While the water boils

I make myself tea several times a day. This action is so habitual it almost escapes my attention, and yet it is the axis around which days at home quietly turn. I fill the kettle, turn it on, and listen as it gathers itself - first silence, then a low murmur, then the rising insistence of water becoming something else. While the water boils, thoughts wander off. A tiny pocket of time holds me still.

How sweet it is to wait for this little hug in a cup. Now, when the kettle is on, I reach for a nice one and hold it as if warmth could be conjured by anticipation alone. It is a small act of hope, and a small act of kindness: effortless proof that I will take care of myself.

The warmth matters. It spreads into the palms and steadies them, gathering attention back into the body. This is what self-directed kindness looks like when stripped of rhetoric - not grand statements of self-love, but a little heat, patience, repetition. A certain discipline of meeting oneself where one actually is.

The same feeling appears when sitting alone in a café with coffee. I choose a table by the window, if possible, and let the world flow through my eyes. People pass, conversations rise and fall, cups are set down with the faint clatter of porcelain, but none of it demands my participation. A pleasant, sufficient blur. Somehow, I am complete. Solitude, when it is chosen, has a particular density, like a well-written sentence that contains more than it says.

I used to think that introversion was a limitation. Now I know it as the greatest strength. The safest shelter ever known. After the disruptions of past years, after the necessary losses and the slow reconstruction that followed, the inner life grew unexpectedly vivid. Boredom no longer found me easily. Loneliness - only occasional, in passing, like the weather, but not the climate. No matter what mayhem unfolds - noise, urgency, other people’s crises - there is a place inside that finally remains intact and solid. It is not sealed off from the world, but it is not at its mercy either. From there, observation is possible without being devoured. Events can arrive, be felt, and move on. Turning inward is no escape; it is a way of metabolising reality at a human pace.

A memory of happiness is happiness, too. A remembered morning - light on a wall, a voice, a feeling of ease - can warm the hands as reliably as a cup of tea. We distrust memory because it cannot be easily verified, because it leaves no external proof. But the soul knows. It loosens, breathes, and recognises something it loved... We tend to speak of romance as if it always requires two people facing each other across a candlelit table, intensity generated only through exchange - although that is a wonderful image. And yet the romance of solitude can be no less saturated. It is an intimacy with one’s own attention. Alone, nothing needs to be translated or negotiated. Desire clarifies. Sensation sharpens. One becomes both witness and participant. Isn’t that beautiful?

Perhaps this is why it feels so natural to accept that even the people we know best remain, in some essential way, unknown. Someone you have loved for years carries within them a private and mysterious inner life. Somewhere in the hallways of their personality, there is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a house you will never enter. This is not a betrayal of closeness; it is its vital condition. Love, as Rainer Maria Rilke so brilliantly suggested, may be nothing other than the protection of one another’s solitude.

The same respect is learned inwardly. There are rooms in me that do not open on command. Thoughts that refuse interrogation. They arrive only obliquely, while the kettle is loud enough to drown out questions. If I wait, they come. If I rush, they retreat.

Eventually, the kettle clicks off. Steam lifts into the air, brief and insubstantial. Water is poured, and the tea leaves unfurl - something that I could watch for hours - each one releasing what it has been holding in the dark. Warmth returns to the hands, familiar and grounding. Outside, the world continues in its uneven way - beautiful, odd, never stopping. Time passes, and I feel grateful that time is all there is. The kettle is on again.