Some weeks seem to suggest that there is no chance, really, of keeping up. The same weeks may lead to questions about time, value, change, and the impact of small choices. What happens when you push the first domino?
“In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall.” ― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
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The week had domino-chain moments, a simple problem or discovery or thought revealing another and another and another.
The week had moments of optimism, moments of calm, moments of reluctance, moments of enchantment, moments of excitement, moments of regret, and moments of deep resignation.
Such is life, you might say. We cycle. We trigger domino reactions, intentional or not. Thoughts and problems and discoveries cascade, rise, fall, expand, bloom, or settle into the background. We wake up and do it all again.
By the time I finished this week’s post, a post about a few unrelated realities from the week and the counterweight of an unexpectedly normal day, I found myself shifting to the adjacent butterfly effect and thinking about scale.
We often think about the butterfly effect as vast in reach. One small moment creates a ripple effect, even if the connections are so distributed and varied that the originating moment is unseen. It, too, was caused by something else. You could continue to backtrack, forever looking for the beginning.
But at the personal level? There is something comforting about the idea that small decisions add up. Small choices matter. Daily art or writing or exercise or healthy habits become a series of micro-moments that weave foundation under the self, the creative life, and identity.1
That’s a very simplified summary, not one intended, yet, to look more closely at the flutter of wings. I am going to set this aside until next week, holding both the realities of positive and negative butterfly effect cycles, scaled to individual life.
Before there were butterflies…
This week started with the less enchanting Diderot effect. In simplest terms, this is a process in which buying one thing necessitates (or feels like it necessitates) buying another thing, and a pattern emerges. For some, this cycle provides motivation and movement. A new interest requires a new thing and then another and then another.
When the cycle starts, it is rarely subtle. It can easily become overwhelming.
Some enjoy the frenzy of it.2
I find it, both the wanting and the needing, to be a recipe for unrest. I try to avoid triggering the domino effect of wanting more and new and upgraded, but sometimes it spawns, unavoidable.
This week’s Diderot chain has been halted, though the signs of it remain comical (she says, having climbed onto the extra cushion to awkwardly sit at the computer she otherwise now can’t reach).
There were three core threads this week. They arrived on the same day, each in varying states. I wrote about the threads more than once, tracing the shape of their surface contours even as I tried to absorb them.
(The rest of this portion of the post is available to those subscribed to Illustrated Life with a free or paid subscription. Subscribing simply requires an email address.)
This was Week 2 in Millcreek. Thank you to those who read last week. I apologize to those I confused with a story you felt too close to truth and yet too far from it, leaving you unsure what was what. It’s a fictional world with a host of writers whose work I am really enjoying and with a house that I am giving in to.
As I continue to post the year-over-year links, I am always struck that there was such a clear before, and then after, and then something undefined that map to the years. The voice stretches back much, much farther, but these three years at Illustrated Life hold clear change.
2025: Be Open to the Not Quite (+ Numbers in an Illustrated Journal)
Thank you for reading.
I encourage you to join in the conversation in whatever way feels comfortable. I have such appreciation for those of you who take time to comment each week and let me know you’ve read. The number of people who comment continues to shrink. Right or wrong, I read a lot into that about the quality and value of what I’m doing, especially as I explore things that are outside of what I ever thought I might do. The flipside is that some part of me thinks the work I am doing now is stronger than before.
I wonder, if I explained what’s going on within me, if I even could, if there is even one reader who would understand that — without needing it to be their story, too. I don’t think so. It’s an interesting thing to realize that, to feel sad about that, and also to be determinedly protective of the self. The connecting threads are so clear to me, and I see the strength in what I’m trying to do and in the willingness to be vulnerable, naive, a beginner, and often incredibly hard to follow, and doing all of that in public. Unfortunately, if I remove the public space, I might turn to dust.
Thank you for being here. This space means the world.
I’m going to send this out, climb down from the cushions, and find an audio book and a set of lives in a game.3
Clicking the heart or restacking is very much appreciated.
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This is not simply a discussion of habit stacks, though habits and routines are often good for personal scaffolding.
Whether you can afford to entertain the cycle or not matters.
I had multiple technical glitches with the final edit, problems a simple undo didn’t solve. I sincerely hope I got things ironed out, and you didn’t end up with multiple copies all strung together, although the domino theory of that would be ironic. If you something seems wrong, just let me know.
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