Dear L, Once our English teacher asked us to write a letter home about a train journey. In India, overnight train journeys aren’t uncommon. I spent most of my overnight journeys in second-class sleepers, which meant open breezy windows, noisy coaches & sheetless beds or berths as they are…
Dear L, I remember a time when a dream of climbing Matterhorn wasn’t unrealistic — even downhill mountain biking was not alien. Everything was somehow possible — from snowboarding off the steep ends of Chamonix to trekking until the tall walls of Baffin islands. In my naivety, all I needed was…
Dear L, Obsessions are funny and muses are mysterious. They hold me together; they drive me wild. Best, A Inside the World of High-End Coffee | Annals of Obsession [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adCKCOCSGpg] The Most Beautiful Icicle: Apollo 11 [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n16/inigo-thomas/…
Dear L, I remember the first time I had opened my eyes underwater — it was one of my swimming lessons. The instructor — for better or worse — would take us to the deep end of the pool and drop us in. Those were scary moments, and I would usually keep my…
Dear L, I never found my reality unpleasant enough to escape into a different one. And by extension it took me thirty years of existence to wrap my head around the idea of escapism. Escapism — defined by Oxford Dictionary as, > The tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant…