Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.

~ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

It had been kin for a lot longer than happiness ever was. It never asked much from me, or rather I had long reckoned with the toll that it waged on my soul. All I needed was to stoke its flames with disappointment muddied with an ever pervasive belief that I was not worthy or essential in this life of mine. Largely, it manifested as a desire to not be. Death would have been too kind, too incisive. A mind cannot visualize its own non-existence anymore than it can remember its beginning. So I wanted an absence from living where I could still manage some form of attendance.

Most evenings, I would get overwhelmed by the need to plant myself infront of oncoming traffic. Other times, I would stand at a height and want to respond to the call of the void, looking down on the commixture of the divine and artificial. “Blast it”, I would cry out, knowing wholly well that I would return to the land of the living having not done anything of use. Wherever that demented notion came from, that a life is only as good as its output, I could not say.

I wanted, then, to root out all that was not fecund, to cast away a net of possibility and optimism and perchance reel in a bountiful harvest.

Indeed, I reaped a harvest but not the one I was looking for. For many, they might have seen an organized, sometimes frazzled member of society. That was certainly expected of me, the organization that is. But internally, there wasn’t any vivacity, only the wretched impressions of decay, slowness, irritability and a lack of agency. These definitely took my best. I immediately rushed to qualify all these feelings as suspended animation as I was wont to do. I do not know if I have ever really woken up. I thought that rationalizing it would be the best, as though there ever was an answer for grief.

Persistently, there came a sleep so great, so potent that I often thought that I could sleep forever and never arise. Every morning was an iteration of the same; a jolt from deep sleep, groggy wakefulness and then the senses arrested by a need to sleep again. Then, a dissatisfaction with food and other ordinary pleasures of life. I could go hours without eating properly, or engaging with people. I often thought of the unprecedented nature of my sorrows, notions of being and feeling better gnawing at me. “Mend my life”, Mary Oliver would echo, the first of many sentiments I would come to rely on when my own fervence for words had turned to ash.

The most prevailing feature of this suspension was the need to constantly stimulate myself with media. The gritty sounds of white noise, or the exuberant chirping away of podcast hosts lent well for a mind that was making feeble attempts at escaping itself.

One of those times as I mindlessly engaged with a film, a term jumped out, that had me questioning the quality of my sorrow. Was I to be awarded a medal for having been such an immersed sufferer? Who was I without my identity in sorrow? At the time, these questions resisted answering. I also cannot recall the name of the film, as it were. What I do remember with clarity was the concept described, terminal uniqueness. It is used in addiction circles and it describes a psychological state where an individual believes that their struggles are so vastly different and special from everyone else’s. This, in turn, impedes the recovery process because it fosters increased isolation and denial. Of course, this was at odds with a sentiment I would later come to find about the perceived uniqueness of my suffering. Baldwin articulated it best:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

I didn’t want to be connected to anyone through this. I had cultivated my pain, whetted its knife, the colors of it so wonderfully mine. Surely I could not claim any singularity in it? I could not move any further than I wanted to without grappling with the reality that my life was not fulfilling and that I was not doing what I needed to do in order for it to be at least bearable. Isn’t it interesting and depressing how attempts at extricating oneself from melancholy end up being things we do in excess? Eating comfort foods, relying on favorite passtimes, wading through life’s pleasures without a care for self or others.

In hindsight, I should have realised that I was indulging in excess for its own sake. The comfort food became something to eat to fill a void other than hunger. The podcast episode I did not need, queued up before the last one had finished because that interlude between episodes was something impossible to contend with. Even rest became something I overdid, sleeping past the point of restoration, deluding myself that this was self care. Of course, if life looked like this, how else could it be anything other than suspension?

I now understood Burton’s sentiment, that melancholy could only be overcome by melancholy. You can try starve it out with joy, drown it with pleasure or try to smother it with the right things until the ‘wrong’ feeling gives up. Excess in the direction of good is still excess.

Share

What that indulgence cost me most was not just time but also memory. I look back at certain periods of my life and find them to be strangely unfurnished. I know that I was there, that I was captured by the motions of life, but I cannot tell you exactly what happened in said periods. Conversations I must have had. People who might have proved important, or skills I might have gained… Thoughts that, had I actually sat with them without drowning them out might have rearranged something in me.

Those lost hours do pain me from time to time, knowing I prevented myself from forming memories that would have been my life. I wonder about the lessons that might have carried me over in seasons of joy or turmoil, people who might have been there differently had I been more honest, more compelling, less tired. That part of me, the one who transformed experience into meaning everytime stayed submerged, unable to come up for air. That form of low grade interaction with the world was easy to co-opt but harder to decouple from.

The thing about melancholy, even when we might be relunctant to admit, is that it demands witness, for someone to see you in the fullness of your sorrow and not offer solutions. It seemed so evident to me at the time, that anyone who was to encounter me had to be with me as I was and not help me. The thought of finding kindred spirits in a similar vortex of decay was mildly thrilling to me, because it meant we did not need to do extra things to remove ourselves from that suckiness. And that again was another form of indulgence, the desire to remain undisturbed in what I thought I knew of myself.

At last I had to ask, is there privilege that underwrites this sorrow? Should I be here in this expanse of pain when there might be better things to ponder on? Melancholy had been afforded much of my attention. There was always something more to find out about myself. Another wound to decipher. Another explanation as to why ordinary life seemed riddled with difficulty. Those myriad inquiries and their answers became sufficient justification for why I had no energy to live the day. At some point, I had to wonder what else might deserve my attention.

I still have melancholy. I suspect I always will. But I want to resist the call to surrender myself to it, not let it rob my capacity for remembering my own life.

There are too many other things I would like to remember.

As always, dear reader(s), thank you for indulging in this piece, taking your time as it were lending your attention. I would love to know what you think.

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in new experience,

Christine.

Conversation, for me, has always felt like a thicket of possibility. A place where exchange and reciprocity meet. There is the underbrush of small talk, trivial questions on the state of the weather, relatable regalements on the frustrations of life’s problems. Then, we get to the canopy, the elevation of conversation, questions on values, principles, ideas. I used to think that I needed to quickly move from the underbrush to the canopy lest the other party found my musings for the former immensely banal. But one cannot adequately meet you at the top if you haven’t spent time cultivating the bottom. To my honest surprise, maintaining the depth at the canopy has proven to be a task indeed.

Some of the most exacting conversationalists that I have had the fortune of interacting with have always been rather good stewards of conversation, people who cultivate the openness needed to have fruitful conversations with seemingly no end. Such consistency in spirit is rare, but when I have had the chance to luxuriate in such a person’s presence, I take note of what feels right about conversing with them. It is not necessarily the content of the conversation, but the quality of openness, of not being seen as a point of extraction, that feels like an implicit invitation to talk about anything and everything.

There is an instinct to measure such openness by the degree of disclosure but the best conversational stewards can be quite closed about their personal lives and still steer the conversation in meaningful ways for the parties involved.

I had a conversation recently with two dear friends, an exploration as it were on wanting to be known and being terrified of it. The conversation meandered on the attachments we might have towards perception of ourselves and others, what it would mean for the quality of relationships particularly friendships and romantic partnerships. There was agreement that this knowledge that we so desperately seek from others is somewhat predicated on positive projections as well as a need to qualify where we stand in others’ esteem. As we steeped in this understanding, the question of labelling what a relationship means to either party arose. One of my friends felt, with specificity, to romantic relationships that she does not feel the need to define what the relationship is, that it is better to decouple oneself from the need to attach labels. I countered that by stating that I believe that ambiguity, especially as relates to the status of the relationship, is what leads to some of the concepts we are seeing today such as “situationships” and “talking stages”. As I offered this counter, I realised that my goal was not to change her mind as would have been the case many years earlier, but to understand her thought process.

Since that conversation, I have understood that the measure of a good conversationalist was not in the response I provided, though there is utility in that. It lies in what is done with the answer once it is received. The old instinct, the reforming one, would have treated her position as a problem in motion, something that I could, with time dissolve, or mitigate. I can concede that this position arose from a need to maintain internal coherence, as if listening to dissenting views would alter something in me worth protecting. Once she gave her answer, it simply stood. It no longer needed to be filtered through internal layers of agreement or correction, because I no longer needed her conclusion to match my own for either of us to be understood. I came away from that conversation having learnt something new about her, that she moves through intimacy with a bit more reluctance than I do, that she had reckoned with the pros and cons of ambiguity long before I had started that inquiry. The conversation did not need to end in agreement to have gone well. This ran in both directions: her openness did not require that I arrive at her position, any more than mine required that she arrive at mine.

I believe that what made this conversation possible was its function as transmission rather than transaction. In a transaction, both parties come away with something that serves their own interests. Much of what unsettles people about networking is this, the need to concretize value beyond the conversation had, irrespective of the character of the people involved. A transmission asks for nothing in return; something simply passes from one person to the other and is received. It behaves like the process of making taffy, two people making the conscious effort to introduce oxygen so as to enhance its sweetness.

For every benefit, there is a cost. The cost of transmission with my friend, meant holding a belief that I have not yet tested as against hers tested by personal experience. I do not know whether it would be something I continue to believe in once there is evidence and I will never know if it is something she will change her mind on with time. I suppose that might become the underbrush that will have occasion to be canopy. Or not.

There might never be a clean theory of conversation, of how to be a good conversationalist, but this account is as good as any, an attempt to trace rather than capture what grows between two people.

As always, I hope dear reader(s), that you enjoyed this foray into a topic that is of increasing obsession to me, conversation. I would love to hear from you, what do you feel makes conversation great for you? What qualities do you look for in a good conversationalist?

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in openness,

Christine.

Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.

~ Michel Faber, Under the Skin

There was someone I once called a friend because they understood precarity. For them, precarity was a position they were making headway out of; the solution space had exits, and they were finding them one by one. For me, the space did not seem to have any exits, and I had lost all inventiveness trying to look for them. We shared similar sentiments about our suffering, and I inferred from that a deeper congruence that was never actually there. Shared understanding can feel like shared values. But they are not the same thing.

Many of the fulfilling relationships we might have in this life have a core that is predicated on proximity. Wonderful friends, formative rivals, impactful mentors—we meet them in rooms gathered for some other purpose entirely. Circumstance has a remarkable way of assembling people who might otherwise have never crossed paths. In the wondrousness wrought by proximity is a truth, ugly but necessary: that we mistake it, especially when it is forged in shared suffering, for a sign that there are shared values. Suffering makes for fast friends but not always long friendships. There is no assurance that once the circumstances change, you or them would continue choosing the same things.

The common appearance that such suffering takes today is “trauma-bonding.” In moments where one feels lacking in the resilience and temerity to keep pushing forward, it is easy to identify with others who share the same pain. There is relief in commiserating with someone who does not need further translation of your trouble. Shared suffering is seductive because it quickly does the heavy lifting of providing closeness without one necessarily undergoing the painstaking patience required for that closeness to appear with time.

Ordinarily, people meet and take time excavating each other, the pace dependent on the kind of relationship being formed. But when suffering accelerates the process, another symptom of the mistake appears: codependency. The belief of closeness arrives quickly, and so does the risk of investing so much in the other person that you lose the capacity to function apart from them.

It is worth asking why suffering can conceal difference rather than reveal it, since on its face crisis seems like it should be clarifying. The answer is that disagreement becomes a luxury neither party can afford. When both people are drowning, correcting each other’s account of the water feels beside the point. Frictions that would ordinarily surface, differences in temperament, a value at odds with your own, get suspended for the duration of the emergency.

Shared suffering comes with its own lexicon. A shared lexicon does a very good impression of a shared value. When two people can name the same trouble without needless translation, it can feel like agreement, as though naming the thing the same way means they have also arrived, independently, at the same conclusions about it. However, a shared idiom for pain is not a shared position on anything else. Crisis has the effect of shortening questions that need to be asked. Most of what value differences are actually made of; patience with the long term, disagreements about ambition, taste, money handled at leisure rather than under threat never come up for distinction because emergencies have no use for such queries.

