Born Today?
A reading for your birthday. Gemini season.
The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of this cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didn't believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.
Donna Tartt
There are quiet moments when you are alone that feel different from the quiet moments when you are waiting for someone to call you back. The first kind of quiet is spacious and lets you think thoughts you did not know you were thinking. The second kind is restless and makes you check your phone twice in five minutes. You have learned to tell the difference between the two, and you have learned that the first kind is not loneliness but a particular quality of attention that only shows up when no one else is in the room with you. The year ahead asks you to stop treating these moments as gaps between the real conversations and start recognizing them as conversations with a version of yourself that only appears when the social part of your mind goes offline. What that version has to say is not small talk.