End of a long day, 10 hours of work behind me, longing for beauty, feeling my health slide, feeling adrenaline still at work in my body, even this late at night. I dreamed of a lying on a beach in some resort while I was working away on important business today. I felt bad that I wanted to be somewhere else. Not mindful, not deliberate, just running away. Flight of fight response, and thinking about our clients, the poor and homeless, no palm strewn beach for them to lie on.

My moral conviction is not as strong as it was when I was thirty; it has tangled into a knotted ball of complexity. Youth has its passion, but middle age has a certain sombre acceptance. I miss dad and I wonder if I am grieving well. Is my ambivalence related to my grief? How soft the rain seemed when I was caught in it the other day without a hat. I was less frustrated by it and wondered: is this a good thing?

I am beginning to think that there is a part of sorrow that is like that feeling you get when you are half way through a jigsaw puzzle and realise that maybe some of the pieces are actually missing. How long do we search for something that isn't there?

Topical application of currency, rubbing it in, and the slow bleeding of change from my life. Can we make music from loss? Is there a sob that echoes back as song? For what does it profit a man to gain eternal life but loose his very soul? Rushing for health I miss the normal outgrowth of disease, the thing called character, which seems to have a close approximation to weariness. A clarity, a settling of sediment, the lighter spirits greeting my nose first, when it is I myself which has been opened. Age drags wine to that drinkable band of time beyond which something else happens – an increase in acidity as frailer molecules devolve. Seize the day takes on new meaning. I should drink the wine at the right time, when it is mature, not necessarily when a certain number of months have been clocked. I rub money on my pain in hopes that possessions will block the outflow of time, the ever present ebb of years. There is no going back, there is no firm foundation, even Jesus is changing, showing up in a new car, winking at me from the drug store window, his sure scared hand steadying my fall into the unknown. How is it that we love the dead so much, even the resurrected? Life is moving on, bright trout puzzle in the solution of days.