It would also be convenient to locate the mistake entirely in misreading the other person, but the mistake usually runs both ways. Suffering narrows a person’s behaviour as much as it narrows their read on someone else’s, which means that whoever is doing the misjudging may not yet know, either, who they will turn out to be once the crisis is over.

Not everyone carries forth memories of their arduous origin into a new season of life. I know of a case that found out otherwise and only after the fact. Two people had come up together through the same lean years, one of them arguably suffering more profoundly if there ever was a scale for such things. The other person in this arrangement formed a settled idea of who their friend was: patient, loyal, magnanimous, because that is who that person had been every time it mattered, every time there was nothing to spare. They mistook the version of their friend that suffering called forth for the whole of them. Then circumstances eased and the one who still wanted the friendship to matter, found that the other bore only a partial resemblance to the friend they had known while suffering.

We assume that the virtues most visible under one set of circumstances constitute the whole person. I find that projection, even of the most positive qualities can still lead to heartbreak when a person does not live up to them. This is part of why leaving a bond like this feels like betrayal, even when leaving might be the correct thing to do. The suffering was real; the closeness that formed around it felt real too… because it was. Walking away once the crisis abates can feel like disavowing the person’s pain, or your own. But having been present for someone’s suffering, even your own, does not obligate a future built around it.

The test, if there is one, is time freed from the original suffering. Remove the shared circumstance; the illness has passed, the job has ended, the crisis has resolved, and see what remains. A person’s worst week can make them seem like your closest match, because crisis narrows everyone’s behaviour towards the same few virtues: loyalty, endurance, magnanimity. It is only afterward, in the return to breadth, that difference has room to show itself again…

This is, of course, only one reading of what shared suffering can produce, and if you have tarried with me till this point, you will realise that this is not wholly indicative of the value that can come from sharing suffering with others. Shared suffering can express the largeness and greatness of human kindness as much as it can limit it.

What I am learning, however, is to be more conscientious of when shared suffering is merely an expression of position rather disposition, a consistency in values independent of context. I am also cognizant that this does not guard the soul against future hurts, of investing in the wrong kinds of people, of believing that there could be shared value systems beneath affliction. Such is the way of life, and as Whitman wisely articulated: That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long. ~ Pablo Neruda

In the throes of ecstatic romantic fantasy, perhaps more like delusion, I like to hold the belief that love is everything. Indeed, love has been the province of bards and minstrels. It is also one of the most socially masticated terms in all of human civilization. So long as one is deemed the object of affection, it seems that anything goes. We are convinced of its salvific nature, of its capacity to right wrongs and for its power to embody all that is good and wonderful. It is in these very attributes that one can begin to see the cracks if you look carefully enough.

One such crack has become increasingly difficult to ignore. There has been an uptick of videos across social media — TikTok in particular — of very young women romanticizing being stay-at-home, partners, wives or mothers. What's worrying is the arrangement many of these women describe: almost wholly or fully reliant on a husband or partner's income, with only a basic education and no plans to further it, and little to no independent stream of revenue of their own. What's rarely mentioned in these videos is what happens the day the love that funds the entire arrangement is no longer enough to hold it together, or rather when asked, the woman gets on the defensive.

In an ideal world, there is a version of this arrangement that works, of course—where both partners view the income as shared rather than owned, where the stay-at-home partner’s labor is treated as equally valuable to the labor that produces a paycheck, where questions such as “What have you been doing the whole day?” are not even remotely considered. But that arrangement requires an enormous amount of trust in something notoriously unstable: another person’s continued goodwill. Goodwill, it turns out, behaves like a resource, one that can be spent down, strained, or withdrawn entirely, often for reasons that have nothing to do with love running out and everything to do with circumstance.

Men are not, contrary to some romantic mythology, inexhaustible wells of care. This is true of anyone asked to carry another person’s wellbeing for years without reprieve. What complicates this further is that the generosity itself is rarely as unconditional as it likes to present itself. People tend to be magnamimous when they feel secure: financially, professionally, emotionally, and that same generosity tends to narrow the moment security wavers. A man under financial strain does not typically become more expansive in his care of a dependent partner; if anything, that strain reveals a limit to his patience that security had been obscuring.

This does not makes love a fallacy. It only reveals what love was never actually built to withstand alone: the ordinary, sometimes depressing pressures of real life: job loss, illness, boredom, resentment, novelty’s erosion over time. A woman who has organised her entire economic existence around the assumption that her partner’s affection will remain stable through all of that has not necessarily made a foolish choice. She has made a trusting one. Unfortunately though, trust, unlike love, requires a plan for what happens if it’s wrong.

Asking a woman to hold onto her own economic footing is treated, in certain circles, including, ironically some of the very TikTok videos that started this thread as unromantic as best, and paranoid at worst. As though a woman who kept her own name on a bank account, or finished her degree, or built some separate professional identity, must be a woman who never really believed in the marriage to begin with. The reality is that the woman who maintains her own ground is not withholding belief in love; she is ensuring that her belief in love never has to double as her only means of survival.

Suggesting that a woman maintains her own income, her own education, even inside an exceptionally loving marriage, is not, in itself an accusation against her partner. Men have been doing this for years. It is also not evidence that she expects to be abandoned, or that she considers his love conditional, temporary, or false. In fact, such considerations are immaterial in so far as we generally do not want to invest in failure. Life is real and has hardships that cannot be anticipated no matter how insured you are. This is risk management. No one calls it cynical to buy insurance on a house you have no intention of losing. We understand, in every domain of life, that security and trust are not the same thing, and that planning for an unlikely bad outcome is not a betrayal of belief in the likely good one.

None of this is an argument against loving fully, or against choosing a partner, a marriage, a family, a home built around shared affection. It is an argument against confusing that affection with a foundation, when it was only ever meant to be the thing that makes the foundation worth building in the first place.

Love is not enough. It was never supposed to be. What it was supposed to be is one true thing among several—real, necessary, worth having—standing alongside education, independence, and a woman’s own unwavering claim to her own space. Seen this way, love stops being just a gamble and becomes what it was always meant to be: a choice, freely made, again and again.

Dear readers, I hope you enjoyed this piece, a cultural exploration as it were inspired by conversations with wonderful women in my life.

I would love to know your thoughts on this in the comments below.

Till the next one,

Yours in grounded love,

Christine.

I’d rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned. ~ Richard Feynman.

As one who is at the end of a transitory phase that is expected of any young adult, I find myself enmeshed in a state of listlessness. The degree has been completed. Some relationships have run their course. The promontories of proximity, spontaneity and the irrationality of quick decisions are slowly undergoing attrition. That version of me that was eighteen, bright-eyed and green-eared has not been around for a while.

Life is increasingly becoming something about choosing the problems worth keeping. This, however, does not mean that every problem in our lives is one that we have chosen. We are as Heidegger gestured, thrown1 into our circumstances, that we do not choose our parents, the time, or the culture we are born into. We are, however, implicitly, required to make something of life despite this throwness.

I had imagined that once I reached my twenties, that adulthood would be the eradication of difficulty. I had thought that I would have had everything figured out and that the growing pains of adolescence would be a thing of the past. I was sorely mistaken. I do like that there is a maturity of mind and mindset that has come with time and it is something I continue to look forward to. It seems, however, that the adolescent confusion is still very much present, perhaps more amplified by the fact that I now have to figure out things, make meaning out of a life that has to feel like mine. Being a willing participant in one’s own life means figuring out the problems worth keeping.

Problems, on this account, can be viewed along these two strands; productive versus sterile, and the sorting between them is what being a willing participant ultimately requires. Productive problems are generative; they are both problems worth keeping and ones that you might, on occasion, want to throw away. They are problems that engender other kinds of good problems. If you want love, you have to risk vulnerability, loss, betrayal. If you want success, you have to contend with rejection, criticism, disappointment. They carry a price within them, one that we must be willing to pay, and may have some reward. The questions that help identify them are worth asking, despite the uncertainty that inhere in them. Does this problem open up onto other generative problems? Does engaging with the problem ask something of me that I have not yet learned to give? And is the price underneath it one that I might be willing to barter with?

To be clear, this understanding can be inverted to a point where one can question the utility of productive problems. Productive problems do require creative ways of answering them. The issue comes when the answer that solves the right problems begins to solve the wrong ones. A clear example of this is casualness. An enticing narrative has been sold to us that we need to be nonchalant, that we must repress all that is sentimental and daring, so that we do not scare away any persons that we would like to have the fortune in interacting with. I did indeed ascribe to this narrative at some point in my life, believing that it would assuage the fears of an intensely fervent heart. What it rewarded me with was a corrective that fared well for protecting my heart against insult from people I really didn’t care about while simultaneously estranging me from people that actually did care for me. Additionally, I thought it would have been easy to confine this ‘conviction’ to one area of my life, only to find that it had colonised areas that didn’t require that looseness, like my work ethic, authenticity and my taste for change.

It is necessary for me to state that such a binary needs to be capacious enough to hold that what can be a corrective in one instance, can be a form of evasion in another. This doesn’t mean that there is no usefulness in figuring out what productive problems exist in one’s life and by extension, worth keeping.

Sterile problems are the antithesis of the generative. They are the ones that do not offer anything more than woe, struggle and a cyclical eating of the self, the self that returns to itself in recursive, unhelpful circles. Questions I have found to be rather useful in assessing sterile problems are as follows: Are these problems keeping me in a state of staticism? Do I find that they are problems that keep resurfacing with ‘new’ faces? Do they limit me in ways that are unconducive to who I want to be, where I want to be, or what I want to do?

A critical observation is that a lot of sterile problems feed on the energy of the masses and lend themselves an appearance of truth. Comparison is one such darling. There is literally nothing more that comparison does for you except steal your joy. It is an exercise in futility as it exemplifies the soreness of one’s own circumstances, while providing no data as to the ways of being appreciative of your life. A caveat here would be the use of comparison as evidence of what is possible in a life. I’m sure you have met people who have shown you that certain goals and aspirations are not too far removed from the realm of possibility as initially thought. This is where comparison can be instrumental. Ultimately though, it cannot be a driving factor for the choices made towards a more present and felt life.

Chasing status is another example. It is a decision with an ever moving target. You could say that you have to be sufficiently motivated to chase status but even then, this seems to be both a means and an end and I fail to see how sustaining such a state can be. The performance of busyness is one such expression, the conflation of activity with purpose and exhaustion as a good. And there is what might be called, an addiction to potential. The person within this grip is never without ambition. They are frequently described as talented, as one from who much is expected. What they are is not active. The potential remains intact because it remains untested, and this can be said generally of sterile problems.

The essence of sterile problems is rooted in the inability to change, the desire to remain hindered by comfort, to never challenge the status quo and the ways in which you might not be living the life that you want. As Dostoevsky reminds; “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” In a similar somber spirit, Kierkegaard offered that the sickness unto death was despair, one of the forms of despair wrought by the need to not be oneself. He states that this despair arises from the knowledge that you know yourself and you cannot obscure this fact from yourself with any degree of success as the self is both temporal and eternal.2

The boundary between sterile and productive problems is not fixed. Just as a productive problem can migrate into sterility through inattention and misapplication, a sterile problem can become productive through the one thing that sterility, by definition, withholds: honest engagement. It can only be done through a proper acknowledgement that you were what you were in that given period of time, and now you would like to move away from that rigidity. This acknowledgement changes your relationship with life from a passive one to a more agentic one.

This binary operates as a diagnostic tool, a description of the relationships between a self and its difficulties. The same problem can be sterile in one season and productive in another. It is also helpful to realise the importance of people in distinguishing these two problems. For productive problems, their generativity lies not just in the self’s curiosity to journey into the unknown but also in other people’s willingness to journey with you. It can also be said that people are often willing to help if you are specific with what you want help in. On the other hand, sterile problems need the masses’ negativity, schadenfreude, apathy, disgust e.t.c so as to remain enmeshed in an unchanged capacity.

Every life keeps its problems. The hope is that, with time, they become better ones.

As always dear readers, I hope you enjoyed this essay.

What do you think, is this binary something workable? Or is it narrow? What do you think are productive or sterile problems?

