Leonard and Hungry Paul

Solitude and peace lose their specialness when they no longer stand in contrast to anything. In a busy—or at least busier—life, quiet reflection provides resonance to experience. But to deprive life of experiences deliberately and to hide from its realities was not special. It was just another form of fear that led to a life-limiting loneliness that accumulated and accumulated until it became so big that it blocked up the front door, drowned out conversations and put other people behind soundproof glass.

As you both change, you will periodically lose each other. You need to find each other again and—here’s the trick—instead of trying to rekindle what you had, you need to reinvent yourselves and your relationship. You have to keep starting new relationships with the same person.

Leonard wore a new feeling of peace. He had always associated peace with the idea of happiness, as if it were some sort of steady state that happiness turned into when it was for real. But now he realized that peace is independent of any one feeling. The deep peace that he now felt was in a minor key. It was not blissful, but melancholy. It was a profound acceptance of things as the were, devoid of superficial preferences. The weight of effort that it took to be happy was lifted from his bones.

Yes, our parents will grow old and yes they will get sick and yes they will die, but that will happen to us two as well. Where you’re wrong is that you think that’s a problem in the future. But it’s not. The answer to that problem is to spend time with them now. Be in their lives so that when the worst happens—which we hope is many years away—there will have been ten, twenty, however many years of Scrabble, University Challenge, curries, walks, gardening and whatever else behind us. And then, when the time comes we’ll know what to do. Not because we’ll have it all figured it out but because we will have had the habit, the practice, of loving them and being with them, and the utter clarity that comes with that. Mam and Dad have enjoyed the wedding so much because they speak to you all the time and you’re calling over, and you’re including them. You being here has reminded them of how much they miss you when you’re busy. They don’t really want a holiday, they just want to know that you won’t forget about them when it’s all over. You need to go and be happy with Andrew, and unfetter yourself from this story you have about your role in the family. And then, when you come over—once a week, once a month, whenever you can, it doesn’t matter—just hang out and be yourself.

Don’t put people off. Don’t think you can make up the time later.

Though this was all still quite new to him, he could see that making big decisions was just as consequential as not making them. Either way you were committing to something. We are never entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.

There’s no point planning for what you’re trying to plan for. I know that, more than anything, you would like me to see the world your way, to wake up to your way of looking at things and to become the version of myself that you’re most comfortable with.

The thing is, as a child the world looked huge, intimidatingly so. School looked big. Adults looked big. The future looked big. But I am starting to feel that over time I have retreated into a smaller world. I see people rushing around and I wonder—where are they going to? Who are they meeting? Their lives are so full. I’ve been trying to remember if my life was ever like that.

What I learned is that everyone in your life has an invisible number on their foreheads, which represents the number of times you will see them again. It might be zero or one, or it could be a thousand, but it’s a number. We don’t have unlimited time with people. I don’t mean that in a morbid way. It’s a lesson for us to appreciate people while we can. Don’t put people off. Don’t think you can make up the time later.

You may wish to note the above

It is hard to appreciate now, but there was once a time before mobile phones and text messages when people communicated with each other by sticking notes to refrigerators using magnets. It got to be so commonplace that it became the secondary purpose of fridges themselves. Families would leave dinner instructions, teenagers would explain their whereabouts, and unhappy wives would initiate divorces, all using short Heminway-esque messages affixed at eye level using coloured magnetic letters. In fact there was a widespread panic in the refrigeration industry when text messages became popular. And then, when free texts became available, the National Association of Subzero Appliances (the other NASA, as they called themselves) brought a case to the Supreme Court, citing an infringement of their right to earn a livelihood.

The short run can often be full of feelings,’ observed Hungry Paul, sagely.

The kids’ lives are their own. From day one you are handing it back to them bit by bit

when you love somebody it can be hard to know where the boundary of solicitude ends and interference begins.

there was something special about the way that quiet people just seemed to find each other in life.

It had been a quiet few days for Hungry Paul since his Yahtzee conversation with Leonard, quiet days not being uncommon in his schedule. This had given him the opportunity to ponder the expansion and contraction of the universe as observed in localised form in the life of his best friend. Edwin Hubble, had he looked inside Leonard with his telescope, would have recorded that everything was just as the universe would ordain it. The thing is, for Hungry Paul the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of its complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was otherwise best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing. Though his life had been largely quiet and uneventful, his choices had turned out to be wise ones: he had already lived longer than Alexander the Great, and had fewer enemies, too. But he had now become awakened by the thought that, no matter how insignificant he was when compared to the night sky, he remained subject to the same elemental forces of expansion. The universe, it seemed, would eventually come knocking. And so it was that over a mid-morning scone he read a short article in the local freesheet with a sense of cosmic destiny.

pact to resist the vortex of busyness and insensitivity that had engulfed the rest of the world.

Leonard often felt he was being paid for his patience. It was hard to do his best work when he knew that all his good ideas would be either rejected without being understood, or appropriated and credited to someone else.

With no mobile phone, he was not tempted to scroll through his texts or refresh his social media feed. His freedom from restlessness meant that he didn’t explore his nasal cavities or fiddle with his zip. His mental stillness left him untroubled by the passage of time or the spooky run-down emptiness of the place.

but nothing made him feel lonelier these days than the thought of spending time in the company of extroverts.

He saw patience as a way of allowing things to happen by themselves, trusting that things would turn out as they were meant to, not by design but because of the innate orderliness of things.

She was a person for whom kindness was a very ordinary thing, who believed that the only acceptable excuse for not having a bird feeder in the back garden was that you had one in the front garden.

It may well be that if you truly want to open a heart, you need to break it open.

Anyone can deliver the right line. But that’s not real. That doesn’t prove anything.

It’s true that it’s hard not to hurt people.

At what stage does a hand become a hold?

Though we may be a species that prizes great minds

some people get so lost in writing they forget to tell a story.

I have been holding you back by letting you hold onto this precious