when the pain leaves, space remains. Space we can fill with life itself.
Pasta
No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.
How to be random
When I am in search of some evidence of the freak randomness of my existence, I think of the generations directly above me. I think of my grandmother, on my father’s side, who studied art at Central Saint Martins in the 1930s. As part of her course she had a year’s placement at an art college in Vienna. While there she witnessed Hitler’s annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938. My grandmother was Jewish. And almost immediately after the annexation—the Anschluss—Jewish people were targeted. Paraded in the street, made to clean graffiti, publicly humiliated. My grandmother got out. She caught the very last train to France she could find, and according to family legend was allowed on board only after flirting with the Nazi guard at the station. She was barely more than a teenager. Then, directly because of this proximity to the terrors of Nazism, when war broke out she decided to become a volunteer nurse and fell in love with my grandfather after he suffered burn injuries during the Blitz.
• • •
They had three children. One was my father, who in the 1960s dropped out of Oxford University to study architecture in Sheffield. It was there he met my mother, who had dropped out of drama school in Bristol to go to teacher training college in South Yorkshire. My mother, who had been abandoned as a baby for reasons she still doesn’t understand, grew up with her adoptive parents on a farm in Devon, hundreds of miles away from my father’s childhood home in Sussex, their paths not crossing until they both entered Sheffield’s Queen’s Head pub one day in 1969.
• • •
This is not that remarkable a story. Or rather, it is equally as remarkable as everyone’s origin story. We all come from randomness. We exist out of uncertainty. Out of near impossibility. And yet we exist. So, when you feel the odds are against you it is important to realize that they are never so against you as they were when you didn’t exist. And there you are, we are, existing.
The future is open
You don’t need to know the future to be hopeful. You just need to embrace the concept of possibility. To accept that the unknowability of the future is the key, and that there are versions of that future that are brighter and fairer than the present. The future is open.
Being, not doing
You don’t need to exhaust yourself trying to find your own value. You are not an iPhone needing an upgrade. Your value is not a condition of productivity or exercise or body shape or something you lose via inactivity. Value is not a plate that needs to be continually spun. The value is there. It is intrinsic, innate. It is in the “being” not the “doing.”
Short
Life is short. Be kind.
Peanut butter on toast
You will need:
Two slices of bread
A jar of peanut butter
Method:
Place the slices of bread in a toaster.
Wait a minute or two. Remove the toasted bread from the toaster and transfer to a plate.
With a knife, spread the peanut butter generously onto one side of the toast. Spread the peanut butter with the knife always traveling in the same direction over the toast. I don’t know why. It just feels better this way.
Don’t rush it. Set the mood of appreciation by moving the knife at a steady, Tai Chi kind of pace. This moment should have the integrity of a religious ritual.
Take the plate of toast to your favorite seat. Sit. Compose yourself. Be fully aware of how wondrous it is to be sentient. To be aware you are not only alive as a human being, but as a human being about to eat some peanut butter on toast.
Close your eyes as you take the first bite. Let your worries float by, untethered from their hooks, as you appreciate this living moment of taste and pleasure.
If you really don’t like peanut butter, this ritual of gratitude and attentiveness has also been proven to work with marmalade.
PART TWO
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
River
People