Dear future hubster

 Dear future hubster, if there was one good thing coming out of the lockdown misery of the early pandemic days (erm, first two years), then it must be the reduced occurence of bra-wearing, and my attitude towards free titties (my own, mostly).  I now give fewer fcks when venturing outside without said clothing item (while, I  need to clarify for historical records, I do wear other clothing items) - the number is not zero yet, but it is lower.  Who knew. 

 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, ...