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kairosclerosis n. the moment you look around and realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart, and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste. Ancient Greek καιρός (kairos), a sublime or opportune moment + σκλήρωσις (sklḗrōsis), hardening. Pronounced
You are unique. And you are surrounded by billions of other people, just as unique as you. Each of us is different, with some new angle on the world. So what does it mean if the lives we’re busy shaping by hand all end up looking the same?
She’ll try to blink the colors out of her eyes, but she’ll never be able to forget that there’s an entire dimension hidden inside things. Everything will now have a grainy reticence that feels intolerable to her. She knows that this humdrum workaday world can explode without warning, blooming with color and potential and chaos.
Most living things don’t need to remind themselves that life is precious. They simply pass the time. An old cat can sit in the window of a bookstore, whiling away the hours as people wander through. Blinking calmly, breathing in and out, idly watching a van being unloaded across the street, without thinking too much about anything. And that’s alright. It’s not such a bad way to live.
the giltwrights n. the imaginary committee of elders that keeps a running log of all your mistakes, steadily building their case that you’re secretly a fraud, a coward, a doofus, and a douche—who would’ve revoked your good fortune years ago had they not been hampered by their own bitter squabblings over proper grammar and spelling. Old English gilt, awareness of wrongdoing + wrought, shaped with hammers. Pronounced “the gilt-rahyts.”
Keep to the middle course. Steal bits of wax and feathers discarded by other, better fliers. Let the sun rise and fall. Let the waves pound themselves to mist, again and again. Your task is not to be flawless. Your task is to fly.
the meantime n. the moment of realization that your quintessential future self isn’t ever going to show up, which forces the role to fall upon the understudy, the gawky kid who spent years mouthing their lines in the wings before being shoved into the glare of your life, which is already well into its second act.
You’re not some finished painting, signed and sealed in varnish. If there is a “real you,” surely it’s the mess of paint on the palette: colors swirling and mixing and playing together, perpetually unfinished, searching and striving to make something new.
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.
foilsick adj. feeling ashamed after revealing a little too much of yourself to someone—allowing them too clear a view of your pettiness, your anger, your cowardice, your childlike vulnerability—wishing you could somehow take back the moment, discreetly bolting the door after a storm had already blown it off its hinges. Scottish Gaelic foillsich, to expose.
mauerbauertraurigkeit n. the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends whose company you generally enjoy—like a poker player who keeps folding a promising hand in order to avoid the pain of losing, or tamp down the urge to go all-in. German Mauerbauer, wall-builder + Traurigkeit, sadness. Pronounced “mou-er-bou-er-trou-rikh-kahyt.” Fig.
dorgone adj. wondering if you could slip away from an event or group conversation without anyone noticing your absence. Old Norse dár, benumbed + forgone, to have already left or abstained. Pronounced “dohr-gon.”
momophobia n. the fear of speaking off the cuff or from the heart; the terror of saying the wrong thing and having to watch someone’s smile fade as they realize you’re not who they thought you were.
Indifference is easy. It takes a lot of courage to fight back against it. So maybe we should stop and count ourselves lucky that there’s still someone out there, fighting the good fight.
We put people in boxes to get on with our day, to feel connected with each other, or feel like we’re a part of something, because we’re afraid that if there was nothing to contain us, we’d melt into the air.
Life is short—and life is long. But not in that order.
fellchaser n. a long-forgotten mistake from your past that could reappear at any time and rip your life apart, like a boomerang you tossed away years ago that’s only just now looping back around, which you’d have no idea how to handle because you have no idea what it is. From fell, to cause to fall by delivering a blow + molechaser, a low swooping throw of a boomerang.
And a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.
Really, that’s all a word is: a constellation of thoughts and feelings that our ancestors traced into memorable shapes.
