Dear future hubster

 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 je...

 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 ...

 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?

 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, ...

Dear future hubster,  I hope you know how to make espresso martinis.  That's it, that's the post.

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...

 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 n...