It is one of those days - the kind of which there have been very few in the last few months, the kind which you don't want many of - at all!
After giving serious thought to my condition, I realise that I am heading for a full blown burnout.
Thinking backwards to my last real break, I realise I haven't had one!
I got back to Brussels in June, before that I went to NZ to get married, before that I crossed continents, time zones and language barriers to move to Brussels, prior to that I was on a whirlwind shopping trip in India buying out stores and scoping alleys for one entire family's worth of wedding finery. This was after packing up four and a half years of PhD life in Canberra, vacating house and the like. Before this I was frantically trying to submit my thesis, dealing with a hostile work environment and a lack of support. Rewind four years and I moved to Australia from NZ a few months after finishing my degree, even before I graduated. Dial it back another four years and I was doing my undergraduate degree. And for ten years before that it was school just like the rest of the world. I will stop here and not retrace my steps to the womb.
So, penning this down, it hits me and hits me hard that I have not had a break. I did not take time off after school, after undergrad years, after PhD, nor did I do the mandatory honeymoon post marriage.
All these years I have been diving head-first into the next thing, sometimes taking with me energy and sanity and other times forgetting to bring them on board. Right now they are part of a distant past. Sleep is measured in fragments, the day is divided, leisure is stolen in between these, not always successfully.
So why am I blogging? Because I need to - I need this final shred of calm to touch base with the old me, to feel that the creative juices are flowing albeit slow and haltingly.
Now where is that Kit-kat?

Another Ganesh Chaturti has passed us by. I remember the time when the hailed remover of obstacles would be welcomed into the house amidst much fanfare! While the rituals have not stuck, the feelings have.
Bringing Ganpati home, the 'mandap' with banana leaves and flowers. The deep red kumkum and bright yellow of turmeric, air thick with the scent of camphor, agarbatti and amvade, tinkling of gejje and akshate, cotton of the deepas and the gejje vastra, burning ghee, baale yele, kadubu, don't look at the moon.
It has not been the same since we left Bangalore, it will never be the same but I am richer for having been there and for the memories. Blessed for being able to transport my thoughts back to those of the excited child that could think of nothing better than a morning of pooje and an afternoon lunch on a banana leaf.
This year we celebrated. A makeshift diya, fruits for the naivedya, aarti and lunch. A new city, a new house, a new person on board - but the unchanging sanctity of the occasion and the unchanging God.