Landed

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThere's a particular kind of morning where you're only half paying attention to your own day because most of your attention is somewhere over the Indian Ocean. That was this one. Irfan's flight was due into London by noon Malaysia time, and between patients there was a fair bit of quiet phone-checking going on — the flight tracker open in one tab, doing the thing flight trackers do, which is tell you almost nothing useful right up until the moment it tells you everything.

No delay, in the end, which felt like more than it probably deserved to. He landed on time, got himself an Uber straight to the apartment without any drama, and that was that — the sort of arrival that's almost disappointing in its lack of incident, except that a lack of incident is exactly what you're hoping for when someone you're fond of is landing in a city eight time zones away for the first time on his own. Uneventful is underrated. Uneventful is the goal.

Work carried on regardless, because it does. Clinic was smooth, mercifully so, the kind of morning that doesn't ask much of you right when you don't have much extra to give. I went through it a little distracted, checking the phone between patients more than I'd normally admit to, but it moved along without any real friction, which I'll take as the day cooperating for once.

Home early after that, properly tired in the way accumulated worry tends to leave you once the worry's been resolved — not the sharp kind of tired, more the sort that settles in once you're finally allowed to relax. And relax, more or less, is what the rest of the day was for. Knowing he'd arrived safely did more for the afternoon than anything on the schedule could have.

Dinner came early, unhurried, eaten with the particular lightness of a day that had turned out better than the quiet nerves of the morning had suggested it might. The evening after that asked for nothing much — just the sort of settling-in that comes naturally once the thing you'd been half-holding your breath for has actually happened, and happened well.

So: a flight tracked, a landing uneventful, a clinic survived on partial attention, and an evening spent simply glad of it. Not every day needs more than that. This one didn't.