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in worthy problems,

Christine.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

Ask any young girl or woman today about their relationship with food and you will find a throughline that is at first alarming and consequently depressing. Behind almost every complicated relationship with eating is a comment—a single careless sentence from a parent, a classmate, a doctor, a stranger on the internet—that lodged itself somewhere and never left. Other times, it is not even a comment, but a larger sociocultural schema that allows for a perverse celebration of thinness, bordering on starvation and treats any deviation from the ever shifting beauty standards with unprompted commentary, unsolicited advice and the cruelty of publicly delivered opinion.

What finds itself outside always starts from the inside. That is the more insidious achievement.

If you were to ask me right now whether I like food, I would tell you honestly that it is a fraught relationship. I have long moved away from counting of calories, from the compulsion to check whether I am within some dream weight that I could never have been in the first place—a number arrived at from nowhere in particular, or from everywhere in general. What I have not moved away from is the casualness with which I treat food and it certainly requires remedying. The hunger arrives and I talk myself out of it. Some days, the answer to hunger is a couple of grapes and some water in the expectation that I will eat better later.

Every other animal eats without drama. The hunger arrives, instinct moves to meet that need and then life continues. A lion does not feel guilty after a kill. A dog, offered food, does not wonder whether it deserves it, whether it has earned it, whether it will still respect itself in the morning. There is no drama between hunger and its satisfaction because there is no self, standing between them, watching, judging, performing.

“‎You’re not the same as you were before,” he said. You were much more... muchier... you’ve lost your muchness.” ~ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

We are cursed with the knowledge of our creatureliness. Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death reckoned with the fact that we carry the terror of our own creatureliness, the anxiety of having emerged from nothing, carrying deep interiority, only for these characterizations to die with us. He surmised as did the Greeks that being human must be an amusing hoax for cynical deities.

Now, if you believe that life and its constructs to be fictions, then it would not be surprising to lift the veil beneath the ceremonies we cultivate around these fictions.

Eating is one such place where if you remove ceremony, you can glimpse at the vulnerable almost profoundly naked version of humanity. Hunger is an involuntary physiological process that does not pay homage to convenience. It is an interruptor. In interrupting, it reminds the self that it is both passenger and driver. Underneath all that construction of identity, image, and controlled presentation, there is an organism that needs to be fed.

This neutral process, as an acknowledgement of basic human want, has become one that is so rooted in shame, that I hardly know what to make of it. I remember, with utmost vividness, being told that I was not the epitome of femininity because I lacked hips at age fourteen. Other times it would be people measuring the size of my wrist as against theirs, in some callous bid to let me know that I should be eating properly. I often wondered what was gluttony’s slimmer twin.

At its most base level, eating is dissolution. You take something that was outside and make it you. The body, like all other animal bodies, is built from other deaths. Mortality deferred by another’s conclusion. The only difference is that we humans partake in the act of cooking. Cooking is the inordinate task of creating distance from that mortality. Yet all in all we transform death into dinner.

Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.

~ Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

Then there are hungers engendered by Hunger which largely manifest as disordered eating. Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are revealing for the human being as they represent the ways in which we try to contend with sating this need.

Anorexia, for example, is a condition characterized by severe calorie restriction and low body weight. Those who suffer from this may often incorporate strict regimens to ensure that their weight does not go beyond a certain threshold or that their food consumption falls within a certain caloric intake. Philosophically, a person suffering from this suggests a fear of permeability, that what I consume becomes me. And that that which becomes me becomes harder to excise. If I take nothing in, nothing can change me.

Bulimia operates on a different playing field. It is characterized by the binge eating followed by compensatory behaviours such as induced vomiting or excessive exercise to prevent weight gain. For bulimia, radical self-containment is the position. The binge is that boundary collapsing, the purge is its violent reassertion.

What anorexia and bulimia share, beneath their opposite mechanics is this: both are attempts at retaining control over a process that was never meant to be controlled this way. Hunger, as explained earlier, is an interruptor. For someone whose sense of self feels precarious, an uncontrollable hunger feels like a threat from within, a saboteur living in one’s body. We can’t have it both ways, the comfort of consumption and the safety of having, technically, not consumed.

Neither resolves the underlying terror, because the terror was never really about food. It was about the unbearable fact of needing—of being an organism with requirements, dependencies, appetites that exist whether or not they are convenient, whether or not they earned. Needing is vulnerable, and it is to be vulnerable, in some sense, at the mercy of the world. Eating disorders are, in this light, an attempt to opt out of vulnerability altogether, a refusal of the body’s terms of engagement with existence.

These are not abstract conditions to theorize about from a safe distance. They are serious, and they are treatable, and if any of this resonates with your own experience, it deserves more than this reflection. Naming the philosophy underneath a thing does not replace the care that thing might need.

We are not lions, nor dogs. Everything we do has ceremony regardless of whether we believe it should exist or not. But I think we should reduce the frictions that arise when engaging in certain human activities, eating chief among them. I wonder what would might have been had I not inculcated disordered eating or taken in notions of what I should have looked like at age fourteen. As such this is an exercise in futility, but knowing what I know now, I would like to say that eating is not shameful and enjoying good food should not be punishment or a reward for depriving yourself elsewhere.

The cynical deities, if they are watching, probably aren’t laughing at our hunger. They’re laughing at how hard we worked to make it mean something, and how, after all that work, it still just means we’re hungry.

Epilogue

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

~ Excerpt, From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee

As always, dear readers, I hope you enjoyed reading this.

Till the next one, keep safe, stay golden.

Yours in keen hunger,

Christine

What is to give light must endure burning. ~ Victor Frankl

As a child, I loved soda with an intensity that I could not possibly account for, and one that embarrassed me even then. Sugar was incidental, almost beside the point. What arrested me, however, was the sensation itself: that aggressive, slightly painful aliveness on the tongue, the way carbonation made the inside of my mouth feel like something was happening.

What I couldn’t stand was how quickly it left. I would open a bottle and get distracted by a book, a window, or little birds feeding on leftover grain harvested from the garden, only to come back and find that the drink had become flat and irritatingly warm. I often remember feeling disappointed, realising that something had been present, and was now irreversibly gone whilst I was caught up in other diversions.

I spent years thinking this was a lesson about attention. Pay attention. Be present. Do not leave the things you love unattended. It took champagne, which is what soda becomes once you’re old enough to deserve it, to give me the rest of the lesson.

Unlike carbonation in a soft drink, which is forced in under pressure, the effervescence in a traditional méthode champenoise wine is born inside the bottle—yeast consuming sugar in an enclosed space, producing carbon dioxide that has nowhere to go, building pressure in the dark over months, sometimes years. The winemaker is not manufacturing fizz. The winemaker is creating the conditions under which fizz becomes inevitable.

The yeast die. Their bodies settle. In the spent, patient dark of the cellar, their dissolution becomes flavor—the mineral depth, the brioche complexity, the thing that makes champagne taste like time itself has been carbonated. All that death is complexity. All the pressure is the point.

Then you open it and it wants out. The entire investment of making terminates in release. This is a strange thing to devote years to. It is also a description of every worthwhile thing I have ever tried to sustain.

Share

Passion has been made too pretty. We have placed it in the obvious locations: from romance, to artistic callings to the speeches of the young, who have not yet been asked to sustain anything. In doing so, we have rendered it almost useless as a concept. What I want is to go where passion goes when life is strikingly ordinary.

The Latin root of passion is passio: to undergo, to be acted upon, to suffer. The Passion of Christ is its very exemplification: the sufferings that Christ endured on the cross, from betrayal to crucifixion. It was the willingness to be broken open by something larger than the self, and to call that breaking a form of contact. The original use of the word contained no suggestion of pleasure. It contained the radical idea that to be in contact with something larger than the self—God, love, truth, beauty, whatever name you give to the force that makes the inside of the mouth feel like a place wehere something is occurring—is to accept being changed in ways you did not choose and cannot fully predict.

All that we have been left with is a word that is the impetus of all brilliant beginnings and one that abandons us entirely in the middle. The middle of things is where life actually happens.

Passion, as we use it, implies agency. Passion, as it arrives, implies surrender. The thing acts upon you. I think what makes it harder to intuit in its early stages is that it is, at first, deceitful. It arrives as novelty. The discovery of a subject, the early intoxication of a calling, this is what we have decided passion looks like. But novelty is largely about the self. It is the excitement of learning what you might be capable of feeling, of becoming. The subject is almost secondary. The newness carries you. You do not yet have to carry it.

Then the newness goes. It is primary fermentation completing itself. The yeast has consumed what was available. The wild aromatic aliveness of the early stage has done its work and the only real question is whether you are willing to seal the bottle and go underground.

Most people take the exit here. The exit at this stage is almost irresistibly reasonable. The feeling has changed. The thing that felt like certainty now feels like effort. The obvious interpretation is that the passion has left, that this is the self’s way of signaling misalignment, that the healthy response is to go looking for the thing that produces the original charge. So the search resumes, always arriving at a new beginning, always finding primary fermentation, always mistaking the CO2 of novelty for the thing the CO2 was pointing toward.

Every craft, every calling, contains a point where enthusiasm can no longer carry you. The work has become familiar enough that you can do it without wonder, and difficult enough that you cannot do it without devotion. This is what passion is made of. The bottles do not know that they are becoming something. The yeast have no theory of champagne. They consume, they produce, they die and the conditions arranged around them transform that blind faithful industry into complexity. The winemaker’s genius is not just fermentation. It is the trust that what happens in the dark is not nothing. That pressure held long enough will be the very mechanism for depth.

Love follows the same journey. You fall and the falling authorises everything that follows. What comes after is the cellar. The slow pressured dark of actually knowing someone. Of encountering them in the ordinary light of day, tired, unperforming. Of discovering that the person you fell for is more and less than what you fell for and in possession of wounds you are only beginning to understand the depth of. The love that survives the discovery is built differently than the love that precedes it. It has gone underground.

What love requires across time is not the preservation of the original feeling, which is like insisting the wine stay in primary fermentation, demanding the yeast go on consuming what has already been consumed. It requires return, going back down, again and again, to the cellar of the relationship, to the fundamental question of who this person actually is, now, in their current vintage, after the years that have changed them in ways you may not have been paying attention to.

Grief is where this argument finds its potent formulation, because grief is passion with no available object. The cultural embarrassment around prolonged grief that it resolve on a reasonable schedule is a direct consequence of our illiteracy about what passion actually is. We have decided grief, like passion, should be most intense at the beginning and should diminish reliably with time, and when it doesn’t—when it returns, months, or years later, with an intensity that seems to have no respect for the time already spent—we pathologise it. We call it unresolved. We send it to be managed.

But grief returns because love returns. The transformation of loss into something to be carried is underground work that cannot be rushed or scheduled or managed into compliance. The grief that comes back after years is not regression. It is the bottle being opened at a new stage, releasing what the last years of dark made of what you lost. Each return of grief is a new vintage of it. Each one tells you something about what the loss has become inside you: how it has settled and deepened, what it has flavoured, what the dissolution of that specific person’s presence in your daily life has been slowly and without your permission transforming you into.

The people who have gone through great loss and come out the other side are not the people who grieved efficiently. They are the people who let the cellar do its work. Who did not open the bottle too early to prove to others that something was happening inside. Who trusted that the dark was process and who returned, when the time came, to find not what they had lost but what the loss had made of them.

I understand now that the longer lesson, the one that has taken everything else to learn is this; some of the best things cannot be consumed quickly. They require the sealed dark. They require the dying and settling. They require you to leave them alone long enough to become what they were always going to be. When you return, you will be someone who has themselves spent time in the dark, what you find will not be not what you lost. It will be what the loss made possible.

As always dear readers, I hope this piece found you in a resounding disposition. If you feel the piece resonated with you, do share with another kindred spirit.

As in all other pursuits, keep safe, stay golden.

Till the next one,

Yours in descending passion.

Christine.

A while back, a story made the rounds on Tiktok about an anglerfish making an arduous journey toward the surface of the ocean—toward sunlight it would likely not survive. The story was almost certainly apocryphal, or at the very least shaped by the internet’s tendency to turn animal behaviour into parable. There is a degree of anthropomorphism here that would be dishonest not to acknowledge. But I am less interested in whether the fish truly wanted to see the sun and more inclined to use it as a metaphor for something that most people recognise in themselves: the desire to be known and the terror that arises from this.

