Leonard and Hungry Paul

by Ronan Hession

the trick is to know how much of the world to let in, without becoming overwhelmed.

How do you know whether you are a force for good? How do you ever know if the world would not in fact be lost without you? At what stage does a hand become a hold?

He liked that she read books, not to have opinions about them, but to find herself in them.

Their friendship was not just one of convenience between two quiet, solitary men with few other options, it was a pact. A pact to resist the vortex of busyness and insensitivity that had engulfed the rest of the world. It was a pact of simplicity, which stood against the forces of competiveness and noise.

Solitude and peace lose their specialness when they no longer stand in contrast to anything. In a busy—or at least busier—life, quiet reflection provides resonance to experience.

Though this was all still quite new to him, he could see that making big decisions was just as consequential as not making them. Either way you were committing to something. We are never entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.

He would have had that familiar sense of social retreat: the desire for invisibility among the crowd, his confidence having folded itself away. But now that he had found a little shelf of peace within himself, he could feel the happiness in the room and no longer felt excluded from it.

‘you get to the stage where you realise that if you don’t give your own life some air and sunlight, it becomes this sad little place inside you.

But it was the nature of being a parent. The kids’ lives are their own. From day one you are handing it back to them bit by bit, until they move on.