Weird August...

Most importantly, we survived hospital-quarantine, and home-quarantine, and we continued to show no symptoms of covid.

I guess feeling that you've had a lucky escape helps ward off "quarantine envy". (But this may well strike, I guess, if others manage to get travelling again before we do. This opportunity in Georgia, for example, had my heart doing a little longing leap. The key to everything: "Focus on what you have.")

I wouldn't say we exactly enjoyed our month's confinement, but we managed to avoid the "acedia" that many are experiencing: a "combination of listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate... the complex of emotions brought on by enforced isolation, constant uncertainty and the barrage of bad news".

And now we're out and about again, navigating Kuching's new normal.


We celebrated with a few day trips last week.





And once again we have a 1 Second Everyday round-up to remind us of the month.

But now we have to look to the future.

I'm crossing my fingers that Bill Gates will be right in his prediction that a reasonably effective vaccine, susceptible to mass production, will put us on top of this scourge by the end of next year.

But that's still a long way away. That's still a lot of OE to learn to do differently...

Our original schedule for 2020 (before this spiky little menace wrecked everyone's plans) would have seen us setting out again for the UK this coming week, on a wonderfully inventive itinerary that would have taken us overland from Ho Chi Minh City to Nur-Sultan...

Well, not happening...

But as I said, it's what we have that counts, not what we don't have.

We can travel here, right where we are. I liked this piece by Rick Steves, much of the philosophy of which we were already adopting when we were beached in Cromer:

"A good traveler can take a trip and never leave her hometown... We can explore our backyards like a tourist would... While the future is uncertain, approaching the world as a traveler can make us less afraid. It opens our minds, it opens our hearts, and it enriches our lives. I am confident that, sooner or later, we'll be planning trips and packing our bags again. In the meantime, I'll be patient and continue to embrace life with the traveler's spirit here at home."


Here in Sarawak, I'm daily reminded of how much I don't know...

That's a good thing. That's a step towards the cultivation of "shoshin", or "beginner's mind" -- aka intellectual humility. The recipe: test your knowledge; argue with yourself; adopt a "growth mindset" with regard to intelligence; and let yourself be awed on a regular basis: "With eyes and mind wide open, it's so much easier to enjoy the wonders of the world, to grow, to learn and to listen."


The other prong in my coping strategy continues to be my "shadow journeys". I'm still in Turkey at the moment, but it will be time to move on again soon. (A couple of Velvet Cushion posts record some of this month's Turkey-focused reading.)

Still conspicuous by its absence, however, is any form of contemplative practice. What I wrote at the end of June still applies: without mental and physical activity -- lots of it -- I fear the opening up of crevasses from which the demons of depression could emerge.

But we've done well so far. Let's hope we can keep it up. We have so much here, and I'm very grateful for it.