Home from India!

Ahhh well, today is the day I would have been flying back from India from my reseach trip. Hopefully tomorrow I can wake up and feel like I am living my normal life instead of thinking I should be in India all the time and that being here is a weird, sad alternative...

Workwise today has been much better already. I have made a more detailed plan; rather than the one that said I should finish this chapter at the beginning of June, I have one that breaks down what I want to achieve week-by-week. I realised last night that it is not a sense of motivation that I lack, but a sense of urgency. I could sit and work at this desk on and off for years with not a problem - it is the sense that I have to finish at some point that I am missing!! So I am trying to tell myself that I have two weeks for this, three for this, and within those weeks I expect to do this and this and this. Make the work and goals more real and tangible - and a bit scary! I have to start imagining myself handing bits of work in, rather than sitting in this groundhog day style time-warp where I work and there are no repercussions for missing self-set 'deadlines'...

I do feel really weird today, like everything is a bit surreal. I think it is the India thing - a day for reflection - when my normal, happy, innocent researching self that spent my 30th in the Andaman Islands meets my changed post-bereavement self who is settled in a cottage and engaged (huuray! but woooo), who learns gardening and has gone off all-day drinking sessions... I have grown-up, but my India self is still frolicking free and doesn't know about what has happened. But today that self comes home and finds out. And then the two visions of myself have to converge and make a whole. A happy whole I hope that sees this day as the point from which to let go and move forward.

Do I make any sense?! Probably not.

Right, off to do some reading.

x J