May your dreams outsize you. May your work fit your hands. May your time be vivified.

This essay is included in the January issue of my epistolary zine, EPISTOLARIA. Project subscribers receive the zine, which includes this essay, a bookmark, and a crossword puzzle, via post. Paid Substack subscribers get access to the digitized version below. Please consider upgrading your Substack subscription to read the essay below in full or join the zine mailing list to support my work! Thank you for helping to make this creative practice a possibility. — Lian

Last month, I wrote about rituals as ways we commemorate moments of our lives. Ritualized, these moments become living, charged memories that inspire the present, levitating it within a cloud of past and future ceremonials. This narrativization naturally creates a chronology unique to each life, and it’s this perspective I must remind myself of often: timing is everything. Knowing in my bones when I must wait and be a little more patient; or when I must seize an opportunity that may never come again, despite feeling unprepared; or when I must hold on fiercely, and when I must unclench my fists. This trust in oneself is difficult; I can’t say I’ve mastered it, so I turn to rituals for guidance. Rituals, done with intent rather than blind obedience to routine, help provide the clarity and bravery to choose wisely within a delicate moment, the way a high school graduation nudges the young adult towards a greater sense of independence and responsibility they may have otherwise postponed, or how house blessings herald a sense of home in a new space. Time takes on a strange quality afterwards, like it’s aglow with both completion and newness. I’ve felt my face tingle with it.