Last night I enjoyed a big bowl of bolognese. We ate al fresco, making the most of this fleeting summer we’re experiencing. It felt like a sign from the universe to hit send on my first essay for spag mol, so let’s tuck in!
You can generally tell how much I’ve enjoyed a book by the number of corners folded down at the end of it. As someone who reads more for the prose than the plot, a page is generally worthy of a crease when there’s a passage I want to return to or a sentence that grabs my attention. Sometimes, all it takes is two or three words arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way for my finger and thumb to wander up into the corner.
Two years ago I read a book that bucked the trend. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Still Life by Sarah Winman but by the time I finished, there was only a single fold among 464 pages. The culprit:
The scale of man - spatially - is about midway between the atom and the star.
The borrowed book was returned to its owner long ago, but I can remember with pinpoint accuracy where the words fell on the paper. It leapt out from the rest of the passage as if printed in bolder ink. One sentence broken awkwardly in half, spilling over the bottom of one page and cresting the top of the next — as if the sentiment was too big to be contained on a single spread.
I’m under no illusions that I intended to fact-check this. I just thought it was a nice, well, thought. And anyway, who am I to let factual accuracy get in the way of aesthetically pleasing prose? Nonetheless, curiosity got the better of me and a quick Google suggests it is grounded in actual scientific calculations — we straddle the cosmos and the microworld, as one cosmologist writes.
What entered my mind as an intellectual curiosity has forced its way to the forefront as a fitting analogy for life lately. Except, instead of feeling nestled cosily between these two scales of existence, my experience of turning thirty has been more like pin-balling between the cosmic and the atomic.
A series of early summer disruptions served as a catalyst for these thoughts. In the middle of May, I caught one of those ‘monster colds’ that always seem to be going around. At first, I was resistant to the “Stop” sign that it felt like my body was holding up to me. My freelancing time-sheet mindset kicked in, seeking justification for taking sick days off work, being offline for an extended time, and heavy-heartedly cancelling my place on a Hen weekend in Bristol. I was simultaneously feeling the lethargy of full-body flu and the frustration of not having the energy or concentration to operate at my full capacity.
For a common cold it felt anything but ordinary, and has had an outsized impact on my frame of mind even still. Spending extended time confined in our flat temporarily shrank my world and magnified the seemingly benign tasks of daily life: constantly popping to Tesco to restock tissues and tablets; the repetitive motion of loading and unloading the dishwasher; the washing machine’s incessant ‘beep beep beep’ indicating yet another load of wet laundry for hanging (not forgetting the laundry already dry that still needs to be taken down). By the time I emerged from my involuntary self-isolation, the lines had blurred between the minor domesticities of adulthood and its defining features.
On the other end of the spectrum, the gravitational pull of The Future has also knocked me out of orbit. I approached my thirtieth birthday ready to exploit what I had learned about myself in the preceding decade, feeling confident (if not certain) in the direction I wanted to move in, yet comforted that there was enough wriggle room to feel my way through it without a set destination. But it’s as if adding another digit to my age changed those sureties into not-so-sureties almost overnight.
Trying to simultaneously navigate the minutiae of the everyday and the immensity of life choices has turned conversations with friends into an unofficial game of Herd Mentality, where the goal is to give an answer that is among the majority. In gameplay, the card might ask ‘What is the biggest thing you can think of?’ and you might have an internal debate between scribbling a Boeing 747 or the sun. In life, it feels like more and more people around me (or in front of me as I scroll through my feed) are turning over their scraps of paper to reveal new houses, career progressions, weddings, and other milestones that I can’t give the same answer to right now. Even when the card in play is as simple as ‘How are you?’, I’m trying to gauge what scale we’re playing at. Are we engaging in candid conversation about the bigness and smallness of things, or are they looking for a facile “Yeah all good thanks, you?” A constant dance of aligning scales.
So, how to find my way back to the midway point — or, as Matt Haig puts it in Notes on a Nervous Planet, to live on a human scale? I started this newsletter, for one thing, which I’ve been talking about doing for years but hadn’t mustered up the courage until recently. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I choose a time when I’m feeling untethered to put down my digital roots somewhere new. Posting on Instagram can often feel like a one-way delivery (screaming) into the void, our content at the mercy of an algorithm that encourages compulsive consumption over meaningful interaction.
I wrote briefly in my welcome post about how I pay attention to the world through words, but it goes much beyond that. Writing is also the way I metabolise it, chew it up into smaller digestible pieces that I can then convert into energy to take another bite. Beyond that, it’s also a forum for relating more authentically with people — something which can’t be done at scale, as Reid Hoffman reflects: Our life is in these moments. Our life is in this conversation. Our life is in a moment of epiphany and delight with a friend.
In this moment and at this time, I’m grateful for having this new medium which creates the space for me to converse with you, human to human. Who knows what the size of the impact will be in the long run but for now, for here at least, this is enough.
Thank you for reading to the end! If this arrived in your inbox, you’re part of an unofficial but no less significant cohort of ‘founding subscribers’ to spag mol. I can’t say it will get you much, but it sure means a hell of a lot to me. If you care to share any reflections, I’m all ears.
Great to find your substack this morning. You might like this podcast episode about being that midpoint: https://open.spotify.com/episode/229WRzlurYBmFPjjTDTV3t?si=w9ZjvNFwQsSHIk5yLLuzjQ
Ahhhh this was so good. The “how are you” question. Can’t wait for the next one