Being seen clearly, without significant distortion, feels a little like leaving the deep sea and hoping that the sun does not kill us. Some of us, if not all of us, spend our lives asking for closeness, while hoping that no one looks close enough to find us unbearable. To have another person arrive, unassisted, at conclusions that you have spent years trying to obscure is exposure so complete that it barely has a name. Most people assume that the opposite of shame is acceptance. I think that what many people want instead is more particular: a measured opacity — opacity that does not prevent one from being loved undeniably; the company of someone willing to spend enough time translating your contradictions into coherence, without demanding that you first resolve them.

In reality, what opacity produces, is this: the feeling that someone has understood you correctly and remains undecided, in ways that they have not made clear. Clear rejection, for all its brutality, at least stabilises the narrative. It tells you where you stand. Sustained ambiguity after accurate perception does something else. It keeps interpretation active. You begin revisiting ordinary moments with increasing scrutiny, trying to locate where evaluation shifted, or whether it stabilized at all. The difficulty is that ordinary moments were not designed to carry this much interpretive weight, and the longer you look, the more they seem to confirm whatever you feared before you started looking.

Intimacy accumulates data. The longer someone loves you, the more your self-concept becomes vulnerable to external verification. Every uncalculated disclosure, every moment in which you were not managing how you appeared, becomes part of a record you cannot audit. You understand, slowly, that you have been handing someone materials and that what they are building from those materials is a version of you that exists entirely outside your jurisdiction.

Human beings consistently move towards forms of exposure that destabilize them. We fall in love despite knowing that intimacy collapses the distance necessary for self-mythology. We volunteer information we swore we would take to the grave. We hand people the instructions for how to hurt us then call it trust. It is tempting to call this courage, but courage implies certainty about what is being defended. I think it is something more ungainly than courage. I think people pursue intimacy because maintaining opacity eventually becomes lonelier than being injured.

This creates an unusual asymmetry at the heart of intimacy. One person becomes increasingly legible to the other over time, while remaining unable to access the interpretive frame being used on them. You can glimpse it in the kinds of questions you find yourself asking—why they remember what they remember, what they choose to say and when they choose not to say it—but the full picture of how you are being assembled inside another’s understanding stays mostly out of reach. This, I think, is what reassurance often attempts to resolve: the tension of how you exist in them. What aspects have been integrated without friction, what parts remain unresolved, what details are gaining traction without being named. Reassurance fails because it answers the question of whether someone loves you while leaving untouched the question of who, exactly, they think you are.

What intimacy produces, then, is the experience of becoming the subject of an assessment still being written. The conclusion forming at a pace you cannot influence, in a language you cannot access, inside a person who continues to look at you as though the looking itself is part of how they are deciding. This is the part that undoes people—the interval between perception and hard crystallised knowledge.

Yet people keep volunteering for this arrangement. What matters is not whether being seen produces a favorable outcome, but that people continue to move toward it without being able to guarantee one. You rarely know the moment when being seen begins to change what is being seen — when someone’s perception of you stops being observation and starts being something that acts on you. Love, when it arrives, does not resolve the asymmetry. It deepens it. You are now known by someone whose interpretation of you remains inaccessible, and what you have gained, being chosen, is immediately shadowed by the question of who, exactly, chose you, on what evidence, and whether the evidence still holds. It is the discovery, made too late to reverse, that the alternative — remaining unseen, intact, unreached— has its own woes. People do not move toward exposure because they believe it will go well. They move toward it because they have already tried the other thing.

As always dear reader(s), thank you for lending your attention to my thoughts in this piece. I would love to hear from you; what is greater, the desire to be known, or the terror of being known? If it resonated with you, share with another kindred spirit.

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in ungainly courage,

Christine.

The eternal quest of the human being is to shatter his loneliness ~ Norman Cousins

Lately, I have been pondering the sentiment of the one who got away. Though, if I am being truthful, I must begin by admitting that I likely dreamt up qualities that he did not possess. And even if he did have those reputed qualities, he was not mine to have or to keep.

Healing is such a peculiar thing. One moment, you move through life a little tender but mostly human; the next you are returned to memories that ask to be carried carefully in the palm of your hand. I often do not know what to do with this heart of mine.

Many of my reflections on the human experience have been premised upon love and how it feels from other people’s point of view. Through deep self introspection, I have come to realise how dangerously easy it is to fall into limerence and its gradual corrosive effects. It happens that its effects do not register immediately. Instead, one is taken back to a place and time where all they can see and hear is this person.

What I hate most is how easily I can become consumed by the idea of someone and what they could mean to me. In those moments, I abandon what is real and precious in favour of fantasy. Limerence transforms innocent attraction into deplorable hunger. It makes one a needy being that is always reaching for outward expressions of affection and reassurance to prove that indeed they are worthy and capable of loving and being loved in return.

I do not wish to waste away like this each time I deeply like someone.

Paradoxically, I fear reciprocity almost as much as I fear absence. I fear that if such depth of feeling were ever truly returned to me, I would lose myself entirely within the fire and reverie of it. That I would surrender all clarity and common sense in exchange for the intoxication of being loved.

I want to be washed clean of these residual feelings. I want leave them behind with the awareness that there are rooms I have yet to enter, people I have yet to meet, and forms of love, romantic or otherwise that I have not yet encountered.

So with this entry, I imagine carrying these feelings into a small boat upon the River Styx, never to retrieve them again.

And if solitude is to be my portion, then let me at least be free of this desire to be loved.

Epilogue

I don’t know how many souls I have.
I’ve changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I’ve never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can’t feel myself.

That’s why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”
God knows, because he wrote it.

~ I don’t know how many souls I have, Fernando Pessoa

As always, dear reader(s), I hope this piece resonated with you. And if it did, you can share the very same resonance with another.

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in portioned solitude,

Christine.

We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. ~ Anaïs Nin

One of the most trite but true aphorisms in existence holds that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. The usual reading is straightforward enough: human perception is subjective, and the appreciation of art, of faces, of worth is never as universal as we flatter ourselves to believe. There is real merit in this. However, turn the aphorism slightly, angle it inward rather than outward, and it yields something far more interesting.

Sometimes, the beholder is also the one who is beheld. The seeing eye is turned on itself.

We carry, each of us, an expansive sense of self: a myriad of settled notions about who we are, where we stand, and what we are moving toward. We know our fears by name. We have indexed our failures. We have rehearsed our desires so many times that they have calcified into something resembling certainty. These stories are mercy of a sort, a stabilized fiction that gives us ground to stand in a world that would otherwise read us however it pleases, assign us meanings we never chose, and leave us at the mercy of every misunderstanding and misplaced expectation that other people, in their own blindness, project onto us. The self narrative is armor. Without it, we could collapse.

However, armor worn long enough become second skin. Second skins, I find, have a rather troubling property: they stop us from feeling what they were meant to protect.

I: The archive

The self-knowledge we accumulate in our life is not gathered all at once. It is built in increments; a humiliation here, a small triumph there, a pattern across years of repetition, until eventually we have assembled something that feels comprehensive. We become, without meaning to, the archivists of our own interior life. Like all archivists, we develop a professional relationship with the material: careful, systematic, and increasingly unable to be surprised by it.

This is how a person comes to know their anger before it arrives. How they can predict their next bout of loneliness on a nondescript day. How they recognize, mid-sentence, that they are about to disappoint someone in the same way they have disappointed people before. This knowledge has real uses. It can be the beginning of wisdom, the substrate of self-discipline, the thing that stops a repeating mistake just before it happens. Indeed, this is the work of everyone, although done to varying degrees.

Admittedly, this pursuit of self knowledge has its woes. When the archive becomes complete enough or when we believe it has, we stop looking at the original. We consult the file instead of the thing. We relate to ourselves as a finished thing, a closed inquiry. The archive, left to itself, becomes less a library and more a tomb.

The self, interpreted this way, is not quite the self that exists. It is a portrait, rendered with skill and admirable honesty, but a portrait still, fixed, framed, and unable to do anything that the painter did not permit.

II: The stranger’s eye

This is where the aphorism, returned to, earns its keep.

When someone who does not yet know us, or who loves us with a freshness that has not yet dimmed into habit looks at us, they are not consulting any archive. They have no file. They only have the living fact of who we are, moving through a room, saying a thing, laughing at something we didn’t know we found funny, going silent in a way that they find inexplicably moving. They behold us in the way we behold a painting we’ve never seen before: with the fullness of attention, undimmed by foreknowledge.

Truly, what they see, is real.

This is the part worth insisting on. It would be easy, and in some ways comforting, to dismiss the perception of others as mere projection, as their casting us in a role their own needs have written. Love, here, becomes autobiography, occupying this liminal space where good will and intention meet. Sometimes what a person sees in us is simply what is there, unobstructed by the cacophony of our self narration. They notice the way we hold our attention when someone speaks which we never thought to notice because we were busy doing it. They find us braver than we find ourselves, even when we would like to believe that we are cowards.

Beauty, in this sense, really does lie in their eye, and it is not a beauty they have invented. It is a beauty they found, one that had been there all along, accruing silently beneath the years of our own inattention.

My submission here is that we fear that others see us more clearly than we see ourselves. This gift of perception when offered freely and kindly is so difficult to receive. We have spent too long as the experts on ourselves that we do not know how to accept this unvarnished version of ourselves without feeling the need to correct that assertion. No, you don’t understand, let me show you the file. So we argue people out of their perception of us, insisting on our own worse account, and call this honesty.

III. The gap

There is often a gap between what we are and what we know about what we are. This is what makes us inexhaustible subjects of inquiry, to ourselves and to others. It means that any self-knowledge we hold, however hard-won, and carefully curated, is partial. The archive is not the totality of the person.

We exceed our self-concepts. This is difficult to believe after years of committed self-examination, because the examined life can come to feel like a fully known life. Examination is an act that happens in time, and we continue to happen in time after the examination ends. We are ongoing. We retain, at every moment, the capacity to surprise ourselves, to find in an ordinary day some grief we didn’t know we had, or some joy we had not thought ourselves still capable of, or some response that contradicts the story we’ve been telling about our limitations.

There is always something left out there. There is always, specifically, something in us left out there.

IV: The return

What would it mean to look at yourself with a stranger’s eye?

Not to pretend the archive does not exist. Not to perform an ignorance of your own patterns and failures in the hope that willfull blindness might feel like innocence. The archive is real. The failures are real. Honest self-knowledge is still better than its absence, and sentimentality about ourselves, the refusal to look at our worst honestly is its own cowardice.

There is a practice, however, more difficult and more rewarding than self-criticism or self-flattery, which is the practice of intentional self-strangeness. Of approaching yourself, briefly, as someone who does not yet know how the story ends, because in truth, you do not. Of asking what might I be that I have not yet noticed. Of granting yourself, occasionally, the same wide open attention that you grant a piece of music you are hearing for the first time, before you know whether to love it, before you know what it is.

I’d imagine this sounds like self help. It is not. It is closer to a philosophical stance, a desire to hold your self-concept lightly, to wear the armor without forgetting that beneath it all lies something alive and unknown. It is the recognition that the stories we tell about ourselves, though necessary, are not final.

The aphorism, fully redeemed, says something like this: the beauty you cannot see in yourself is not absent. It is simply waiting for an eye that has not yet learned to look past it. Sometimes that eye belongs to someone who loves you. Sometimes, at the right moment, it belongs to you, arriving at yourself after a long journey, as if for the first time, and finding, to your surprise, that there is something here worth the trip.

You have been the beholder for a long time. But the thing you have been beholding is larger than what you have seen.

That is the beginning, not the end, of the inquiry.

Epilogue

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,
I can’t help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

~ Excerpt from Nothing Twice by Wisława Szymborska

As always, dear reader(s), I hope this piece resonated in some way.

Till the next one,

Keep safe, stay golden.

Yours in clarified seeing,

Christine.

