the mere living

I started the first book of C.S. Lewis's space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, during my trip to Uganda and finished it within a week. I found it strangely appropriate to read about the main character, Elwin Ransom, his culture shock upon landing on Mars, and his subsequent adjustment to the hrossa (Martian, for the uninitiated) culture. 

"Ever since he awoke on the spaceship Ransom had been thinking about the amazing adventure of going to another planet, and about his chances of returning from it. What he had not thought about was being on it. It was with a kind of stupefaction each morning that he found himself neither arriving in, nor escaping from, but simply living on, Malacandra; waking, sleeping, eating, swimming, and even, as the days passed, talking."

In Random's own words: 

"Those quiet weeks, the mere living..., are to me the main thing that happened."

Quite often, I feel as if I have nothing to blog. My life here has become almost normal: I wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, make dinner, chat with my housemates, do chores, and go to bed, just like my life in America. At points, I have to remind myself that stepping outside to fill a jerrycan with water so we can have drinking water isn't "normal." But at other points, I have to remind myself that sitting with a Kindle on a sofa in the evening isn't "normal" either. 

"Mere living" here is a conglomeration of paradoxes. 

For example...who would have thought that in Africa, of all places, I would learn to enjoy having a cat sleep on my lap while reading a book? 

Those who know my family's most recent cat will understand the irony of this picture...