There’s a shop we like, in a place we like, on the coast up north. We’ve been to this shop several times, and every time we’re there we make our way to the back of it where it opens up to a balcony of sorts. This balcony has a view over some lush green hills, dropping towards the ocean, and down there we can see waves break relentlessly and remind us that eternity exists and that most of the time nature wins and life is full of beauty.
Above the balustrade on this balcony hangs a couple of gongs for sale, and there’s a mallet so that you can try them out. We always do, each of us in turn, and consider what it’s like to bang a gong in a place like that in that particular moment, and we feel the cosmic vibrations and it’s as if we can communicate with the whales out in the Pacific, or something, and we tell each other «we should probably get a gong!» But so far we haven’t. It’s a big decision getting a gong, circumstances have to be aligned.
But this year it was time, and so now we have a fancy metal disc hanging from a tree out in the garden, and on an irregular basis we pick up one of the mallets and go out there and maybe we think about the whales or about the universe or about everything — or perhaps we don’t, perhaps we ponder something a bit more lowercase or ponder nothing at all — and we hit the gong and set the air in motion with otherworldly sounds, and it makes everything feel a little better, there and then, in our garden.