Small and Beautiful Things
Some thoughts from the border between a challenging present and a promising future
He had been there the whole day, the day before. Whenever I looked up into branches, there he was. He was singing his little heart out. I’m not sure why. I just checked and it isn’t mating season. Presumably he was marking his territory. Telling the other birds that that branch was his branch. Or maybe he was simply attesting to his own existence; telling the world he was there. In any case, he was always there, and both he and his song were small and beautiful.
Apparently the reason Robins often follow us around is because, as concerns their concerns (which are the only concerns which concern them), when a human is in a Robin’s territory, this brings with it the potential for activities that will produce earthworms. And so, what appears to us simple humans as the robin’s conviviality is in fact just an instinctive understanding that, if they are patient with us, we may eventually make ourselves useful to them.
In the song ‘Jolene’ by Ray LaMontagne, there’s a part that goes as follows:
A man needs something he can hold onto;
A nine-pound hammer or a woman like you.
Either one of those things will do.
As it happens, it was a ten-pound hammer I was holding onto that day; I know because I checked. I’m not sure why it was ten pounds and not nine. It seemed like a small thing for the makers of hammers to quibble over. Maybe it’s something to do with the metric system. In any case, at that moment I was pretty sure I was in need of something more, and the extra pound in the hammer apparently wasn’t cutting it.
This has not been a kind year to me. Following a sequence of years in which my fortunes have ticked both up and down, though mostly down, I can safely say that 2025 has been the cruelest year of my life so far.
I won’t go into the details. Primarily, because I get the impression this moment is not being kind to many of us. More importantly, because I know there are so many right now for whom this moment is being immensely and immeasurably crueler. Lastly, because however much I might detest my own writing, not to mention the notion of my being worthy of the title of writer, I am nevertheless a writer, and I know that there is nothing worse than writing that simply dwells within itself.
For some time now, I have been haunted by the question of usefulness. This is a question of two halves. One half of this is rooted in the simple question of survival. On many days, it feels like I am trying to persist in a world that has simply ceased to have any use for me. This is the half of the question that I know to be base and abject, reducing the question of my life to one of pure instrumentality, of calculated means and ends. It is a question of use posed by a world which understands itself as a mathematical formula and which views people like me (an ever-increasing number) as the remainder that nobody is interested in solving. It is living in the knowledge that there is a force out there that would feel much more comfortable if numbers such as yourself would simply wipe themselves off of the board and be forgotten about.
The other half of the question is personal, and the one I understand to be more profound, and whose origins I can trace in the very way life happens and is happening right now. Against this base question of usefulness is the more poignant question of purpose, which leads inexorably to the relation between what I will do and the consequences those doings will create. Experiences and observations over the past few years have heightened my sensitivity to this unseverable connection between actions and consequences.
This bond affirms itself most poignantly each and every time we bear witness to the taking of life. But the stakes needn’t always be so high for finality to impress its weight upon the soul. In every action – acting, interacting, speaking, publishing, kissing, hugging, thanking, cursing, disavowing, affirming, and yes, even posting – there is an element of finality. Life is a question concerning how we interact with the world in which we understand that there are some moves that, having taken them, we cannot take back.
I suspect the reason I am so haunted by this problem right now is that it feels as though we are all being thrown into an emergent world in which action is everything, and consequences either do not matter, or perhaps no longer even exist. Like the social feeds, informational streams and digital flows in, by, and through which so much and so many of our lives and livings are now made and unmade, it feels as though this world that we have built demands a commitment to action that is perfectly smooth, immediate and frictionless, without any pause for reflection or contemplation.
For this world, to pause and think about the impact of one’s actions is something akin to a ‘buffering’ notification on a screen; a computational failure, the mark of a detestable fault to be fixed and ironed out. To survive in a world of the relentless, unabating content churn, it feels like what is demanded is a commitment to action on the level of non-contemplative, zero-latency amorality.
Apparently, the gladiators of this world are the ones who have accomplished that Herculean task of becoming their own rapid-response ethical tech support. To pause in contemplation of the import of an event, to question its significance, or think about what reaction one’s own reaction might incur – all of these are signs of weakness. The champions of this nascent world are the ones who live within the very infinity of that recursion of reaction, and whose moderators of their own interiority are always already ‘working on it’.
There is a part of me which holds that to know what someone truly believes, we need only look at how they act. And yet so often I gaze upon these digital gladiators, and their lives which present themselves as both relentless and ubiquitous; lives of pure action and activity. And yet, in spite of all the evidence they present (in the form of content, which they create), I cannot discern a single thing that they believe.
I am no stranger to being told by people that it is possible that I am ‘thinking about it too much’. In most cases, these people, who say this to me in the spirit of friendship and care (or at least with more conviviality than the robin) are probably right. My instinctive retort, which I keep to myself – because I know how it will probably come across, because I think about it a lot – is that my greater concern is that a lot of people don’t seem to be thinking about anything at all.
A few weeks back, at my lowest ebb, an individual with whom I was only vaguely acquainted saw me in my hour of need, and they asked me this question: “So what are we doing?” And, as always, I didn’t know. I had ideas, and thoughts, strands and threads of thought bundled together in a disorganised mass from years of questioning, but I had always been too paralysed by the weight of pending consequence to ever do anything with them.
It’s more than fear of failure (though I willingly confess to that part of it). It’s the weight of the knowledge that whatever I do, I will be putting things out into the world with my name upon them, and that each of them will become part of how I exist in the world, and how I am known. Little fragments, each one a testament to who I am and what I believe.
After more discussion (though not much more), this individual gave me a directive: “Stop thinking. Just do.”
Here is the paradox, as I understand it: To live is to be confronted, in every single moment, by a profound and meaningful question concerning how one will act. However, it is the possession of that ability and freedom to think, and to act, that is the very gift of life itself.
Life is a profound and heavy burden that is not to be taken lightly. It is also a simple and beautiful thing that is gifted to us with no demand for payment or recompense. Bills, rent, food, meal deals, train tickets, all of these hideous things – and they are things, and they are hideous – all of these come later. And as concerns the much larger question of judgement in the great hereafter, that is a bill that can only come due once the doing of life has been done (which demands the doing itself).
But to begin with: Here is a life – it is yours to keep. Take care of it.
In honour of that paradox, these words are both a confession and affirmation. For too long I have been paralysed by the profound weight of that question of action, which is a question of living. So today, I am affirming my commitment to act, which is a commitment to life. I am writing and publishing this today because I feel like a fledgling bird on the ledge, terrified by the thought that when they jump, their wings will fail them. But I also know that part of my communion with the world demands taking flight, and embracing fate through the very act of taking action which is an affirmation of one’s existence.
On the day in question, the work I was doing was unlikely to produce earthworms. From what I could see, it was mostly turning up earwigs, woodlice, centipedes and other such creatures. Later on, I checked, and I was reassured to learn that robins like those too. At one point during my labours, I saw the robin, perched directly on the upturned handle of my tool, staring at me, as if waiting expectantly for me to continue with my work. I looked him in the eye and I told him, “Everything I am doing today, I am doing it for you.”
At one point, I did find an earthworm. It was big, and long and looked like the kind of earthworm that a robin would describe as juicy if robins had use for words, which they don’t. I left the earthworm in a patch in the open where I hoped the robin would see it and take it. I wanted to thank him for the gift he had given to me, of making me useful, which he had given through the simple fact of his existence.
Later on, I checked for the earthworm, and it was gone.