There is a great misconception that the strongest survive, when that's never been the case. It's not strength, but adaptability that wins, because even the most rigid, load-bearing material eventually snaps under enough pressure. It's the same with control, where the desire to exert control itself eventually erodes your ability to maintain it. If you're driving over black ice, the strength of your grip on the wheel does not stop the car from spinning; rather, it's your ability to turn with the skid that allows you to maintain control. And that requires having a loose enough grip to turn reactively.
The desire for control is half of the survival equation; the other half is the chaos that impinges itself on our lives. The struggle to make order out of chaos has to be calibrated. In other words, control is adaptive when our desire for control matches the chaos we're confronted with. In life or death situations, the drive to control will save your life; it's useful as a reaction to circumstances. The problem with the future is that you can't be reactive to something that hasn't happened yet, hence why openness to experience and possibility - what you call flirtation - is the best way to prepare yourself for it. Control doesn't work, because it treats the future like a multiple choice question where there is only one right answer or path, instead of seeing all of the possibility of optional paths.
This is the reason why all of the great change in our lives happens when we flirt with the future; when we relinquish control. We loosen our grip on the wheel and become dynamic in our ability to both see and react to the different possibilities, as opposed to trying to force our lives down one narrow path, only to find that the road has long been closed.
Always insightful, always incisive, and always intuitive. Thank you, Tamara.
Andrew, I’ve always felt that adaptability is misrepresented as a kind of passive yielding, when in reality it’s one of the most aggressive forms of intelligence we have. It asks something strength never does: the willingness to update the self. That’s why control eventually collapses under its own weight. It refuses revision, insisting the world honour yesterday’s strategy in a tomorrow that never agreed to it.
What fascinates me is that most people imagine the future as an opponent in need of subduing, when in truth it’s more like a dance partner who keeps changing rhythm mid-step. Rigidity isn’t just impractical in that context, it becomes…… humiliating. You don’t out-muscle a shifting rhythm; you attune to it, even if that attunement briefly feels like losing balance.
Sure, you cannot react to what hasn’t happened, which is why the only sane posture toward the future is one that lets information arrive before identity hardens . Flirtation is the refusal to commit to a single interpretation of what could be, long before the evidence has even introduced itself.
If control tries to collapse the world into one path, flirtation multiplies paths by refusing to crown any of them prematurely. It could be seen as escapism, but I would disagree. It’s the only methodology that respects the fact that the future is co-authored, not engineered.
Thank you for reading me with such precision! I feel that every time. My most analytical and pragmatic reader, and the writer I am still learning a lot from.
I’ve read this and entered in a secret chest in my mind where I’ve been stockpiling all the moments I pretended were “accidents” instead of invitations.
Honestly, the times my life has actually pivoted have never come from the versions of me gripping a to-do list like a life raft but from the little breaches in my self-management. The night I missed the last train and ended up walking home with a stranger who became a lifelong friend. The time I said ‘yes’ to a job I wasn’t “strategically aligned” for, simply because something in me leaned toward the unknown heat of it. Or the moment I caught myself grinning at a future as if it had just whispered something obscene and promising in my ear.
Control never gave me that. Control gave me a year that looked impressive on paper and felt like eating unseasoned oatmeal in the dark. Horrible, I know.
What you write about flirtation feels uncomfortably accurate. The future has always shown up for me in the same way people do when they’re genuinely interested, that is slantwise, playful, completely indifferent to my plans. And every time I tried to behave like a responsible adult and “optimize” myself into transformation, life stopped flirting back. I’ve never felt more invisible than when I was trying to be impressive. I can’t even believe I’m writing this here. But it’s true.
Lately, I’ve been practicing what you describe, that subtle tilt of attention, noticing what sparks without trying to own it, letting tiny, irrational curiosities tug at me. And the wildest thing is that it works. Not like magic. Obviously! More like gravity rediscovered.
Your essay is the permission to admit that maybe the most grown-up thing any of us can do is to stay seducible. To stay interruptible. To stay willing, because every time I’ve been bold enough to follow the shimmer instead of the checklist, my life stopped behaving like an obligation and started behaving like a conversation I actually wanted to have.
And maybe that’s the whole secret that you’ve just generously shared with your readers, the future answers only when we stop talking at it and start flirting back.
Tamara, this is everything I needed to read as another year finishes soon.
That quiet recognition that the so-called “accidents” were never accidents at all, just invitations you were too well-trained to name is interesting. I think most people only realise this in retrospect: the life that felt chaotic while it was happening was, in fact, exquisitely choreographed by all the moments where their guard slipped. The breaches, not the blueprints.
When we over-manage ourselves, we stop emitting a signal. We become efficient but undetectable. Life can’t flirt with someone who’s broadcasting nothing but competence; there’s no friction, no asymmetry, no point of entry. Mystery doesn’t approach polished surfaces, it approaches porous ones.
What you’re doing now, that subtle tilt, that willingness to let something irrational tug at your sleeve without demanding credentials first… that’s the real adult skill nobody teaches. Anyone can plan; very few can perceive. And perception is what actually alters fate. When you follow a shimmer, you’re not being whimsical; you’re obeying a piece of information that arrived pre-verbally. This is how animals survive and how humans evolve, through sensitivity.
It isn’t magic! It’s gravitational literacy. It’s learning to recognise when something is pulling at you and refusing, for once, to rationalise away the signal.
You’d already begun letting the future nudge you before you had language for what you were doing. I’m just naming what your life has been demonstrating all along: that the most dignified form of adulthood might be the refusal to become unseducible.
Thank you, Céline, for letting my words into that “secret chest”. That trust is never lost on me!
Great essay, Tamara. A number of years ago, a tall, handsome guy picked me up on the subway, something I was reading, I think. I was so excited. Then Dad called asking if I could come over, I said sure, I'd like to, but I have a date, Dad. I flirted with the idea of the date, but it's Dad who pulled me back, joking "oh, if he is worth it, he will wait". I arrived and Dad was so happy, he was alone, with my step Mom away. He took me out to dinner, a rarity, just me and him. We chatted a long time, he showed me pictures I've never seen, he even sat through the entirety of Strictly Ballroom, without even falling to sleep. We had a great time, listened to music, classics. On Tuesday, he rang me again. Something nudged me to leave a consulting meeting, and disregard my colleagues and whatever else was going on, to take his call. He told me how much he loved me, and how much the "date" meant to him. Then on Wednesday, he was going to buy groceries, cabbage, I think, and was run over on a crosswalk a few meters away. Struck down on a left turn. 17 days later, he was gone. You don't know what tomorrow brings. Life tugs and pulls, follow it. Paulina.
Paulina, this is one of those stories that made me realise that sometimes the shimmer isn’t in the opportunity you think you’re pursuing, but in the interruption that reroutes you…… what a story!
Your father’s gentle tug, that small joke he probably didn’t know was prophetic are exactly the kind of moment I mean when I talk about flirtation with the future. Not romantic flirtation, but existential. A soft summons from life that says: come here instead, just for now’ And how quietly you obeyed it, without making it a moral dilemma or a spiritual decision, as if something old and animal in you already understood the stakes.
It’s astonishing how often meaning hides in the ordinary: a subway ride, a phone call, a cabbage run. We’re trained to look for destiny in grand gestures, but destiny usually arrives disguised as adjacency… a nudge, a shift, a request that doesn’t feel dramatic until time reveals its magnitude. You didn’t “choose correctly”; you responded to something deeper than logic. That responsiveness is the purest intelligence we have.
And what a gift you gave him…. your presence in the exact window where it mattered. What a gift he gave you in return!!! A memory untouched by rushed obligation, a last conversation without the shadow of hindsight, a moment where life leaned toward you and you leaned back. These are the decisions that become emotional frame, they hold the roof up when grief blows everything else apart.
Just like you, I always say the same, you don’t know what tomorrow brings. But some part of you clearly knew what yesterday was asking. And that instinct , to follow the pull when it comes, even if it defies the script, is the very definition of living awake.
Thank you, Paulina, for trusting me with this! You’ve given my whole essay its most human proof, and I’m very grateful for that.
All this made me think that the future is a terrible listener. And I mean that lovingly. We keep whispering intentions at it like it’s a well-trained oracle, when in reality it hears only tone. It responds to attitude, not architecture. Which might explain why all my most carefully plotted life plans died with the dignity of an unanswered email, while the half-formed impulses, the ones that arrived like a mischievous whisper, were the ones that actually materialised.
Your line about receptivity being treated as moral failure made me realise that we’ve confused being porous with being passive. Yet all real metamorphosis is porous. Caterpillars literally liquefy before becoming anything worth writing poetry about. Meanwhile, I’ve spent entire seasons of my life trying to negotiate with the unknown as if it were a middle manager who simply needed clearer KPIs. Unsurprisingly, nothing changed except my migraine frequency.
I believe the future seduces the interruptible. My biggest shifts didn’t come from plans extended in years but from micro-interruptions, those tiny atmospheric anomalies that make you pause in the middle of everything. Once, a single question from a stranger on a train (“Are you sure that’s really what you want?”) punctured three years of intellectual justifications and sent me down a path I’d been too cowardly to admit I wanted. Another time, a line in a footnote, yes, a footnote, the literary basement, jolted me into quitting a job that made me slowly die inside. None of that appeared in any strategic plan. All of it arrived like a mischievous tap on the shoulder.
Which is why your idea of the “shimmer” rings so true, interruptions are the shimmer’s preferred delivery system.
Planning may produce order, but flirtation produces apertures. And I suspect the real art is cultivating a psyche that can be interrupted without collapsing, one that recognises when an interruption is actually an invitation wearing the disguise of inconvenience.
So yes, the future flirts. But it also heckles. It interrupts. It misbehaves. And you’ve helped me see and finally understand that the most intelligent thing I can do is learn to overhear it. Or, to borrow your language: to keep a small, disobedient corner of ourselves perpetually tuned to the frequency of what almost wants us.
What you call the future being a terrible listener is exactly why I’ve never trusted those rituals where we’re instructed to “speak our intentions clearly into the universe”. As if the universe were a secretary with perfect dictation skills. If anything, the future is more like a distracted poet who registers mood and temperature long before meaning. It doesn’t care what we say; it cares how receptive we are when we say it. Tone is the only language it shares with us.
