May Love Letter

The things you want always take longer than you think

Everytime I sit down to write it feels like I’m doing it for the first time. Let’s try it once more, with spirit. I’m going to hold your hand when I say this: the things you want always take longer than you think.

But hey I made some progress, a few weeks ago I took my mom to a spa day.

This sentence is far less ordinary than it appears. We got massages, spent the afternoon at the beach, and somehow ended up booking flights to Amsterdam together for next January. I can already feel myself getting cold and it’s not even peak summer. The Alex from a year ago would’ve never believed that sentence. Mother-daughter relationships have a way of distorting time. Years pass. People change. Old wounds heal. New ones appear. And yet every conversation somehow contains all previous conversations. You are never speaking only to your mother. You’re speaking to every version of her you’ve ever known. Not too long ago I would see her name appear on my phone and let it ring a little longer than necessary. Now we’re planning a trip together.

Was this fast?

Or slower than I thought?

How does one actually measure?

I’ve been carrying that question around with me lately because despite all available evidence, I constantly feel behind. My life keeps moving and somehow I remain unconvinced. The relationship with my mother changes. I open a private practice. I build an app that somehow ends up sitting in the App Store. I spend the last two years writing a novel. I become interested in investing and (sometomes I think) accidentally develop an entire framework around it. My life keeps producing evidence. I vowed to myself that I will always follow the trail of my own excitement, to th best of my ability and without expectation. And I do it, that curious cat that I am, playing with the string of yarn the gods throw at me, and it’s actually fun.

So why do I feel so restless?

It comes in waves, usually accompanied by a little boredom. An emotion I don’t feel often and am not particularly comfortable with. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. Because if I’m being honest, the restlessness isn’t new.

I don’t do casual anything. Not casual conversations. Not casual relationships. Not casual curiosities. Especially not casual obsessions. The older I get, the more I realize that every meaningful thing in my life began exactly the same way. Not as a plan, but a little pebble of fascination. A tiny thread. A question. A curiosity that felt alive enough to follow.

The novel began that way. The clinic began that way. Neolux began that way. The investing poc began that way.

At some point I stopped trying to predict which interests would change my life and started paying attention to which ones made me feel more alive. This sounds obvious until you actually date to try it. Most people want certainty. And I’m no different, the letting go was a bitch.

A few weeks ago I went for a morning walk on the beach, that accidentally became a two-hour walk. Somewhere along the way I found myself thinking about ordinary people.

Or rather, my fear of becoming one. I’ve been afraid of that for as long as I can remember. As the eldest daughter and the first grandchild of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant family, you’re a wish fullifilment and a grandiose fantasy. That I felt obligated to deliver.

The problem is that the longer I thought about it, the less certain I became that I knew what ordinary meant.

Who exactly are these ordinary people?

The people who stop dreaming?

The people who settle?

The people who never leave home?

The people who don’t build things?

The people who don’t ask questions?

The people who don’t become?

I stopped near the beach and looked around. The sea was doing what the sea always does. People were drinking coffee. Dogs were dragging their owners in every possible direction. Nothing remarkable was happening. And yet, I couldn’t help myself but cry.

Isn’t this what you were yearning for?

To have the time to pursue what it is you find meaningful? To use all of your different and somewhat polarizing talents?

Enough to wonder whether my definition of ordinary had been wrong all along.

Because perhaps ordinary isn’t a type of life. Perhaps ordinary is what happens when familiarity erases wonder.

Around the same time I found myself trying to explain something to my therapist. Or rather, failing to do so. There is a particular feeling that visits me whenever things are going well. You would think dissatisfaction would have the decency to appear before the achievement.

Instead it arrives afterwards. After the thing. After the milestone. After the accomplishment.

It arrives quietly and asks:

Is that all there is?

I spent an entire session trying to explain this feeling and failed completely.

Later that evening I sent him a Peggy Lee song.

Sometimes another person can articulate a feeling before you can. The question haunted me because it felt familiar. Not disappointment. Not cynicism.

Restlessness. The suspicion that life is happening somewhere else. That the real thing hasn’t started yet.

A few days later, my brother published a scientific paper.

My brother is a chemist and I am not, but I can usually put two and two together. As far as I understood it, they were trying to find a better way to produce ammonia. In the process, they discovered that one material helped another do something it was already capable of through a phenomenon called surface activation. This is the point where an actual chemist would probably be horrified by my summary. But stay with me.

The potential was already there.

The material didn’t need to become something else. It needed contact. It needed activation. A catalyst, if you will. Because maybe we don’t become through doing something.

Maybe we become through being in friendship. Being in heartbreak. Being in cities. Being in conversations. Answering the phone. Being in life while it is happening. Moment to moment to moment.

I took my shoes off and ran towards the water, mt feet curling up in the sand. And jumped up on my back and attempted to float. The water insists it can hold me. I remain unconvinced.

Every instinct tells me to help. I can feel my body starting to tense. To interfere. To participate in my own rescue.

But wait a damn minute, what if I’m not in trouble?

I stop and soften my shoulders. My neck lets go. The water holds me. And suddenly my world is quiet. And then it’s loud. I can hear the wooosh wooosh of the water. The clouds above me are no clouds anymore. They are a family of bunny rabbits frolicking around. Then they are trains going to the North Pole. Later, they are specks of sunshine.

Maybe ordinary was never the person who stayed, or the person who left. Never the person who built something, or the person who didn’t. Maybe ordinary has nothing to do with the shape of a life and everything to do with the way we meet it. Maybe ordinary is what happens when familiarity dulls our sense of astonishment. When we stop noticing. When we stop allowing ourselves to be fascinated. Children understand this instinctively. Give them a cloud, and they’ll find rabbits, trains, and entire worlds hidden inside it. The cloud doesn’t change. Their relationship to it does. Somewhere along the way, we become convinced that life is happening later, somewhere beyond the next achievement, the next milestone, the next version of ourselves.

Meanwhile, life keeps arriving exactly where it always has: in conversations, in beaches, in mothers, in scientific papers about ammonia, in the strange and miraculous fact of being here at all. Maybe the secret is learning to notice yourself noticing yourself. To stay in contact with your life long enough for it to come alive again. And perhaps that’s what stayed with me about my brother’s paper. The potential was already there. What was needed wasn’t more. It was contact.

Now, I invite YOU to the Surface of activation. Not to become something else, but to remain close enough to your own life for it to activate you.

The water insists it can hold me. Lately, I’ve been helping a little less.

Until next time,

Be Magnificent,

Alex

❤️