Focus

It’s 8:52pm. I’m in the shed with just a desk lamp and the bulbs from my DAC and headphone pre-amp adding light to that emitted by my Mac’s enormous screen.

I’m listening to Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” through my comfortable cans and hearing it as I’ve never heard before. Eberhard Weber’s warm, lyrical fretless provides the brown satin sheets for Bush’s haunting voice.

My keyboard is responsive and having learned the lessons of 33 years of abuse, I’m using a wrist rest to keep my RSI below the threshold of incapacitating pain.

Vapour from my electronic cigarette clouds the glow from the lamp, making my desk look like the circa 1970 refugee that it is, like some aged cop show; like The Sweeney in fact.

I’m debugging a default constructor in my C++. I have been focussed today, without anxiety. Just determined, accepting, relaxed. Even if there was noise outside, I wouldn’t hear it. I have none of the tension I used to have, in anticipation of yet another London assault on the peace I’d build, minute by minute, precariously, like some greased house of rice paper cards.

This is the focus I prepared for all my life. There is nothing like it. There is no thing without it.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I will be working. There will be progress. There will be creation. There will be peace. May peace be upon you.