A Man in Love (My struggle book 2), Karl Ove Knausgaard, still hanging in there, nearly at the end

Karl Ove continues to inspire and make me feel better about my life. I read this while sheltering from a thunderstorm at the allotment this morning, in the ramshackle shed that just about supplies cover from the rain.

The flat landscape, the sun rising, the stillness outside, the sleeping passengers, reinforced by a happiness that was so strong I remembered it twenty-five years later. But this happiness hadn’t had a shadow, it had been pure, undiluted, unadulterated.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove (2013-04-25). A Man In Love: My Struggle Book 2 (My Struggle 2) (Kindle Locations 8482-8484). Random House. Kindle Edition. 

In previous posts I've written about that sense of fear, that shadow that stops me from being simply happy and content in a way that I did manage when I was younger. Not always, but some of the time.  I seem to feel so much better actually at the allotment, there's a sense of calm there as well as the magnificent view ( I watched the storm clouds mass over the sea from my hilltop plot, and the most beautiful birdsong).  Partly I think it's the physical work, the keeping going, partly being outside surrounded by green, bathed in fresh scented air.  I had another idea to add to the story that I began yesterday and I hope that will allow the story a greater range, across a meadow of childhood, across the darker recesses, but, finally, hopeful, childhood nurtured in the bower of a family that values kindness and communication, that can't stop bad things, but takes them in its stride. The kind of family that I want to have supplied, and probably did, no I know we did.

But back to Karl Ove, he slips in and out of the hell that can be a life in your forties, when successes have happened, but they haven't changed your underlying sense of worth, don't make it easier to sweep floors and empty bins, don't make it easier to communicate the depressive moments, sometimes insulate you from the good times (that shadow of fear), don't stop you from stopping yourself enjoying yourself.  He experiences and writes so well about those times when you are so locked up in yourself that you can't get out, you can't join in, you can't celebrate.  Yep, been there, and in the other places too, the joyous, and have never understood how literally you can switch from one to the other in an instant, just a little stimulus, the wrong word or the right word.  Why are we (Karl Ove & me...  and others  I'm sure) so volatile, so unable to accept our blessings, so quick to bury ourselves in undefined, terrifying .. what?  remorse? depression, fear. Something that swoops over the self and shrouds it in unfeeling.

Meditation helps. I watched myself this morning, in the 20 mins I set aside just to sit and think, watching the feelings rush in, like the dark clouds across the sea today, and just letting them enter and knot up in my stomach ( can I really write? should I start the WordPress project, can I do it? how long is this fucking meditation going to last, for God's sake?), and as I did that they dissipated and went.  They would return  but each time I felt the knot and the thought I just sat still and let it pass.