Navigating the River of the Recluse.

Another Christmas Day, another reason to ruminate on the matter of being alive.

It will have been noticed, no doubt, that I live an unusually narrow lifestyle with hardly any of the normal activities which provide interest and meaning. Visitors to the house number no more than about ten a year at most, there’s hardly anything out there in western culture to attract my interest, and meaningful face-to-face conversations are very rare indeed. It is, therefore, a largely empty life, and I’ve found that as time has gone by I’ve developed more and more routines to add at least a modicum of structure to it.

Today I had a visitor as befits the tradition of Christmas. Mel, my ex, called in on her way to visit her parents in the city. It’s a naturally pleasant experience to see her, but it comes with a problem: it breaks up my routines and forces me out of the structured comfort zone in which I’m used to living. It’s like sailing down the same river every day until a big ship passes by and creates a wave which throws my boat off course. It might seem an odd thing to say, but the disturbance can last for several hours after the visitor has left.

On the other hand, living such a life has made me very much more aware of the minutiae which would otherwise pass by largely unnoticed. Today, for example, I was thrilled to be able to stroke a Leonberger dog. (For those who missed it the first time around, this is a Leonberger):

 

 

 

And today produced the tantalising mystery of what on earth T88 was doing driving down Bag Lane which isn’t its normal territory. Such small things are big to me now. They matter.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? I would say it’s a neutral thing. It’s just different from the days of travel, sport, living with different women, walking the dog, engaging with romantic dalliances, attending thespian parties, assailing the sensibilities of fiscal miscreants with a Rule 2 caution, remaining upright on a small ship through a force 11 storm, and so on and so forth. And, taken in its entirety, a life should be about variation, shouldn’t it? Because variation makes you think.