201. Venice will eventually drown...

(morning thinking)

View from vaporetto

Life is always precarious and chaotic. I think when people try to get rich or attempt to accept what they have as richness enough, (either end of whatever spectrum that is) they are trying to make life less chaotic.

We try to make life still. Safe.

I visited Venice. We stayed on Lido, at the Adriatic fringe of the lagoon and took the vaporetto into the plazas, narrow winding canals and arched bridges of the city proper.

From the water, I looked across to the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute. Leant against the open window of the vaporetto with a sense of disbelief my jaw may actually have dropped. Awe? I didn't get it at the time but I think because everything else, including me, was in constant motion - waves lapping, boats bobbing or jetting about. The massive, unmoving presence of the towers and Basilica is a disarming contrast; static for hundreds of years in an environment of constant motion.

Venice is man-made geography that engenders disbelief. That hands could make mountains.

I thought that stability was calming, stabilising, soothing. I thought it was awesome - that I felt awe. Venice was built by people fleeing rampaging invaders who sacked cities. It makes sense that the architects of this new landscape, informed by the intergenerational trauma of lost homes, would seek to build weight and stability into their refuge. Some of the pillings driven into the lagoon's clay bed are a thousand years old.

Grounded by mass, I felt surety in the altered Venetian gravity.

Or maybe I was feeling envy.

When my son was little I found the rollercoaster of toddler emotions intolerable. I did not cope well as a new father. I am concerned about how I will cope when he hits the full flush of tumultuous teenage years.

Maybe I felt envious that this city had found such stillness at its core.

In response to my poor show as a fresh father I tried to remove all other chaos from my life. Sobriety was part of this. Health, fitness, meditation, routines. I cut out all chaotic extra familial relationships.

I don't know that it's healthy to try and eliminate chaos. It might be a kind of denial.

All of existence is chaos.

Venice is an attempt to freeze time and find stability while all around is havoc and disorder but still, in time, the city will be submerged.

I have tried to learn to be better at accepting what chaos there is.

Anchored Venice will eventually drown. I'm trying to learn to float.

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Paul