My friend was getting excited. Wading birds are his favourite, and they’d be out on the estuary. Birdwatching is a good hobby if, like my friend, you enjoy seeking focal points, ways of ordering your experience of nature. Giving things names. Yet there’s another kind of life, which is about living alongside things that have no names: memories that can’t be explained.
—Noreen Masud, from "Flat Places," in AEON
(grabs you by the shoulders) you have to make room for new experiences in your life. you have to go through the unpleasant work of leaving your comfort zone, even if just for a few minutes at a time. because if you don't, your brain will trick you into stagnation. you will start to believe that the world can barely fit you in it. but that's not true. it's the opposite way around. you can fit the whole word inside of you. your task is only this: to welcome it with open arms
my year in review but it's the different flavors of tea i tried and loved in 2025
"Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. ...Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. ...For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity."
G.K. Chesterton
Heard this in a lecture by David R. Hawkins: "How you contextualize your life then is how you present yourself to the world and that's what you are to the world. The universe responds in like. When you are thus to the world, the world is thus to thee, and you walk safely through the hail of bullets and if one's meant for you, so? If you come out the other side then there wasn't one meant for you. That is the way it goes. That's complete surrender, is it not? The past is eliminated by the realization that a decent regret is all that's necessary. You can stop ruminating and trying to rewrite the past. Have a decent regret about it and let it go. I don't want to hear other people's chain's dragging. They wallow in the past because their ego is sucking the juice out of it."
i’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.
as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”
small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.
i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.