I. The Sibyl’s offer

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

~ William Butler Yeats

In the year of 509BC, near the end of the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, an old woman arrived at the palace carrying nine books. She was the Cumaean Sibyl. The books were prophecies: the complete fate of Rome, every crisis, founding, and catastrophe that the city had not yet gone through.

She named her price. Tarquin refused.

She left, burned three books and returned with six at the same price. He refused again.

She burned three more.

When she returned a final time with the remaining three, she asked what the full nine had once cost. He paid.

The surviving books were kept in the Temple of Jupiter, consulted only at moments of danger, until the temple burned down in the 80s BC. The other six were never recovered. No one ever knew what they contained.

The abstraction to be drawn from this is precise: inspiration does not discount itself for your hesitation.

It does not wait and return on better terms. It returns, if it returns at all, already burned and the asking price for the remainder is exactly what the whole once cost.

You will pay it. What you receive will be the fraction. And you will spend the rest of your life wondering about what was lost.

That is the specific nature of creative regret. It does not fade with time. It compounds with it.

This is the starting point. Everything else follows from it.

II. Chronos, kairos and the habit beneath the hesitation

The Greeks had two words for time and the distinction is where the full cost of hesitation becomes visible.

Chronos is sequential time, the time of clocks, the passage of one moment after another, the axis along which later is simply a different position from now. It is the time we use to tell ourselves we will return to the idea next week, when things are more aligned.

Kairos is something else entirely: the appointed moment, a sense of ripeness, the quality of convergence that will not recur. The archer’s moment of release. The physician’s window of treatment. Kairos is not a position on a timeline. It is an opening and openings have a different relationship to duration than positions do.

What this means for the person who has decided to act on the inspiration later is that later is not a delay of the same Kairos. It is its absence. The hope that another moment such as this will avail itself may be well founded. But the habit of hoping rather than moving is the only foundation matters here, because habits once built are not interrogated. They are inhabited. Automatically. Without the person noticing when the inhabiting began.

This is why delay presents itself as reasonable. Seen from within chronos, there is always a later. Chronos is infinite and accommodating. But kairos is neither. And the self that has trained itself to wait has not preserved the inspiration. It has only changed its relationship to motion. Such a relationship once repeated, necomes the default response to the next opening. and the one after that.

Inspiration is not stored by waiting. It is eroded by it.

III: Movement is the condition

The act of making is also the act of knowing to make. It is to create a methodology between inspiration and execution which is not sequential but simultaneous.

Clarity is not a prerequisite. It is a consequence.

A philosopher who waits until he fully knows what he wants to say before beginning to say it will wait forever, because the knowing and the saying are the same event and cannot be separated without ceasing to be that event.

Movement is the condition.

This is why people who make things, actively as a practice, as the terms on which they have agreed to live, often speak of inspiration as something that arrives to those already in motion.

The painter Francis Bacon, spoke of the accident, that all painting is an accident but that the artist must decide what to preserve.

In this sense, inspiration does not initiate the work. It joins it.

IV: What the fear is actually costing you

There is certainly the concern that arises when translating inspiration into meaningful output. The fear that the act of making the inspiration real will reveal it to be less than what it was in potential. That the executed thing will not hold the quality of the unwritten thing that it seemed to promise.

The gap between vision and execution is real.

But the calculation here is almost universally misread: the thing that falls short of the vision is infinitely more valuable than the vision that is never executed.

The vision that remains a vision is a wish and wishes do not compound. Only steps do.

Every creative vision arrives at full luminosity.

The training of a lifetime, the daily practice of moving before contraction, of acting before the reflex of self doubt closes the available space is not preparation for the vision.

It is the removal of what would prevent you from holding steady in it when it comes, because contraction once chosen slowly becomes reflex. And reflexes are the only thing that can be trained against before they are needed and not after.

V: You are its location, not its source

Inspiration does not originate with you.

You are not its source. You are its location.

You were chosen for this, in that the idea arrived here, in you, and not in someone else. It arrived because something in you was the right shape to receive it and pass it on in the form only you could give it. The same conditions that produced Moby Dick would not have produced Anna Karenina. Both ideas required a specific instrument. Both ideas required their location.

To let inspiration fallow is to break that implicit agreement. You do not need to treat this as obligation to recognize it as responsibility. The idea arrived here. That is already a form of selection. Will you act as though it matters?

The Sibyl’s books are still nine.

The price has not changed.

Epilogue

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

~ William Carlos Williams.

As always dear reader(s), thank you for your time on this piece. Do let me know what your thoughts are on this piece, I would love to hear all about it.

Till the next one,

Keep safe, stay golden.

Yours in executed inspiration,

Christine.

Good conversation is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. For the first 380,000 years of its existence, it was opaque—too hot, too dense, too turbulent for light to pass through. Everything was noise. Then it cooled. Then light traveled. Then eventually after an incomprehensible passage of time, matter organized itself into creatures with nervous systems complex enough to sit from each other and ask: but what do you think it means? The distance between the opaque, screaming infant universe and that question, that enormously human question is the only distance that has ever really interested me. And yet we treat the asking of it as ordinary.

We treat the extraordinary apparatus of conversation, the larynx, the ear, the hundred billion neuron instrument tuned over millenia to the frequency of another mind, as utility, a convenience, a way to order lunch or schedule meetings or tell someone we are running five minutes late. We have inherited the most improbable gift in the known universe and we use it, mostly, to fill silence.

We have grown suspicious of rapture. The word itself has been kidnapped by religions and romance novels, associated with the ecstatic and the overwrought, the embarrassingly transported. We are more comfortable with the language of productivity: a conversation was efficient, it was useful, it covered a lot of ground. We have reduced one of the most extraordinary things that a human can do into a logistics problem. In doing so we have robbed ourselves of something essential. That hunger to be met cannot be abated easily. It manifests in the way we scroll endlessly through screens at night, seeking, seeking, seeking the dopamine ghost of genuine contact. It manifests in the loneliness felt after a dinner party at which one talked for hours and said nothing. It manifests in that other feeling when a conversation ends and we walk out into the night air feeling, improbably, larger than we were before.

What is that feeling? What has actually occurred?

Levinas can offer a revealing perspective. He states that the “face” refers to the human face and is not to be construed merely as an idea or deemed a purely physical or aesthetic object. From this we understand that we cannot reduce another to their physical attributes alone. To find meaning, transcendence and engagement with the world, we need to move beyond the physical. And here is what this means for conversation, genuine conversation begins when we look beyond the face. The moment we receive another in their strangeness, their inexhaustible interiority, their capacity to surprise and overturn everything we thought we understood, then we really are conversing. Levinas called this the encounter with the Other. We are allowing the otherness of the other to register in us. We are consenting to be disturbed. This is what it distinguishes the rapturous conversation from the comfortable one: in the comfortable one, we manage the otherness, we translate the stranger into something familiar enough not to trouble us. In the rapturous one, we let the strangeness stand. We let it work on us. We come away having been enlarged, called into a fuller version of ourselves by the sheer force of having genuinely encountered someone we could not reduce.

Neuroscience corroborates this. When two people engage in deep reciprocal conversation, their brains do something interesting: they begin to synchronize. Neural oscillations align across two skulls, two nervous systems, two separate biological systems. Uri Hasson at Princeton has documented this phenomenon called neural coupling and what his lab found was that the degree of synchrony between a speaker’s brain and a listener’s brain predicts with, remarkable accuracy, the degree of understanding achieved. The best conversations, the ones where genuine understanding occurs, the listener’s brain does not merely mirror the speaker’s. It anticipates it. The neural patterns in the listener’s brain begin to precede the speaker’s by fractions of a second, leaning into the meaning before it arrives, completing the thought in the space between words. What looks like listening is partly a form of inspired guessing, a continuous act of imaginative projection into another’s consciousness, a reaching across the bridge between selves. This reaching, this constant creative anticipation, is what great conversation feels like from the inside, a form of co-authoring.

This is what distinguishes the merely pleasant conversation from the rapturous one. In the pleasant conversation, we wait for our turn. We are thinking while the other speaks, of what we will say next. The conversation becomes a sequence of monologues dressed as dialogue. Nothing is truly received because we are not truly present to receive it. The words are decipherable but land on the surface of our preoccupations, unable to register concretely. We have in effect sealed ourselves off. The rapturous conversation, by contrast, is a frightening act of opening, an amenable porosity to change and its accompaniments, an allowance to vulnerability which ideally would lead to a reconstituted landscape of awareness. This, this is the hardest kind of intellectual courage. It is the thing that Socrates was doing when he wandered the agora in Athens asking questions he didn’t really know the answers to, curiosity his handmaiden. The Socratic method, at its best, was a practice of mutual transformation, two people following a question together into the dark, neither knowing where it led, both changed by the journey.

The implication of all of this is that every real conversation is, however small, an act of world repair. The Jewish concept of tikkun olam, the repair of the world, suggests that the shattered nature of human living can be gathered and restored through acts of righteousness and attention. What if conversation, true conversation, is one of those acts? What if the moment we stop performing and start listening is a moment in which something broken is briefly mended?

Which brings us finally to love. Not romantic love specifically, though that too, but the larger more encompassing love that the Greeks called philia, the love between friends who genuinely know, challenge and delight in each other, the love that Aristotle considered to be cornerstone of a good life and a good city. Aristotle’s account of friendship is remarkable for how much it centers on conversation. The highest form of friendship, he argues, is between people who love each other for virtue’s sake, for the quality of each other’s character, the quality of another’s thinking. What sustains and deepens this friendship is precisely the shared life of discourse; eating together, yes, but more than eating, philosophizing together, arguing together, reading together, talking late into the night about the things that matter most. The beloved friend is, above all, another self, a self that does not solely confirm and flatter but a self that is genuinely different enough to see what you cannot see, to ask the question you have been avoiding, to push back where you have been comfortable. This friction is, in my view, one of the greatest expressions of friendship and conversation’s guiding principle. The friend who argues with you truthfully loves you more than the friend who agrees with you always. Rapturous conversation is the medium of this love, the practice in which it deepens and proves itself.

This is what it means to talk. This is what it means to listen. This is what the word, rapture, at its Latin root, actually contains: rapere, seized, carried away, taken somewhere you could not have gone alone. There is no safer adventure and no more dangerous one. It requires nothing more than awareness, a deep seated understanding of one’s place in the face of things. It costs nothing but the self you were before you began. It leaves you, always, more porous, more alive to the sheer implausible fact that the universe produced not one consciousness but billions, and arranged them so that they might, if they are brave enough, lean toward each other in the dark and bend the air between them into light.

P.S. In case the notion of conversation interests you, here is another recommendation that I feel is important to share.

Experimental History

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs

Photo cred: my dad…

Read more

5 years ago · 4089 likes · 94 comments · Adam Mastroianni

As always, dearest reader(s), thank you for reading this piece.

If it resonated with you, share with another kindred spirit.

And of course, I am endlessly curious, do you think conversation is rapture? If you are in the affirmative, do let me know what you think in the comments below, and if not, I would like to read alternative perspectives.

In all respects, keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in satiated hunger,

Christine.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

~ T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding.

On June 28th, 1914, Gavrilo Princip was eating a sandwich outside the Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen in Sarajevo. This is probably apocryphal—historians dispute the existence of the sandwich but let us keep it anyway, because the universe needs it sandwiches, its ordinary details, its banalities that precede the cleaving of time itself. Princip had failed. The assassination attempt on Archduke Franz Ferdindand had gone awry earlier that morning, a comedy of errors involving a grenade that bounced off the car and injured bystanders instead. The conspiracy had dissolved into embarrassment and dispersal. The last meal before you accidentally start World War I is fittingly something you didn’t even know would be your last meal in the previous world.

Because Franz Ferdinand’s driver took a wrong turn.

Because the universe operates on the principle that tragedy first requires a pratfall and history pivots on the greasy hinge of lunch.

What interests me is not the shooting itself—that has been analyzed to death, if you’ll pardon the expression—but the sandwich. Though mythical, Princip likely assuaged the pangs of hunger before he went to do the dastardly deed. He was in his body. He was in time. He was thinking presumably about the failure that morning, about what comes next, about whether the conspiracy was compromised, about getting out of Sarajevo. He was not thinking: I am about to start a war that will kill tens of millions of people, end four empires, redraw the map of Europe, and set into motion a chain of events that will lead to an even worse war twenty years later, and fundamentally alter the trajectory of human civilization. He was thinking: I am hungry. There is a deli. I will eat.

There is something utterly terrifying about the moment of the just before. The moment before you know. It looks like every other moment. It is ordinary. There is no angel at the boundary saying, “Beyond this point, your life will divided into Before and After.” What an appalling thing it is indeed, not knowing whether we need to assign cruelty or mercy.

Physics has the answer, though we do not use it in regular parlance. In quantum mechanics, there is a state called superposition: a particle exists in all possible states simultaneously until observation collapses those possibilities into one thing. Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead in the box until you open it and force reality to choose. But what the thought experiment does not adequately address is the subjective experience of being in superposition. Not the cat—the cat is either alive or dead, just unknown to us—but the person standing outside the box. The person who is simultaneously about discover a living cat or about to discover a dead cat. The person who is in some meaningful sense, in both futures at once.

You are Schrödinger’s person. Right now, as you read this, you are in superposition. You are simultaneously healthy and ill (the test results exist but haven’t been read). You are simultaneously employed and unemployed (the decision has been made but not been communicated). You are simultaneously loved and abandoned (they have already decided but have not verbalised their decision). All possible futures exist in potential, and you contain them all, and none of them are real yet, and all of them are equally possible. The phone is ringing but hasn’t been answered. The envelope is sealed. The car is approaching the intersection but hasn’t arrived. Someone is walking toward you with that particular expression you haven’t yet learned to decode, carrying news that will split your life into before and after, but they haven’t reached you yet.

What are you in that space?

I think about this when I think about Bruegel’s painting of the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus which Auden made immortal in Musée des Beaux Arts. In the painting, Icarus is drowning. His legs stick absurdly out of the water, a splash, a disaster occurring in the corner of the frame while the world goes on about its business. The ploughman is ploughing. The shepherd is shepherding. The expensive delicate ship is sailing somewhere important, ‘sailed calmly’ on as Auden wrote. Everything turns away quite leisurely from disaster.

But I want to talk about the moment before Icarus hits the water, because the moment must exist even if Bruegel chose not to paint it. When he’s still flying. When the wax is beginning to soften but hasn’t failed yet. When the ploughman glances up maybe or he doesn’t, and Icarus is just a boy in the sky, and the sun is just doing what the sun does, and none of them know yet what kind of day it is becoming.

The moment before only becomes the moment before in retrospect. It is not marked in real time. You cannot know you are in the moment while you are in it, which means that you are always potentially in it, which means that every moment carries the latent possibility of being the last moment of Before. The moment is only constituted as The Moment Before by its relationship with The Moment After. This means you’re living in the present that is constantly being restructured by events that have not happened yet.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Somewhere in the universe, a star went supernova 500 years ago. The light is still travelling towards us. An astronomer in 2026 is eating dinner, thinking about an argument with her sister and then she looks through a telescope and sees it. New star. Except the star isn’t new. It died five centuries ago. The light has been in transit this whole time. The star was dead, but no one knew yet.

The question that bugs me is whether anything can be done with the knowledge that you are always, right now, potentially in that moment. Whether this awareness changes the quality of experience or just makes you paranoid. Because here’s the thing, the moment before’s value comes from its innocence. Princip’s purported sandwich is poignant because it is an artifact of the just before. If he knew what his actions would do, it would not have been the same.

So how do we contend with both things? The knowledge that every moment might be the last moment before and the innocence required for those moments to be what they are…

Think about Euripides’ ‘Trojan Women’. Troy has fallen. The women sit on the beach waiting to learn which Greek soldier will come to claim them as slaves. They know the general shape of what’s coming, captivity, catastrophe, but not the specifics. Hecuba does not know yet that she’ll be given to Odysseus. Cassandra does not know yet the manner in which she will die. Andromache does not know that they’ll throw her infant son from the embattlements.

While they wait, they sing. They remember. They mourn. They are caught in the last moment before knowing becomes being, before abstract catastrophe becomes concrete. This moment has value. The waiting isn’t just dead time. It’s the space when they are still themselves. Still who they were before they became what this will make them.

And so we return to where we started. The phone is ringing. It is 3AM, or 3PM, or 10:47 on a day that feels like every other day. You were thinking of something trivial, whether you need milk, whether that email was too harsh, whether the pain in your side is nothing or something.

The phone is ringing.

You know, the way animals know before earthquakes, that this is not a normal call. Your intuition has warned you, indeterminate though the warning may be.

The phone is ringing.

In a moment, all possible futures will resolve into one actual present. You will learn what you didn’t want to learn or desperately needed to know and had no idea was coming. The news will be born into this world and you will be its midwife.

But right now, right now, you are still in the moment before. You are Gavrilo Princip with your ‘sandwich’, not knowing that you are about to start a war. You are the ploughman not looking up yet. You are Hecuba on the beach, still queen in your mind. You are the astronomer one second before seeing the light from a dying star.

You are everyone who has ever stood in this liminal space, this anteroom, this second before everything is shown to you.

“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” ~ Andy Bernard

The phone is ringing.

You can’t not answer. You can’t freeze time. You can’t stay in the Before forever. You will find out.

But you can know with the certainty that only time can offer, that you are always here. That every moment is potentially a moment before. That the ordinary is only ordinary until it isn’t. That the universe is kind enough to disguise its hinges of history, as sandwiches, as fine mornings, and you have time for one more breath in the before.

So take it. Take a deep breath. Finish the sandwich. Feel the sun. Notice the miracle of being here in this moment that might be the last moment of Before or might be another moment in an endless chain, each one poised on the same edge.

Take the breath.

Then answer the phone.

This is what it means to be human: to stand in the moment before, to know you’re in the moment before and to answer anyway. To reach for the knowledge that will change you. To be brave enough or curious enough, or simply present enough to let the future arrive and make you who you’re going to be.

The phone is ringing.

You know what to do.

Epilogue

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

~ Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski.

As always dear reader(s), I hope this piece resonated with you. I have always been fascinated by the concept of the moment just before something monumental happens and this is my articulation of it.

Share with another kindred spirit who may benefit truly from this. As in all other respects, I do hope you keep well and stay golden.

Till the next one,

Yours in the anteroom of everything,

Christine.

The heat this past February has been quite intense. In a country where ‘summer’ is seemingly eternal—nine months out of the year—any respite would serve well. In the desiccation brought by such warmth, it is apparent that most beautiful things lean toward some form of desperation. Leafy foliage resists the inevitable shade of brown, polished black shoes turn earthy, and oily skin is no stranger to restless honey bees.

In a wonderful twist, brown becomes a favorite shade. A gaze upon friendly faces, lit by laughter, worn by exhaustion, beauty is evident. It is wondrously visible. It seems, then, obvious: to look for it, to cultivate rituals around searching for it. What is beauty if not meaning? Or so I think.

Brown things are beautiful—like coffee and someone’s eyes ~ Unknown.

It has become a tempting habit to dress words when journaling. To ensure tears do not sully apparel worn. To hope that I am the vision of beauty even while angry. The pursuit of beauty, and its imagined rewards are most desired in moments of fracture. This neglects a simple fact: that even as beauty is sought, it often retreats where pain is most visible. Where there is linguistic subterfuge, obscurity arises; where purging occurs, red rimmed eyes are a consequence; where you hurt most beauty exists least.

This longing does not abate. It prompts the query: For whom am I curating this vulnerability? What does this pursuit of beauty signify? Is beauty in vulnerability consolation, a rationalisation of suffering? Or is it illusion, a mask placed on the unyielding truth that being human is often inelegant?

Here is where fiction may provide an answer. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, motifs of beauty, power and decay intermingle with utmost precision. Dorian Gray pursues outward perfection while his inner life wastes away. His tragedy is not simply vanity; it is the severing of action from consequence. In separating beauty from vulnerability, he reveals only cruelty and hollowness. In his obsession with preservation, the hues that give life its depth are denied; the very act of avoiding suffering renders him less human, less capable of witnessing truth.

It is especially frightening to arrive at a conclusion such as this: that a failure to indulge in pain is to refuse reality in its varied forms.

Still, for all its misgivings, my participation in beauty continues. I look for good lighting and a proper mirror, detracting from my own sorrow. Streaks of mascara and raccoon eyes, and my word, I am quite the sight to behold. I sit with pages of esoteric words—sentences that pretend at intellect—marveling at my emotional acuity. Rather pathetic, don’t you think?

It is also interesting that this pursuit of beauty is often tangled with the desire to take myself seriously, as though beauty alone could absolve me from the embarrassment of trying, of failing and not having quick solutions, of having a lump in your throat not only because there has been a miscarriage of justice, but because you would rather argue with the principle of it all as opposed to the action itself. As though coherence were the toll for dignity.

Even living wants good lighting. But some days there is only the overhead bulb—the kind that only has a harsh, forbidding glare. It is one that exposes the dullness of fatigue, the unromantic dryness of heat, the surreal terrain of pain. There are no pretensions here, only the blunt fact of being. Under this light, beauty withdraws.

Share

On those days, I feel the instinct to curate rise like this February heat. I crop my speech. I dab tears yet to fall from the corner of my eyes. I pluck out the splinters from memory before offering it to anyone. Nothing is ever truly destroyed, merely repurposed. Even grief is asked to sit upright, to cross its legs, to articulate itself in full sentences.

What continues to unsettle me is that I want more than just beauty. It is that I want to be beautifully understood. I want to be seen, yes, but through good lighting. I want the tremor in my voice to read as depth, not instability. I want exhaustion to mirror devotion. I want my sorrow to be seen as sensitivity rather than collapse. I do not fear pain as much as I fear misinterpretation.

Who, then, is the audience?

The imagined other is vast and faceless: the friend, the stranger, the future lover, the ghost of myself ten years from now. I perform for them all. I offer the best angle of my vulnerability, as though fragility were a gemstone to be held against the light. But a gemstone is cut. It is faceted. It is altered to refract well.

The body, however, does not last in spectacle. And when spectacle is stripped, the mind can feel unbearably plain. Unadorned being has no guarantee of applause.

I know not whether it is romance I seek or some palpable undressing of the soul that I already engage in daily. Some days, it seems that life is like an ouroboros— a constant consumption of self and inquiry, that one hardly knows where they begin and where they end. A self that edits itself in order to survive its own scrutiny.

Epilogue

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

~ The Waking, Theodore Roethke

As always dear reader(s), here is a little spilling of self on the search of beauty as coherence, coherence being a depth of soul. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below.

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in good lighting,

Christine.

Sentimentality is the brain impaling itself on softened memory. It is not quite sharp enough to wound but precise enough to stay ever-present. It fashions itself as the most reliable narrator even as it colors remembrance in rose-tinted hues. There is arrogance in sentimentality, in its refusal to let rotten things persist in their decay. It would rather cloak malodor in perfume than accept that all things tend toward entropy.

This arrogance is made manifest in a myriad of ways:

We curate a positioning of fruits imagined, adjusting what seems off from memory, tracing the edges of our victories while dulling our own small cruelties and slights against others. Even when a situation did not pan out as we remember it, we remain unable to relinquish our losses. We attempt to redeem ourselves retroactively, insisting on the last word with imagined nemeses who will never hear it.

We create encapsulations of defeats conquered and valiant truths accepted. We take stock of all the things that hurt us and try to give them a more friendly shape. Rejection becomes redirection. Failure becomes a lesson worthy of learning. Change arrives differently than we expect, but yes we were prepared. Sometimes this is how we heal. Other times, this is just how we avoid admitting that it hurt.

A convolution of belief follows, a posture towards meaning. Aphorisms do not become trite unless we believe them to be. Certainty becomes our guiding principle even when we do not feel firmly convinced that our values allow us to derive any benefit from life. Around others, we hold these convictions to be true. Alone, we begin to wonder whether all we are doing is a performance for some unseen audience.

