There’s nothing quite like the anxiety and dark thoughts that strike in the wee hours. Lying awake, those thoughts crowd in together and form bleak, hybrid conversations that may or may not have happened. Unanswered emails suddenly seem urgent. Throwaway conversations take on greater meaning and self-doubt looms. After nights like these, there is nothing more immediately soothing to me than opening the door and stepping outside. The sounds of the Canberra morning – birds, distant traffic, wind – have always been a tonic. Everything is there just as I left it; the depth of night was just a scary, and fast receding, mirage.
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I recently listened to a podcast about Americans in Paris, and the enduring puzzle of why so many are drawn to the Parisian dream. After all, said one contributor, a city doesn’t love you back. I disagree. I once had to interview a dying man – a much-loved community figure who was facing his own death with dignity and an articulateness that failed me at the time. Having bid him goodbye, I stepped out to the street to wait for a taxi, feeling the inevitable bleakness that comes with the knowledge that you face an afternoon of wrestling with a blank screen and a deadline. Some stories write themselves. Others are too important to let that happen. Either way, it’s dire. Add to that all these intimations of mortality – we all will die! – and the immediate future looked grim.
Glancing down the street, I saw a vista that I had seen many times, in many different iterations. A wide road, leafy gutters, trees forming a canopy overhead. Garden foliage, red brick. Cars in the distance. Magpies darting. All was quiet, but the sounds never stopped. Those who are fortunate enough to have the choice will often choose to live in the place that brings the most clarity to the mind – the place in which they can see themselves or the world most clearly. On that afternoon, I felt, suddenly, the same swelling relief, gratitude and clarity as I do on those mornings after a rough night. The world stands around me pleasantly, waiting for me to act in my own time. I have a space into which I fit, snugly, with no pressure, or bagginess. This city, if it doesn’t necessarily love me, accepts me, cares what I think, reciprocates with good deeds and just wants me to be happy. And isn’t that, after all, what true love is?
