The Jotter Nook

休息是为了走跟长途的路。Rest paves the long road ahead.

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

My dream is always the same. May my travels never end.

你有走丢过吗？你弄丢过什么呢？我们不断地往外看。一不小心，松开了一位一直会紧握我们的手。再回头时，才发现，我们好像失去了什么。究竟，我们遗失的是走丢的自己，还是迷路的他们呢？

Have you gotten lost? Have you lost anything? We keep looking outward. Without realising it, we’ve let go of the hand that always held us. When we look back, we realise that we’ve lost something. After all, did we lose our lost selves, or those who have lost their way?

小时候总是觉得时间很多。恨不得快点长大。但不知道从什么时间开始突然觉得时间好像再也不够用了。佳云说自从她有了孩子之后，时间好像不够用了。苏菲说自从她的猫六岁生日之后，时间好像不够用了。那我呢？我从来不觉得我爸爸会变老。但那天，我看到他的背影，我忘了，人都是一瞬间变老的。

As kids, we felt like we had so much time. We couldn’t wait to grow up. But at some point, it suddenly feels like time is running out. Jia-yun said, ever since she had kids, there’s never enough time. Su-fei said, since her cat turned six, time is running out. What about me? I never thought my dad would get old. But that day, I saw his back, and I realised, people just age in an instant.

这四年中“我走了啊”还是四个字没变，但是离家的距离却越来越远。

In these four years, the words "I'm going!" (that I call before setting off) have never changed, yet the distance away from home has only increased.

被爱包围着长大是怎样的？

It's strange and extraordinary
To stand here looking over the waterfall
Closer to the end sooner than I expected
Feeling the threat of death spray my face

But from way up high
Where the end of me is close
I can see a little farther than everyone else
What an extravagant earth

And what a shame that I didn't see it until now
Nightbirde

As I grow older, I reckon with the reality that memories are just fragments, shattered remnants of time. Photos and words are merely echoes of who we once were and the people we once knew. And yet for all their limits, these pieces of you and me are everything.

Once upon a time, there was a little boy. That boy was me, and yet he is not. Moments lost in a torrent of consciousness—too much, too many, never enough. Shadows fell upon those futile paths, and then there was nothing. We are all living on borrowed time. | Courtney

If you ask a Swede to name the words that best encapsulate the Swedish psyche, vemod—originally from the German word Wehmut—may very well be among the top ten.

The closest English translation is probably melancholy, or perhaps wistfulness—it’s a kind of sorrow, lined with a longing for things that have been and are still to come. They’re not quite within your reach, but you know that they’re there, and you know they're not yet lost.

Picture the solitude of the vast northern Swedish forests, the feeling of regret at the end of summer, the weariness as you know that spring is right around the corner but winter just won’t seem to let go, the excitement and sadness of moving to a new country.

That’s vemod. | Emma Löfgren

In being so eager to prove what we ‘bring to the table’ we’re conditioned to show only our strengths. And while those things may be impressive, they’re not as intriguing as the scuffed and unpolished parts of who we are. There’s a reason we tune into podcasts of successful people reflecting on past failures. A reason writers cling to stories of famous authors tormented by doubt. And a reason behind-the-scenes footage holds a weight the final cut doesn’t—it’s where friction and sincerity live. It’s an openness that finally allows us to see something of ourselves in another. | Ayishat Akanbi

You prolong your own misery when you treat negative thoughts as a personal defect rather than common noise to be ignored.

I’ve learned to think of the mind like a radio. There’s a station for all sorts of thoughts: optimism, memories, goals, fear, and so on. You can’t delete them because the programming began many years ago, so now they play constantly. But you can learn to tune the stations out.

Naturally, at times the signal is off and you’ll hear the crackling of Self-Doubt FM or Regret Radio creeping through. I used to think every thought was worth analysing, taking “the unexamined life is not worth living” a little too literally.

This may well be why so many famously contemplative people came undone, perhaps they took every passing idea seriously, rather than recognising how little most of them matter. 2025 was the year that finally became clear to me.

But most helpful is understanding that this background hum is simply the mind’s operating system working normally, not always a sign of malfunction. If the mind is like a radio, picking up signals from a lifetime of experiences and encounters, it’s naïve to think peace is a state free of noise rather than a mind skilled at turning the volume down. | Ayishat Akanbi