The Sunday Letter #13: Revelations
The Sunday Letter #13: Revelations
So many revolutions of the sun ago.
Yesterday I spent the day in Edinburgh. I woke up a tiny bit later than I’d planned to, which necessitated getting the train instead of the bus, but no matter—I’m on vacation! I do what I want! Then I took the train into Haymarket station in the west end, and meandered about in my old neighbourhood, Dalry, for a bit.
When I lived in Dalry fifteen years ago, it was classed as a “trendy, up-and-coming” neighbourhood, which was of course marketing-speak for “no one but the brave and/or economically desperate want to be here”. There were a few tired shops on the way to the train station. There was a hairdressing place where I’d occasionally get my eyebrows waxed. Mostly there was stone everywhere, and very little green.
Yesterday I could see that the “up” part had finally come to the area—no green, sure, but more bakeries, more restaurants, more shops filled with things to buy. After walking past my old apartment building and looking out over the view—a new view now, marked by developments and other buildings that have gone up in the past 15 years—I stopped at a Turkish café and had breakfast. Then I walked down to Princes Street and had a stroll through the gardens, thinking back to the first time I came to Edinburgh with Jess. I have pictures of Jess and her classmate, Megan, strolling through the green and looking at the trees. As I walked I felt almost like I was superimposing my steps over those photographs. A ghost from the future walking over ghosts of the past in that magical, slippery, impossible state we call the present. Which, of course, I was.
Do comets feel this way, I wonder, when their orbits bring them back to that particular worn part of the circle, however many centuries into the future?
It’s a silly question, I know. Comets (so far as we know, and to be clear: we don’t know a lot!) don’t feel anything. They make their icy orbits over decades or centuries or thousands of years and when they return to a familiar bend they do so on space-time, that marvellous, stretched-out place of infinity that makes all other things seem like specks of dust. Is a comet sentient? Probably not. Would they be thinking of past observations if they were? Debatable. How important is memory over the span of thousands of years?
On one hand of course it’s incredibly important—where would we be, after all, without the oral storytelling that has carried knowledge forward through millennia? Memory holds things for us, keeps things alive for us, helps us move forward through dark and terrible days. But memory can also, if we let it, bog us down. It can hold us adrift in nostalgia, pining both for things that were and also for things that were never quite what we thought them to be, no matter how we tried. Memory can keep us from the future.
When I think of something like Hale-Bopp, I imagine that the next time it comes by Earth—sometime in the distant future, 2300 or so years from now—it will have seen so much and passed through so much that the comet it used to be will feel so faint as to be almost imperceptible, like remembering a dream.
After walking through Princes Street Gardens, I took the #26 bus to Portobello, on Edinburgh’s eastern coast, where I lived my second year in the city. It really did feel like stepping into a time machine. We passed this wedding dress boutique and Meadowbank Stadium and St. Margaret’s House, just like I did every day thirteen, fourteen years ago when taking the bus to work. Just before we got to Portobello we passed Telferton Industrial Estates, an industrial park I’d forgotten about completely until I saw the sign for it and remembered being twenty-seven and wretchedly poor and so tired all the time but so determined to make life in Edinburgh work that I got on that bus every day without complaining.
I got off in the heart of Portobello and walked up to my old flat, stood beneath my old window, and went to the beach. Then I walked the length of Portobello Promenade and took in the ocean and the people and the new (playgrounds! art installations! notices on garbage cans reminding people to pick up after their dogs!) and the old (the Turkish Baths! the Espy! the Beach House!) before turning around at the end and walking back to the Espy, where lunch with old colleagues from work waited for me.
As I made my way back along the Promenade I realized that I did not want to move back to Portobello, or indeed to Edinburgh at all. Had you said this to me even five years ago, that I would one day get to a point where I didn’t want to move back to this most beautiful of cities, I think I would have scoffed. Of course I want to go back, I might have said. One day I’ll get there. Just you wait and see.
Or if I accepted the idea I might have couched it in all kinds of buts—okay, maybe I won’t move back, but I’ll always be a little bit sad about it, I’ll always be wondering what might life might have been like if I had stayed, but but but.
But—walking back to the Espy yesterday, on that beach? The realization just felt natural. Obvious. Like it was always meant to be this way.
Or maybe it felt natural because I’ve travelled light-years of distance since leaving Edinburgh in 2010 and the problems and the sadnesses of all those years ago feel so far away it’s like they’ve happened to a ghost. Maybe that, too.
Sometimes comets and stories feel similar to me. We share them in the same way—we observe and we pass down information, and then years later the comets appear in the sky or the stories pass through a moment in time that makes them reverberate through the world in a different way, and we are reminded all over again of their significance. We see them with new eyes because of all of the time that has passed since last they were here. The things we’ve learned, the things we’ve lost. The things that we’ve had to let go.
I have carried the sadness of leaving Edinburgh for the last thirteen years. It has always felt like a failure—like I didn’t do enough to stay. I’ve held this belief close even as I’ve also come to know that that was wrong—that I left because nothing was working out even though I was doing everything I possibly could to stay there. I left because I had to let go of it. There was no other option.
