Kate

sometimes the most important thing we can do is let ourselves stay blurry. to be unbranded, unpositioned, undone for a while. because real self-knowledge is a slow, unmarketable process. and the lost feeling might just be the first sign that you’ve finally stopped performing someone else’s idea of a good life.

there’s a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much, but from thinking too much while doing very little.

Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.

Almost anything that we are able to direct sustained attention at will begin to loop on itself and bloom.

To take a dark example, if you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.

And you do the same thing with joy. If you... See more

Perhaps it’s more helpful to think of collecting books like collecting wine: you pick up novels you know you will enjoy at some time in the future. That time might be right now, or it might be next year. Like a bottle of Sancerre, you’ll bring it down off the shelf at the perfect moment, when you’ll enjoy it most. That’s okay, even encouraged,... See more