The Adventure of Suddenly Pulling the Handbrake
I wake up before sunrise, have a coffee, and finish an urgent article still in my pajamas. Spilling coffee on the keyboard is how clumsy people like me know the day won’t be the best of our lives. I shower while listening to the news on the radio and rush out of the house. In my haste, I forget breakfast. I bend down in the building entrance to pick up the keys I’ve dropped, and a thunderous jolt of sciatic pain suddenly leaves me curled up like the damned Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Not even half an hour has passed since I got out of bed, and I’m already on the terrace of my usual café, having another coffee while I organize the day’s schedule and answer emails. I have a meeting 10 minutes later at my office, and I arrive a bit dazed, because I think I’ve taken the wrong dose of muscle relaxant. I’m more dangerous with medication dosages than a monkey with two pistols. I rush to the other side of town to deal with an unexpected family matter and realize that this Friday is starting to look a lot like a Monday.
I return to my office, print some drafts, grab a stack of books with the documents I’ll need, and head back down to the bar for another coffee. I’ve managed to stretch my back, but now I can’t stretch my leg, so I walk with my feet very close together, as if I were afraid my testicles might fall off. I write there on the terrace for a while, as the city wakes up to grumpy drivers and children running late for school. I take several phone calls until I decide to turn my phone off so I can focus on writing. The last call is from a man who wants to sell me extremely cheap insurance for my dog. Problem: I don’t have a dog.
I write by hand, as usual, and then go back up to my office with all my notes to revise and finalize each piece. I type standing up, because my sciatic nerve has decided I’m not allowed to sit. I have to leave soon because my car is waiting for me, fully repaired at the garage, and on the way I have yet another family matter to deal with. The wait at the garage is longer than expected, and I end up scribbling a column on the trunk of the car. Driving with a sciatica attack is almost funny, because when you have no choice but to brake, you quickly calculate whether it will hurt more to fully extend your leg or to hit the car in front.
I rush out again to the notary’s office to take care of some paperwork, stop to pick up a package, and do a video conference from the car to give my opinion on a television talk show. I return to the office to record an interview with a singer, and my literary editor sends me a message asking whether I’ve finally made any progress on the novel. I joke that I’m thinking of killing off all the characters, not so much out of narrative conviction as to free myself from them.
I start doing some housework while taking part in a meeting with the guys from my magazine, and once again an unexpected family matter calls me to the other side of town. Resignation: walking is good for sciatica. I head back home, sit down to write while I eat something, and go downstairs for another coffee to organize the afternoon’s schedule, although on the way I have to stop to argue with a traffic cop who insists my car isn’t parked as neatly as he would like. I avoid the ticket, but not the irritation.
Running around like a headless chicken from one place to another, I receive a message from a friend about his serious illness, and something clicks in my head. By coincidence, in the past few days I’ve had to talk several times about serenity; first with an artist acquaintance, then with a journalist, and finally with a professor. All three told me the same thing: They feel alienated from this world of constant five-second attention spans, and that they need to return to the calm of 20 years ago.
We live in times so immersed in noise, immediacy, productivity — and life itself — that the days go by with fewer and fewer opportunities to find a little calm. There are countless books that deal with contemplation. One that has helped me the most is Cardinal Sarah’s, which I’ve mentioned here before, The Power of Silence. There are also wonderful mystical poems devoted to the secluded life and to peace, such as those by Fray Luis de León or Saint Teresa of Ávila. And yet, despite being a proud apostle of calm and contemplation, every so often I let myself get caught in the machinery of hysteria and end up in the same anxious spiral as the world I claim to detest. I suppose writers often end up writing about the very things we ourselves need.
They say that calm is a state of the soul, a force that emanates from within, and I think that’s only half true. We all have a place that restores our peace, often a place that takes us back, in our minds, to the happy years of childhood. I finished writing this column in the rose garden of a park near my parents’ house, where I lived until I was 18.
In that same park I used to play as a child, and I still remember my grandfather’s slender hands lifting me up onto the wall so I could practice balancing. I also remember his serene voice telling me wild stories from his youth, delicately glossing over the horrors of the civil war he lived through, and making me laugh. I don’t know whether it’s the memory of my grandfather, or the intense color of the roses, or the park where I once dreamed of becoming a soccer player, or the garden’s penetrating aroma (what a memory the sense of smell has!) or the message from my sick friend, or all of it at once, but I’ve found a bit of calm in the midst of the chaos, and this day, which began so badly, ends with me giving thanks to God.
READ MORE by Itxu Diaz:
Why We Should Give to God What Is God’s, and to Caesar What Is Caesar’s