As I write this (some weeks ago), this is the tenth day since I dropped a 25-kilometre gym plate on my left foot.
My left leg is the ‘bad leg’, the one with the knee replacement.
The one that I talked about in Bionic.
Initially I thought I was going to get away with it, but I didn't. My foot's broken in 3 places, including a crushed fracture to the ‘knuckle’ of my left big toe.
It's going to take a while, this.
As I write this, though, it's Bank Holiday Sunday, and the Friday that I broke my foot was in the middle of a two-week holiday.
I had planned a huge training week the following week, and the weather was good enough to manage it.
I was going to do hundreds of miles on my bike, together with the gym and some other things, as I started to prepare for a cycle trip in Mallorca later in the year.
Gone in a minute!
And so what happens next? Particularly in a week where you don't have any commitments that you have to fill? When you don't have anyone that you ‘have’ to see.
I don't even have the ability to walk my little dogs; I don't really have the ability to walk any distance outside, but what I do have the ability to do is to think and be quiet, and to reflect and to look forwards, and to plan and to scheme.
It took me a few days to get my head around it, but it didn't make me sad in any way (which is surprising for me). What happened next was I decided to ask myself, what can I do?
And so later in the week, I started to get into some strength and some stretching, stuff that I could do with the boot on my foot after I'd been to fracture clinic.
Later on, I started swimming, and so I'm back to swimming again, and I can swim with a pool buoy between my legs as long as I bum shuffle into the pool.
None of this takes up the time that the bike was taking up before, though, so it opened up time that I could possibly have.
Alison is out doing the horse stuff all the time or working; my kids have basically flown the nest, or they're on holiday.
It's me and the dogs and all the electronics that I could possibly need, and books.
What happened, bizarrely, in a relatively short period of time, is what happened to me in the first sabbatical back in January 2017.
“I found a level of contentment that I could barely believe existed”.
It's not a joke, it's not twee, it's not a marketing hook.
The peace that I've found at the end of this week has been something that I'll remember for ages and ages.
I'll try to replicate it, but it's almost impossible.
When you are ‘not letting the old man in’ (see one of my favourite blogs; I'm about to write about that).
Then the world is busy and frantic and full of curiosity, and full of excitement and full of challenge, and amongst that it's very hard to be able to create a space to find peace.
But find the peace I have, and going forward, find the peace I will.
The best things in my mind happen at times like this, not when I'm in the middle of the fire.
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