Something Spicy

My day always starts the same way: wake up, drink my first coffee, tidy the room a little. Most of the time I’m shooting or making work, but yesterday a monograph on the British artist Richard Hamilton — which I’d ordered from a bookstore in the States — arrived at home, so I sat down and looked through it.

It was, in other words, an ordinary day. A good one, even, and not unfulfilling. But looked at over the span of a year, days like this are almost all of them. You could say it’s just the same quiet work repeating itself.

Half the work is thinking. The other half is done at the desktop. Very simple, very unglamorous hours. Today will probably be more of the same. Nothing dramatic happens, but without stacking up days like these, nothing moves forward.

It feels like a rainy summer this year. When the days stay monotonous and the rain keeps on, I find myself strangely wanting something spicy. I’m not good with spicy food and normally don’t eat it, so maybe the body is asking for some kind of stimulus.

We don’t live by sight and thought alone. When the mind decides things have gone monotonous, the body may already be asking for something else, before we’ve noticed.