And yes, we’ve completely misread porosity. People talk about being “open to change” as though it were a spiritual manicure, a light buffing of the soul. But true openness is biological mutiny. It’s dissolution. It’s the ego liquefying the way you described, losing its familiar shape so something unanticipated can find space to assemble. No wonder we resist it; literal metamorphosis requires a willingness to disintegrate inside our own narrative.
Your examples of interruptions are perfect because they reveal a truth nobody teaches, the future doesn’t arrive with trumpets; it arrives in footnotes and offhand questions and the quiet humiliations that puncture our self-mythology. The hinge moments are always small, borderline disrespectful in their subtlety, and yet those are the ones with enough voltage to rearrange a life. A question from a stranger is more fate-making than a decade of planning because it bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to the part of us we keep trying to drown.
The shimmer loves camouflage. It hides inside what looks like inconvenience, mischief, even delay. A cancelled train is an existential séance if you know how to listen. A footnote is an initiation rite disguised as academic clutter. That’s why controlling people miss everything, they are allergic to anomalies, which is exactly where the invitations hide.
What you call cultivating a psyche that can be interrupted might be the truest spiritual discipline available to us. Forget serenity or mastery. I focus on interruptibility. The capacity to remain coherent while letting your trajectory be hijacked by something wiser than your plans. It’s a kind of inner elasticity, a refusal to become so self-possessed that nothing can possess you.
Most people chase what they want. The interesting lives are built by those who notice what wants them back.
Thank you, Clara, for this fabulous comment! I’m so grateful to be read by people like you. Truly inspiring.
Your essay makes a compelling case that our relationship to the future has become overly managerial. But what struck me most is the precision with which you trace the real loss, not mystery, not possibility, but our capacity to participate in them. You’re identifying a psychological malfunction, this instinct to treat life like a compliance protocol rather than a dynamic partner.
I don’t see flirtation as the opposite of control. For me, it is the antidote to psychic contraction.
We don’t fear the future because it is unknown, we fear it because we’ve narrowed our own internal range so much that we can only tolerate what fits inside certainty. We have a fixation on control and a shrinking tolerance for ambiguity. And ambiguity is the native climate of becoming.
There is a difference between agency and interference. Modern culture has confused the two. Agency is responsive. Interference is intrusive. Agency keeps you receptive but directional, like a door left ajar. Interference is what happens when we micromanage the unfolding and clog every psychic channel with our demands. The more we interfere, the less we can hear the subtle cues—the shimmer you describe—that guide us toward a future we could never blueprint.
When you say the future responds to availability, not excellence, you actually describe something neurologically true. The mind only perceives possibility when it is in a state of attentive looseness, a paradoxical blend of readiness without rigidity. It is the same mental state in which insight arrives, in which creativity germinates, in which intuition speaks. This is not magical thinking. I call it cognitive hospitality.
And I think that’s the point many people miss: the future seduces us because seduction is its language and we’ve forgotten how to stay linguistically available.
Surveillance kills seduction faster than certainty ever could. This is why so many people cling to rigid planning. They’ve never been taught how to trust themselves in the wildness between steps.
Your essay makes seduction sound mythic (only you can do that), and it is, but it’s also deeply pragmatic. A flirtatious orientation to the future increases adaptability, emotional range, and cognitive flexibility. It makes us more perceptive and less brittle. It’s the presence of inner spaciousness.
The future leans in constantly, but most people are so defended by productivity dogma and fear-based discipline that they can’t register the temperature shift.
We often accuse life of being silent when, in fact, we’ve padded every psychic surface against the tap of possibility.
What I admire the most in your confession is its practicality disguised as poetry. You’re advocating a stance that is both erotic and strategic, so Museguided I would say. Strategy in the evolutionary sense where sensitivity is an advantage, and responsiveness is intelligence.
Your piece is my reminder that the question is not “How do I get what I want?” but “How do I stay permeable enough to recognize what’s calling me?” I’ve just written it down in my notebook. And I’ll see it every day.
In the end, the future doesn’t choose the disciplined, it chooses the attentive. The ones who can feel the room shift (I still remember your essays about Rooms, what an incredible one) who can sense invitation in the quiet, who can resist the seduction of certainty long enough to be seduced by possibility.
You’ve written a theology of the gaze between now and not-yet.
And your point is amazing: the future doesn’t need obedience but reciprocity, someone willing to lean.
And some days, that willingness is the bravest form of intelligence we have.
Tamara, yet another memorable essay that makes my mind expand, enriching my soul and life perception. Thank you.
What you name as “psychic contraction” is exactly the pathology I keep seeing everywhere, that chronic tightening of the inner world until only certainty feels tolerable. It’s astonishing how much suffering comes from our refusal to widen the internal aperture through which the unknown must pass. We didn’t lose mystery; we lost range. And a life with reduced range can only metabolise the most predictable forms of experience, which is why so many people mistake numbness for stability.
Your distinction between agency and interference is one of the most accurate psychological diagnostics I’ve read in a long time. What we call “taking control” is often just emotional vandalism, kicking down the door of a moment that was meant to unfold more subtly. Real agency, the kind that moves life rather than muting it, is almost architectural: it creates openings, not barricades. The world responds much more when we stop trying to choreograph it and instead cultivate the ability to register its cues.
And yes, cognitive hospitality….. again, most people don’t realise how little of their own mind they actually inhabit, everything is partitioned by vigilance, performance, or self-surveillance. No wonder insight rarely arrives. Intuition needs oxygen, not a taskmaster. The mind only becomes perceptive when it’s slightly loosened, when it isn’t bracing against the next expectation. That looseness is not laziness but intellectual invitation. It’s how perception grows teeth.
What you say about surveillance killing seduction is, in my view, the secret epidemic of our era. We’re monitoring ourselves to death. Hyper-awareness has replaced self-awareness. It’s impossible to flirt with the future when you’re busy policing your own spontaneity. At some point, rigidity turns into a psychic gag order. And then people wonder why life won’t speak to them…. How could it when they’ve installed so much internal monitoring that no whisper can get through?!?!
The evolutionary angle you point to is the part most people never see: flirtation is a survival method. Sensitivity is intelligence. Responsiveness is strategy. This is why I’ve always been suspicious of those who worship discipline above all else, although I am one of the most disciplined people you’ll see. But they tend to be exquisitely prepared for everything except the thing that actually happens.
Thank you for the generosity of this comment, Alexander, I feel it sharpened the essay’s spine!
Pervious. I love that you used that word. I kept rolling it around it my mind until it finally hit me - it's the opposite of impervious. Impervious is a word I remember reading from a fairly young age. It's a fairly common word. I'm not sure your essay isn't the first time I've seen pervious actually used in anything other than a spelling bee! And I remember well the hard edges of reading the word impervious. I can feel the difference viscerally in their meanings by hearing the sound of each word - one hard, one soft.
Pervious, curious, improvisation, flirtation - there's a lightness to all of them, an energy that gives the game away as to what they mean, their essence or presence in your life, and how it can impact you.
I'm in a wrestling match right now with the future, and if I'm reading you correctly, you're suggesting a dance might be more appropriate? My next step is clear, it's the one after that I thought I understood. But when I'm wrong, the lightness is gone, the heavy, dark worry descends. A reminder - not to be irresponsible - but to lighten up, relax, and remind myself I don't have to decide yet. Yes, people think I'm nuts because I don't know what I'm doing or where I'll be a little more than two weeks away. I think I'm nuts when I see that the choice I thought I'd make would have pushed me to the financial limit. I backed away from planning too far ahead (!) and things lightened up, other ideas opened up, and I've not yet decided, because I know there are other options, too.
I remember in 2019 leaving for Spain to walk the Camino with 25 handwritten pages of notes with plans for how far I'd go, where I'd stop for the night, what albergues were best, options if those didn't work out. 25 pages that ended up being thrown out, because after a week I flew to Ireland and spent the remainder of my Camino hopscotching my way through Ireland, changing plans when a hurricane showed up, or I wanted to go back to see the woodcarver who became my Camino muse.
I'm not always comfortable with being pervious. I'm not always comfortable being impervious. Hmmm. Guess the truth is, I'm not always comfortable. So if I can get comfortable with discomfort, then pervious is clearly the option overflowing with possibilities. All I can do is keep remembering to lighten up.
What I like about your meditation on “pervious” is that you’ve stumbled onto something most people never notice: the language we use for our inner lives has been colonised by militaristic metaphors. “Impervious”, “shielded”, “guarded”, “fortified”. We learned, very young, to associate safety with hardness. No wonder “pervious” feels like a rare visitor… softness has been treated like a liability rather than a capacity.
What you discover, though, is that perviousness isn’t the absence of strength, on the contrary, it underlines the presence of permeability. It’s the difference between a window and a bunker. A window isn’t weak because it lets light in, it would be absurd to claim that. And yet, emotionally, we’ve been trained to praise the bunker!
Your wrestling match with the future is entirely familiar. I’ve never once seen someone “win” that fight because the future doesn’t respond to force. A dance is a better metaphor, yes, but even that suggests a predictable rhythm, and sometimes the rhythm is nothing more than a shift in air pressure that your intuition feels before your plans can make sense of it.
What you experienced with your Camino notes is exactly what I mean when I talk about flirtation: the moment the world proved that it had more imagination than your itinerary. You didn’t fail by abandoning the plan, the plan itself failed by being too small, too literal, too certain. A hurricane has better comedic timing than any spiritual teacher, right?
Being pervious is staying relational with life even when uncertainty is inconvenient.
If you wait to feel comfortable before allowing permeability, you will be waiting forever. Comfort is not the prerequisite; it’s the byproduct of remembering, again and again, that the world expands for people who don’t treat every unknown as a threat.
You said it perfectly without meaning to:
you’re not comfortable with perviousness and you’re not comfortable with imperviousness , which means you’re trying to develop range. Range is where intelligence lives.
Lightening up is a refusal to suffocate possibility before it can even introduce itself. And the fact that things opened the moment you backed away from overplanning tells you everything, the future had been trying to get your attention; it just needed you to loosen your grip long enough to hear it knock.
Thank you for this reflection, Doc, the honesty in it is its own kind of permeability!
Beautiful? I was very much in my physics mind where I’m always cognizant of Chaos and Complexity theories and how I swim in a sea of uncertainty where I’m the most comfortable and feel most alive.
Measuring is what I learned getting my undergrad degree in Chemistry, realizing it bored me to death. Calculating, computing, measuring with instruments and equations as my supple inner world was being desiccated into dried wood.
