Robust
Summer has finally passed, and it was almost gone over night. Leaves are still green, somewhat, but more like covered by a layer of dust. The season is getting deeper, everything still and clear. One thing I like about autumn in particular is the night falls earlier. With all those heat and smoky air and seemingly never ended sunlight, summer is more like a torture for me.
I got some feedback from Michael about one of my journal paper to be submitted. I did all the analysis and experiments long time ago, so mostly it was just a polish phase. Last week I almost finished another paper and sent out to people for feedback. While waiting, now everything needs to start again. Find a new problem, find a new solution, solve it, prove it, write it, and submit it. Just another cycle.
Do I want to continue? I have to. Am I exhausted? A little bit. Why did I want to go for a PhD anyway? I couldn’t find a satisfying answer without cheating myself. I’m not that kind of person who’s brave enough to stand in the frontier of a field. I’m not a pioneer to explore some “future“. I’m lost, in the definition of myself, and the trends of the world I’m in.
I couldn’t fall asleep last night, not because I was anxious. Not panic. Not insomina. I listened to my heartbeat. I gazed at the square-shaped light projected by the moon through the window. I buried my head into the pillow and breathed heavily. It was the sentence that I remembered from Karl Ove Knausgård’s book, Autumn:
That’s the experience I’ve gained from working in the garden: there’s no reason to be cautious or anxious about anything, life is so robust, it seems to come cascading, blind and green, and at times it is frightening, because we are too alive, but we live in what amounts to a controlled environment, which makes us fear whatever is blind, wild, chaotic, stretching towards the sun, but most often also beautiful, in a deeper way than the purely visual, for the soil smells of rot and darkness, teems with scuttling beetles and convulsing worms, the flower stalks are juicy, their petals brim with scents, and the air, cold and sharp, warm and humid, filled with sunrays or rain, lies against skin, accustomed to the indoors, like a soothing compress of hereness.
Is it? Is life so robust?
