41/67 out of time

Thinking about time.

I woke in the early hours of this morning, praying that the previous night's story on social media that a 19 year old student had died in a fall on Table Mountain, was not true. I know his mom, as an acquaintance, and he was with my older son all through primary school, in the same grade. He was at Westerford, where Adam is, and at UCT this year. I resonate with his family's loss and feel so much for them. 

Adam on the way to school at 7.30am, pointing out the neon yellow green of new oak leaves, against the grey rainy sky. Simultaneous colour contrasts against the grey towers of the brewery buildings. Spring is not far away.

Mike, flying back from a weekend on Wasan Island in Canada, and how strange it is to fly backwards out of time and forwards into time again. How time is elastic. In his own, intact, discrete time-space, but stretched apart from each other, always six hours behind us there, always out of sync with what we were doing at home. 

And then this evening at gym, from 8 to 9pm, the latest I have ever been.  Conscious that I am among many young people. All the ones without families, who can go to gym when other people are busy with domestic routines of supper, TV, bed, preparing for the next day. I am outside that routine for a little, waiting to collect Adam from a play rehearsal. I quite like the feeling of not being a slave to routine, of being out of time. Perhaps I will try it more often.