Transience

I finish the last chocolate-covered macadamia nut. The room is cold in that special southern European indoor way that anyone who has lived through a winter in Salamanca, Ferrara or Barcelona would immediately recognize. I wrap the static fleece blanket even closer and think that, as we move into November, my nights will instead be eroded by sweltering summer heat.

Today I returned the Avis car, read through the referee comments once more and started to write. I think it will take a few more days until I am ready to send in the revised version to Environmental Science & Policy.

After work I spent an hour walking around St Kilda beach, a lot of European backpackers there, loud German voices and a place called the Oslo Hostel. Otherwise, Melbourne speaks to me with a certain escapist flair, it is that “other shore” that you reach a lifetime later, when all potentiality has turned into irreversible actuality. I know it is an aesthetic fallacy but by then one wants to have set the score straight somehow, to have lived all that one knows there is to it, to fully have trusted one’s intuition. Yet, intuition can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Life it is not only about searching but also about having the courage to hold on.