There is also a reaping of virtue from coincidence and serendipity. We call it fate when goodness roots itself so concretely. We call it strength when we survive what we had no choice but to endure. We are relentless pattern-finders because patterns are much kinder than randomness. They allow us to believe that nothing is wasted, that even the worst of moments were in some way preparing us for the next best thing, that pain is not always gratuitous.

All these allusions are nothing more than wretched illusions, mechanisms tasked with furnishing the mind some semblance of hope, faith, or continuity. Candor, by contrast, arrives unrefined and utterly uncompelled to give you closure.

For all its comforts, sentimentality makes us poor witnesses. We perform reductive experiments of the past, assigning it depth where there was confusion, precision where there was harm, kindness where there was indifference. To see reality as it was would be to do oneself justice. Sometimes meanness was simply meanness, and goodness was unmitigated goodness. Some things require no rehabilitation. They stand on their own.

Sentimentality is every writer’s shadow when reckoning with realities too hard to bear. It offers narrative where none existed, causality where there was only consequence. It allows us to treat the past as we wish it had treated us. The worst concessions, our greatest betrayals are often against ourselves, and sentimentality is chief among them.

This arrogance is clearest when relationships fracture, and you only have yourself to return to. The world moves on, indifferent to our heart-rending plights. Sentimentality blinds us to the faults of others when it would be wiser to adopt a more pragmatic vision, not only of them, but of our own limits, our own complicities.

It also proves too tedious to rely on sentimentality when all around us is momentum. The luxury to remain dormant in hindsight’s shadow is afforded to few. Most are compelled forward by necessity rather than insight. Those of us who might otherwise do better are left wondering why we do not reap what they sow, why understanding alone has never been enough to produce change.

Sentimentality promises consolation, but rarely accountability. It asks us to feel better rather than to see more clearly. And while it may soften memory, it also obscures agency. In refusing to let the past remain intact, even in its ugliness, we deny ourselves the dignity of truth. It is as Proust states: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

Epilogue

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

~ The Plain Sense of Things, Wallace Stevens

As always dear reader(s), I hope this expressed sentiment in such a way as to evoke emotion. In any case, my question to you is, is sentimentality important? If not why is that the case for you?

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden,

Yours in accountability,

Christine.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

~ Maya Angelou

I was responding to the call of sustenance as one does on a hot, languid afternoon. None of the options particularly excited my palate, but the imagined taste of food was marginally better than staying starved. My phone—slow, decrepit—took its time awaking, reminding me that attention is never guaranteed even when we think it is.

As I waited to pay for my food, right behind me were two fellows engaged in a conversation of curious misalignment.

A: “My sister is crazy, she is fifteen and is trying to matchmake me with her friend.”

B: “Yoh, that’s crazy. Kids are wild these days.”

A: “By the way… do you know what the word conceited means?”

B: “Something like…hard to do? Man I don’t know.”

To my food deprived mind, I found it hilarious. Absurdly so, because they could have checked their phones to find the meaning. I, the curious observer, lingered in that conversation because of the way their conversation tilted, took a peculiar tangent and yet found its own rhythm. Misalignment, I realised, is magnetic. It entices the mind, draws attention and keeps the feeling of being human alive.

I thought about all the conversations I have had with friends and strangers alike. The ones that remain etched in memory are never smooth or perfectly logical exchanges. The throughline is never resolution, but eccentricity. It is the pauses, the digressions, the things that refuse to line up neatly. These diversions have always been moments of expansion, ones that create wonder. They tilt attention just enough to make the ordinary extraordinary.

Walking away from the cashier’s, I began noting other small misalignments in the world around me: A group animatedly chatting in my path, with seemingly no intention of sitting down; my sweaty palms as I tried to balance the tray, and how they suddenly didn’t feel so once I placed the tray on my table; my friend’s boisterous laughter, at odds with the noisy cafeteria; the sudden, almost imperceptible chill carried by the wind. Each minor disruption, an action slightly askew, a gesture out of sync drew my attention, demanding that I notice.

We are subtly attuned to difference, to asymmetry, whether that be in the configuration of facial features, a building’s architecture, or in the flow of conversation. We attempt to correct misalignment, to straighten what is crooked, that we forget that this is where interest, sustained interest lives. The straight and narrow bores. Predictability dulls curiosity. Misalignment keeps interest alive. It gives the mind the liberty to linger, to notice absurdities and to contend with them.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work ~ Mary Oliver.

Silence also sustains interest. The lull in conversation, the half forgotten thought, the space between people on a bench speaks volumes. I had an interaction about two years ago that has firmly pressed on my memory. I found myself in a haze of grief, suddenly made aware of a loss in the family, as I was doing a community based activity.

During this trip, I was alone, in that I didn’t have friends with me. The only person I knew with a certain measure of friendliness was an upperclassman whom we had worked together on a number of occasions. In my misaligned state, I asked to sit with him so as to not feel alone. He acquiesced and sat with me in the silence. It was one of those few interactions where no allusions of romance or attraction would have been made on either side. We were humans, one comforting the other.

The silence and my internal misalignment sustained interest for the duration of the journey. The following morning, I sought him out with a card, thanking him for the brief respite and companionship he offered. Interest is selective and he certainly did not owe it to me. Through misalignment, life almost tenderly sweet. The intimacy of fully witnessing someone’s presence without needing more was not lost to me.

Sustained interest is also a sensuality with life itself. To echo Baldwin;

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”

It is the light that comes though canopy, komorebi as the Japanese would have it. It is the movement of facial expressions on the face of a loved one. It is the comfort offered by one who is neither stranger nor bosom friend.

Then, inevitably, interest moves on. The tray is returned, the friend stops laughing, the wind is replaced by afternoon heat. But for a small misaligned moment, I hold life fully, expansively. I am Atlas with the world slightly tilting.

Epilogue

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

~ I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordworth

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in misalignment,

Christine.

It is one of the most fundamental part of any language: the act of doing something, of continuous motion, of intention being transformed into the physical. In English we know it as the gerund, the suffix -ing. Think becomes thinking. Hope becomes hoping. Live becomes living. The gerund speaks to continuation, staticity turned dynamic. Nouns become verbs, and what was rendered seemingly motionless is suddenly equipped with the wonder of movement.

I believe that happiness belongs to the same camp. Happiness is not simply being happy in the moment but an act we consciously perceive and call into being. (yes, yes thanks for pointing out the obvious)

What English expresses with -ing, other languages capture differently, yet the sentiment remains the same. In Spanish, the verb estar in the present tense combined with the gerund, —whether the verb is an -AR, IR, or -ER— render action ongoing. Take for example estoy viviendo (I am living). The act of living depicts a moment in progress, one that is not stuck in finality.

French arrives at a similar intuition by way of suspension rather than suffix. To say je suis en train de vivre is not to simply say, ‘I live’, but ‘I am in the process of living.’ An action is caught midway with no origin or destination in sight.

Let’s not forget Swahili, that amalgam of old—one spoken across the soil I walk on—ninaenda, ninaishi, does not simply mean I go or I live but I am in the act of going, I am in the act of living.

Notice how the languages have different manifestations of the same thing. Whether it be a suffix, prefix or merely an intervening phrase, to be in motion is to always align oneself with life as it was given to us at birth; always unraveling.

It is here, I think that happiness finds its most vibrant expression.

Happiness as momentum, happiness is momentum. Happiness, I find, resists stillness. We cannot shelve happiness much like we can carry sorrow. We can only pray and hope that moments of joy find us, or that we find them. Think upon the rib tickling laughter you had when you were in high school, or the sensational feeling of one declaring their love to you or the camaraderie that comes with shared joy. Each of these moments shows momentum; whether it be by the one who so humorously shared a witty joke, the one who gathered the courage to express that age old sentiment or the warmth of being part of a collective doing something great. Being happy, then, is not merely sensation or feeling but the act of doing, orienting oneself toward doing.

When we fail to move, despair creeps in like a familiar host. Tis why they say, depression cannot hit a moving target; because stagnation appears to be invitation for discontent.

Before the economic system that is capitalism overwhelmed every facet of human living, a happy life was as Aristotle described it, a life of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is understood as the highest good: a life lived well because one has cultivated the virtues necessary to live a life of purpose and fulfillment. A flourishing person is not just one who possessed happiness but one who enacted it consciously through choice, habit and character.

We, however, are consumed with the dopaminergic type of happiness, one derived from fleeting metrics such as likes, reposts, retweets. We ask not ‘How do I live?’ instead we ask ‘How should I feel right now?’ When the transient nature of happiness is made apparent, we assume happiness has abandoned us, rather than noticing that we have stopped practicing it.

Henri Bergson argued that reality itself is movement. Life, he said, is durée (duration), a concentration of efforts towards experiencing time and participating in life. Happiness, if it belongs anywhere, belongs to duration: to lived time not clock time. It seems that is why we find ourselves lacking when all we do is consume, consume, consume. We are trying to pin down emotion that only survives by moving.

One of the most underexamined enemies of happiness is not sadness but waiting. Waiting for life to begin. Waiting for clarity. Waiting for permission. Waiting for the right version of ourselves to appear. Curiously, you are not unhappy enough to revolt but also you are not happy enough to feel alive.

Much of what we call the modern human condition conspires against motion. We live in systems designed to arrest momentum. Algorithmic feeds replace wandering curiosity. Notifications fracture intention into fragments too small to sustain meaning. We are not bored, we are overstimulated into paralysis. Happiness requires a certain continuity of attention: the ability to stay with a thought, a project, a relationship long enough for it to become something more than novelty. Contemporary life trains us in interruption, and interruption, over time, erodes momentum.

Nothing meaningful emerges without structure. Even when chaos seems abundant, the solutions that arise from it form the structure of hope, the shape of happiness. All we would need to do is mold it better rather than pounding it back into a shapeless mass. We romanticise serendipity as though chance does not need a place for it to fall. This is where design finds its home, pun intended; the design of your day, the design of your routines, the designs of the spaces you inhabit, the designs of what you allow to interrupt you and what you hold sacred. A poorly designed life robs you of movement as you spend more time correcting rather than moving forward. A well designed life does not guarantee happiness, but it makes momentum possible.

There is another fallacy we seem to hold regarding happiness: that happy people suffer less or that they are dimwitted. In reality, happy people often suffer just as much if not more, but they suffer while moving. They grieve and still write. They fall and rise again. They doubt yet still decide. Suffering that moves becomes narrative. Suffering that stagnates becomes identity. This is why we love rags to riches stories, because we like to see momentum rewarded, even when deeply laden with strife designed to remove it. We like to see momentum such as this as we believe we can also have it for ourselves.

It is hard to be happy because we need to move, we need trajectory. It is hard to be happy because happiness demands we reduce distraction, sideline comfort, embrace hard work, often unrewarding work, in the expectation that all we are doing matters in the end. Happiness knows no destination; rather it is to be willing, to be porous to life and the essence of numerous beginnings and endings.

It is hard to be happy because we cannot possess it without participation. It cannot be outsourced. It cannot simply be waited for. It must be done repeatedly, that the taste of it is one we can easily identify and we allow ourselves to richly deserve it. Happiness is in the most unremarkable of ways; in speaking up where you might be silenced, in forgiving where revenge might have been easier, in loving where hating might have been better.

The task is not to chase happiness or interrogate its origin endlessly or mourn its absence. The task is decidely harder; to stay in the verb, to remain stubbornly and within reason, in the -ing.

Epilogue

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

~ Caminante, no hay camino, Antonio Machado.

As always, dear reader(s), I hope this piece resonated in some way.

I do hope that as you move, you are happy. Claim happiness as momentum and you’ll find that life is yours for the taking. Let life not be a deferred sunrise.

Till the next one,

Keep safe and golden.

Yours in the rewarding momentum.

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm - yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”

~ A Room with a View, E.M. Forster.

Dearest one,

It is with most ardent desperation and a hint of melancholy as well, that I beseech your consciousness with this pleading inquiry, ‘Do you ever think of me?’ In many ways, the question itself feels like a form of gross arrogance—a way to believe that I registered so concretely in your awareness as to leave something of me behind.

