Celestial maps and the world opening its arms
My friends are stars and moons that made the world their sky.
Endings can be difficult to wrap up, or so I have read from authors who write long form. Perhaps it’s a matter of plain preference, I find beginning a post so much more challenging over stitching it all together in the end. Conclusions, whatever they may bring with themselves, they still have a sense of familiarity attached to it. You know what to make of it, how to behave with it. On the other hand, when you’re handed a blank sheet, where do you begin?
Novelty has its own excitement, the supposed hope for possibility. It brings with itself a lot of uncertainty, how do you know that what’s happening will pave way for enrichment of any kind. What I’m trying to say is that when you begin something, you don’t know how it will treat you, it’s just a caricature of your ideas. You can’t gauge whether its a positive or a negative you account for.
When I started to read “Atomic Habits” this week, the common thread held together was art of deconstructing all the things you do. How easy it is to overestimate the importance of one unintentional moment in time and underestimate the value of all the deliberate, smaller things that led up to it.
Take time capsules for instance, I read an article about it on JSTOR. People think to put down all these commemorative era defining objects into a box, the context specific mostly to them. And you ask yourself, why do that at all? Yablon describes the creation of the capsule as involving “safeguards against oblivion”—protective measures for the container itself to survive, be found, and be opened at the right time. But there is no time better than the one that that object is relevant in. And perhaps, it’s a plea to not be forgotten.
Imagine doing all these microscopic activities, life goes on, and one day you have all these objects no matter how mundane they may be, they’re worthy putting down ten feet under. And that didn’t happen overnight, it happened maybe over weeks, years even that something that unknowingly chipped into who you were, could be materially identified to keep a portion of who you had become at this very deliberate point in time.
Why I talk about this is that I read this other book, its called “Nothing to See Here” and it was a simple, shorter read that completely shifted how I felt about things on a random thursday morning. The story is axised around Lillian, who’s had an uninteresting, somewhat of a failure of a youth and finds herself in a hilariously quirky situation taking care of kids who can set themselves on fire.
The best part was that she remarked on how unremarkable of a person she had become, how she was this splinter in this vast world. And then, one fine day, the very moment came that she wouldn’t like to be anyone but herself.
“Because anytime I said what was inside me, they had no idea what I was talking about. They made me want to smash a window just to have a reason to walk away from them. Because I kept screwing up, because it seemed so hard not to screw up, I lived a life where I had less than what I desired. So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing, not even food or air. And if I wanted nothing, I’d just turn into a ghost. And that would be the end of it.
And there were these two kids, and they burst into flames. And I had known them for less than a week; I didn’t know them at all. And I wanted to burst into flames, too. I thought, How wonderful would it be to have everyone stand at a respectful distance? The kids were making me feel things, and they were complicated, because these kids were complicated, were so damaged. And I wanted to take them. But I knew that I wouldn’t. And I knew that I couldn’t give them the hope that I would.” - Kevin Wilson, Nothing To See Here
It’s a good thing, to be miniscule, how else do you make a sky map? No god made the sky map I attached in the beginning, that’s a human’s doing. And you can only make that when you’re small enough to allow the world to permeate through you, absorb everything it is. I miss being fascinated by the stars, and I miss even more the urgency with which I wanted to go to a planetarium.
“The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.” - Kevin Wilson, Nothing To See Here
Sometimes when you read a word, even though you’ve spelt it out your whole life, it suddenly seems foreign to you. I had a whole day where the spelling of ‘difference’ looked so wrong, I didn’t think it was a word that could hold any meaning in it. While travelling to my friend’s place, the word ‘home’ read as so misplaced, so meaningless in its own right. Thought of spelling it out on wordle to tell myself the terminology existed, maybe if I just put it down on a screen or a piece of paper it would be real. It made no difference. And then I had the good fortune of seeing my friend at her doorstep; all of a sudden I didn’t have to look anywhere to know what a home meant. If someone asks me how my day went or how my week culminated, I will close my palms around this very moment because I could not afford to lose this luxury.