I feel a deep sense of happiness, pride and accomplishment for keeping the Kable running this long. It’s an extension of me, pretty much - a place for me to feed, indulge and grow my curiosity about the world. I still remember writing the Kable for the first time - a combination of me sending cool things to read to my friends, me being inspired by people around me starting TinyLetters, and honestly an inspired choice of naming (I’m Kat + I’d just read Cat’s Cradle + who doesn’t love an alliteration?).

In a way, I’ve always wanted to play the long game. After the first few issues, I remember thinking to myself, “whoa, wouldn’t it be cool to one day get to Kat’s Kable #1000?”. Almost halfway there now :)

I’ve gone back to Maria Popova’s 10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings many many times, and I’ve never indulged myself in writing something like it myself. No longer! Here’s my version of notes to myself about the Kable:

1. The Kable is an infinite game: I’m a big fan of James Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games. An infinite game is a set of sustained interactions where the aim isn’t to win, but to keep playing. It allows for an expansive view of the world. For me, the Kable has never been a means to an end, because there is no end. The joy of the Kable is in the unfolding, and in keeping it alive in a way that nourishes me. It doesn’t only nourish my curiosity, but also my social life! I’ve made friends via the newsletter, I’ve gotten my current job (and hence met Samira) via the Kable, and more. There’s no way any of these would have happened had I had a more narrow view of the Kable, or viewed it as a “project” with a certain end.

2. I do it for myself: Looking back, I’ve had many moments when I’ve felt like I didn’t really want to continue. Honestly, most times when I send the Kable out, I get zero replies and maybe a couple of acknowledgements from friends/family. What I’ve done consistently is ask myself, “would I still curate the Kable if I didn’t have an audience? Is it fun for its own sake?” and thankfully, the answer to that has almost always been yes.

3. I’ve been stubborn with my format: The Kable doesn’t look materially different now than it did back in 2016. I’ve been stubborn! I liked the format, and it has been easy for me to put it together this way. Changes I’ve made have been minor - I remember back in 2018/19 I had three mini-themes in each set of ten articles, but even that wasn’t too different from what it is now. Looking back, I like this: I reflect “stubbornness” as a positive thing, in fact.

4. In retrospect, I could have been a more aggressive marketer: Not only have I been stubborn, I’ve been a strange combination of bashful and arrogant in my positioning. I never wanted to shout out about the Kable from the rooftops, and I also thought, “The Kable is so good, and the readership will come.” Considering the fact that I’ve had pretty much no growth in my readership base in the last five years, this feels like I was just silly - I should have marketed myself more!

5. Reading widely is joyful: The Kable is essentially me following my curiosity. Having a conduit for it is joyful in a way that I can’t quantify or describe. The Kable is, in a way, me giving myself the license or the permission to take this sort of exploration more seriously. I have always enjoyed knowing things and showing that off, and in my undergrad this manifested primarily as my passion for quizzing. I grew out of that, though - both by the nature of the competition and the orientation towards facts - and I’ve found that the Kable is now my way of feeding a critical part of myself.

6. Very cool and unexpected things have happened as a result of the Kable: Yes! I could never have imagined these when I started off. I like to joke that my newsletter-friend Kriti, who I’d never met, was the one who introduced me to my current workplace and hence led to me meeting Samira. And the Kable reached Kriti because of another dear friend, Anjani! People talk about increasing the surface area of your luck, or about concepts like writing things being equivalent to constructing complex search queries to find fascinating people, and yeah, that’s what the Kable has been. It’s been so rewarding to find the Kable come back and surprise me in these ways. And it makes me feel like I need to be a better marketer to make more of this happen.

7. There’s a lot of confidence I get from having kept something going for a decade: I know I’m pretty good at a lot of the cerebral things I do, but mental stamina hasn’t been my strongest suit. I still remember feeling bad about “silly mistakes” I made in my math exams in school. As I sit down writing this, reflecting on curating the Kable for a decade, I feel this surge of self-assurance. I can do something consistently for this long. Wow. I started the Kable before Substack was founded! In fact, I feel prouder of the fact I’ve run the Kable for a decade than I do for completing my PhD. I suppose the percentage of newsletters that run for ten years is lower than the success rate of completing a PhD :)

8. I eventually realized that curation is an active choice: I had always seen myself as a conduit - but I’m actually more. When I was in the final year of my undergrad (just when I started the Kable and took my first Adult decisions), I thought that the best thing for me to do was something “pure” and apolitical. That’s why I chose to do a physics PhD. Fundamental science is apolitical, right? When my research group’s members were invited to military conferences about securing missiles, I realized the joke was on me. I also thought that my job in life was to “reduce” my footprint (carbon and more) because it was all bad. That is why I thought of the Kable as some idealistic thing - I was just the messenger. I realize now that curation is an active choice, and I now aspire to have a larger, and significantly positive, footprint in the things I do and for the people around me.

