Connected and Separate.

I sat out in my garden until late yesterday evening; first with a beer, then with my dinner, then with a coffee, and finally with just my thoughts. I sat until the hot orange sun was half hidden below the western horizon.

As it sank, I worked out where it would be in relation to places around the globe that have now become important to me. I knew it would be high and hot in America, but still several hours from appearing in Mumbai and Thailand. It occurred to me yet again how the heavenly bodies connect us. I knew that my friends in America might, at that very moment, be looking at the same thing I was. It’s why young lovers, separated by physical distance, make pacts to look at the moon simultaneously.

But it symbolised separateness, too. If I had a lover in Sydney, say, over on the east coast of Australia, we wouldn’t be able to do that. Her night would be my day, and her summer my winter.

And then I retreated back into my own world, which is the only world any of us can have, and washed the dishes.