Making the most of the sunshine! Yesterday I worked all day on a paper for a conference in Madrid, and I was thinking about Marx when he said, 'history is nothing but the activities of man pursuing his aims...' Written here, like this, it doesn't really have any context, but it will. At the moment I am just grabbing ideas as I try to make sense of the piece I am trying to write. What it does mean is you write a lot that gets thrown away but this is just part of the process. However, every screen break and RSI break, to ease my athritic typing fingers, allowed me to sit here in the sunshine. Changing the shape of my hands, exercising my fingers to do something else, helps a great deal - and if ever anyone has seen Keith Richard's fingers you will know what I mean - gnarled old things that can play guitar but little else. Its a conscious decision, changing their shape every hour or so because come the winter they ache. So, making the most of the sunshine is necessarily therapeutic as well as fun. Every day should be like this, and I reason its good for the soul, as Hegel says, 'reason is purposive activity.' Steve Earle write's great duets every now and then, this is one of them - 'do you still have dreams, did they all come true...'
