The Endless Mesmerization of Crackling Light

Ruminations on the passing of time

Photo by Sapan Patel on Unsplash

Hello friends,

I haven’t written in a bit, but I didn’t think you’d mind; this is a busy time of year. Hopefully, it wasn’t too stressful for you all. Even if it was, we’re here now, in 2023. We crossed the magical threshold. The clock struck midnight, and we entered a universe brimming with infinite possibilities. The secret is that those possibilities are always available to us. Learning to see them, though, takes some practice.

None of us are the people we used to be. Nor are we the people we’ll become. The average lifespan is 79 years or 28,835 days. That’s 28,835 midnights. It’s 28,835 thresholds to step over. Every day could have been a new year if we had decided to track time that way. It still can be. We treat time as linear because that’s how we perceive it. But what if every choice we make is happening at the same time? From another perspective, we never stop waving sparklers in the backyard. The mesmerization of crackling light is endless. The scent of sulfur follows the click of the lighter as we ignite mini fireworks in our hands. Flaming echoes tattoo themselves to our eyelids as we repeat the cycle.

There’s a certain delirium that comes with staying up late. It arrives just before the exhaustion overwhelms everything else. It tugs at us gently, with humor and the memory of youth. It reminds us that midnight is made-up and that days are only days because we say so. Our infinite possibilities begin to make themselves seen.

Until next time,

Yardena

Weekend Potpourri

• My current soundtrack for sleep

• Here’s a book of Finnish fairy tales and folk tales from 1922

• We might be approaching long covid the wrong way

• If you need something to read, here’s Orion Magazine’s recommended poetry collections for winter, along with all the books Natasha Joukovsky (who writes Quite Useless) read this year