It is already full summer. I do not usually feel that “time flies”, that time passes more quickly now than before, but these past weeks I have had exactly that apparently common experience. Perhaps it’s the irregular sleep I get since we stopped feeding our baby at night and started trying to take control over his sleeping patterns. It used to be I could sleep and my wife Camilla would breast-feed him whenever he wanted. Now I am up singing to him and caressing him at night, and often getting up at 4.30 or 5.00 because he is wide awake. I hear there are otherwise conscious and modern couples, even friends of ours, in which the mother takes the kind of automatic responsibility she has traditionally taken and the father lives pretty much as he did before becoming a father. For Camilla and me, shared responsibility was always the default (if she had to breast-feed, I would do something else instead, like changing diapers). We take steps away from perfect equality, but we do so consciously, because I have a career (that brings in money) and she doesn’t (yet).

In April I held a philosophical salon on Future Generations at Stockholm city library with my friend Lars Lindblom and one on my own on Love at Falun city library, my old home town. I prepared for a conference in Iceland that was cancelled due to the ash cloud and we visited Malta to celebrate my father’s 60th birthday. On last of April I held the traditional speech to the spring here in Stjärnsund, a pleasant honor. I also started preparations to sell my apartment in Stockholm, taking another step away from a past life. And, not least, I received the rank of first Dan in Shorinji Kempo, the martial art I practice.

May was partly focused on getting the apartment ready for viewing, it is now sold for slightly less than I expected and I had the peculiar experience of being disappointed with a mere 60% return on my investment over six years. I held a course in Technology and Ethics at Örebro University, worked on some old papers, and took part in a philosophical cruise to Finland, speaking again on Love. I should really write a short book on Love some day. I also work towards my graduation as philosophical counselor, receiving guests under supervision from my good teacher Helge Svare in Oslo.

It is now June and I fully enjoy sitting outside my little house, writing on my laptop, hearing the leaves and feeling the sun. In this setting even grading 140 essays from the Örebro course could be rather pleasant.