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“What I’m talking about is taking your interests seriously enough to have the courage to stay moving. You can give stuff away. You can abandon things. You can tolerate failure because you know that tomorrow there is more.”

The world, I've discovered, is a masterful flirt. It leaves little gifts everywhere—the way morning light catches in spider webs, how rain releases that earthy sweetness into the air (petrichor, they call it, though no word could fully capture that particular alchemy of water and dust that smells like pure possibility), the particular green of new... See more

More striking, and moving, is the alphabetically ordered, temporally disordered narration: ‘Grandma died. Grandma has been sick. Grandma is ailing still’. Death, after all, comes before life in the dictionary.

choices are like a mini-death, where we lose a possibility of what our lives and work might become.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

And I thought about how funny these tiny coincidences are, threaded through our lives, through even our most inconsequential decisions. And I thought that maybe I am not yet done with intensity, or it might not be done with me. I thought about the joy both of lush greenery, and of being held through the strange and lonely dark.

An essay is not the process of translating a fully-formed idea into words on a page; it is the process of discovering and testing an idea by challenging it with form, syntax, structure.