here. Acceptance is gradual, but I’m nearly there.
Getting through the shock phase now.
It helps to be a positive thinker. Where did this character trait come from? Somewhere in my twenties, but I can’t be more specific. Perhaps it was the travelling; perhaps it was the drugs. Perhaps it was the women or the music or the jobs, or that book on Buddhism I read at university. Somewhere along that roller coaster, the big truth emerged – that nothing much matters. Nothing much really matters. As soon as you see it, you’re pretty much happy for ever more.
Adversity is a challenge to be confronted intellectually, not a blow that’s already been struck. No one will wound me without my permission.
Yesterday I lost my memory stick, and along with it, 960 megabytes of personal data. Emails going back 10 years, diaries, professional notes, all my website files, financial spreadsheets, my running logs, short stories, letters to everywhere, my not-so-great unpublished 150,000 word novel, and yes, the 45,000 words of my running book. Sweet silver angels over the sea, please come down flyin’ low for me.
My running book. Remember that? It was stuck on 20,000 words for a long time, then I met up with Nigel in the summer when we talked about our respective writing projects. He did the decent thing and got on with his. I dribbled on with mine. It was one of the reasons my contribution to this site was even sketchier than usual. I wound up with 45,000 words, which I was going to supplement with 50,000 or so hacked from these pages.
But it’s all gone now.
Backups? Er, well.
It doesn’t matter.
Time to run.