How do you find time to sleep, Tamara? 😗😗 Your output (for lack of a better word!) is endless and wonderful. As ever, printed off to read this evening. I love your work, it works my brain hard and takes to to places I know but have never recognised before. Again, many thanks.
If you want me to be totally honest… I’m an insomniac. I sleep three-four hours a night. Story of my life. And I’m very disciplined with everything else.
Then another truth, I don’t “produce”, I metabolise. I write when something rearranges my nervous system and refuses to leave. It’s the pull, not the plan, that keeps the work coming.
Thank you for printing it out and giving it the kind of attention that can’t be performed on a screen, Jeremy!
From the very outset of your essay, Tamara, you employ uncommonly long sentences. I like that, because it makes your writing more interesting. And, unintentionally perhaps, filters out those faux readers who’d sooner react swiftly, with an X-like retort. Paragraph-length sentences are often prerequisite for expressing complex ideas.
I was often chastised at school & uni for using long sentences. I was forced to crew-cut 36 words to six. The result was that they missed my point, largely due to laziness & impatience I expect, but also due to lack of interest & sometimes even low intelligence.
I raise the matter of sentence length because I believe that it signals a preparedness to “lean” to a less predicable future response from readers. And I suspect, Tamara, that your writing style is not merely instinctive, but intentional. I may of course be wrong.
And yes, I’m off on one of my adventurous, come-what-may, tangential responses to your essay yet again. It’s one way I “lean” into a future of possibilities.
I engage in other unstructured ways of opening to possible futures: eg, imagining what I’d like to be doing, in say five or ten years, if I had unlimited funds. Often the result is surprisingly humble: the Rolls Royce Cullinan or Bentley Bentayga are nowhere to be seen.
I know of many people who’ve been open to more fulfilling futures, & have ‘fled’ their often highly paid, even prestigious, yet oppressively stifling careers, to live their life the way only they can. Far from regret, they usually find joy in their freedom, albeit often even relatively impoverished, financially.
I’m going through that decision now, having had an offer on my Melbourne apartment, deciding whether to move to UK or Poland, despite all their problems, because that’s where my heart is, likely because that’s where most of my family are, & because I love Britain & Europe. Australia is very nice, clean & comfortable, but I feel as if I’m in exile here. That you chose Paris, fully aware I expect of the problems she faces, is inspiring to me.
What you call “tangential” is, to me, the mark of someone who actually thinks. Readers who follow the momentum of an idea instead of waiting for a punchline are rare because contemporary reading culture rewards speed, not depth. Long sentences act as a kind of border control: those who want to skim hit a wall, and those who are willing to breathe inside complexity are invited through.
And yes, sometimes the length is intentional, other times it’s natural. When I do it intentionally it’s not an aesthetic flex, but a structural necessity. Certain ideas refuse to be diced into minimalist pellets. A long sentence is sometimes the only container spacious enough to hold contradiction without amputating nuance. When teachers force brevity onto everything, they teach reduction. There’s a difference! Some truths must be walked through, not bullet-pointed.
Your instinct to “lean” toward the future through imagination is a kind of psychological reconnaissance. People dismiss those exercises as fantasy, but they are diagnostic tools. When you imagine yourself with unlimited resources and discover that the fantasy is modest, you reveal the structure of your actual longing. Wealth exaggerates desire. It doesn’t invent it. The fact that your imagined life is humble tells you exactly where your interior compass is pointing.
As for the people who fled prestigious careers to reclaim their own aliveness, well… that pattern is almost universal once someone stops performing for the approval of systems that were never designed for their flourishing. The “impoverishment” that follows is usually just the shedding of external measurement. The joy that emerges is the return of ownership over one’s days. And days, not titles, are what life is actually made of!!!
Your own crossroads… Melbourne or Poland or the UK… what an existential dilemma! Where does your identity breathe? Where does your past knock from? Where do you stop feeling like a guest in your own biography? Australia may be orderly, comfortable, bright but comfort becomes exile when it doesn’t reflect the truth of one’s belonging.
I didn’t choose Paris because it was easy or sensible. I chose it because something in me refused to feel exiled any longer. Every city has problems; what matters is whether its problems feel like noise or like home. That is the difference between living somewhere and living FROM somewhere.
Whatever you decide, choose the place that feels like your own untranslatable sentence, the one too long for anyone else’s rubric, but unmistakably yours :)
And thank, Russell, you for reading me with your usual intellectual generosity! Few people can understand, accept and love my Proustian way of expressing ideas.
Well, Tamara, I didn’t think of my motivations as Proustian, but of course they are. Even at 14, when my Great Aunt died, I went to her photos first, & my mother to her books. My father & sister were less interested. Those heirloom documents were of little interest to her children.
Personality appears to be a critical element in this. The most intensely exciting time in my life was not when I had my first physical romantic encounter in 1978, but when I was about to travel ‘overseas’. I could hardly sleep for days, with the excitement of it all. Magnified by travelling the Trans Siberian in 1983, through lands my father fled in WWII.
My first experience of Paris was in 1991. It was superb.
In hindsight, my always having an historical focus, clearly points to the way I should lean. Thus being a trillionaire in Dubai would be of little appeal.
I frequently think that, if we are not prepared to be ourselves, no one can be us for us. We then cease to exist, as a person.
I recall Steve Jobs saying that with money, he could pay others to do everything for him, except be sick for him.
Similarly, most of my friends have little patience with matters of depth. That’s good to a point, but….
You mention generosity. I know of no one other than you, Tamara, who possesses the discipline, intellect & generosity to take the time to respond to strangers on line with the understanding you do.
I have little time for mutual praise sessions which resemble Hollywood awards ceremonies, but the sessions on Museguided are about understanding & philosophical enrichment, not praise.
Flirting, inviting, extending a hand to the Universe, all these things enable us to play with, not control, our lives. Reading this makes me think that’s the entire point, that our existence arises through flirtation itself, a dance with the unknown, and we invite a co-creation to emerge as we live through life. I agree with all of this Tamara, and relate to your point about control (which all of us have been locked into at some point). To control is to suffocate; to flirt is to loosen up, to open up to the life circulating before us. To trust a little, to hope for the possible.
The ego likes to control, the soul loathes it. I love how you you’ve used the word flirting here, because it suggests all sorts of things — openness, play, dare, courage. Flirting is undeniably human, very in the moment, but in a weird way, how we speak about the future is very inhuman, controlled, 💯 logical, often missing feeling and evolution. So much to think about here! P.s Paris has been on my mind lately, and so I enjoyed your reference to the city. It’s far easier to flirt with the future in a place that pulls you in like Paris than in most other cities…
I read your comment and I realise that we often talk about “playing with life” as though it were a whimsical indulgence, when in reality it’s the most evolutionarily sound strategy we possess. Every artistic, scientific, and spiritual breakthrough in human history came from the audacity to court the unknown. Control is what we use to maintain what already exists; flirtation is how we generate what never has.
We always think the same, Joanna, the ego loves control because it’s predictable. The ego would rather live in a dead narrative it understands than a living one it cannot script. The soul, however, has no patience for that kind of stagnation. It wants improvisation, friction, the risk that sharpens perception rather than numbs it.
What nobody admits is that flirtation is trust in motion, I see it as a spiritual mechanic: you lean forward, life leans back toward you, and suddenly you’re co-authoring something neither of you could have written alone.
And yes, Paris….. Paris makes flirtation feel like a civic duty :)
It’s one of the few cities that refuses to let you forget you have a pulse. Some places demand efficiency; Paris demands aliveness. No wonder the future feels more seductive there, the city itself is permanently tilting toward what might be. My first and last love.
Thank you, Joanna, for reading with such sensitivity and imagination, it always shows!
Thank you Tamara! This piece is so timely, I think we all need a reminder that life itself is a path of play. And yes! “Flirtation is how we generate what never has.” Ahhh you’re so right about Paris! I lived there briefly a decade ago, maybe it’s time to spend more time over there. Although the European continent is so much more flirtatious as a whole than the U.K. 😜
What people forget is that play isn’t childish at all, I see it as the mind operating at its highest bandwidth. When you’re in a state of play, you’re improvising, perceiving, responding, adapting. There’s more intelligence in that than in any rigid five-year plan. The reminder isn’t “be lighthearted”, it’s “stop mistaking seriousness for depth.” Some of the most serious lives I’ve ever witnessed were unbearably small.
And yes…. Paris. My city doesn’t flirt; it compels. Europe in general is more permissive toward spontaneity, less performative efficiency, more ambient invitation. The U.K. has its charms, but it often asks you to apologise for wanting enchantment :)
Thank you for your warmth, Joanna! And come back to Paris!
This notion of play as being at the highest bandwidth of the mind, is confirmed in a most memorable event in an experience at a workshop with Patricia Sun during the "world symposium on humanity conference." Her vocal tonations raised my awareness through a rainbow energy field and thereafter in a lucid frequency zone all I was able to do was be with the children at the conference, in their play area, and be, at play!
I really liked this. It is amazing how your thoughts weave in and out of the work I am doing on Leadership. It motivated me to put together my own manifesto, if you will.
I want to stop treating the future like a project plan and start relating to it like a presence. Not a problem to solve, but a gaze in the room—a quiet intelligence watching how I move. When I hold it that way, the question shifts. It’s no longer “How do I force my life into the result I want?” but “What is leaning toward me, and am I still capable of leaning back?” The future becomes less a destination and more a relationship, one that answers not to my control but to my responsiveness.
When I look honestly at what has actually changed me, almost none of it came from strategy. The hinge moments didn’t arrive because I was finally disciplined enough, optimised enough, or sufficiently “ready.” They showed up like a shimmer at the edge of attention—a city that felt like a secret addressed to me, a person whose presence rearranged my breathing, an idea that wouldn’t stop tapping at the window of my thoughts. My real life has unfolded less through execution than through receptivity. The skill I need, then, is not endless tightening of control, but the capacity to remain reachable.
Desire, in that light, ceases to be a liability and becomes a form of intelligence. Ambition, stripped of coercion, is desire with stamina. The question is not whether desire is perfectly accurate—nothing is—but whether I will let it speak before I smother it under respectability and fear. What draws me, what quickens my pulse, what quietly refuses to leave me alone: these are not embarrassing glitches to suppress. They are directional signals. I don’t have to obey every one, but I do have to listen. Desire is a navigation system that works only if I stop apologizing for having it.
