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?
Cut the list to three items this morning and finished all three by noon, which has never once happened with a list of nine. The nine were never a plan. They were a way of feeling busy about deciding.
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.
Borrowed certainty is the heaviest thing to carry, because you cannot put it down without an argument.
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.
Useful for the mechanics rather than the romance: how headings were chosen, why the index mattered more than the entries, and how little of it was ever meant to be read straight through.
Coffee, then the long task of making a homepage feel inhabited rather than just tidy.
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
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.
An inbox is a portrait of what other people want. A notebook is a portrait of what you want. Keep the second one longer.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.
The same hand that painted the forge painted this. One canvas is all heat and company; the other is all cold and solitude. I keep them together on purpose.
Fourth rewrite of the same small function tonight. The behaviour has not changed once. What changed is that I can now read it without holding my breath, which I have decided counts as progress.
Two kinds of patience: waiting, and continuing. Only one of them is a virtue.
April, in the ledger: more mornings kept than lost. That is the whole report, and it is enough.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Spent the evening sharpening rather than cutting. Nothing was produced and tomorrow will be twice as fast, which is a trade I am still learning to make without feeling guilty about it.
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 worth keeping has ever been finished on the first attempt, and nothing at all has been finished on the tenth.
Unfashionable and correct. Every layer you add between the text and the reader is a layer that has to survive twenty years of nobody maintaining it.
Borrowed a book and found a stranger’s pencil in the margins, arguing with chapter four. I finished the chapter twice: once for the author, once for whoever had been so patiently annoyed by him.
Nothing is ours except time.
Sat with one lamp on and the window uncovered, which makes the room feel smaller and the evening feel larger. Painters knew this. A single source of light does not merely illuminate a scene; it decides what the scene is about.
Deleted forty items from the backlog this afternoon. None of them were done. All of them had been quietly declined months ago; the list was simply the last place still pretending otherwise.
January, counted honestly: four books begun, one finished, eleven mornings kept, three lost to a cold, and one argument I would take back. A modest ledger, and the first one I have not exaggerated.
Everything is a draft, including the parts already printed. That is not an excuse; it is permission.
A tidy desk is not a sign of a tidy mind. It is a sign that the mind wanted somewhere quiet to sit.