A super short story
The Egg by Andy Weir
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Are you god?” You asked.
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”
“My kids… my wife,” you said.
“What about them?”
“Will they be all right?”
“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”
“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”
“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”
“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”
You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”
“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”
“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”
“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”
“Where you come from?” You said.
“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”
“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”
“So what’s the point of it all?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
“I’m every human being who ever lived?”
“Or who will ever live, yes.”
“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”
“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.
“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.
“And you’re the millions he killed.”
“I’m Jesus?”
“And you’re everyone who followed him.”
You fell silent.
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
You thought for a long time.
“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”
“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”
“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”
“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”
“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”
“An egg,” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”
And I sent you on your way.
A few good podcasts
Rewire your brain. Dr Tara Swart on DOAC.
Beliefs are just thoughts we keep thinking - and we can change our thoughts.
Creating a life you like. Abbie Schiller on Goop.
Learn to manage your thoughts and feelings. We can’t control what pops into our head, but we can control rumination.
Stop chasing balance and start chasing purpose. Molly Fletcher on the Rachel Hollis Podcast.
You should have three mentors - and one of them should be you.
Creative Ideas Worth Sharing: February
1. Did you know that an Apollo rocket is actually on course only 2-3 percent of the time? That means at least 97% of the time it takes to get from the earth to the moon, it's off course. The astronauts know this, accept this fact as part of the process and are constantly course correcting.
In other words, your work doesn’t need to be in perfect alignment every single day. Just keep trying and keep adjusting.
2. Publish at 70% (Oliver Burkman)
3. There are two sides to creative productivity: proactive and receptive. We focus a lot on the former and not enough on the latter. When we aren’t creating enough, we tell ourselves to go out and fill the well. Consume more creativity, so we can create more creativity. But I think the key to overcoming / avoiding burn out might instead be to make enough quiet space to receive ideas.
The last time I was feeling super inspired and in creative flow was a few summers ago, when I spent literal hours everyday floating on my back in the pool.
I wasn’t “filling the well” with countless books and experiences. I was just … floating on my back and staring at the sky.
So the question is: how do I get out of GO MODE and into FLOAT MODE? Particularly when I’m living in London and I haven’t see the sun for weeks on end?
(Podcast: Helping Writers Become Authors)
4. Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. - Mary Oliver.
5. “Anyway, that is a thing art does for us: allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permit a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear. Whereas in life, from moment to moment, one can’t tell an onion from a piece of dry toast.” - The Women’s Room, Marilyn French
Believing in beauty.
‘I believe them all, and none,’ he said. ‘I am more than one thing, you see. I am a Hindu; I make offerings at this temple for Radharani. I am also a scholar at the college, discovering another story about the Universe that does not include Shiva and Rama. Which is true? I cannot choose one - how can I, when there are so many? All the stories are true, or none. I find more beauty if they are all true.’
Spirited by Julie Cohen
The Paris Novel by the delicious Ruth Reichl
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl ~~ Self‑Portrait, c. 1876. Victorine Meurent (b. 1844). At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
The Paris Novel follows the story of a young woman named Anna who moves to Paris to uncover the story of her mother's past - and ends up solving the mystery of a long-forgotten French painter, Victorine Meurent. It’s a super fun read and made me so happy!
Half of the book is set inside Shakespeare and Company and the other half of the book she’s traipsing around Paris eating, drinking and solving a mystery. What else is there?
Flâneuse, another
Défense d'afficher, Paris, 1937 by Marianne Breslauer
Défense d’afficher. Do not advertise. And yet, there she is, Elle s’affiche. She shows herself. She shows up against the city. - Lauren Elkin
Your backdrop matters
Drawing my Days, by Jane Heinrichs
“Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is vastly better than crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss
Photo via library of congress, a strip mall in Plainfield, Indiana
On strip malls:
Don’t we deserve better? Humans don’t just thrive no matter where you put them. Environment matters. Environment is determinative, constitutive; it makes you who you are, it makes you do what you do. My father’s best architecture teacher, Louis Kahn, used to tell his students to think like the beams, feel like the beams, what’s pushing you in, what’s pulling you down, and that’s how you think through a building.
- Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse
Leaving isn’t the hardest thing.
“Fact is, there are more than two doors, forgiveness or Kathy Bates. The third door is, you don’t have to forgive at all. You can just go right on living your life with one less asshole to deal with.” - Lauren Hough
On Shadow Work
The Swan, Hilma af Klint
Uses of Sorrow
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
- Mary Oliver
Rules for being human
Handed down from ancient Sanskrit:
You will receive a body.
