Once again, yesterday, Thursday, like some obsessed Victorian scientist I found myself in an industrial museum, my mind connected with the ghosts of those of times gone. The museum was large, belonging to a large city, and me and the ball and chain saw not a soul throughout our whole time in there other than four staff at the entrance hall. The building was Victorian mill, the machines were so massive, sometimes, and the intricate ingenuity displayed was terrifying as well as astonishing. Clearly people, now dead, had poured their whole lives into these endeavours. In my mind was a clanging pendulum: was it worth their life? or should they have lived a life perched high aloft observing many lives, and varying one's life....a book of many and varied, shorter chapters; a book of many lifetimes?
Which way is the best way to spend one's life? If I go on holiday, say around Europe, here there and everywhere, a new camp every day, different countries, etc, then after only about two weeks when I sit with an evening's reflective beer, thinking back to home, is like looking the wrong way through binoculars; it seems like home was years ago! Time, my perception of time, has stretched when compared to 'home time'. So in those two weeks I got much more out of my time (my life), and this is what is niggling me. The routine of home seems to contract my time greatly, so that ten years can seem like a year.
