I was walking home one evening when a stray line from a conversation I’d overheard lit up a corner of my mind: “We forget not because memory fails, but because we never wrote the thought a second time.” The line was half-remembered, italicized by my own imagination, and stubborn enough to...
I have argued online more times than I care to admit — in comment threads under longform...
There’s a kind of ridiculous intimacy in keeping tiny regrets. They don’t announce themselves...
I remember a scene from a film more clearly than I remember a conversation I had last week. It’s...
There is a small ritual I return to whenever I want to understand a place: I go to the supermarket....
Ideas arrive in odd ways: in the margins of a newspaper, halfway through doing the washing up, in a...
There’s a particular ache I recognize now: the sudden rush of warmth when a song from my teenage...
I have a habit: whenever a thought arrives that feels too loud or too general, I make tea. It is a modest ritual—boil water, choose a leaf or a bag, wait—but it subtly rearranges the interior furniture of my day. Tea-making slows something down, or rather, it makes me notice the speed at which I am moving. It reveals how I steward time, how I make tiny decisions, and how I seek comfort in...
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There’s a particular flicker I pay attention to now: a small, insistent question that arrives out of nowhere — the kind that makes you pick at an idea like a loose thread on a sweater. It could be about a movie line, a smell, a stray headline, or why a neighbour always hangs the same plant by their window. Those tiny curiosities are where I start. They’re not dramatic; they’re patient....
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I have sometimes treated books like possessions to be acquired rather than companions to be kept. For years I read with the sense that each book was a ladder rung: climb far enough and you become smarter, more useful, more accomplished. It is a satisfying model — tidy, measurable, efficient — but it flattens an experience that can also be warm, messy and intimate. Reading for companionship...
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I have a habit of rewatching sitcom episodes not for the jokes but for the quiet moral conversation that sits behind the punchlines. It’s a strange pastime: while my partner watches for the one-liners, I’ll pause, rewind, and listen for the little argumentative threads — the assumptions about what’s fair, what counts as loyalty, what we owe to strangers. Sitcoms are short moral...
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I keep a small ritual: whenever I’m stuck on a problem or drifting through a new topic, I force myself to ask what I’ve come to call a “stupid question.” Not the rhetorical kind—those with obvious answers or meant to be flattering—but deliberately naïve, sometimes embarrassingly simple questions that would make me sound like I’d never learned anything. Over time this habit has felt...
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I found the book in a secondhand shop that smelled faintly of dust and lemon-scented cleaner, a place where time gathers like lint in the corners. It had no host of five-star endorsements on its cover, no bolded "Modern Classic" stamp. The spine was creased, the paper slightly foxed. Its author was someone I had never heard of; the novel itself had been out of print for years. I bought it because...
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I recently spent an afternoon in a small, quiet museum that had no blockbuster exhibition, no flashy installations, and only a handful of visitors. I went intending to pass the time, to be polite to a friend who had persuaded me to join them, and to enjoy the soft light that always seems to fall differently in galleries. Instead, I found my relationship to everyday objects gently—almost...
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Some mornings I wake with a head full of errands, a tangle of obligations and a nagging sense that the day will be "too much." Other mornings the sky seems to afford me a breath: the first cup of coffee tastes decided, my steps feel steadier. What makes the difference? Over the years I’ve noticed a tiny ritual that shifts the tone of the whole day: keeping a three-item mental list as soon as I...
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