Only the journey

or, contemplating the consequence of caffeine withdrawal

A short semi-serious post ahead.

Ideas born by coffee’s wonder. (And Midjourney.)

The month of May. How can that be? I started writing SLAKE in January, words laced by the taste of whiskey and summer’s southern apex, evenings of the Australian Open, slouching on a beanbag stuffing pages of The Shards into my brain, clumps at a time.

Then it’s all now-BAM-it’s-May!

Almost June, even. Colder than it should be, wet and dark.

How'd that happen?

If anything, committing to a weekly routine of posting has sped things along. No sooner am I hitting publish than I’m pondering what will come next. What has to come next, sometimes. It’s been a joy, a rollercoaster of writing commitment resulting in more words clacked out in the last few months than the last year. And I think part of that joy is the panacea it’s provided to the pressures of a teaching semester drawing to a close.

Back in January, I was mildly terrified about the looming semester and running a unit I’ve taught in previously but that this year I’d be convening. A sizeable unit, enrolment numbers upwards of 300. Labs, workshops, lessons, new assessments that needed writing each week, new content I needed to understand and then teach, at times just ahead of the students so I could, err, pretend to understand that content enough and wing it. (I jest. Of course I fully understand that content. Completely understand it …)

Yet despite that trepidation, it’s ended up being exhilarating, in the best sense. Stressful and madly busy, yes; exhilarating, yes.

Much like writing here, there was a beat to each week created by work. I have a calendar in my office and every Friday I go up to it, wielding my favourite pen and striking black lines across the seven days just gone. A satisfying So Long. The semester carved away.

But then—now—I’ve reached the end. Come Saturday, there’ll be no more weeks of semester to strike off. No more lessons to plan or content to cram, last minute assessments to craft.

And yet the whole thing leaves with me this strange taste of What Next?

There’s another semester, of course, just a few months away, and the zillion research-related things I need to be doing and catching up on, but those don’t give that immediacy I’ve felt these last three months. At the start of it all, I held onto this sense of End, when semester would be done. I looked to it, projecting myself there. Now I’m here, though … does it matter? Will I truly relax and be at peace? Is there closure? I don’t think so. I’m not great at that. Instead, I think it’s a reminder to myself: embrace the journey, not the goal.

I think the same applies to writing.

I have goals, yes. Many. Ones I hope will come to fruition. But what’s truly giving me pleasure is the journey.

So I think that in writing this, it’s about me saying I’m all in on the journey.

I hope you are, too.

“Journey”, etched into this post by Substack.

And there’s something else strange that goes with all this, related to that image at the very top. I’m feeling a slight hollowness in my mind, one where creativity usually resides. I’m worried that life at work and all the stupid pressure it brings somehow helps channel and fuse some seed of creative focus that occasionally grows and blooms. A thing that wells during the evening of sleep, to await the glint of dawn.

So if I don’t need to seek that escape, what happens to that seed? To the tree and flowers it could yield?

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Or … it could just be that I’m off coffee. (For a little while.)

It could all be down to the wonders of coffee and its sudden absence.

Within the slow present that has become my morning writing time, was coffee venting some creativity fissure deep within, releasing a valve and allowing ideas to flow through, even if for scant more than an hour or so?

Was it?

I hope not, because for some period I’ll be sampling the lesser wonders of teas. Blacks and greens and mints and dandelions—lovely teas, sure, though lesser companions, for me.

It sounds stupid, but I lament the loss already, the ritual I have adored for many years. I used to joke with a colleague in my early days in Melbourne, when we’d have the luxury to go and sit and have coffee mid-work at a nearby café, sometimes twice a day if experiments allowed, breezing through early post-doc life, joking that all caffeine was doing was restoring a baseline we’d forgotten we knew existed. That magical boost? No, it wasn’t to some ethereal, caffeine-infused land—it was Just Restoring Baseline.

Was there anything to such banter? It makes me wonder: what if I’m restoring baseline right now through this brief abstinence? What if, when I clamber my way to withdrawal’s peak, there’s a verdant mesa to be found, one with seeds scattered throughout?

Or what if I find there’s nothing but sparse scrub?

What if?

Well, so be it. Maybe I’ll just have to forage a little harder.

It’s all about the journey, after all.

And I’m OK with that.

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Thank you for reading and being here. You’re the best.

In coming weeks, I want to return to more Brae, but also to Jisa to drop in more context of her world, her mind, her place in that city of rain.

I also want to craft some dreams. There haven’t been any dream stories for a while, which is ironic because I originally thought that was what this place was mainly going to be. My diary has lots of notes. They just need to be formulated into words.

I meandered past the morsel tree recently, too—skirted it, to be safe—and caught the faint scent of its fruit. Some had fallen, washed by waves. Others were still there, clinging to limbs. I shall await a larger crop of the salt-washed fruit before laying bare such contents.