You will learn lessons.
There are no mistakes, only lessons.
A lesson will be repeated until it is learned.
Learning lessons does not end.
‘There’ is no better than ‘here’.
Others are merely mirrors of you.
What you make of your life is up to you.
Life is exactly what you think it is.
Your answers lie inside you.
You will forget all of this.
You can remember it whenever you want.
Flâneuse
“I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.”
- Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women
“An American Girl In Italy” by Orkin, Florence, 1951.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
This book was delightful! A few favourite passages:
1 - I’m just saying,” Jinx said, seemingly more lucid now, “when you’re lost in the deep dark forest, the thing to do isn’t to get scared of the trees. You have to find your way out again.
2 - You can't tell me that if it was men and a medical decision would result in their penis splitting open and them not being able to hold their pee for the rest of their life, they wouldn't think that should be their own decision.
3 - It really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?
Ladies are quite impossible.
Describing her occupation as ‘spinster’, Virginia Woolf takes out lifetime membership to The London Library in 1904.
She later recounts in her diary of an infuriating chance meeting with E.M. Forster. “…met Morgan in the London Library yesterday & flew into a passion. ”Virginia my dear,” he said. “You know I’m on the Committee here. And we’ve been discussing whether to allow ladies.” Oh but they do – I said. There was Mrs Green… “Yes yes – there was Mrs Green. And Sir Leslie Stephen said, never again. She was so troublesome. And I said, haven’t ladies improved? But they were all quite determined. No no no, ladies are quite impossible.” See how my hand trembles. I was so angry.”
(credit: https://stjameslondon.co.uk/news/the-london-library-a-history)
Image via Lit Hub. Penguin Modern Classics, various editions: To the Lighthouse (1966), The Waves (1964), Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway (1972; from a painting of Woolf by Vanessa Bell), The Voyage Out (1970), Night and Day (1969), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Jacob’s Room (1965; cover design by John Sewell), A Room of One’s Own (1963; cover drawing by Paul Hogarth), To the Lighthouse (1964; cover drawing by Duncan Grant)
A Few Favourite Quotes from The Wedding People
1 - Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it.
2 - She doesn’t see the point in staying alive only to do all the same things that made her want to die.
3 - Some people are like religious children that way, mistaking suffering with goodness.
4 - It is nice the way everyone here keeps asking this, even if it’s just their job. Each time feels like another chance to practice asking for what she needs.
5 - Maybe this is the part of her life when she gets to start saying what she means, for better or worse. Because no amount of truth can be worse than the feeling she got after years of hiding from it.
6 - The wife is the reason the man becomes the architect. The mistress is the reason the architect keeps building.
The Silence in Between
“Mozart said that music is not in the notes but in the silence in between. I think that's where our souls are – hidden in that silence. Evil demanded little of me – it merely asked me to stay silent, to do nothing.”
- The Silence in Between by Josie Ferguson
by Josie Ferguson
Always, on this day
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
- Louise Erdich, The Painted Drum
M.K. Ciurlionis, 1906/7, from The Zodiac
Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
~ Danusha Laméris
Maira Kalman
Horizon
I hope I haven’t already driven
past my greatest moments.
I hope there is something beautiful on the horizon
that’s just as impatient as I am.
Something so eager,
it wants to meet me halfway.
A moment that is diligently
staring at its watch, trembling with
nervousness, frutrated,
and bursting at the seams,
wondering what’s taking me
so long to arrive.
by Rudy Francisco
Image via @well_hello_april
(Fear of) Choice
There isn’t a right answer.
There just isn’t. The game show
where the bells ring and the points
go up and the confetti falls
because you got the answer
is a lie. The preacher who would assure you
of how to attain salvation
is making it all up. The doctor
who knows just how to fix
what ails you will be sure
of something else tomorrow.
Every choice will
wound someone, heal someone,
build a wall and open a conversation.
Things will always happen
that you can’t foresee.
But you have to choose.
It’s all we have—that little rudder
that we employ in the midst
of all the eddies and rapids,
the current that pulls us
inexorably toward the sea.
The fact that you are swept along
by the river is no excuse.
Watch where you are going.
Lean in toward what you love.
When in doubt, tell the truth.
–Lynn Ungar
KwangHo Shin on Behance
In Praise of Mystery
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.
- Ada Limón
