I made zero progress on the fourth Sermon in the fourth quarter of 2020. On top of the pressures of my full time job and three small kids and various health problems, the rising number of Covid-19 cases has led daycare to be closed and made life more difficult in a large number of small ways – like how difficult it is to find a babysitter now.

I was previously more optimistic than most on a Covid-19 vaccine, but not optimistic enough. Still, with vaccinations starting, I’m now less optimistic than most because the new mutation from southern England appears poised to outrun the pace of vaccination. (Seems like the smart people focused on developing vaccines and left the tasks of production and distribution to less smart people.) This makes it unlikely I will make much more progress in the first quarter of 2021.

That said, while I still can’t find enough time and mindspace for difficult writing, I can still translate in moments between, or while, doing other things. I translated Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah for my mom with the help of my dad, and wrote up lengthy notes on the translation. And I have started work on a translation of The Games of Entropy into German. This one is significantly harder than the translation of Adrift in Space and Time into Im Flug durch Raum und Zeit was, but it is better than doing nothing.

It has occured to me that Im Flug durch Raum und Zeit gives me the opportunity to perform it at local open mike or poetry slam events, once the pandemic is defeated. The English language sermons I have read at international meditation meetings and conferences, but those take days of travel and I don’t know when I’ll be able to afford that kind of expense of time again. Something like a poetry slam could be done in an evening which seems a reasonable target. Of course the sedate pace at which I usually present the sermons would be completely inappropriate there, so I shall experiment with speaking much faster, perhaps like this: