Almost two years later...
It's still dark in the office - I
haven't turned the lights on yet. Slow but persistently drizzling
rain falls on the meagre bushes in the office building's courtyard.
The world seams quiet. Only for a moment, though - a wishful moment -
and then I hear footsteps and a door slamming upstairs, the cars and
lorries on the nearby street and the tapping of my fingers on the
keyboard.
What a strange world we have created
for ourselves here in “the West”! I spend sometimes ten hours a
day in front of a luminous screen and at the end of the day I come
home and I realise that if I didn't have to eat and sleep and if I
didn't have a few friends and my girlfriend, I'd have barely anything outside of that luminous screen... most of my worries, fears, hopes
and ideas - most of my work, my efforts, my great plans for big
changes and most of my connections with friends and family - all of
that happens in front of or through this screen!
I have never really worked regularly in
an office before. And even in the last three months I have discovered
that I have a certain level of physical anxiety that correlates more
or less directly with the amount of time I spend in front of my
laptop - after a long day with little out-of-office work I feel that
my stomach is squeezed, my diaphragm tensed-up and my heart a little
nervous. And then there's the back, the tight shoulders... why do I
do this to myself? It is so clearly unhealthy, yet such a huge part
of my world is determined by this thing - it's incredible!!!
I am not
happy about that. It
has to change. And I know
that it will take years to construct a life where that is not the
norm. But that must be the goal.
Since
months I have been wanting to write here again. And I could never
find the right subject, the right moment, the right setting. My life
has turned inside out in many ways since I last wrote here - I
was still in Jordan, starting a 'new life'... AGAIN! Haha. Little did
I know that the life I was wishing to restart wouldn't be all that
different to what life was like before.
Now
however, it is certainly a new life. I was plucked out of my old one
like a flower from a garden bed and left to start over. What a shock
- and what a blessing!
More
on that later - hopefully within less than a year. :)