Flirtation becomes the stance that ties this together. Not the cheap, manipulative parody of seduction, but a way of knowing: moving toward what glimmers without demanding guarantees, holding ambiguity long enough for it to reveal its texture. To flirt with the future is to say, “I am here, alert and unarmoured, willing to be altered.” It is the posture of approach rather than conquest. It doesn’t abandon agency; it refuses the fantasy that mastery over outcomes is the highest form of power. The most interesting things I will ever do will probably begin as a slight, almost ridiculous lean toward something I cannot yet defend with reasons.
Failure is part of this. Sometimes I will lean toward a possibility, and it will evaporate. Sometimes I will misread the shimmer. Those moments are painful, but they are also calibration. They refine my taste, sharpen my discernment, and expose the difference between what I truly want and the performances of wanting I’ve inherited. The greater danger is not failed flirtation with life, but successful self-enclosure: building a fortress of plans so watertight that nothing unscripted can get in, and then mistaking that fortress for a well-lived life.
So the code, as it crystallises, is demanding and straightforward: I will value responsiveness over rigidity. I will treat desire as data. I will protect a zone of permeability in myself, even when disappointment tempts me to harden. I will let slight shimmers count as real information, not dismiss them as irrational noise. I will use plans as tools, not altars. I will allow myself to be surprised—not only by catastrophe, but by possibility. I will measure “being on the right track” less by how closely reality obeys my blueprint and more by whether I still feel capable of being moved.
If the future is watching, I don’t want it to see a foreman supervising a construction site of predetermined outcomes. I want it to see a co-conspirator: someone who listens, who leans, who risks approach without demanding certainty as the entry fee. Someone who refuses to live as the project manager of fate and chooses instead to be its willing accomplice. In that choice—small, repeated, imperfect—I suspect most of what we call aliveness resides.
I really love this piece Tamara. As someone who used to be a devoted “manifester,” I’ve found myself shying away from that practice.
Sometimes I still dabble, but always with the caveat of “this or something better.” For the most part though, I believe the universe knows better than I do the possibilities that will most enliven me. It’s like that Christmas Carol I sang as a child with the line, “Bring for me dear Santa Clause what you think is best.”
At the same time, I still like to have a plan. For me a plan serves like a safety net. I dance better on the high wire if I feel a plan beneath me. The plan helps me relax, take risks, and then receive.
There are many times I find that the plan is pure fiction, and my life will turn on a dime. Sometimes the most catastrophic changes become the most delightful with time.
I suppose I’m not quite as daring as many of you. Complete uncertainty can cause me to freeze. I recognize my plans will often change, but simply having one, for some reason, helps to set me free.
Tamara, I marvel at the fruit that flows from your interior life. Your capacity to explore ordinary human experience from a perspective both poetic and philosophical never fails to stimulate the imagination of your readers. I also very much appreciate how you incorporate visual examples of your insights, your communication is multifaceted and extraordinarily prolific. Thank you so much for sharing your literary gifts on Substack. Your weekly essays and brief interjections are a treasure!
What moves me the most in your comment is your generosity and the fact that you recognise where the work actually comes from. People assume writing is an act of expression, but for me it’s an act of excavation. I’m not producing fruit so much as digging through the compost of my own contradictions and finding something alive underneath. The interior life is a workshop, a fault line, sometimes a battlefield. Whatever clarity emerges is usually hard-won.
As for being prolific, that’s just because I stopped treating the inner world as a storage room and started treating it as a living collaborator. I don’t sit down to “produce content”. I listen for what refuses to stay quiet.
Thank you, Jim, for reading me with incredible attentiveness! It’s rare to be seen for the mechanics behind the work.
Get it. I was insomniac for years. thanks to a late middle-age supercrisis - which I soon realised was a super opportunity to change my life. So I did. Helped by significant and regular worhk with the sacred medicines.
Now sleep 8 hours most nights, and feel thankful it. And thankful that you have no choice but to write, write, write! For you, and for all your readers.
Tamara. This is spiritual annihilation of biblical strength, nothing left living, complete cleansing of the land. I believe this is your greatest achievement to date. Substack called it a 17 minute read; it took me an hour. Every paragraph had to be digested on its own terms. If I moved on, I wasted my time. I was inevitably called back to the previous paragraph to read it again, to listen to its heartbeat again, to hear its angel's song again. One paragraph forward, two back.
Is it your best writing? Hell, I don’t know. Everything you do is well written. Everything slays. But I do know this: the edges of your voice, the clarity of your truth, are here so sharp they soften the blade’s slice. It penetrates and the flesh rejoices in its cut. I enter this piece as at an altar, a holy of holies. As a devotee? Of course. But utterly unclean, of the desert, wild. I bring no Issac, son of my loins, to sacrifice, no lamb to slaughter, no grain of Cain even, only the beating heart which you have cut out and I lay it before what you have done here with quiet pride. To know I have read and heard, tasted and savored, seen and understood is to know I have been called to rise.
And then I arrived at your confession. Paragraphs flowed, one into the next. Life! Secrets! Truths! Revelations! I was in the grip of forces too powerful to deny. I took my bleeding heart from the altar, ran it to the courtyard, still bleating in my hands, and threw it at once into the sky. To the sun! the blue unknown, the heavens directly. You remind me that Freewill is an oxymoron: you cannot be free and willful in the same instance. And I choose Free! Internally, I have always chosen free. In action, I might say rarely. Willfulness is a waste. That is why I come to the temple unclean and wild. I dirtied myself by denying myself, and I remained untamed, surviving as hunter/gatherer of unrealized dreams. Self truths gathering dust in the attic of my soul. Death by false living.
Yet, I knew better. Your work summons that better in me to rise. You call on truth to be true to itself. Your work makes me a better man. To suffer slaying on the blades of your incisive intellect is an honor worthy of my darkest, most sanguine blood. May your keen eyes catch every wink your future flashes at you.
It’s astonishing how you read me, as a participant in the combustion. Most people approach an essay looking for clarity; you approach with the willingness to be altered. It’s rare, almost ancient, that kind of reading. You remind me that the relationship between writer and reader is not a transfer of meaning but an exchange of voltage. Some pieces aren’t meant to be consumed, I guess I sometimes write to have my essays survived.
And what you describe as “spiritual annihilation” is precisely the space where I write from: the stripping away of every false layer that prevents a person from recognising their own interior authority. People often think self-discovery is gentle. It isn’t. If anything, it’s surgical, the kind of surgery where the patient must remain awake, watching the instruments enter the places they’ve tried to ignore. The pain isn’t punishment, it would be too easy, so it’s precision.
Your reflection on free will moved me more than I expected. Most of us don’t struggle with choice; we struggle with the preconditions for choice. We behave as though agency were something we could grab with our hands, when in truth it’s an internal posture, a loosening of the places where fear impersonates intention. The tragedy is not that people are unfree; it’s that they cling so tightly to the illusion of willfulness that they never experience actual freedom. You naming this, without self-pity, without theatrics, just the blunt truth of lived contradiction, is an act of liberation.
And your confession of having “gathered dust” is one of the most honest descriptions of existential neglect I’ve ever read. Dreams die because the person carrying them refuses to update the version of themselves capable of living them. You are doing the opposite here, you’re hauling the forgotten parts of yourself back into circulation. That is resurrection in its most human form.
Honestly, I don’t take lightly what you said, that something in this piece summoned a better version of you. That is the only measure of writing I care about. Not praise, not reach, not craft. Effect!!! If the work doesn’t move someone inwardly, it’s decoration. If it does, it’s a tool.
Thank you, Andrew, for bringing your whole, unguarded self to this comment!
I have read this essay twice through. It sings through me now, offering shimmers to consider as the year draws to a close. I’m typing one handed, so limited in response, but I’m marinating in the lure of flirting with the future, with the idea of ambition as desire (of course! Such a vixen, teasing me along!). I spent the year writing something that had been flirting with me for five years, and I have been in a besotted fever. Who knows how it will fare in the world? I never do. But writing in that state of wild desire, dreaming of my lover-book, laughing with it, sharing our secrets, was such a delight. It’s the entire reason I want to write, for that very feeling.
That fevered state where the work becomes a presence rather than a project is the closest thing adults have to enchantment. Most people misunderstand writing as output, but what you describe is authorship as affair: the text chooses you back, pulls you out of linear time, alters your appetite, reorganises your attention around its own pulse. I love this devotion wearing ambition’s clothes.
And here’s the part few writers will admit out loud, the worth of a work has almost nothing to do with how it fares in the world. A book that seduces its author has already succeeded in the one arena that matters… the interior one. Everything else is external weather. Some manuscripts become public phenomena, some become private hauntings, and some become the hinge that changes the writer even if it changes nothing else. Only one of those outcomes is guaranteed, and it’s the one you’ve already lived.
There’s also a deeper truth in what you said about long-term flirtation that is a test of stamina. Five years of being courted by an unwritten thing means your psyche refused to let the idea go flat. That’s fidelity to the part of you that refuses to age in dogmatic ways. Most people abandon the projects that pursue them because they think longevity means impracticality. But sometimes longevity is simply an idea waiting for you to grow into the version of yourself capable of writing it honestly.
And the one-handed typing is almost symbolic. Desire always finds a way to speak, even when the available instrument is imperfect. That hunger to articulate, to capture the heat of the thing, is pure intelligence.
I’m glad my essay found you in a moment of ripeness, Barbara! Thank you for sharing the aliveness of your own process, for me that’s a reminder that the future isn’t the only thing that flirts with us; our unwritten work does too!
There is a great misconception that the strongest survive, when that's never been the case. It's not strength, but adaptability that wins, because even the most rigid, load-bearing material eventually snaps under enough pressure. It's the same with control, where the desire to exert control itself eventually erodes your ability to maintain it. If you're driving over black ice, the strength of your grip on the wheel does not stop the car from spinning; rather, it's your ability to turn with the skid that allows you to maintain control. And that requires having a loose enough grip to turn reactively.
The desire for control is half of the survival equation; the other half is the chaos that impinges itself on our lives. The struggle to make order out of chaos has to be calibrated. In other words, control is adaptive when our desire for control matches the chaos we're confronted with. In life or death situations, the drive to control will save your life; it's useful as a reaction to circumstances. The problem with the future is that you can't be reactive to something that hasn't happened yet, hence why openness to experience and possibility - what you call flirtation - is the best way to prepare yourself for it. Control doesn't work, because it treats the future like a multiple choice question where there is only one right answer or path, instead of seeing all of the possibility of optional paths.
