OSCILLATIONS

I feel like I'm oscillating between my worlds at the moment.

There's an oscillation between the past and the present. It resonated this morning, when I listened to a recording of an old friend from uni, preaching to a church as though he were a dad in his forties.

The past (in which he was a nervous young man) suddenly resonated across eighteen years of history to the present (in which he is indeed, a dad in his forties). It was a moment for me, in which two ends of a very long string were suddenly connected, and I was oscillating between them like a weird harmonic.

There's another oscillation between work and home. At one end of the string, I spend my evenings doing endless washing up and figuring out how I could ever get a dishwasher into a tiny kitchen. At the other, I'm subjected to crudity, cliché and stress, as though those things were listed in bullet points on my contract. I find myself wobbling between the two, out-of-phase and experiencing the interference pattern that seems to define my days.

I don't mean all this to be as depressing as that. After all, the universe itself functions on beautiful oscillations.

Every atom is the result of oscillating frequencies on a quantum level, held together by the tiniest and most wonderful of harmonic vibrations. The universe is literally bound together by music.

What I think I'm saying (without the science diversions) is that somehow in the middle of all of this, I feel out-of-balance, as I wobble between things and people, and don't know how to be anything in between. It isn't specifically depressing - other than I feel wholly inadequate most of the time. It is troubling though, as I don't always feel like I can be entirely in one of these worlds without compromising another.

I had coffee with Mike last night in Stockholmhaven. He made me think, but in a way that I wasn't ready to explain. I found myself caught in yet another oscillation - this time between my own thoughts, and the conversation. Back and forth, back and forth, back and f...

"You look like you've gone into standby mode," said he, somewhere in the distance. I swam back into reality.

"Sorry - just thinking," I said. I hope he didn't think that was rude. I tried to explain what was going through my head, but I went on to make a pig's ear of it, and it didn't sound right at all. For me, thoughts are sometimes like baking a cake: you can't open the oven door until the pinger goes off. Stop asking me to open the oven door.

So how do you cope in an oscillating world?

There's a debate in physics about electromagnetic oscillations. An electromagnetic wave is composed of two orthogonal properties - the electric and magnetic fields. These two fields oscillate in and out of each other always at right angles to each other, creating light waves, radio waves, x-rays, gamma rays and microwaves. The debate is about whether or not one of those fields causes the oscillations in the other.

Either way, the result of these oscillating perpendicular waves is that they move - and that's a good thing if you want to use a microwave, listen to the radio, see the stars, or let a doctor examine your bones. The oscillations push the wave forwards.

And maybe that is the point of all of this. Perhaps my oscillations are designed to help me push forwards into something too, each world bouncing off the other to pique my discontentment and make me do something about it.

I suppose I could start by getting a dishwasher. Though, where I might put it is anyone's guess.