9. There’s a sense of stagnation from just being a conduit: Telling myself I was a passive curator was problematic from another angle - it was boring! Many people, including my dad and my dear friend Valerie, told me that they read the Kable for my commentary, for my choices, and not necessarily for the long articles I shared. This was another piece of feedback which prompted me to be a more active curator. And when I think about it now, I want to write new pieces synthesizing things I’ve read; I want to bring new ideas and metaphors to my thinking and to my creative output.

10. Maybe the format will have to change: Let’s face it. People don’t really read anymore. And maybe the future will entail your AI agent reading and summarizing the Kable for you. We are entering brave new worlds, uncanny valleys, and all sorts of other technological (or dystopian, you pick) futures. When I reflect on the stubbonness that kept the Kable the same for this long, I don’t feel so strongly about it now. I feel that the Kable will have to evolve a bit more and I feel comfortable steering it actively.

1. Walking etiquette. One of the basic things I knew about Mumbai was that everyone is on the move, hustling to make ends meet, doing gigs upon gigs upon side gigs. However, I was not prepared for how badly everyone walks on the sidewalks. Of course, we don’t have enough sidewalk for the number of people, but at the same time, people take up so much space. They also stop suddenly, don’t obey “lane” rules, and so on. After observing this for a few months, I have a few theories. The simplest, people are just bad walkers. Another theory is that personal space is at a premium, so people want to take up as much space as they can in public. Or.. people are so stressed with all their hustling that they don’t have the headspace for the spatial awareness and peripheral vision good sidewalking requires. I’m inclined to go with the first theory though.
2. Elbows. A continuation of the first, to some extent. The second-most dangerous object when walking on the streets is people’s elbows! People love to shove them out, or just put them in places where they’re going to jostle others. Obviously, this is mostly a guy thing. I find it really annoying. Whenever I feel like it, I go butt into people’s elbows hoping that they’ll get the message to stop elbow-spreading.
3. Conversations. I’ve had random, enlightening and fun conversations with cab drivers really often. More than other cities I’ve been in, I think the cab drivers here enjoy the transience of our short relationship and are happy to have a conversation with lots of style and not too much substance (kinda). My taxi to work only takes five minutes, but I’ve played agony aunt, gotten life advice (“just keep your heart open”), and been told how the city has changed in the last twenty years. The highlight, though, was a cab ride from the airport when the driver recited his favourite Kabir ke dohe to me.
4. Pickles. People trust each other here, to a larger extent than elsewhere. But every time I walk home from work, I see two pickle shops which have chained the larger pickle jars to each other, presumably to prevent people from stealing them! It’s quite funny honestly.

I like to ferment food and drink, and given the kind of person I am, I also like to think about the process quite a bit. Of late, I’ve started to think of the different timescales involved in fermentation, and how I seem to be measuring life, in a way, based on them. Tepache takes a day, sauerkraut takes two weeks, sweet miso takes three months, and a salty miso can be aged for a whole year before it’s considered ready.

I moved to a new apartment (in a new city!) last month, and it didn’t feel like home until I started a few fermented foods and drinks in various glass jars and bottles. These things generally take time to come ready, and rather than be frustrated by the lag between making and eating, I like to embrace it. I know I’ll be marking the new calendar year with some miso soup and miso ginger cookies made with miso I started last month. Similarly, a friend told me that they might be moving to the same city as me in six months, and my first response was, “let me start a batch of soy sauce now so we can taste it together when it’s ready.”

It feels like the timescales in my life, and perhaps all of our lives, have been mostly set externally. For a few years, I was in grad school getting my PhD and I measured life in semesters and the time between getting papers published, neither of which were really in my control. Apart from days and years, the other units of time we use: minutes, hours, weeks, months, they’re all just made up. Measuring life in three-month increments of miso batches is far more relaxing and freeing–at the same time, it also feels more… wholesome and constructive. It lets me pace life with a different clock.