This is the reason why all of the great change in our lives happens when we flirt with the future; when we relinquish control. We loosen our grip on the wheel and become dynamic in our ability to both see and react to the different possibilities, as opposed to trying to force our lives down one narrow path, only to find that the road has long been closed.
Always insightful, always incisive, and always intuitive. Thank you, Tamara.
Andrew, I’ve always felt that adaptability is misrepresented as a kind of passive yielding, when in reality it’s one of the most aggressive forms of intelligence we have. It asks something strength never does: the willingness to update the self. That’s why control eventually collapses under its own weight. It refuses revision, insisting the world honour yesterday’s strategy in a tomorrow that never agreed to it.
What fascinates me is that most people imagine the future as an opponent in need of subduing, when in truth it’s more like a dance partner who keeps changing rhythm mid-step. Rigidity isn’t just impractical in that context, it becomes…… humiliating. You don’t out-muscle a shifting rhythm; you attune to it, even if that attunement briefly feels like losing balance.
Sure, you cannot react to what hasn’t happened, which is why the only sane posture toward the future is one that lets information arrive before identity hardens . Flirtation is the refusal to commit to a single interpretation of what could be, long before the evidence has even introduced itself.
If control tries to collapse the world into one path, flirtation multiplies paths by refusing to crown any of them prematurely. It could be seen as escapism, but I would disagree. It’s the only methodology that respects the fact that the future is co-authored, not engineered.
Thank you for reading me with such precision! I feel that every time. My most analytical and pragmatic reader, and the writer I am still learning a lot from.
If the strongest survives you bet he is more weaker than before!
I’ve read this and entered in a secret chest in my mind where I’ve been stockpiling all the moments I pretended were “accidents” instead of invitations.
Honestly, the times my life has actually pivoted have never come from the versions of me gripping a to-do list like a life raft but from the little breaches in my self-management. The night I missed the last train and ended up walking home with a stranger who became a lifelong friend. The time I said ‘yes’ to a job I wasn’t “strategically aligned” for, simply because something in me leaned toward the unknown heat of it. Or the moment I caught myself grinning at a future as if it had just whispered something obscene and promising in my ear.
Control never gave me that. Control gave me a year that looked impressive on paper and felt like eating unseasoned oatmeal in the dark. Horrible, I know.
What you write about flirtation feels uncomfortably accurate. The future has always shown up for me in the same way people do when they’re genuinely interested, that is slantwise, playful, completely indifferent to my plans. And every time I tried to behave like a responsible adult and “optimize” myself into transformation, life stopped flirting back. I’ve never felt more invisible than when I was trying to be impressive. I can’t even believe I’m writing this here. But it’s true.
Lately, I’ve been practicing what you describe, that subtle tilt of attention, noticing what sparks without trying to own it, letting tiny, irrational curiosities tug at me. And the wildest thing is that it works. Not like magic. Obviously! More like gravity rediscovered.
Your essay is the permission to admit that maybe the most grown-up thing any of us can do is to stay seducible. To stay interruptible. To stay willing, because every time I’ve been bold enough to follow the shimmer instead of the checklist, my life stopped behaving like an obligation and started behaving like a conversation I actually wanted to have.
And maybe that’s the whole secret that you’ve just generously shared with your readers, the future answers only when we stop talking at it and start flirting back.
Tamara, this is everything I needed to read as another year finishes soon.
That quiet recognition that the so-called “accidents” were never accidents at all, just invitations you were too well-trained to name is interesting. I think most people only realise this in retrospect: the life that felt chaotic while it was happening was, in fact, exquisitely choreographed by all the moments where their guard slipped. The breaches, not the blueprints.
When we over-manage ourselves, we stop emitting a signal. We become efficient but undetectable. Life can’t flirt with someone who’s broadcasting nothing but competence; there’s no friction, no asymmetry, no point of entry. Mystery doesn’t approach polished surfaces, it approaches porous ones.
What you’re doing now, that subtle tilt, that willingness to let something irrational tug at your sleeve without demanding credentials first… that’s the real adult skill nobody teaches. Anyone can plan; very few can perceive. And perception is what actually alters fate. When you follow a shimmer, you’re not being whimsical; you’re obeying a piece of information that arrived pre-verbally. This is how animals survive and how humans evolve, through sensitivity.
It isn’t magic! It’s gravitational literacy. It’s learning to recognise when something is pulling at you and refusing, for once, to rationalise away the signal.
You’d already begun letting the future nudge you before you had language for what you were doing. I’m just naming what your life has been demonstrating all along: that the most dignified form of adulthood might be the refusal to become unseducible.
Thank you, Céline, for letting my words into that “secret chest”. That trust is never lost on me!
Great essay, Tamara. A number of years ago, a tall, handsome guy picked me up on the subway, something I was reading, I think. I was so excited. Then Dad called asking if I could come over, I said sure, I'd like to, but I have a date, Dad. I flirted with the idea of the date, but it's Dad who pulled me back, joking "oh, if he is worth it, he will wait". I arrived and Dad was so happy, he was alone, with my step Mom away. He took me out to dinner, a rarity, just me and him. We chatted a long time, he showed me pictures I've never seen, he even sat through the entirety of Strictly Ballroom, without even falling to sleep. We had a great time, listened to music, classics. On Tuesday, he rang me again. Something nudged me to leave a consulting meeting, and disregard my colleagues and whatever else was going on, to take his call. He told me how much he loved me, and how much the "date" meant to him. Then on Wednesday, he was going to buy groceries, cabbage, I think, and was run over on a crosswalk a few meters away. Struck down on a left turn. 17 days later, he was gone. You don't know what tomorrow brings. Life tugs and pulls, follow it. Paulina.
Paulina, this is one of those stories that made me realise that sometimes the shimmer isn’t in the opportunity you think you’re pursuing, but in the interruption that reroutes you…… what a story!
Your father’s gentle tug, that small joke he probably didn’t know was prophetic are exactly the kind of moment I mean when I talk about flirtation with the future. Not romantic flirtation, but existential. A soft summons from life that says: come here instead, just for now’ And how quietly you obeyed it, without making it a moral dilemma or a spiritual decision, as if something old and animal in you already understood the stakes.
It’s astonishing how often meaning hides in the ordinary: a subway ride, a phone call, a cabbage run. We’re trained to look for destiny in grand gestures, but destiny usually arrives disguised as adjacency… a nudge, a shift, a request that doesn’t feel dramatic until time reveals its magnitude. You didn’t “choose correctly”; you responded to something deeper than logic. That responsiveness is the purest intelligence we have.
And what a gift you gave him…. your presence in the exact window where it mattered. What a gift he gave you in return!!! A memory untouched by rushed obligation, a last conversation without the shadow of hindsight, a moment where life leaned toward you and you leaned back. These are the decisions that become emotional frame, they hold the roof up when grief blows everything else apart.
Just like you, I always say the same, you don’t know what tomorrow brings. But some part of you clearly knew what yesterday was asking. And that instinct , to follow the pull when it comes, even if it defies the script, is the very definition of living awake.
Thank you, Paulina, for trusting me with this! You’ve given my whole essay its most human proof, and I’m very grateful for that.
You brought tears fo my eyes, Tamara, in a good way that they smiled😇. Thank you❣️🙏
All this made me think that the future is a terrible listener. And I mean that lovingly. We keep whispering intentions at it like it’s a well-trained oracle, when in reality it hears only tone. It responds to attitude, not architecture. Which might explain why all my most carefully plotted life plans died with the dignity of an unanswered email, while the half-formed impulses, the ones that arrived like a mischievous whisper, were the ones that actually materialised.
Your line about receptivity being treated as moral failure made me realise that we’ve confused being porous with being passive. Yet all real metamorphosis is porous. Caterpillars literally liquefy before becoming anything worth writing poetry about. Meanwhile, I’ve spent entire seasons of my life trying to negotiate with the unknown as if it were a middle manager who simply needed clearer KPIs. Unsurprisingly, nothing changed except my migraine frequency.
I believe the future seduces the interruptible. My biggest shifts didn’t come from plans extended in years but from micro-interruptions, those tiny atmospheric anomalies that make you pause in the middle of everything. Once, a single question from a stranger on a train (“Are you sure that’s really what you want?”) punctured three years of intellectual justifications and sent me down a path I’d been too cowardly to admit I wanted. Another time, a line in a footnote, yes, a footnote, the literary basement, jolted me into quitting a job that made me slowly die inside. None of that appeared in any strategic plan. All of it arrived like a mischievous tap on the shoulder.
Which is why your idea of the “shimmer” rings so true, interruptions are the shimmer’s preferred delivery system.
Planning may produce order, but flirtation produces apertures. And I suspect the real art is cultivating a psyche that can be interrupted without collapsing, one that recognises when an interruption is actually an invitation wearing the disguise of inconvenience.
So yes, the future flirts. But it also heckles. It interrupts. It misbehaves. And you’ve helped me see and finally understand that the most intelligent thing I can do is learn to overhear it. Or, to borrow your language: to keep a small, disobedient corner of ourselves perpetually tuned to the frequency of what almost wants us.
Brava, Tamara. Encore!
What you call the future being a terrible listener is exactly why I’ve never trusted those rituals where we’re instructed to “speak our intentions clearly into the universe”. As if the universe were a secretary with perfect dictation skills. If anything, the future is more like a distracted poet who registers mood and temperature long before meaning. It doesn’t care what we say; it cares how receptive we are when we say it. Tone is the only language it shares with us.
And yes, we’ve completely misread porosity. People talk about being “open to change” as though it were a spiritual manicure, a light buffing of the soul. But true openness is biological mutiny. It’s dissolution. It’s the ego liquefying the way you described, losing its familiar shape so something unanticipated can find space to assemble. No wonder we resist it; literal metamorphosis requires a willingness to disintegrate inside our own narrative.
Your examples of interruptions are perfect because they reveal a truth nobody teaches, the future doesn’t arrive with trumpets; it arrives in footnotes and offhand questions and the quiet humiliations that puncture our self-mythology. The hinge moments are always small, borderline disrespectful in their subtlety, and yet those are the ones with enough voltage to rearrange a life. A question from a stranger is more fate-making than a decade of planning because it bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to the part of us we keep trying to drown.
