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SUN Something happened today This did not happen all at once. For much of life, reality can feel like the thing that keeps ruining the plan. The bill arrives. The body hurts. The relationship changes. The weather turns. The app crashes. The person says no. Reality appears as resistance. But following clues slowly changed the […]

SAT Something happened today I was remembering time with a young family member who used to stay at our house, including the small rituals that made those visits feel safe and affectionate. At the time, the gestures had seemed like ordinary kindness. Looking back, I could see that they had become part of a lasting […]

FRI Something happened today Every dream has seemed too distant, too expensive, too fragile or too dependent on somebody else. Then a small possibility appears. Not a promise. A possibility. That is enough for curiosity to get its foot in the door. What if? Let us see. Maybe. Those words can carry more hope than […]

THU Something happened today During a delivery shift I was carrying an order that included two cappuccinos. A turn, a drink tray and a little bad luck made the moment much less orderly than I had intended. The old impulse was immediately available: criticize myself, replay what I should have done, and let one mistake […]

WED Something happened today For someone who has spent many years trying to understand persistent sadness and discouragement, an instruction to ‘be hopeful’ can feel almost meaningless. It tells me what emotional state I am supposed to have without showing me a way to enter it. Curiosity has worked differently for me. A question about […]

TUE Something happened today Voice dictation occasionally gives me a rather rude reminder that a machine is listening to sounds, not sitting inside my head. One night I was speaking without my upper dentures, and the transcription became especially adventurous. It was funny to see how badly an apparently simple sentence could be interpreted when […]

MON Something happened today Marriage can create a dangerous illusion: after enough years, we think we know the person. Of course we know a great deal. History matters. Familiarity matters. Shared language matters. But familiarity can become a kind of blindness if I begin responding to the person I remember instead of the person standing […]

SUN Something happened today I had been thinking about the difficulty of having conversations in which both people genuinely participate. It is possible to preserve an appearance of peace by doing most of the talking, or by quietly making one person’s needs invisible. Neither gives us the companionship we were hoping for. That was the […]

SAT Something happened today One of the gifts of a relationship that lasts for decades is that you eventually acquire a very large archive of evidence that you are two different people. This should not be surprising. Somehow it still is. We want closeness, and then we are startled when the other person continues to […]

FRI Something happened today I’ve sometimes asked why I don’t seem to enjoy activities that other people describe as naturally pleasurable. In our conversation, I began to wonder whether the question might be badly framed. Perhaps the problem was not a defective appetite but the circumstances in which I had learned to associate certain activities […]