When do you know when something’s shifting? I feel like any time I’m consciously working on a change, it slips into a new normal that doesn’t feel like much of anything—it’s the unexpected and unanticipated that actually makes a difference. So when do you know that it’s actually happening? And if it’s not, how do you know it’s time for something new?
It’s so easy to get stuck in a routine out of force of habit and even easier to forget it’s a routine at all when it’s like water to a goldfish or a strong sense of self to the likes of us. It’s so easy until it’s even easier to get unstuck, I suppose.
Anyway, here’s a photo of me that @hellosabah took on expired film when I was in Lebanon in January. Ba22oosi.
Maybe nothing really changes. Maybe it only gets rearranged. And maybe the order of disparate things begins taking on different forms over time. Most things just need enough time, I’m told. I’d like to think there’s a shape it’s all meant to take someday. Or maybe it’s all about the permutation. The journey not the destination, or some other more cringe way of putting it.
In any case, I read a very interesting thought today. Chiara Bottici says that most of philosophy is based on an obsession with death—that our very definition as “mortals” betrays this reduction of our essence as beings-towards-death. But this forgets that we are also beings that have been born; that our shared mortality is presaged by a more fundamental shared natality, as Hannah Arendt also realized.
What would shift in our lives if we thought of ourselves as “natal” instead of mere mortals?