On the Road Again

I like travelling. I do. I like trains. I like Edinburgh. I like the folks I'll be seeing on this next part of the NESTA take-an-idea-and-make-it-into-a-project journey, so why I am going about packing like a reluctant school girl dragging my feet on the first day of school?

I am tired. The kind of deep down tired that needs more than one night's sleep or a massage--although both of those sound pretty good right now. The kind of tired that comes from knowing that no matter how much success and good support from a handful of hard working folks we have already accomplished, there is much more to be done and much of it has to be done by me by myself.

I saw a bit of TV program last night about a man who had an exquisite but excessive vision of a garden he needed/wanted to create. You might doubt the man's sanity and certainly his ability to pull off the grandiose scheme but you would never doubt his pleasure in his creation. So when he was working flat out and things were looking up and the TV interviewer asked him how he felt about a piece of good luck, it shook me when he said he was too tired to get the pleasure of it. He went on to say that in 6 months he knew he would be very happy about it but just now he was too tired. Not too tired to be grateful or to continue to work or even to believe in the long term goal, just too tired to be exuberant.

When I finally read Don Quixote, I was surprised to see how much the very same characters who tried to make him abandon his madcap ideas were desperate to get him to believe when his melancholy took over his whimsy. So yesterday a friend told me to keep up with the patter, so I'll rattle down the road on the train and doze and dream and keep tilting at windmills.