What did you do when it happened?

The car crash in a Paris tunnel. The fallout. The updates. I remember only Cartoon Network being unaffected. I sat in my pyjamas with a bowl of Shreddies and watched Cow and Chicken.

Gran had just had the carpets washed, so when the second plane hit I was removing my shoes. Still slick with the sweat of a September’s walk through the village and up the hill, view of the tele half-blocked by a blonde settee. That’s what I remember. But I’ve since gone and checked and it’s all a cute fiction. The second plane hit at 09:03 EST. I would have still been in school.

Wrapping paper littered the floor of my grandparent’s front room when Indonesian and Sri Lankan beaches flooded their screen. I stood, pocket full of chocolate coins, and watched grainy footage of swells and objects, stuff, caught on the toothpaste white froth. But then I was called to the table and we poured brown gravy over slices of beef.

The dancer, the singer, the King of Pop. He died whilst I was nursing an inexpensive yet toxically induced hangover. I was lying in an unfamiliar bed in Köln and morning light was drilling a hole from my forehead to my spine. We were a month out from the start of his world tour. A friend had texted to ask if I thought he would be liable for a refund.

On the basement floor of Durham’s library I watched a Japanese girl move her hands from her cheeks, to her keyboard, then back to her cheeks. She was in the carrell next to mine. The girl placed a call and spoke quickly, was asked to leave the library by a brunette with glasses and a red, cable knit sweater. The Japanese ran off without her laptop. Fukushima on her screen. Vehicles and radioactive waves. The keyboard was dotted with puddles of wet.

Even as the armies were moved along the nations’ borders, I told my Politics students that nobody wanted a war. Then it happened. We spent a lesson watching foreign news channels in my classroom, a cutout of Margret Thatcher pinned to the wall. Coal-black stickers where the eyes should have been. The next day we heard the story of the woman who told the Russian soldiers to put sunflower seeds in their pockets, so that when they died on her land, flowers would grow.

This time, I was leading a seminar on Culture in Al Mankhool, a Dubai Public Library. The seminar ended and I waited for the second cohort to arrive. By that point, news was starting to trickle in. Some of my writers chose not to attend. Others tried, but their GPS had been scrambled and they were stranded on the side of the road. For those that came, we got deep into a discussion of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets as a barrage of drones and missiles intensified. But for several blissful hours we were beautiful pigs snuffling through pages another had laboured. Our innocence was not threatened.

Later that evening my girlfriend taught me the word labeed. It is a Lebanese word, the sound of impact. A thwumping. Labeed is the sound of a missile, of interceptors. She taught my ears to feel the labeed, to feel the sound of an air filled with violence.

What do you do with an air full of thwump?

I am no longer a child. Cannot eat roast beef and watch Cow and Chicken and ignore the world. Or, perhaps, I could ignore the world, but death has informed my acknowledgement of mortality and, once acknowledged, occasions such as these will pinch at the priorities that underscore a life. I found it difficult to focus on the mundane in the wake of it.

Perhaps that is why admin tasks have stacked as little bullets in my planner. Emails from semi-important people were marked unread. The cabbage and sticks of celery I bought to meal prep in the call of health are still, a little rudely, at the bottom of my fridge. Cans of Carlsberg and non-brand vodka with slimline tonic have left an aspirational box of green tea untouched.

But if one can find Flow. That abstract, ethereal space that is difficult to describe but wonderful to feel. I find it when sweating, working out, pounding a bag and dodging old men in tank tops whilst lapping Barsha Pond.

I also find it when writing. For me, writing is a state of deep concentration in which my mind gets a tickle. My words. Words of others. The mental gymnastics of finding a phrase or image just right. It is a space in which to think beyond the half-articulated ideas that get spouted in voice. This blessed document provides the time to consider. As writers, we can make the Tetris blocks of life, if for only a brief moment, fall as we wish.

Variously attributed, and invariably right, is the maxim To Write Well, Is To Think Well. And in this world of thwumping, labeed, rotting celery and twenty-four-seven coverage of a war that’s overhead, To Think Well is clarity; in application, and by internal condition; clarity both in and of thought.

What a wonderful reason to choose today to write again.