The shimmer loves camouflage. It hides inside what looks like inconvenience, mischief, even delay. A cancelled train is an existential séance if you know how to listen. A footnote is an initiation rite disguised as academic clutter. That’s why controlling people miss everything, they are allergic to anomalies, which is exactly where the invitations hide.
What you call cultivating a psyche that can be interrupted might be the truest spiritual discipline available to us. Forget serenity or mastery. I focus on interruptibility. The capacity to remain coherent while letting your trajectory be hijacked by something wiser than your plans. It’s a kind of inner elasticity, a refusal to become so self-possessed that nothing can possess you.
Most people chase what they want. The interesting lives are built by those who notice what wants them back.
Thank you, Clara, for this fabulous comment! I’m so grateful to be read by people like you. Truly inspiring.
Your essay makes a compelling case that our relationship to the future has become overly managerial. But what struck me most is the precision with which you trace the real loss, not mystery, not possibility, but our capacity to participate in them. You’re identifying a psychological malfunction, this instinct to treat life like a compliance protocol rather than a dynamic partner.
I don’t see flirtation as the opposite of control. For me, it is the antidote to psychic contraction.
We don’t fear the future because it is unknown, we fear it because we’ve narrowed our own internal range so much that we can only tolerate what fits inside certainty. We have a fixation on control and a shrinking tolerance for ambiguity. And ambiguity is the native climate of becoming.
There is a difference between agency and interference. Modern culture has confused the two. Agency is responsive. Interference is intrusive. Agency keeps you receptive but directional, like a door left ajar. Interference is what happens when we micromanage the unfolding and clog every psychic channel with our demands. The more we interfere, the less we can hear the subtle cues—the shimmer you describe—that guide us toward a future we could never blueprint.
When you say the future responds to availability, not excellence, you actually describe something neurologically true. The mind only perceives possibility when it is in a state of attentive looseness, a paradoxical blend of readiness without rigidity. It is the same mental state in which insight arrives, in which creativity germinates, in which intuition speaks. This is not magical thinking. I call it cognitive hospitality.
And I think that’s the point many people miss: the future seduces us because seduction is its language and we’ve forgotten how to stay linguistically available.
Surveillance kills seduction faster than certainty ever could. This is why so many people cling to rigid planning. They’ve never been taught how to trust themselves in the wildness between steps.
Your essay makes seduction sound mythic (only you can do that), and it is, but it’s also deeply pragmatic. A flirtatious orientation to the future increases adaptability, emotional range, and cognitive flexibility. It makes us more perceptive and less brittle. It’s the presence of inner spaciousness.
The future leans in constantly, but most people are so defended by productivity dogma and fear-based discipline that they can’t register the temperature shift.
We often accuse life of being silent when, in fact, we’ve padded every psychic surface against the tap of possibility.
What I admire the most in your confession is its practicality disguised as poetry. You’re advocating a stance that is both erotic and strategic, so Museguided I would say. Strategy in the evolutionary sense where sensitivity is an advantage, and responsiveness is intelligence.
Your piece is my reminder that the question is not “How do I get what I want?” but “How do I stay permeable enough to recognize what’s calling me?” I’ve just written it down in my notebook. And I’ll see it every day.
In the end, the future doesn’t choose the disciplined, it chooses the attentive. The ones who can feel the room shift (I still remember your essays about Rooms, what an incredible one) who can sense invitation in the quiet, who can resist the seduction of certainty long enough to be seduced by possibility.
You’ve written a theology of the gaze between now and not-yet.
And your point is amazing: the future doesn’t need obedience but reciprocity, someone willing to lean.
And some days, that willingness is the bravest form of intelligence we have.
Tamara, yet another memorable essay that makes my mind expand, enriching my soul and life perception. Thank you.
What you name as “psychic contraction” is exactly the pathology I keep seeing everywhere, that chronic tightening of the inner world until only certainty feels tolerable. It’s astonishing how much suffering comes from our refusal to widen the internal aperture through which the unknown must pass. We didn’t lose mystery; we lost range. And a life with reduced range can only metabolise the most predictable forms of experience, which is why so many people mistake numbness for stability.
Your distinction between agency and interference is one of the most accurate psychological diagnostics I’ve read in a long time. What we call “taking control” is often just emotional vandalism, kicking down the door of a moment that was meant to unfold more subtly. Real agency, the kind that moves life rather than muting it, is almost architectural: it creates openings, not barricades. The world responds much more when we stop trying to choreograph it and instead cultivate the ability to register its cues.
And yes, cognitive hospitality….. again, most people don’t realise how little of their own mind they actually inhabit, everything is partitioned by vigilance, performance, or self-surveillance. No wonder insight rarely arrives. Intuition needs oxygen, not a taskmaster. The mind only becomes perceptive when it’s slightly loosened, when it isn’t bracing against the next expectation. That looseness is not laziness but intellectual invitation. It’s how perception grows teeth.
What you say about surveillance killing seduction is, in my view, the secret epidemic of our era. We’re monitoring ourselves to death. Hyper-awareness has replaced self-awareness. It’s impossible to flirt with the future when you’re busy policing your own spontaneity. At some point, rigidity turns into a psychic gag order. And then people wonder why life won’t speak to them…. How could it when they’ve installed so much internal monitoring that no whisper can get through?!?!
The evolutionary angle you point to is the part most people never see: flirtation is a survival method. Sensitivity is intelligence. Responsiveness is strategy. This is why I’ve always been suspicious of those who worship discipline above all else, although I am one of the most disciplined people you’ll see. But they tend to be exquisitely prepared for everything except the thing that actually happens.
Thank you for the generosity of this comment, Alexander, I feel it sharpened the essay’s spine!
Always brilliant!
Pervious. I love that you used that word. I kept rolling it around it my mind until it finally hit me - it's the opposite of impervious. Impervious is a word I remember reading from a fairly young age. It's a fairly common word. I'm not sure your essay isn't the first time I've seen pervious actually used in anything other than a spelling bee! And I remember well the hard edges of reading the word impervious. I can feel the difference viscerally in their meanings by hearing the sound of each word - one hard, one soft.
Pervious, curious, improvisation, flirtation - there's a lightness to all of them, an energy that gives the game away as to what they mean, their essence or presence in your life, and how it can impact you.
I'm in a wrestling match right now with the future, and if I'm reading you correctly, you're suggesting a dance might be more appropriate? My next step is clear, it's the one after that I thought I understood. But when I'm wrong, the lightness is gone, the heavy, dark worry descends. A reminder - not to be irresponsible - but to lighten up, relax, and remind myself I don't have to decide yet. Yes, people think I'm nuts because I don't know what I'm doing or where I'll be a little more than two weeks away. I think I'm nuts when I see that the choice I thought I'd make would have pushed me to the financial limit. I backed away from planning too far ahead (!) and things lightened up, other ideas opened up, and I've not yet decided, because I know there are other options, too.
I remember in 2019 leaving for Spain to walk the Camino with 25 handwritten pages of notes with plans for how far I'd go, where I'd stop for the night, what albergues were best, options if those didn't work out. 25 pages that ended up being thrown out, because after a week I flew to Ireland and spent the remainder of my Camino hopscotching my way through Ireland, changing plans when a hurricane showed up, or I wanted to go back to see the woodcarver who became my Camino muse.
I'm not always comfortable with being pervious. I'm not always comfortable being impervious. Hmmm. Guess the truth is, I'm not always comfortable. So if I can get comfortable with discomfort, then pervious is clearly the option overflowing with possibilities. All I can do is keep remembering to lighten up.
What I like about your meditation on “pervious” is that you’ve stumbled onto something most people never notice: the language we use for our inner lives has been colonised by militaristic metaphors. “Impervious”, “shielded”, “guarded”, “fortified”. We learned, very young, to associate safety with hardness. No wonder “pervious” feels like a rare visitor… softness has been treated like a liability rather than a capacity.
What you discover, though, is that perviousness isn’t the absence of strength, on the contrary, it underlines the presence of permeability. It’s the difference between a window and a bunker. A window isn’t weak because it lets light in, it would be absurd to claim that. And yet, emotionally, we’ve been trained to praise the bunker!
Your wrestling match with the future is entirely familiar. I’ve never once seen someone “win” that fight because the future doesn’t respond to force. A dance is a better metaphor, yes, but even that suggests a predictable rhythm, and sometimes the rhythm is nothing more than a shift in air pressure that your intuition feels before your plans can make sense of it.
What you experienced with your Camino notes is exactly what I mean when I talk about flirtation: the moment the world proved that it had more imagination than your itinerary. You didn’t fail by abandoning the plan, the plan itself failed by being too small, too literal, too certain. A hurricane has better comedic timing than any spiritual teacher, right?
Being pervious is staying relational with life even when uncertainty is inconvenient.
If you wait to feel comfortable before allowing permeability, you will be waiting forever. Comfort is not the prerequisite; it’s the byproduct of remembering, again and again, that the world expands for people who don’t treat every unknown as a threat.
You said it perfectly without meaning to:
you’re not comfortable with perviousness and you’re not comfortable with imperviousness , which means you’re trying to develop range. Range is where intelligence lives.
Lightening up is a refusal to suffocate possibility before it can even introduce itself. And the fact that things opened the moment you backed away from overplanning tells you everything, the future had been trying to get your attention; it just needed you to loosen your grip long enough to hear it knock.
Thank you for this reflection, Doc, the honesty in it is its own kind of permeability!
How much time spent studying the moments
Moving in your life
Like the physicist measuring velocity and mass
Of each particle calculating momentum
Calculating energy levels
Different molecules to aid prediction
Molecules you see as fear
Others you see as excitement
Those you see as hurt or disappointment
Those of possible fulfillment
Trying to predict and control
Until you relax into uncertainty
No longer measuring each event
No longer calculating each glance
Using your tool of statistical mechanics
To measure the emergent property temperature
You measure the temperature and decide
How you will act
Is it warm
Is it cold
Will you be burned
Will you freeze
But maybe you stop measuring
And shoot your arrow of curiosity
Into the unknown
To find something
You could not have predicted
This is beautiful, Jim, thank you so much!
Beautiful? I was very much in my physics mind where I’m always cognizant of Chaos and Complexity theories and how I swim in a sea of uncertainty where I’m the most comfortable and feel most alive.
Maybe you stop measuring indeed!