I want to believe that you meant as much to me as I did you. Oh, the folly of my ways. Here I am bleeding, and there’s not even a mark on you.

Do you ever think of me?

In the height of noontime, where the sun is most blinding in its insistence on scorching the earth, you come to me. I see you there—a mirage—and every time I reach for you, you disappear. You exist most vividly where you are least attainable. I wonder how I exist to you. Do you think of me softly, like heat yielding to a knife through butter? Or am I sharp, unaccomodating, too much?

Do you ever think of me?

I would like to think that I did not lose my muchness in the fervor of my affection. Did you ever want what I had to give, or did I delude myself into offering what you never asked for? Did you revel in the fire of my self-immolation, content to see me go up in flames? Or did you see me fall into a pit of my own making, hoping—maybe— to catch me? I want to believe I simply was, and that being was enough to leave some faint impression.

Do you ever think of me?

Or is it only I who thinks of you? You once told me, ‘‘I can’t be anything more than what I am.” And I wondered then what I had done to mischaracterize your intentions. Were you more than I wanted you to be—or less than I was willing to accept? They say that you cannot find the same person twice, not even in the same person. Was I so averse to change that any other explanation was easier to take than the painful belief that you were simply different?

Tell me, if you do not think of me now, did you ever? Or was that consideration merely a sunk cost, a brief friction against a soul that only knows how to give ceaselessly? I want to know if I was ever difficult to forget, or if forgetting me required no effort at all.

I will not ask again after this. I have learned what it costs to keep such a query alive. I have only learned that loss is often inexplicable, and hope is the error we make in trying to understand it. Hope, I am discovering, is solitary, often self-authored and sometimes profoundly misdirected.

I do not write this as an accusation. I am tired of indictments; they require too much certainty. You were what you said you were. I was what I needed you to be.

So if I pass through your mind again, let it be in the most unremarkable way possible. Let this be the last place I am fully present.

This is me letting you go.

Epilogue

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

~ For The Anniversary of My Death, W.S. Merwin.

As always dear reader(s), I hope this left a trace as it did me as I wrote it. I wonder do you believe that hope is the error we make to understand loss? I would love to hear all about in the comments below, or if you are shy, you may yet find me by way of message.

In any case, I pray that the year is unceasing in its kindness to you. The next few entries shall take up the form of an epistle as did this one. I find it quite revealing and interesting to convey sentiment through it.

Till the next one, keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in epistolary obsession,

Christine.

Plants die when watered too much, and I never learned when to stop giving.

~ Louise Kaufmann

There are many admirable traits to find amongst people. Often it requires just the right calibration of attention, a fidelity to one’s interior life, and the conscious awareness that you need not be anything than what you are in any given moment of time. Of these traits, I would say that simplicity takes precedence. It is the refusal to dilute meaning through unnecessary elaboration.

Simplicity, in this sense, concerns both the conveyance of intent and security of being— the assurance that one’s existence does not need continuous justification. This is the kind of person who does not need to explain themselves into existence because they have undertaken the philosophical labour of self-knowledge; they have accepted that meaning does not always require guardianship and that misunderstanding, should it occur, does not constitute a crisis of identity. They trust both their words and their being. They trust, too, that those who they choose to speak to possess the moral discretion to meet their meaning with care.

Thus simplicity is never naive. It is a wager on reality: a belief that what is true does not require ornament to remain true.

Simplicity, therefore, cannot be mentioned without an acknowledgment of the role of precision. Precision in sentiment requires a disciplined relation to language: knowing what to say, when to say it and how to arrange words in such a way that they will have the most meaning. It also asks to consider to a degree how those words will register in the consciousness of the other person.

Such nuances suggest that a person undertaking this process is not concerned with merely pleasing the other, but is committed to honoring reality as faithfully as their awareness allows.

And here’s where a prescription for the malady that is people pleasing lies.

People pleasing is an act that is anchored to convolution. It is an act anchored to the belief that one’s worth is contingent, fragile and perpetually negotiable.

This convolution manifests diversely. In over-explaining, one feels the compulsion to always explicitly state your intent, to give excuses for not meeting certain expectations failure to which a moral assignment of ‘badness’ roots itself in the person’s psyche.

In over-apologising, one assumes remorse or guilt for perceived slights when in fact there was no wrong done.

In subsuming one’s needs to others as it becomes easier to contend with meeting other people’s needs instead of one’s own. One becomes well-versed in the art of other people and not themselves.

And in introspection based on projection as one becomes educated in how well to treat other people, the introspection that we often need in our day to day lives becomes one that is based on how well others perceive us and how we can continually give that which we do not reserve for ourselves. You cannot pour from a cup that is empty.

This is not kindness but self erasure masquerading as virtue.

Yet, all is not lost if you find yourself identifying with these notions wholly. Lost agency can be reclaimed.

Begin with the willingness to differentiate the roles that people play in your life. Distinction is not cruelty. Words have power and we humans have always thrived in categorization. In the same breath, do not hesitate to demote others as well, if a person was once a friend but is no longer, then why continue calling them a friend?

Similarly, never overestimate your importance in another’s life. You must realize that you are not the only one making value judgements of the people in your life. To accept this frees you from the exhausting work of proving your worth incessantly. Furthermore, one must take solace in the fact that even if a relationship ended, whether platonic or not, it had meaning and value for that moment in time.

Reduce your aversion to rejection. In fact, court rejection. Of course it hurts, immensely so depending on context, but it is simply the world indicating where you do not belong. As they say, rejection is redirection. It is not a mark against your being, rather a re-orientation of it. Therefore we must always be resolute in our pursuit of doing things because really and truly, the worst thing we can be told is no.

Assess how much information you share. And even for those closest to you, you need not say everything. To be human is to always have some facets of you that remain unknown.

Attend also to your intuition. Red flags often do not appear red in the beginning. Like many things in this life, it is a muscle worth exercising. The moment you get an inkling that all you are doing is for people who are committed to misunderstanding you then it is time to leave. With immediacy.

Finally, spend time in silence. It reduces the need to outsource agency on things that with time, solutions may yet reveal themselves.

So may we unlearn the reflex of self-erasure. May we loosen our grip on things and people who do not want to understand us. May we trust that clarity does not make us unkind and that boundaries do not make us cold. In choosing simplicity, we become more of ourselves.

Simplicity is to say that life is finite and therefore too dear to be lived in fragments. And a life anchored in simplicity rather than pleasing is not only possible, but one profoundly worth living.

Epilogue

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

~ Still I Rise, Maya Angelou

As always, dear reader(s), thank you for reading. If this piece resonated, I would love to hear all about in the comments or by way of message.

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden.

Yours in simplicity,

Christine.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

~ William Shakespeare.

We often wrestle with injustice, betrayal or loss. When someone harms us, whether through words, deeds or outright betrayal, the instinct to retaliate is immediate. We want to “even the score,” to feel relief or to see balance restored. And yet, scripture invites us to a different path, one that is both challenging and freeing. From stories such as the Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas, Les Miserables by Hugo to films such as Breaking Bad or the Godfather series, it is plain to see how revenge plays out for the parties involved. It is as Gandhi stated, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

God’s retribution is not presented as an excuse for inaction, nor as a demand that the wounded make peace with harm. Rather, it draws a boundary between justice and revenge. Justice seeks truth, restoration and protection whereas revenge seeks relief through retaliation. Romans 12:19 speaks directly to this tension: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God… ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.’” The passage does not deny wrongdoing, nor does it sanctify silence. It insists that vengeance is a weight too corrosive for human hands to hold. To seize it ourselves is not strength but displacement and an attempt to relocate the burden of moral reckoning onto another person.

When we are wronged, the desire to act quickly often comes from the belief that relief lies on the other side of retaliation. Yet lived experience tells a different story. Anger lingers, bitterness settles in and the mind begins to rehearse the injury over and over again. God’s retribution, then, is not merely about what happens to the offender; it is about what happens within us if we allow resentment to take root. Like carrying a hot coal with the intention of throwing it, the longer we hold it, the more damage it does to us.

Psalm 37:1–2 urges restraint not because injustice is insignificant, but because retaliation distorts the one who indulges it: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers… for they will soon fade like the grass.” The verse does not promise immediate satisfaction, and that is precisely where it becomes difficult. Delayed justice feels unfair. It can feel almost insulting to be told to wait when the wound is still open. Scripture does not pretend otherwise; instead, it asks whether responding in haste would truly heal us, or simply deepen the injury.

Of course, it does not help that we are often told to be the bigger person, that we should not succumb to pettiness because it does not do anything for the injured party. The logic behind pettiness is something that is quite understandable.

In a sense, pettiness is a form of low grade suffering. It is low grade suffering because of the following things:

1. Duration: The extent to which the person suffers often is shorter than the time the person took to exact the pain they did on you. Whatever the case, the relief we presume we would get from doing such is also short lived.

2. Intensity: The petty action may be initially intense for the one who is the recipient or slowly intense depending on the one who is injured and intends for it to be so.

3. Awareness: You know that you can no longer keep the offending party in your life so what better way than to leave with a bang? It is the very knowledge that you might have to remove the person from your life that makes the urgency of pettiness all the more real. Maybe it is a cheating partner, a toxic friend, an unkind relative, a mean stranger. The temporal nature of the time you have together can be a great impetus to exact your petty revenge. In this, there seems to be an implicit form of knowledge that there’s too short a time to do all you had envisioned to this person for the hurt they did to you. It could also be that the person is too dangerous to even exact such pettiness and it would be wise to leave them well enough alone.

Trusting God’s justice is therefore not naïveté. It is not the assumption that everything will work out neatly, nor that wrongdoing will always be visibly punished. It is, rather, an act of self-preservation. To trust divine retribution is to refuse to let another person’s sin dictate the shape of your inner life. James 1:19 captures this interior discipline well: “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” Slowness here is not weakness rather it is restraint born of wisdom.

Retribution is also relational and restorative. It is not simply about punishing wrongdoing; it is about allowing space for learning, repentance and reconciliation. Genesis 50:20 shows us the power of transformation: “God can turn what was meant for harm into good.” Even when we feel powerless, God’s justice reminds us that no harm is meaningless, and no betrayal is wasted. There is potential for growth, for healing and for eventual restoration.

And yet, as humans, we cannot ignore the pull to act, the desire to see justice immediately. There is a temporal urgency in our hearts, a longing to witness the downfall of those who hurt us. But perhaps the point is not to witness it at all but to find peace in knowing that justice is unfolding, even if outside our sight. Ecclesiastes 3:17 reminds us: “God will judge both the righteous and the wicked…there is a time for every matter.” We are invited to trust, not control; to let go, not cling; to live faithfully, not vengefully.

It is especially depressing to think that we cannot be witnesses in the downfall of those who meant us. We believe that if we could quickly be participants in their suffering, we would get relief from all that was done to us. Revenge is as Aang the Avatar said “A two headed rat viper. While you watch your enemy go down , you’re being poisoned yourself.”

Perhaps, you might not find solace in these words, after all who am I to talk about your suffering? But you see, it is in that suffering that you can choose to let go and trust that they will reap what they sow, whether you see it for yourself or not. Perhaps the fact that the wicked see no rest should be something you can find peace in.

In this sense, divine retribution teaches us how to live, not how to wait passively. It shows us how to walk away without becoming small, how to set boundaries without becoming cruel and how to release the fantasy that another’s suffering will heal our own. By watching how God handles justice, with patience, proportion, and restraint, we learn how to resist pettiness, even when it tempts us with quick satisfaction. Like a firecracker, retaliation may flare brightly, but it burns out fast, leaving little behind except smoke and exhaustion. What God offers instead is endurance and a way of responding to harm without being consumed by it.

In this, we can only hope that we receive some respite from the sorrows of a weary soul.

Epilogue

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

~ A Poison Tree, William Blake

As always, thank you dear reader(s) for reading this piece. Definitely one that is a little bit different from my usual posts but here it is. And a collaborative one at that, so thank you for your thoughts, insights and overall creativity.

If this resonated, share with a friend who has a friend.

Till the next one,

Keep safe and stay golden,

Yours in wistful delight,

Christine.