Part of embracing the lengthy incubation period of fermented foods is falling in love with the process. I think it’s simply wonderful that putting the right ingredients in the right conditions enables microbes and enzymes to transform them in scarcely believable ways. Wonder is an emotion I try to cultivate more and more of these days, and watching my ferments do their thing is a big part of it. Encouraging and watching over these biochemical processes lets me “commune”, so to speak, with life forms we generally don’t interact with much. Not intentionally, at least.

Working, and being, with my ferments lets me be more intentional. When it feels like life is sweeping me up, it’s nice to remember that the ferments in my apartment can’t be hurried. There’s a witchcraft to them, and to paraphrase Gandalf, “a ferment is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” And it’s good to be there with them.

What’s the most interesting thing for me here is that this mental state seems to be characterized by an apparent lack of effort. I will say upfront here that I know there is a correlation/causation ambiguity going on here. I mean this in the sense of am I feeling good because of lack of effort, or is it the feeling good that makes me put less effort in? Either way, it gives me a sense of what my ideal way of being is like.

An example of healthy or “easy processing” in the recent past is that I had a severely upsetting and triggering episode last week. It lasted for about half an hour, then I visited a friend, told them, got a hug, and it was gone. This is quite amazing for me, as usually I have considered that I’m slow at processing things emotionally and thus have resigned myself to a protracted and difficult path out of something difficult. Also, this particular episode didn’t seem like a shortcut, it still feels like I did justice to the thing I felt.

I’ve also not been journaling for a few weeks. This is also going to fall under the correlation/causation thing. I know that generally when things are going well, I don’t feel the need to journal. Right now, though, it feels like it’s different from just that. I feel like I’m more willing to bounce off things quickly. I think there is a self-indulgence associated with journaling about things bothering me, and I just don’t have that self-indulgence anymore. There can be multiple reasons for this. One is that I’ve lost patience. The other is that my long break from employment have slowly let me become “me”. And so on.

I think this is a big step in my large, multi-year project (which I began in 2020) of wanting to feel through things rather than think through things. Historically, I have processed things by thinking through them, and I was always rewarded for thinking in general. It seemed “right”, “deserved”, and “effortful”. I think that last adjective is the most relevant here. I’ve always thought of moving through life as a labour, and when I shifted course to put my feelings and instincts first, I pleasantly realized that not all inner mind things are strenuous acts. I think that in slowly becoming truer to myself and my feelings, things come easier to me, and it is straightforward to act in ways that align with who I am. So of course it’s easy to process things.

“Courage, Merry, courage for our friends.” – Eowyn

Over the past few years, I’ve lost some friends and loved ones. It’s been hard, obviously, to deal with and move on from the voids that those losses have left in my life. In this essay, I’m going to talk about it at some length. It’s the first time I’ve talked about these things in a public setting, so please be kind when you read.

Lately, I’ve made a conscious effort to feel more of my feelings. This has been a project that’s been going on for a couple of years, and came from a desire to be more human and less depressed. Because of this, these losses have welled up to a significant degree. It appeared as though they were waiting to be acknowledged and processed in a certain way. I’m not sure how exactly to say this, but I think there were two things involved. I wanted to move on, but at the same time I also wanted to stay true to the memory of these people who were important to me. For a long time, this involved a certain degree of guilt and self-flagellation. I thought that the way to remember someone was to keep reminding yourself of the specific things that you missed them for.

I felt like the best way to honour someone’s memory was by omission, by forgoing something in my life. Someone I know of and follow on social media lost someone who was close to them few years ago. They made a nice post about their friend, and then declared that as tribute, they would retire a certain adjective they used for their friend from their vocabulary. It was like a sports team retiring the jersey number of one of their most important members. At the time, I thought that this was a really cool thing to do. So I decided to use it too since it was a form of reminding myself of the void that they left behind.

Since then, many things have changed. I have changed. My general outlook towards life has changed (see Participating in the world) from one borne of cynicism to one borne more of.. possibilities and taking up space. I now think that it’s important to base my beliefs and thinking in what I want and what I can imagine, rather than what I don’t like. Relatedly, I realized is that remembering people by giving up something was a way to center some form of guilt. I don’t think guilt is the right word here, but it’ll do for now.

