Where your skates are

 Dear future hubster,
I'm sure I've said it before, but in case I haven't: home is not a place. Although sometimes it might look like a place,  like a moderately ugly orange sofa in the Tshukudu house.

But it's so many more things. 

It is where you're picked up from the airport and handed balloons, water, GT; or where you already have metro tickets on arrival and don't have to line up with all the losers at the ticket machines; you also know which line to take without having to check. Home is where somebody gives you instructions in a way that makes sense to you, none of that 300 meters northeast, but "after the green door". Home is where you get a key, can make your own coffee (if you figure out how the buttons work), and you know you can grab a few hangers for your clothes - sometimes you even get a dedicated drawer!

It is where somebody gets grapefruit juice and oat milk for your breakfast; where there is late-night ramen prepared if you and your jet lag get hungry, where your dietary choices are remembered. 

Ok fine maybe home is at least part food ( shoutout to the good old Luxair cheese sandwich), it is also where you feel quietly smug for ordering un crémant and hearing the flight attendant politely lecture the savages in the row behind who asked for champagne.  

  

Sure, your phone connects to the wifi, but also, you don't need your phone that much, because outside you know your way around a little bit, and inside there are people you want to be with, watching real estate reality shows or playing Scrabble or just gossiping about politics and celebrities and group therapy and sexist poetry and assessment methods.

It's also where five languages are spoken in the house but the only known word for some berries is "ribizli" and everybody understands it.

Home is where you buy extra concert tickets because you know exactly whom to offer them to; where you know the best corner of the concert hall and you know that you might see some familiar faces there; and where the moment you wince somebody asks if it's too loud, too crowded, or if you need earplugs because they know your track record with crowded and loud places.

Home is where you can go out for dinner with some friends and run into others like it's no big deal. It's also where your heart skips happily when you see a place you used to go to still being open after everything; where your heart sinks a little when you hear about places that didn't make it. 

If home is a place, it's not defined by geography. It is a space where you can be yourself, if you know who that is, can think about who you want to be, and have permission to not be anything you don't want to be. More importantly, it's a place where not having the faintest clue of who you are and what you're doing with your life is nothing to be ashamed of or hide. It is a space where everybody knows that most of us are winging it; it's a space where you're allowed to not know, helped in your trials, supported in your error aftermaths, and celebrated for the miniest of wins. 

One day the sun will come out

 Dear future hubster,

imagine that you live in the early ages of science when all the knowledge we now take for granted is just starting to emerge. When all that the community knows for sure is that some times of the year dark lingers for longer. Very literal dark, the opposite, the lack of light.

Imagine that in that early age you can't artificially create light, and although you understand it comes and goes, you can't measure time accurately to tell and predict when. And although you and everybody has the profound belief that after the long dark, light will come again, although it is based on experience year after year, at the core of it, it is "just" that: a belief, a hope. For you also know that it's never a given that you and your family will live to see that day, that the dark wasn't lingering for too long to damage life and livelihood. 

Wouldn't you then, when light does eventually win over darkness, bringing promises of warmth, harvest, life, feel that you have been graced by some higher power? 

Wouldn't then you too be inclined to erect temples, to mark, celebrate, adore the victory that has come every year but we never know if the next one won't be different? Wouldn't you feel, after the longest night passes, at that sunrise among the aligned pillars, that you, we, have been chosen? Wouldn't you feel that it's an obligation to let the light in, to carry it, to guard it for the times when darkness comes again?

Lover of the light

 Dear future hubster,

what time of the year is this? Is it Mumford & Sons season, or is it Tom Waits season? Which one comes first? Do they overlap? 

And if neither of them make your heart sink and expand and ache and glow, do you even have one?

We asked for signs, and the signs were sent

 Dear future hubster,

if you're even a little bit like me, then sometimes, when you're caught up in all the things to do and all the things to be and everything in between, you forget some simple lessons.

You forget that laughing is good for you, that music is medicine, that you might just be one workout away from a better mood.

That human connection is magic. It's unpredictable, it cannot be forced, it is very hard to resist - and why should it be resisted? A person walks into the room and the way they hold their coffee, how they pretend to know stuff about stars and planets, how they matter-of-factly talk about their difficulties, looking at the setting sun, shifts something in you. It connects to thoughts you forgot you had, perspectives you haven't visited in a while. A light switches on inside you that maybe you didn't believe you still had.

The light is then yours to carry. A connection once made will not be unmade, even when the person walks out of the room, the country, your life. 

Even when you think it wasn't that important, or when you think it wasn't enough. 

Especially when you feel they left you with a crack you'll never fill again. Because, you know, that's how the light got in.

A way to my heart

Dear future hubster, 

I hope you know how to make espresso martinis. 

That's it, that's the post.

i carry it in my heart

Dear future hubster,

when a relationship ends, there's grief, and loss, and sadness. For what just ended, for what used to be but won't be again, for what has to be different now.

And also a bit for all the relationships that ended before. It's hard to not think of all the other ones that haven't worked out. It's hard to not think that we've been here before, that there's nothing new in that they, too, have to leave. Here on my own again. 

But then, supposing that it wasn't a particularly ugly ending, there's also that quietly grateful inventory of all the ways that person and that time impacted our lives. All the things we now know that we wouldn't know without them, all the little rituals, the things we now find funny, the person we see in the mirror. 

Here's another person who brought joy and beauty to my life. Here's another person whose life I touched. 

When we say we have baggage, I hope that includes the good stuff too. That we're happy to carry.

And it's World Introvert Day

 Dear future hubster,

sometimes those great moments of introspection and reflection don't happen on the days arbitrarily chosen for them.

Especially if you just got out of quarantine and had to rush through a working Friday that of course included a meeting until 17:15, preparations for a party that wasn't going to happen, trying to find a balance between not being in a gathering that's conducive for community transmission and not being alone, trying to make not too big a deal of the arbitrarily chosen day of retrospection and still acknowledging it. 

Sometimes the slow, peaceful moment of balance, the inventory of what has been and the wondering of what will be happens a day or two later, on an otherwise uneventful Sunday, on the roof watching a dramatic sunset over what is called pretty much the Rocky Mountains in the local language. A moment of grace when it suddenly doesn't feel strange at all that it's 37 degrees on the 2nd of January, that you're sitting next to a giant satellite dish while a colleague is practising My Grandfather's Clock on their ukulele, and you experience anticipatory nostalgia, knowing that you will miss all this once you're gone, and for the rest of your life you're going to be looking back at this moment, this day, this year with the same mixture of feelings, knowing that you're living something unusual but also accepting that it is what it is. 

In an elevated moment of clarity, you might even come to the revelation that "unusual but it is what it is" pretty much sums up life.