Dear future hubster

 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...

 Dear future hubster, I'm sure you (and anybody who's ever met me for longer than 5 minutes) already know how much I dislike when people go away. From a workplace, from a city, from places we called home, from my life.  But do you know how much I love it when they come back? And do you think they know?