I woke up early this morning with plans to write about the rules of English Grammar. But I looked at the home page of The Guardian and was affected by a beautiful article on summertime loneliness and depression in inner city Sydney.
It was written by a Sri Lankan Australian - Gary Paramanathan - and what he describes is familiar. 'There is a non urgency to summer, everyone slows down, everyone is having a good time. Everyone it seems but me.'
Except I don't want to have a good time, if you're talking about the kind of thing they have at Christmas parties and on New Year's Eve. I don't think I went to any Christmas parties, and I was very happy to be in bed by ten o'clock on New Year's Eve.
I haven't been lonely. I have company. But that's not entirely the reason for my contentment. Rather, it seems that my heightened sense perception on the hot sticky days and nights we've been having, combined with the current quietness of my neighbourhood, has made me more than usually present to myself.
It's almost as if this part of my summer has spontaneously turned into a spiritual retreat and my experience has been one of quiet consolation. On retreat you get away from the busyness of everyday life and open yourself to unexpected shifts of spirit. That's what has happened to me. Gary could also be on retreat and, like me until now, doesn't know it. His contentment is yet to arrive.
He's lying in bed restless, thinking: 'When you wake up, you can only hope your head is clearer.' Like mine. He's feeling desolate in the 'emotionally void streets of Sydney’s most dense and overwhelmingly white suburb'. Like I do from time to time, even without his race selfconsciousness.
I can feel to some extent at one with the other people who walk the streets of my area of Newtown, even though our steadfast gaze is mostly away from each other's eyes. But there's more, if I want it. Gary writes that he was 'spoilt' growing up in Colombo, where eye contact and richer human connection are the norm.
He finds it a challenge in Sydney. But I know it is possible because my friend John has made an artform of it. Recently I was moved as I walked with him along his Kensington street and witnessed him making not just eye contact, but exchange of words, and warm and genuinely friendly conversation, across racial and other cultural boundaries. John's human contact is not my human contact, but he shows me that the familiar faces in the streets of our neighbourhood need not remain strangers.