For instance, my friend S passed away in 2016 in an accident, and I was bereft. I will eventually write more about what he meant to me later, but one of the ways my grief manifested was in giving up certain bands and artists’ whose music S loved and talked to me about. I too, embraced that, thinking that if I gave up these things, I’d never forget S. And yes, I didn’t forget S. But it was torture to live life this way. Every time I heard that band, or that one song, I’d be filled with sadness and longing. It took me some time to realize that this was almost a sort of trauma bond that I was constructing with myself, and that I had to stop.

The funny thing is that it took a few more losses for me to realize that it just wasn’t possible. I couldn’t live every day with a mental account of all the things not to do, especially when a part of me was asking, begging for me to instead embrace those very things. All of us are imprinted upon by the people around us, and it is futile to fight that. So each time I told myself I wouldn’t listen to S’s favourite band, I became less myself, I think. I don’t think the answer is to totally embrace every single influence in my surroundings, but at the least to avoid defining life by what to avoid.

Right now I’m in a healthier place. There are things I remember each of these people for, and I make a conscious effort, almost, to incorporate those things into my life. I don’t know how better to say it, but it almost feels like I am secure in my loss. I know what it is that I miss, I don’t need external validation to bolster my feelings, and I am sure that I keep these people alive in me in my own way. I am also comfortable keeping these things private. There are certain rituals or activities I do for each of these people, and I don’t think I’ll ever tell anyone what they are. I just don’t need to, and I genuinely enjoy the feeling of having my own personal tribute. The fact that these things aren’t known or visible seems to make them more real and valid. This is so freeing, so much better than remembrance by omission. I am happy to be here.

I am happy to be here because I am not trudging through life with an albatross around my neck. I am not afraid of losing my grief, which means I don’t hold on to it so tightly. I still honour it, but in a more positive way. My relationship to these people is not defined by them being away, but rather by a feeling of gratitude that they were in my life in the first place. I still feel angry, of course, and wish they were around. But it is not the only thing I feel.

What feels especially pleasing to me is how this whole journey has integrated me as a person. I feel aligned in how I deal with loss and grief, because it goes parallel to the way I wish to participate in the world. I feel empowered having figured this out mostly by myself, and know that I have the emotional wherewithal to deal with any other loss that I’ll inevitably have to deal with in years to come. I’ve come a long way in my general long-term personal project of wanting to feel more things and feel them instinctively. And finally, I’m doing far more justice to people who are no longer with us but who I am still able to hold in high regard without feeling guilt.

• I’ve always maintained a number of concurrent hobbies.
• This is usually good, because it makes life meaningful in a variety of ways.
• Further, there is a sort of flywheel effect. Each independent “thing” gives me momentum, joy and motivation to do the next thing. When all the things are “working”, they all move the flywheel, and it makes me get along well! Also it keeps me robust, in the sense that I have ways to pick up the slack if I slow down or pause some facets of life.
• This is why I call it a flywheel: each hobby (or each activity) adds to the overall momentum of the flywheel and lets me smooth out the kinks in life while also maintaing a certain level of enjoyment.
• I think I think this way because of being depressed. I want to actively cultivate this flywheel so I can have the energy to stave off major depressive episodes when they threaten.
• Anyway, to continue the analogy.. a flywheel is heavy. It needs momentum to keep going. This is why I can have some periods of catastrophic slowing-down. This is when more and more aspects of life stop working, and then it all comes to a halt.
• Because of the way I live my life (doing lots of different things), these crashes feel terrible, and they make it really hard to build up to the previous momentum of the flywheel.
• It’s not lost on me that this also seems similar, in a way, to a hamster wheel. I seem to be in a loop of my own making. In the sense that it has arisen because my coping mechanism has been “do lots of things”.

• When we find surprising connections in new things we do, or in new people we meet, we often say that it’s a small world.
• It is indeed a small world.
• But I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think that my reaction to each such realization is the exact opposite of delight.
• I’ve come to realize that each time we realize it’s a small world, it is a reminder of the way our spaces are shaped. Many fields and projects and avenues are gatekept to the extent that only a certain pattern of individuals can break in. And this is a sort of nepotism (not the best word).
• The other reason, relatedly, that this is upsetting is because these “small world” connections go back to remembrances of childhood. While it’s cool in a way.. it also means that you’re well set on your path even then sometimes.
• So on a personal level, each “small world” realization makes the world seem narrower and more stifling.
• However, I think it more serious to think of it at a larger scale. I think many, if not all endeavours, will be made better with a plurality of people taking part in them. Thus, I think it’s good for us to actively reject this small world phenomenon. And perhaps try to build systems where they do not occur.

