“the slower day will never come” – Rob Parsons
(but how often I persuade myself that it will)
It is a Saturday afternoon and I am sitting on a serene, leafy balcony in Phnom Penn in Cambodia. And yet I still do not feel like I can relax.
I guess I feel like I am juggling a lot of different things in life at the moment. Sometimes I think that this is a good thing – it keeps life from ever becoming boring. But sometimes, I feel it means I can’t concentrate on one thing enough, and it means that even when it is supposed to be a day off, I still can’t really rest.
At the moment, these are the main things I am juggling:
- writing essays for a part-time theology degree I am studying for, which is based in London (current essay is all about “the land” in the Old Testament – interesting stuff).
- continuing to give motivational talks about Cycling Home From Siberia (last week I gave one talk in China to Maersk, and one in Singapore to the ministry of finance (!), as well as a radio and TV interview).
- writing freelance magazine/newspaper articles, or pitching them
- re-editing the Cycling Home From Siberia book for the American edition (out in April 2011)
- learning Cantonese (Christine’s mother tongue)
- together with Christine, setting up a Hong Kong fund raising office for Viva (a children at risk charity whose work we believe is very important… I will write another blog about this soon).
And on top of all this of course, hunting for a church, spending time with friends (old and new) in Hong Kong, trying to keep fit, and – most importantly – trying to be a good husband.
There is not one of these that I feel I can drop. But I think I have to stop giving myself a hard time, when the progress in some of them does not proceed as fast as I’d hoped.
And I am also trying to have a proper cut off time for when I finish work in the evenings, and to take one proper day off per week. Easy to say – hard to do.
Am I the only one who deals with these kind of issues, or do you as well?
There are two reflections I have had after this experience of daylight robbery.
Firstly, the official was certainly right about it being a privilege to spend time in this beautiful country of the Philippines. Working with the former street kids, who are some of the most likeable characters I have ever known, has been full of fun and satisfaction. However, the reason I am angry is not so much because I had to pay to stay, or that his department was busy lining their pockets with trumped up fees. Rather, it is because his government has shown itself to be so capable of channelling a great deal of thinking power and man power into developing an elaborate immigration charging system. And yet at the same time, they are unable (or unwilling) to organise themselves enough to put an end to the fact that the city’s streets are full of uncared for street children who die from inhaling glue, or are trafficked into the sex trade by evil men.
My second reflection is that perhaps it is not such a bad thing for me to occasionally suffer injustice: it helps to remind me of just how bad it feels.
In my life, I suffer injustice only very occasionally, and with the result of minor cost or minor inconvenience. But as I experience the emotions of fury, disbelief and helplessness which result, I remind myself that I should remember these are just tiny inklings of how it must feel to be not just mildly inconvenienced but rather totally ruined by the formidable powers of unjust government or money hungry corporations.
I think of the toilet cleaners in India, who have no other choice about where to work because they are of a low caste. I think of the falsely accused in Nigeria who are imprisoned for many years without trial because the police need to show that somebody is guilty. I think of the children in sweatshop factories in Asia working for incredibly small wages, whilst their owners get extremely rich.
And I think of the millions of others, who daily face injustice and helplessness on our planet, whilst I complain (and exaggerate) about another minor inconvenience.
