Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.
It’s the kind of night where you miss someone who isn’t missing you back. I’ve learned to be okay with that, I think. There’s a world I still visit sometimes. You’re never there. I go anyway. Almost reaching out, then not.
It seems like plenty of great thinkers have arrived at the same paradoxical conclusion that the capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. I think this makes sense when you take a little time to analyze it: if you need the other person, you are turning the other person into a possession/resource. If you are “full” independently, then that turns love into a gift. You can grant the other absolute freedom because whether they stay or leave does not affect your core. I will not cite the exact hadith, but the Prophet made it clear that true riches is self-contentment. What you don’t receive from the other, the other cannot take. Two solitudes protect, touch and greet each other.
Just discovered a book called Love Letters by Khalil Gibran where it documents a lifetime of deep romantic letters between him and the Lebanese-Palestinian poet May Ziadeh even though they never met. I’m just asking: me and who?
Rain before work, the kind that makes the street look varnished. I stood at the window longer than the coffee required. Nothing was decided in those minutes, but the day that followed was better for them, and I have stopped asking that kind of time to justify itself.
Walked the long way home to finish a thought. It did not finish, but it loosened, which is often the useful part. Speed is good for errands and bad for questions.
The lineage this page hopes to join. Locke kept a formal index for his; I am making do with tags and good intentions.
A thought written down is a thought you can argue with.
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.
Coffee, then the long task of making a homepage feel inhabited rather than just tidy.
Privacy is not a wall you build once. It is a practice, like tidiness, and it fails the same way: quietly, by small permissions.
A good question survives its first answer. If the answer closes the subject, I was probably asking about a fact; if the answer opens three more rooms, I was asking about something worth carrying.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.
Two kinds of patience: waiting, and continuing. Only one of them is a virtue.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Every catalogue is an argument about what matters, pretending to be a list.
The morning does not owe me clarity. I owe the morning attendance. On the days I remember which direction the debt runs, the work goes considerably better.
Nothing is ours except time.
A tidy desk is not a sign of a tidy mind. It is a sign that the mind wanted somewhere quiet to sit.