Feeling Good

I’m calm, relaxed and sitting in the library. Listening to beautiful music. I can hear birdsong even over my headphones. I love the fact that our campus is so green. Sitting on the top floor of the library on the side which faces the road, I can see people walking by, some I know well, some I recognise and some I’ll never know. As I write I deliberate whether I should put an oxford comma or not. For the uninitiated grammar nazi, it is the comma before the ‘and’ at the end of the sentence. As it gets darker, the library tube lights start coming on and apart from changing the mood, hurt the eyes which have been used to the relaxing late evening natural light. I can see the colour of the sunset which is a nice yellowish-orange glow that I can only see through the large square vents on the other side of the library. I’ve done nothing of consequence today, which is not uncommon for me, but I don’t feel the nagging disquiet and burning eyes that I feel after the mandatory ten hours on the computer. For I’ve been reading, on good old paper, not a backlit computer screen which is giving me a headache every night I sleep. The sunset’s colour is getting better and better and the flocks of birds flying in the sky look like small moving black dots in what is now orangeish-red sky. But no one I see is looking that way. They’re in their rooms or here in the library focused on what they think is important, an upcoming paper to write, or the news of something that happened halfway around the world, on a news website. When W.H Davies in 1916 wrote “What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.” he could never have imagined how much more relevant it would be 95 years later.
The sky’s now almost red with dashes of dark blue. And the tube light over my head is put on by some well meaning guy and instantly my eyes recoil to the sudden brightness. Now the people in the cars in the road that I can see have their headlights on. What would I do without technology? It is indispensible and I’m the kind of person who finds it difficult to live without a laptop or some other distraction which can overwhelm the senses. But sometimes I wonder if there is something that we have lost because of it. The sky is all dark blue now. In a world lit by fire, most people would be getting ready to sleep now since there is not much that they could do. But, for us, people of the 21st century, having wonderful, extraordinary machines that our ancestors could never contemplate or imagine, the night has just begun.