I feel as if I am in the grip of the malaise (The Malaise, sigh my Indonesian friends, Always trouble!) and everything, except sleeping, is a huge effort. Though, in some ways, it always has been but what is different now is that lockdown has taken away the future. No projects to be involved with, no travel plans to design. No adventure, no risk.
The other day I cut down one of the three trunks of a small cypress tree at the bottom of the garden. This part of the tree had died and dead twigs and foliage looked unsightly against the living growth. First I had to climb a ladder carrying a chainsaw and fell the top part of the trunk so that it fell safely into the road, this was the only direction for the fall. Tho make sure there would be little traffic around I did the job at 6am. I put up a warning sign but nevertheless the tree might fall straight across the road and hit a passing car if the job was not well done. It was all risky and broke most of the standard rules for this kind of work, wrong tools, no safety equipment, yet it was all well thought out and done with great care and concentration so that the tree fell exactly where I wanted it, just behind the warning sign, parallel with the road and not blocking it. While up the tree and fully aware of the danger and concentrated on the task I became more alive than I have been for months past.
Later i considered the importance of risk and how without risk life becomes dull, insipid pointless. I do not mean careless dangerous and stupid risk taking but
a managed, minimised, careful executed risk that forces one towards a perfected act. This is the risk of the climber, the acrobat, the diver and so on, not the competitive racing driver or other sporting risk but something where the goal is to complete a task as well as one possibly can. Simply moving through the world is a small and universal example of this kind of risk and it has been taken away from me, supposedly for my own good.