While the water boils
I make tea several times a day. The action is so habitual it almost escapes my notice, yet it has become the quiet axis around which days at home turn. I fill the kettle and switch it on, listening as it gathers itself - first silence, then a murmur, then the rising insistence of water becoming something else. While it boils, thoughts wander. A small pocket of time opens.
How sweet it is to wait for this small hug in a cup. When the kettle is on, I reach for a good mug and hold it as if warmth might be summoned by anticipation alone. It is a small act of hope, and a small act of care - effortless proof that I will look after myself.
The warmth matters. It spreads through the palms and steadies them, gathering attention back into the body. Self-kindness, stripped of rhetoric, may look like this: a little heat, patience, repetition. Nothing grand. Just the discipline of meeting oneself where one actually is.
I recognise the same feeling when sitting alone in a café with coffee. If possible, I take a table by the window and let the world pass through my eyes. People move, conversations rise and fall, cups meet saucers with the faint clatter of porcelain. None of it asks anything of me. Everything becomes a pleasant blur.
In such moments I feel strangely complete. Solitude, when chosen, has a particular density - like a well-written sentence that contains more than it says.
I once thought introversion was a limitation. Now I recognise it as a strength, perhaps even a shelter. After the disruptions of recent years - the necessary losses, the slow reconstruction that followed - the inner life grew unexpectedly vivid. Boredom rarely found me. Loneliness appeared only occasionally, like passing weather.
No matter what mayhem unfolds outside - noise, urgency, other people’s crises - there remains a place inside that feels intact. Not sealed off from the world, but no longer at its mercy either. From there, observation becomes possible without being devoured by what is observed. Events arrive, are felt, and move on. Turning inward is not an escape so much as a way of digesting reality at a human pace.
A memory of happiness is a form of happiness too. A remembered morning - light on a wall, a voice, a feeling of ease - can warm the hands as reliably as tea. We distrust memory because it leaves no evidence, because it cannot be verified. But the soul recognises what it has loved…
We tend to speak of romance as if it always required two people across a candlelit table, intensity generated through exchange. And yet solitude has its own romance. It is an intimacy with one’s own attention. Alone, nothing needs translation or negotiation. Desire clarifies. Sensation sharpens. One becomes both witness and participant.
Perhaps this is why it eventually feels 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 life you will never fully enter. Somewhere in the hallways of their personality there is a locked door, a stairway leading to a house you will never visit.
This is not a failure of intimacy. It is its condition. Love, as Rainer Maria Rilke suggested, may be nothing other than the protection of one another’s solitude.
The same respect must be 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 hurry, they disappear.
Eventually the kettle clicks off. Steam lifts briefly into the air. Water is poured. The tea leaves unfurl - something I could watch for hours - each one releasing what it held in the dark.
Warmth returns to the hands.
Outside, the world continues in its uneven way - beautiful, strange, unstoppable. Time passes, and I feel grateful that time is all there is.
Soon enough, the kettle is on again.
