June Love Letter

Life is a seduction game.

It was what seemed to be a typical Tuesday.

I exercised, wrote my morning pages, meditated, and rode my bike. Later, I had a long meeting with my psychology supervisor discussing some cases, followed by a long group supervision meeting in which I presented a therapy case to think about it together. I usually bring a video of the therapy session into these meetings, since, funny enough, I find it more comfortable to be as exposed as can be in the ever-changing dynamic in my therapy room rather than be bothered writing what happened word for word. One of the many invisible jobs of a psychologist.

I got some compliments for my playful nature, connecting it to the writings of Anne Alvarez. In her work, she spoke a lot about alive presence in the therapy room. But most of all, I believe my apparent bravery with coming emotionally naked into these meetings isn’t bravery at all, but rather my innate need to be able to express myself fully and honestly. The fact that I was filming a therapy session I had with a child eliminated my ability to perform completely, creating the perfect conditions to be expressing whatever it is that I was, or felt. Moment to moment to moment.

In other words, being witnessed.

When I finished work, I sat down in my garden and wrote May Love Letter and published it here on Substack. A few moments later, I rode my bike to meet my friend on the beach. It was Pride Month, and they were having a small party on the beach. So naturally, this was where we were going.

I was riding my bike by the shoreline as I watched the big S floating in its orange attire, almost kissing the crystal waters underneath. And suddenly, without any warning, I felt my chest getting warm, and then warmer, and then a hot sizzle burning me from the inside out. “Fire, fire!” You thought I would scream, but instead it spread through my entire body. A perfect moment in which I existed and did not exist anymore.

And then suddenly it occurred to me: I am experiencing the perfect day.

“It is the perfect day. This moment is perfect,” I wanted to scream. But instead, my mind rushed into thinking: how can I make it last longer or recreate it on command? Because in a matter of seconds, it will be gone. How can I customize it? Share it? Teach it? Have it in my pocket forever?

I ran towards my friend, trying to tell him all about it, but I couldn’t quite find the right words. While I was stuttering, “Look, Alex, look,” he said, pointing to the horizon. The sun was about to be swallowed completely. We watched her go, little by little, fast and slow, until there was nothing left of her.

We sat and had some beers first. Our conversation carried into brainstorming a mutual creative project of creating a children’s book. I would write it and he would illustrate it. After that, we went dancing, and then biked all the way towards Jaffa, me telling him a folklore story about a giant beast turned into stone in the water beside us.

On the way home, I kept thinking about zoocosis: the strange, repetitive behaviors animals develop in captivity. Pacing. Swaying. Circling. A body trying to make a world out of an enclosure too small for it.

I wondered if we do something similar with joy.

The moment something beautiful arrives, we begin pacing around it. We ask how to keep it, how to recreate it, how to make sure it happens again. We take the living thing and place it behind glass. We call it gratitude, documentation, a plan. Sometimes it is all of those things. But sometimes it is simply fear, the fear that life will not come back for us in the same way twice.

You cannot seduce life by chasing it. You seduce it by being seducible.

To be seducible is to leave a little room in yourself for the world to enter. It is to move through the day without deciding in advance what would count as enough. It is to let a meeting become more than a meeting, a bike ride become more than transport, a sunset become more than a photograph you should take before it disappears.

The perfect day did not arrive because I had designed it perfectly. In fact, none of its most beautiful parts were planned. It arrived because I was porous enough to receive it. I had not yet asked the day to belong to me. I had not tried to turn it into a system, a ritual, a lesson, or a guarantee that I could summon again next Tuesday.

Maybe that is the trap of trying to capture a perfect moment: the second we ask it to belong to us, we stop belonging to it.

We leave the experience and begin managing it from the outside. We pace around it, trying to find the exact sequence that produced it, as though joy were a creature we could keep alive by studying its cage.

There is a question people ask when they look back at a photograph, an old apartment, a version of themselves they did not know they would miss: How did I not know those were the good old days?

But maybe the better question is: How do you know you are in them?

Perhaps you know because, for one second, you stop trying to make the moment mean more than it does. You stop reaching for proof that it will last. You stop asking life to give you a receipt. You look around and understand that nothing needs to be added, fixed, captured, or explained. You are here. The day is here. And somehow, that is enough.

Perhaps that is how you know you are in the good old days: not because everything is perfect, but because for a moment you are no longer trying to escape, improve, preserve, or explain the life you are already living.

Life is a seduction game. It does not belong to you, and you do not get to keep it. But when you stop trying to capture it, you may find that YOU belong to it completely.

Until next time,

Be Magnificent,

Alex.

❤️