For your stray attention this weekend

On ambition

Hello,

Your humble scribe is tired. I find it very hard to say that, not because I take issue with being tired, but because I struggle to notice it. 

Kate Fox wrote a brilliant piece recently that touched on introception, the ability to perceive what you’re feeling. It’s not my strongest suit. I tend to be a very poor reader of my body’s signals, leading me to learn about internal states from oblique clues. Like this morning, for instance: I got up at 5am, dropped the spoon three times while I was trying to make tea, knocked over a vase while I was trying to shelve some of the books that are stacked up around my desk, and then had to pick shards of glass out of the gaps between the floorboards. After that, I put myself back to bed, and as I lay there, I thought, Ah, I was tired. 

I’m always clumsy when I’m tired. I realised that when, four hours later, I unlocked my writing cabin and immediately hit myself in the mouth with one of the shutters. At moments like this, I feel like all the world’s materials conspire against me. I am still nursing a split lip.