Three O'Clock in the Morning

Stop reading and concentrate on the noises around you,
the noises you weren’t conscious of until a few seconds ago. You may be in a quiet room, but you’ll still detect the sound of some distant equipment, a rustling, a humming, voices—some close, some farther away—whose words you can’t make out but are there. And you’ll become aware of the movements, the vibrations produced by your body: your breathing, your heartbeat, the gurgling of your digestive system.

Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Balikwas. It’s a word in Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines. It’s not easy to translate. It means something like: jumping suddenly into another situation and being surprised by it, changing your own point of view, and seeing things you thought you knew in a different way.

she says that she and I and everybody are all divided beings: a series of emotions, inclinations and characteristics, desires that pull us in different directions, in contradictory ways, and that we need to squander joy, when it surprises us, because that’s the only way not to waste it.

“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place,”