The want came back, that is the message

MONDAY, 31 AUGUST

there is something you have been thinking about for a while now. not planning it, not researching it, just returning to it. it turns up on the drive home and in the ten minutes before you fall asleep, and every time you put it down again with the same word. impractical.

the ace of wands does not have an opinion on whether the thing is practical. it notices only that the thought keeps arriving, and a thought that keeps arriving is usually carrying information about you rather than about the thing itself.

monday makes this harder than it needs to be. the week opens, the instinct is to get sensible again, sort the diary, put wanting at the back of the queue behind everyone who needs something from you. so the flicker gets postponed one more week, and the postponing feels like maturity.

it might not be. wanting something is not a promise to do it. you are allowed to hold it and look at it properly before you decide anything at all, and today is a reasonable day for that.

what is worth leaning into today: the small unreasonable thing you keep coming back to. give it ten honest minutes instead of dismissing it in two seconds.

what is worth staying away from: asking whether you can afford it before you have worked out whether you want it. those are two separate questions and the second one comes first.

my advice for today: write the thing down somewhere you will see it on wednesday. not a plan, just the words. a want you have written down stops being something you have to keep carrying around in your head.

if you have one of these, i would like to know what it is. reply and tell me, even if it looks silly typed out.

/ a reflection

on the things we call impractical

i have been thinking about how many women learn to present a want as a solution to a problem. not i would like this, but this would help with that, and here is who else it benefits.

it works, which is the trouble. it gets things approved at home, at work, and inside your own head, and after enough years of it the justification starts arriving before the want does. you find yourself building a case for a saturday afternoon.

i am not sure when it begins. somewhere in the long stretch of being the person who arranges things for everybody else, probably, when wanting something plainly began to feel like making a demand.

i do not have a tidy answer. i only notice that the women who eventually take the trip or the class or the quiet morning almost never describe it as something they earned. they describe it as something they finally stopped arguing about.

so that is what i would put in your hands today, not as a task, just as something to carry around. when was the last time you wanted something out loud without attaching a reason to it.

if something came to mind while you read that, send it to me. no case built for it, no reason attached, just the thing itself.