Coming back, I worried that I would feel that sadness again, in the same way that I worried a little about fielding all of those bittersweet memories of being in St. Andrews with Jess. But instead I feel like I’ve come back into love—into a space that is holding me in every way possible because I am holding me.
These past thirteen years have held so much. Grief and depression and joy and frustration and fury and boredom and sadness. A cosmic timespan’s worth of feelings. It’s not the 133 years (give or take) of Swift-Tuttle’s orbit, or the 2300 of Hale-Bopp’s, but there’s enough packed into those thirteen years to make the distance between then and now feel enormous. The distance between those days wandering Princes Street Gardens with Jess even more so. It’s a distance that feels so huge I wonder if it’s warped my perception of things. Everything that I worried about then felt enormous, like it could crush me. But the space between then and now holds things that almost did crush me—and as I expanded to hold those things, those previous worries became softer. Not less, because they never stopped mattering. Just…softer. Yes, you too. I can hold you too. There’s room for all of you here.
In his book Journey of Souls, the past-life regression therapist Michael Newton details what he calls the Life-Between-Lives—the place we go to after death, the cosmic in-between that comes after this life and before the next. According to the thousands of case studies that Newton collected over the course of his work, after death we all return to this in-between place before going on to our next lives. We review our lives in detail and look at what this particular incarnation taught us—and then we use these lessons to guide the choices of our next foray on this small blue planet.
It might be true, it might all be bunk. It dovetails nicely with the Buddhist approach to existence that has been such a lifeline for me over the last two years. It also dovetails nicely with that split-second of recognition that Jess and I experienced at our first meeting at David Russell Apartments all those years ago.
You! Of course it’s you—it was always meant to be you.
But even more than this, thinking about the world and the universe in this manner has helped me to zoom out and imagine living on cosmic time. The way that big things seem smaller the farther away you get—and the way that small things seem enormous when you’re so close to them you can’t see anything else. When I lived in Edinburgh those years ago, everything felt so immediate and overwhelming, constantly. I was so lonely almost all of the time I was there. I wanted so badly to have a particular kind of life, and I could not let that idea go—in much the same way that letting go of a future with Jess was its own kind of impossible. (A much darker, deeper kind of impossible, yes, but the actions were still the same. Clench. Refuse. Clench. Refuse. And so on.)
I was forced into giving that up. But it was only the act of giving that up that allowed other things to come in and flourish. And it was only the melding of those two things—giving up and time—that brought me here, to this moment, standing on an Edinburgh beach with a kind of astonished recognition.
I don’t want that life anymore. I haven’t wanted that life for a long time. The life that I have now is so much richer.
What if the lives we all have are even richer than this? What if the joys and sorrows and griefs and ecstasies of our blink-and-you’ll-miss-them lives here on this planet are just bits of time in a longer arc of existence, and the touchstones and signs I’ve talked about before are moments that point to this longer arc?
The eighteen months that Hale-Bopp was visible to people on Earth was only a fraction of time in its orbit. Maybe we are like that too.
It doesn’t even have to happen on a cosmic, metaphysical level. We live so much life in the span of our years here. We can, if we allow it, let this so much life expand our hearts and souls so that eventually even the things that seemed inescapable become soft. I don’t need to go to the afterlife to know this. All I needed to do, apparently, was stand on an Edinburgh beach again.
But I guess even that was an afterlife, in a way.
After lunch with old work friends (“You look younger,” they said, which was just another hint that my old life in Edinburgh had been made of more stress than good) I went back to the Old Town. As it got dark I felt the edges of the loneliness that had dogged me all the time I’d lived in the city. It wasn’t terrible, but it was enough. I found dinner (long live The Mosque Kitchen) and then got on a bus shortly after that and made my way back to St. Andrews.
I might go back once or twice more, mostly to see the colleagues from work again. But I won’t be staying over. And I probably won’t go back to Portobello. My orbit is different now—larger and softer and filled with terrible things that would have terrified me at 27. Now I just swing on by, moving out elsewhere into the solar system, and I carry the grief and the terrible and the joy with me and all of it is soft, eventually, given enough time.
Yes, you too. There’s room for all of you here.
The light really is something else, though. I’ll never stop marveling at that.
Tomorrow I’ll be releasing my first instalment in Drafts—the section of Notes From a Small Planet where I share snippets of work-in-progress. I’ll be sharing chapters from my new novel Wild Life, coming to a bookstore near you in 2025! If you’d like a sneak peek, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. As a paid subscriber, you’ll also get access to Glimmers, where I share regular, bite-sized meditations on delight, grief, and all of the glimmery things that anchor us deep in the business of living.
Regardless, the Sunday Letter will still show up in your inbox every week. I hope the Sunday Letters have brought you joy and moments of rest, moments of cosmic zooming-out in these blink-and-we-miss-them lives. I hope you share them if they meant something to you. (Thanks so much to those of you who got in touch this week to say exactly this!) I hope they’ve held you too, the way that they’ve been holding me.
Till next time, comets. Shine bright and beautiful this week, like you’re on an orbit of 2300 years, heading out into beautiful mysteries we can only dream about.
Currently Reading: Notes On Complexity, by Neil Thiese
Currently Watching: the waves at West Sands Beach
Currently Eating: leftover curry from The Mosque Kitchen. 10/10, no notes.