Running Through Sand

    The Cathedral bell here rings every fifteen minutes. Nothing grandiose; just a staccato "ding" followed by a natural decrescendo into silence.  For someone coming from the United States, there's an initial romantic novelty to this; the idea that a brass bell encased within a medieval stone building is helping me keep track of the time. After all, in our pockets we have fancy bricks of circuitry and rare earth metals that can do that for us. Plus, these things come equipped with apps full of cat memes and terrible news stories. With time pieces this good, who out there is still relying on a bell? 

    

    The thing about time over here is that it seems to always be moving at a pace contrary to what I'd like. When rushing to the grocery store before it closes at 2pm, time flies. Laying awake at 1am, unable to sleep, the opposite is true. All the while, despite the desired rhythm of my immediate task, there's that stupid church bell holding court over all of it; metronomically passing judgement on my progress. Ding...ding...ding. 

    If I sound like a person going insane the honest truth is that I might be. It's just a phase though, I swear. Usually my infatuation with time and church bells is fairly mute but these days my life has felt like it's in a constant state of acceleration and deceleration with plans being made only to come to an immediate halt once the wheels of progress are set in motion. Problems seem to arise from the most trivial tasks and time always seems of the essence. Finding forward momentum in these circumstances feels akin to running through sand; the harder I try to push off, the deeper I sink. 

 

    Back home, it's easy to take for granted the ease with which you can exert your will over an obstacle. You come up with rank order tasks that need to get done and then you do those tasks accordingly. In a foreign country though where you don't speak the language or understand...honestly anything...getting from point A to B is never a straight line. Take printing out a piece of paper for example. Few would think twice about this in the comfort of their normal environment but here it requires Google searches, asking friends, terrible translation attempts, and (most often) a frustrated clerk. Now imagine this dynamic combined with all the other, more pressing issues that come up when moving your life to a different country. Oh yeah, and add in a pandemic. 

    As a result of all this my life seems to have become a series of user errors; moments where I think things are progressing well only to see me fall on my face because I left my shoe laces untied. It's frustrating to say the least, especially given the frequency of these follies seems to be on par with those damn bells. Ding...ding...ding.

    Growing up, an often muttered phrase in the Oronte household was that "every rejection is a percentage of the sale" or, in other words, you gotta fail a few times before it goes right. Perhaps that's where I am right now; consistently coming up short as a mean to eventually figure it out. I have no clue if that's actually the case but it's a comforting notion none-the-less and one that, for now, I'm sticking with.