It isn't clear exactly how a person is supposed to meet with the beginning of another year, and there likely isn't any truly simple way to go about it. People do look for easier ways, and this looking is often both well-meaning and frantic, but these easier ways don't necessarily help, and what sometimes appear to be preventative or protective measures against the inevitable outpouring of a new-year-beginning can in fact leave you feeling emptier and more at sea than if you had instead turned and faced directly into it all, into all of the weather. There are a few things that I have noticed in the last four days:
1. It can be less exhausting to think clearly when looking down at something, or at someone, rather than looking up (as a practice this tends to be frowned upon, but I think it can produce more favourable, even gentler outcomes)
2. Time seems to be, in January at least, a game that we've long forgotten the rules of, so people look as if they are pretending to know what's going on even more than they did before
3. Everybody can probably be placed into one of two categories: those who think they have corners, and those who think that they do not (I'm wary of any sort of categorisation, but this one caused me to think differently about some people, and thinking differently feels like a quenching)
4. Quiet things need to hold just as much of our attention as the loud ones, because they almost always have a better ratio of love to noise
5. It is more important at this time of year to accept with smooth hands that which one might normally try incredibly hard to steer clear of: being wrong, being late, being over or under-slept, leaving endings unfinished, going nowhere, going too far, etc.
Walking as calmly and brazenly as possible towards a whole year all at once doesn't look or feel very advisable, although I know it is sorely tempting to do so anyway, and there are certainly those who seem to achieve the transition without a scratch. I believe that for many or most of us, lying down in the rain is a better option than trying to run from it, and that is really as far into it as I can think on this particular occasion (by the time I've gone and thought into this further, it will be February, and then there will be no need to think at all).
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
Having noted above at some length how important it might be to go more gently during this month, I am moving both house and continent while trying to complete long-time-taking work tasks in the space of two weeks (make of this, make of me, what you will).
One such task is the cover lettering for the Italian edition of my yet-to-be published book, Eating the Sun, which is a strange thing to find oneself doing at this point considering the initial US release date isn't even until mid-April. This being said, I'm delighted to be wanted again in Italy by Marcos y Marcos—to confuse matters they will have an entirely different title, 'Piccolo libro illustrato dell’universo' (as you might have already noticed this translates as 'The small illustrated book of the universe'). Compared to the universe, the book is indeed small, but when compared to my previous two books, I suppose this one is, in some less obvious ways, large.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
These pieces by Polish painter and film-maker Wilhelm Sasnal, which to me alternate between being quietly settling, quietly unsettling.
Images via Colossal.
Several weeks ago I wrote about a small, thin-legged, and ephemeral-looking spider in the bathroom, and having returned to the house after a few weeks of here-and-there, the spider has either grown considerably (breathtakingly) in size, or has left to find a warmer climate. (The fact that I don't know whether it's the same spider or not makes quite obvious how little we had in common, how we couldn't ever find much of anything to talk about.)
The end.
Copyright © 2019 Ella Frances Sanders, All rights reserved.