Show me nothing but surrender
Hello there, This is embarrassing really. I logged back into this email program for the first time since February and found this. A whole email sitting waiting in drafts. Unsent. So, I've tidied it up a bit and am sending it on to you.
It made me laugh to realise I'd started reading Dune when I wrote this. And now, 5 months later, I am still reading Dune... Ok, so here's what was whirring round my mind back then:
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I found myself in Chinatown on the 21 January, the day before the Lunar New Year celebrations. The fun was getting started and I watched dragon dancers and drummers move through the crowds. In that moment, it made so much sense to mark the changing of the year at the end of January. To have a bright celebration at the end of a long, grey month. To start looking to the future just as the weather's brightening and the year is unfolding ahead of us.
So that was all the justification I needed. All resolutions, plans for self-improvement, new projects and plans - they can all wait for when February arrives. January is hard enough without insisting you develop new routines/become a new, better person/leave the house and go to the gym on top of it all.
As it happens, I don't really like making resolutions but I do like making plans. Is there a difference, or is that only semantic? A resolution is a promise, maybe, and a plan is more concrete?
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//status update
Reading 📚: Dune by Frank Herbert. After years of being slightly intimidated by its epic nature (there's just something about those books that come with a map and a list of names or glossary that can be a bit offputting right?) and it's being part 1 of a multi-book series, I've decided to give it a go.
And this is something I think about A LOT, "Though it makes me feel like a grandmother on her deathbed to admit it, I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it." - The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small
Listening 🎧: The 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' episode of If Books Could Kill. I always knew that this legendary self-help title must be a mess of gender-essentialist tripe, but WOW it's so much worse than I imagined.
Making 🎨: The past few months haven't been productive in any outward-facing, measurable sense. But they have been a time of necessary recuperation, rest, comfort and warmth. A kind of hibernation.
As always,
//Hellen