Measuring is what I learned getting my undergrad degree in Chemistry, realizing it bored me to death. Calculating, computing, measuring with instruments and equations as my supple inner world was being desiccated into dried wood.
How do you find time to sleep, Tamara? 😗😗 Your output (for lack of a better word!) is endless and wonderful. As ever, printed off to read this evening. I love your work, it works my brain hard and takes to to places I know but have never recognised before. Again, many thanks.
If you want me to be totally honest… I’m an insomniac. I sleep three-four hours a night. Story of my life. And I’m very disciplined with everything else.
Then another truth, I don’t “produce”, I metabolise. I write when something rearranges my nervous system and refuses to leave. It’s the pull, not the plan, that keeps the work coming.
Thank you for printing it out and giving it the kind of attention that can’t be performed on a screen, Jeremy!
I identify
From the very outset of your essay, Tamara, you employ uncommonly long sentences. I like that, because it makes your writing more interesting. And, unintentionally perhaps, filters out those faux readers who’d sooner react swiftly, with an X-like retort. Paragraph-length sentences are often prerequisite for expressing complex ideas.
I was often chastised at school & uni for using long sentences. I was forced to crew-cut 36 words to six. The result was that they missed my point, largely due to laziness & impatience I expect, but also due to lack of interest & sometimes even low intelligence.
I raise the matter of sentence length because I believe that it signals a preparedness to “lean” to a less predicable future response from readers. And I suspect, Tamara, that your writing style is not merely instinctive, but intentional. I may of course be wrong.
And yes, I’m off on one of my adventurous, come-what-may, tangential responses to your essay yet again. It’s one way I “lean” into a future of possibilities.
I engage in other unstructured ways of opening to possible futures: eg, imagining what I’d like to be doing, in say five or ten years, if I had unlimited funds. Often the result is surprisingly humble: the Rolls Royce Cullinan or Bentley Bentayga are nowhere to be seen.
I know of many people who’ve been open to more fulfilling futures, & have ‘fled’ their often highly paid, even prestigious, yet oppressively stifling careers, to live their life the way only they can. Far from regret, they usually find joy in their freedom, albeit often even relatively impoverished, financially.
I’m going through that decision now, having had an offer on my Melbourne apartment, deciding whether to move to UK or Poland, despite all their problems, because that’s where my heart is, likely because that’s where most of my family are, & because I love Britain & Europe. Australia is very nice, clean & comfortable, but I feel as if I’m in exile here. That you chose Paris, fully aware I expect of the problems she faces, is inspiring to me.
What you call “tangential” is, to me, the mark of someone who actually thinks. Readers who follow the momentum of an idea instead of waiting for a punchline are rare because contemporary reading culture rewards speed, not depth. Long sentences act as a kind of border control: those who want to skim hit a wall, and those who are willing to breathe inside complexity are invited through.
And yes, sometimes the length is intentional, other times it’s natural. When I do it intentionally it’s not an aesthetic flex, but a structural necessity. Certain ideas refuse to be diced into minimalist pellets. A long sentence is sometimes the only container spacious enough to hold contradiction without amputating nuance. When teachers force brevity onto everything, they teach reduction. There’s a difference! Some truths must be walked through, not bullet-pointed.
Your instinct to “lean” toward the future through imagination is a kind of psychological reconnaissance. People dismiss those exercises as fantasy, but they are diagnostic tools. When you imagine yourself with unlimited resources and discover that the fantasy is modest, you reveal the structure of your actual longing. Wealth exaggerates desire. It doesn’t invent it. The fact that your imagined life is humble tells you exactly where your interior compass is pointing.
As for the people who fled prestigious careers to reclaim their own aliveness, well… that pattern is almost universal once someone stops performing for the approval of systems that were never designed for their flourishing. The “impoverishment” that follows is usually just the shedding of external measurement. The joy that emerges is the return of ownership over one’s days. And days, not titles, are what life is actually made of!!!
Your own crossroads… Melbourne or Poland or the UK… what an existential dilemma! Where does your identity breathe? Where does your past knock from? Where do you stop feeling like a guest in your own biography? Australia may be orderly, comfortable, bright but comfort becomes exile when it doesn’t reflect the truth of one’s belonging.
I didn’t choose Paris because it was easy or sensible. I chose it because something in me refused to feel exiled any longer. Every city has problems; what matters is whether its problems feel like noise or like home. That is the difference between living somewhere and living FROM somewhere.
Whatever you decide, choose the place that feels like your own untranslatable sentence, the one too long for anyone else’s rubric, but unmistakably yours :)
And thank, Russell, you for reading me with your usual intellectual generosity! Few people can understand, accept and love my Proustian way of expressing ideas.
Well, Tamara, I didn’t think of my motivations as Proustian, but of course they are. Even at 14, when my Great Aunt died, I went to her photos first, & my mother to her books. My father & sister were less interested. Those heirloom documents were of little interest to her children.
Personality appears to be a critical element in this. The most intensely exciting time in my life was not when I had my first physical romantic encounter in 1978, but when I was about to travel ‘overseas’. I could hardly sleep for days, with the excitement of it all. Magnified by travelling the Trans Siberian in 1983, through lands my father fled in WWII.
My first experience of Paris was in 1991. It was superb.
In hindsight, my always having an historical focus, clearly points to the way I should lean. Thus being a trillionaire in Dubai would be of little appeal.
I frequently think that, if we are not prepared to be ourselves, no one can be us for us. We then cease to exist, as a person.
I recall Steve Jobs saying that with money, he could pay others to do everything for him, except be sick for him.
Similarly, most of my friends have little patience with matters of depth. That’s good to a point, but….
You mention generosity. I know of no one other than you, Tamara, who possesses the discipline, intellect & generosity to take the time to respond to strangers on line with the understanding you do.
I have little time for mutual praise sessions which resemble Hollywood awards ceremonies, but the sessions on Museguided are about understanding & philosophical enrichment, not praise.
Thanks once again.
I am very grateful to all my readers, Russell, especially to those who take from their precious time to comment and engage here.
Hmmmm. I guess that makes me a “faux reader.”
I’m humbled.
Flirting, inviting, extending a hand to the Universe, all these things enable us to play with, not control, our lives. Reading this makes me think that’s the entire point, that our existence arises through flirtation itself, a dance with the unknown, and we invite a co-creation to emerge as we live through life. I agree with all of this Tamara, and relate to your point about control (which all of us have been locked into at some point). To control is to suffocate; to flirt is to loosen up, to open up to the life circulating before us. To trust a little, to hope for the possible.
The ego likes to control, the soul loathes it. I love how you you’ve used the word flirting here, because it suggests all sorts of things — openness, play, dare, courage. Flirting is undeniably human, very in the moment, but in a weird way, how we speak about the future is very inhuman, controlled, 💯 logical, often missing feeling and evolution. So much to think about here! P.s Paris has been on my mind lately, and so I enjoyed your reference to the city. It’s far easier to flirt with the future in a place that pulls you in like Paris than in most other cities…
I read your comment and I realise that we often talk about “playing with life” as though it were a whimsical indulgence, when in reality it’s the most evolutionarily sound strategy we possess. Every artistic, scientific, and spiritual breakthrough in human history came from the audacity to court the unknown. Control is what we use to maintain what already exists; flirtation is how we generate what never has.
We always think the same, Joanna, the ego loves control because it’s predictable. The ego would rather live in a dead narrative it understands than a living one it cannot script. The soul, however, has no patience for that kind of stagnation. It wants improvisation, friction, the risk that sharpens perception rather than numbs it.
What nobody admits is that flirtation is trust in motion, I see it as a spiritual mechanic: you lean forward, life leans back toward you, and suddenly you’re co-authoring something neither of you could have written alone.
And yes, Paris….. Paris makes flirtation feel like a civic duty :)
It’s one of the few cities that refuses to let you forget you have a pulse. Some places demand efficiency; Paris demands aliveness. No wonder the future feels more seductive there, the city itself is permanently tilting toward what might be. My first and last love.
Thank you, Joanna, for reading with such sensitivity and imagination, it always shows!
Thank you Tamara! This piece is so timely, I think we all need a reminder that life itself is a path of play. And yes! “Flirtation is how we generate what never has.” Ahhh you’re so right about Paris! I lived there briefly a decade ago, maybe it’s time to spend more time over there. Although the European continent is so much more flirtatious as a whole than the U.K. 😜
What people forget is that play isn’t childish at all, I see it as the mind operating at its highest bandwidth. When you’re in a state of play, you’re improvising, perceiving, responding, adapting. There’s more intelligence in that than in any rigid five-year plan. The reminder isn’t “be lighthearted”, it’s “stop mistaking seriousness for depth.” Some of the most serious lives I’ve ever witnessed were unbearably small.
And yes…. Paris. My city doesn’t flirt; it compels. Europe in general is more permissive toward spontaneity, less performative efficiency, more ambient invitation. The U.K. has its charms, but it often asks you to apologise for wanting enchantment :)
Thank you for your warmth, Joanna! And come back to Paris!
This notion of play as being at the highest bandwidth of the mind, is confirmed in a most memorable event in an experience at a workshop with Patricia Sun during the "world symposium on humanity conference." Her vocal tonations raised my awareness through a rainbow energy field and thereafter in a lucid frequency zone all I was able to do was be with the children at the conference, in their play area, and be, at play!
Fascinating!
I really liked this. It is amazing how your thoughts weave in and out of the work I am doing on Leadership. It motivated me to put together my own manifesto, if you will.
I want to stop treating the future like a project plan and start relating to it like a presence. Not a problem to solve, but a gaze in the room—a quiet intelligence watching how I move. When I hold it that way, the question shifts. It’s no longer “How do I force my life into the result I want?” but “What is leaning toward me, and am I still capable of leaning back?” The future becomes less a destination and more a relationship, one that answers not to my control but to my responsiveness.
When I look honestly at what has actually changed me, almost none of it came from strategy. The hinge moments didn’t arrive because I was finally disciplined enough, optimised enough, or sufficiently “ready.” They showed up like a shimmer at the edge of attention—a city that felt like a secret addressed to me, a person whose presence rearranged my breathing, an idea that wouldn’t stop tapping at the window of my thoughts. My real life has unfolded less through execution than through receptivity. The skill I need, then, is not endless tightening of control, but the capacity to remain reachable.
