you need to be more whimsical in your daily life

i have had this journal page open for almost two hours now, and i still cannot understand how people move through their lives without developing any sort of intimacy with them. not intimacy with another person, but intimacy with the actual experience of being alive.

i do not know how people wake up, move through their routines, return home, go to sleep, and repeat it all again without creating little rituals and affections and absurd attachments along the way. maybe they do and i simply do not see it. i hope they do.

because i think somewhere along the way a lot of us became far too practical. everything has to justify itself now. every interest needs to become expertise. every hobby should eventually produce something. every spare moment should be spent learning, improving, building, fixing, optimizing. and i understand the temptation. i fall into it myself all the time.

but i think something gets lost when every corner of your life is expected to earn its place. i think delight starts disappearing. i think curiosity starts disappearing. i think we stop leaving room for the kinds of things that make a life feel personal.

some of the happiest people i know have an almost unreasonable affection for the world around them. they have favourite benches and favourite bakeries and favourite routes home. they become attached to neighbourhood cats. they remember the names of dogs they meet on walks. they buy flowers when there is no occasion to celebrate. they create traditions that would sound ridiculous if they tried to explain them to anyone else.

and every time i meet someone like that, i leave feeling as though they understand something the rest of us have forgotten. because what is whimsy if not affection for your own existence?

what is whimsy if not deciding that a random tuesday deserves a little imagination? using a wine glass for your matcha because it makes the afternoon feel different. buying the expensive pastry once in a while because you happened to pass the bakery and felt like it. carrying home a stone from a trip and keeping it on your desk for years because every time you look at it, you remember exactly how the air felt that day. none of these things are useful. that is precisely why i love them.

i think we spend so much time waiting for life to happen that we forget it is already happening. we imagine that meaning lives somewhere in the future. in the promotion, the relationship, the move, the achievement, the thing we are working toward. meanwhile, entire months pass by unnoticed because we never learned how to develop a relationship with the days themselves. and the truth is that most of our lives are made up of days that look completely ordinary.

most of our lives will never be major milestones. they will be afternoons and walks and conversations and cups of coffee and familiar streets and sunlight through windows and songs playing in the background while we wash dishes.

that is the part that gets me.

if this is where most of life happens, why would we not make more of it? why would we not create tiny ceremonies for ourselves? why would we not allow ourselves to become fascinated by things? why would we not point at the moon when it looks particularly beautiful, or stop to admire a tree, or keep collections of strange little objects that mean absolutely nothing to anyone else?

i do not think those things are childish. i think they are evidence that a person is paying attention.

and maybe that is all whimsy really is. paying attention long enough for affection to form. allowing ourselves to care about things that do not improve our lives on paper but make them feel richer while we are living them. refusing to become so efficient that we forget how to be enchanted. refusing to move through the world as though our only responsibility is to get through it.

i really think we need to be more whimsical in our daily lives. not because it will make us more creative or more productive or more successful. because one day we will look back on our lives and realize they were built from thousands of seemingly insignificant afternoons. and i hope when that day comes, we can say we did more than simply pass through them.

i hope we loved them a little. i hope we made them our own.