• Reading about indigenous ways of living, in particular Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, made me realize that it is possible for humans to live in such a way that they can enhance natural ecosystems.
• I think it’s important to combat the notion that the only thing humans can do is harm the natural environment, even if that is what we do for the most part.
• Relatedly, this ties into my views on the messaging that humans should minimize their footprint, the amount of waste they generate, and so on. That messaging is fine, but when things are exclusively like that, then we start to live tentatively, and also our existence is defined by things to reduce and things to not do instead of things to do.
• Even though humans harm the environment for the most part, it is important to remember, and even center, the fact that that’s not the only way we act.
• Further, by centering the things we shouldn’t do, or the things we should reduce, makes us think of being apart from the world, instead of as a part of it.
• And species loneliness is scary too.
• To me, a natural way to combat that cynicism is to look at the world with wonder.
• The world is a big, beautiful, sometimes funny, often profound place, and there are all sorts of things to witness, if we look.
• Observing the world closely is also a way of respecting it.
• Also, for me personally, this is part of a concerted effort of dealing with depression over the years. Whenever I have the energy, I will actively resist the anhedonia and cyninism that comes from being depressed.

also How can wonder transform us?, an essay about Rachel Carson, Earthsea, and wonder in general with regards to the natural world.

also

And of the moth that first captured my heart in a single moment of pure trembling enchantment? How could I not have known such a joyous thing existed, or that it would inspire such a sense of wonder? A sumptuous beauty in clothed in emerald velveteen that came to mind each time I closed my eyes for weeks after my first sighting.

from The Extravagant Partisanship of the Leek-Green Faction

More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring. The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition—perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year—we can get the measure of it.

from Wintering, by Katherine May.

also Noticing small things

Attention and Will, an essay by Simone Weil

The Pathologies of the Attention Economy and Your Attention Is Not a Resource and On Two Ways of Relating to the World and The Virtue of Noticing. All by LM Sacasas.

When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention.

from Jenny Odell’s book

also see Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day:

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Looking back, it seems like most of the validation I received as a kid was for being smart and clever and good at exams and such. I think it was so pervasive that it became my identity, and then I started to resent it as I entered my higher and graduate studies. A large part of resenting it was an effort to move away from it, so that I could spend some time figuring out who I was, rather than fit the mould of the expectations that were placed on me. There’s so much I can write about this, but I’ll be brief for now.

It also appears, retrospectively, that a lot of the hobbies I picked up were for precisely this reason. In particular, my quizzing habit/practice is an interesting example. I love(d) quizzing, and was decent at it, but eventually realized it was leaving me too close to the smart/clever/studious identity that I was trying hard to let go of. And so, for this reason and for a few others too, I decided to actively avoid competitive quizzing. It feels very natural to do so. My other hobbies, at least the ones that have stuck for a few years (cooking, baking, fermenting, gardening, running), have a kind of unifying theme to them. They are all stuff to physically do! In a particular place. Not at a laptop or on a piece of paper.

For a few years, I think I was really struggling with a sort of reconciliation. That is, how do I internalize that I am smart and good at some things without letting it become my identity, and how exactly do I include the other esoteric-ish things I do in a way that doesn’t make me feel like I have two split personalities? I think it is safe to say that this was an existential crisis, albeit not a life-threatening one.

And now! I met a friend who primarily knows me for my cooking and fermenting and baking! And that’s been reinforced because of my time with them! And probably if they need to introduce me to someone, that’s how they’ll do it: as a cool person who ferments stuff and knows a lot about food. I can’t fully comprehend how free this makes me feel right now.

I think what’s really nice is the way I’ve been patient with myself? I’ve let this process take its due course. At the same time, parts of it have been active in a way that I didn’t recognize at the time, but I didn’t stop myself at some points in time when I could have. I suppose that reaching out for more handy than nerdy hobbies seemed intuitive and something I needed, and I let myself reach out and start to claim some of that territory without second-guessing myself? And it feels like I’m decently integrated now? Like, how do I say it? I feel like I have different facets but don’t feel compelled to gravitate to any of the edges. And none of them are pulling me too strongly.