Desire, in that light, ceases to be a liability and becomes a form of intelligence. Ambition, stripped of coercion, is desire with stamina. The question is not whether desire is perfectly accurate—nothing is—but whether I will let it speak before I smother it under respectability and fear. What draws me, what quickens my pulse, what quietly refuses to leave me alone: these are not embarrassing glitches to suppress. They are directional signals. I don’t have to obey every one, but I do have to listen. Desire is a navigation system that works only if I stop apologizing for having it.
Flirtation becomes the stance that ties this together. Not the cheap, manipulative parody of seduction, but a way of knowing: moving toward what glimmers without demanding guarantees, holding ambiguity long enough for it to reveal its texture. To flirt with the future is to say, “I am here, alert and unarmoured, willing to be altered.” It is the posture of approach rather than conquest. It doesn’t abandon agency; it refuses the fantasy that mastery over outcomes is the highest form of power. The most interesting things I will ever do will probably begin as a slight, almost ridiculous lean toward something I cannot yet defend with reasons.
Failure is part of this. Sometimes I will lean toward a possibility, and it will evaporate. Sometimes I will misread the shimmer. Those moments are painful, but they are also calibration. They refine my taste, sharpen my discernment, and expose the difference between what I truly want and the performances of wanting I’ve inherited. The greater danger is not failed flirtation with life, but successful self-enclosure: building a fortress of plans so watertight that nothing unscripted can get in, and then mistaking that fortress for a well-lived life.
So the code, as it crystallises, is demanding and straightforward: I will value responsiveness over rigidity. I will treat desire as data. I will protect a zone of permeability in myself, even when disappointment tempts me to harden. I will let slight shimmers count as real information, not dismiss them as irrational noise. I will use plans as tools, not altars. I will allow myself to be surprised—not only by catastrophe, but by possibility. I will measure “being on the right track” less by how closely reality obeys my blueprint and more by whether I still feel capable of being moved.
If the future is watching, I don’t want it to see a foreman supervising a construction site of predetermined outcomes. I want it to see a co-conspirator: someone who listens, who leans, who risks approach without demanding certainty as the entry fee. Someone who refuses to live as the project manager of fate and chooses instead to be its willing accomplice. In that choice—small, repeated, imperfect—I suspect most of what we call aliveness resides.
Sometimes there is nothing to add. Your words mirror my thoughts. Thank you, Thomas!
That was my thought. There was nothing to add except to try to incorporate it into my life.
I really love this piece Tamara. As someone who used to be a devoted “manifester,” I’ve found myself shying away from that practice.
Sometimes I still dabble, but always with the caveat of “this or something better.” For the most part though, I believe the universe knows better than I do the possibilities that will most enliven me. It’s like that Christmas Carol I sang as a child with the line, “Bring for me dear Santa Clause what you think is best.”
At the same time, I still like to have a plan. For me a plan serves like a safety net. I dance better on the high wire if I feel a plan beneath me. The plan helps me relax, take risks, and then receive.
There are many times I find that the plan is pure fiction, and my life will turn on a dime. Sometimes the most catastrophic changes become the most delightful with time.
I suppose I’m not quite as daring as many of you. Complete uncertainty can cause me to freeze. I recognize my plans will often change, but simply having one, for some reason, helps to set me free.
Thank you so much, Karin!
Tamara, I marvel at the fruit that flows from your interior life. Your capacity to explore ordinary human experience from a perspective both poetic and philosophical never fails to stimulate the imagination of your readers. I also very much appreciate how you incorporate visual examples of your insights, your communication is multifaceted and extraordinarily prolific. Thank you so much for sharing your literary gifts on Substack. Your weekly essays and brief interjections are a treasure!
What moves me the most in your comment is your generosity and the fact that you recognise where the work actually comes from. People assume writing is an act of expression, but for me it’s an act of excavation. I’m not producing fruit so much as digging through the compost of my own contradictions and finding something alive underneath. The interior life is a workshop, a fault line, sometimes a battlefield. Whatever clarity emerges is usually hard-won.
As for being prolific, that’s just because I stopped treating the inner world as a storage room and started treating it as a living collaborator. I don’t sit down to “produce content”. I listen for what refuses to stay quiet.
Thank you, Jim, for reading me with incredible attentiveness! It’s rare to be seen for the mechanics behind the work.
Get it. I was insomniac for years. thanks to a late middle-age supercrisis - which I soon realised was a super opportunity to change my life. So I did. Helped by significant and regular worhk with the sacred medicines.
Now sleep 8 hours most nights, and feel thankful it. And thankful that you have no choice but to write, write, write! For you, and for all your readers.
It’s also an internal call to liberate all my “crazy” thoughts :)
🥳🥳
Tamara. This is spiritual annihilation of biblical strength, nothing left living, complete cleansing of the land. I believe this is your greatest achievement to date. Substack called it a 17 minute read; it took me an hour. Every paragraph had to be digested on its own terms. If I moved on, I wasted my time. I was inevitably called back to the previous paragraph to read it again, to listen to its heartbeat again, to hear its angel's song again. One paragraph forward, two back.
Is it your best writing? Hell, I don’t know. Everything you do is well written. Everything slays. But I do know this: the edges of your voice, the clarity of your truth, are here so sharp they soften the blade’s slice. It penetrates and the flesh rejoices in its cut. I enter this piece as at an altar, a holy of holies. As a devotee? Of course. But utterly unclean, of the desert, wild. I bring no Issac, son of my loins, to sacrifice, no lamb to slaughter, no grain of Cain even, only the beating heart which you have cut out and I lay it before what you have done here with quiet pride. To know I have read and heard, tasted and savored, seen and understood is to know I have been called to rise.
And then I arrived at your confession. Paragraphs flowed, one into the next. Life! Secrets! Truths! Revelations! I was in the grip of forces too powerful to deny. I took my bleeding heart from the altar, ran it to the courtyard, still bleating in my hands, and threw it at once into the sky. To the sun! the blue unknown, the heavens directly. You remind me that Freewill is an oxymoron: you cannot be free and willful in the same instance. And I choose Free! Internally, I have always chosen free. In action, I might say rarely. Willfulness is a waste. That is why I come to the temple unclean and wild. I dirtied myself by denying myself, and I remained untamed, surviving as hunter/gatherer of unrealized dreams. Self truths gathering dust in the attic of my soul. Death by false living.
Yet, I knew better. Your work summons that better in me to rise. You call on truth to be true to itself. Your work makes me a better man. To suffer slaying on the blades of your incisive intellect is an honor worthy of my darkest, most sanguine blood. May your keen eyes catch every wink your future flashes at you.
It’s astonishing how you read me, as a participant in the combustion. Most people approach an essay looking for clarity; you approach with the willingness to be altered. It’s rare, almost ancient, that kind of reading. You remind me that the relationship between writer and reader is not a transfer of meaning but an exchange of voltage. Some pieces aren’t meant to be consumed, I guess I sometimes write to have my essays survived.
And what you describe as “spiritual annihilation” is precisely the space where I write from: the stripping away of every false layer that prevents a person from recognising their own interior authority. People often think self-discovery is gentle. It isn’t. If anything, it’s surgical, the kind of surgery where the patient must remain awake, watching the instruments enter the places they’ve tried to ignore. The pain isn’t punishment, it would be too easy, so it’s precision.
Your reflection on free will moved me more than I expected. Most of us don’t struggle with choice; we struggle with the preconditions for choice. We behave as though agency were something we could grab with our hands, when in truth it’s an internal posture, a loosening of the places where fear impersonates intention. The tragedy is not that people are unfree; it’s that they cling so tightly to the illusion of willfulness that they never experience actual freedom. You naming this, without self-pity, without theatrics, just the blunt truth of lived contradiction, is an act of liberation.
And your confession of having “gathered dust” is one of the most honest descriptions of existential neglect I’ve ever read. Dreams die because the person carrying them refuses to update the version of themselves capable of living them. You are doing the opposite here, you’re hauling the forgotten parts of yourself back into circulation. That is resurrection in its most human form.
Honestly, I don’t take lightly what you said, that something in this piece summoned a better version of you. That is the only measure of writing I care about. Not praise, not reach, not craft. Effect!!! If the work doesn’t move someone inwardly, it’s decoration. If it does, it’s a tool.
Thank you, Andrew, for bringing your whole, unguarded self to this comment!
I have read this essay twice through. It sings through me now, offering shimmers to consider as the year draws to a close. I’m typing one handed, so limited in response, but I’m marinating in the lure of flirting with the future, with the idea of ambition as desire (of course! Such a vixen, teasing me along!). I spent the year writing something that had been flirting with me for five years, and I have been in a besotted fever. Who knows how it will fare in the world? I never do. But writing in that state of wild desire, dreaming of my lover-book, laughing with it, sharing our secrets, was such a delight. It’s the entire reason I want to write, for that very feeling.
As ever, thank you for the passion in your words.
That fevered state where the work becomes a presence rather than a project is the closest thing adults have to enchantment. Most people misunderstand writing as output, but what you describe is authorship as affair: the text chooses you back, pulls you out of linear time, alters your appetite, reorganises your attention around its own pulse. I love this devotion wearing ambition’s clothes.
And here’s the part few writers will admit out loud, the worth of a work has almost nothing to do with how it fares in the world. A book that seduces its author has already succeeded in the one arena that matters… the interior one. Everything else is external weather. Some manuscripts become public phenomena, some become private hauntings, and some become the hinge that changes the writer even if it changes nothing else. Only one of those outcomes is guaranteed, and it’s the one you’ve already lived.
There’s also a deeper truth in what you said about long-term flirtation that is a test of stamina. Five years of being courted by an unwritten thing means your psyche refused to let the idea go flat. That’s fidelity to the part of you that refuses to age in dogmatic ways. Most people abandon the projects that pursue them because they think longevity means impracticality. But sometimes longevity is simply an idea waiting for you to grow into the version of yourself capable of writing it honestly.
And the one-handed typing is almost symbolic. Desire always finds a way to speak, even when the available instrument is imperfect. That hunger to articulate, to capture the heat of the thing, is pure intelligence.
I’m glad my essay found you in a moment of ripeness, Barbara! Thank you for sharing the aliveness of your own process, for me that’s a reminder that the future isn’t the only thing that flirts with us; our unwritten work does too!
That enchantment is my life blood. I can't say it happens every time, but I'm always open to seduction.
And yes, if I could give new writers one thing to believe, it would be the truth that the writing is ours before it belongs to anyone else.
Precisley!