🐥The Paradox of Now #9

No Intro Necessary

The main body speaks for itself this week.

I think it proves you can find beauty and love and art even within pain.

Something to reflect on perhaps.

Anyways, a quick taste of what's coming:

🐥My number one book recommendation

🐥An assortment of postcards

🐥Tantalising tooth and teeth talk

🥚Eggstra News🥚

Your weekly dose of some fascinating and fun finds:

📖 Atomic Habits – Top 3 most influential books I’ve ever read. Hands down, my number one recommendation.

🏋️ Wrist Straps – Simple, cheap, and perfect for lifting heavier weights — especially if you’ve got clammy hands like me.

🏨 Manor House & Ashbury Resorts – 3-star hotel, 5-star facilities. Just back from hosting my Year 2 Olympics there with my mates. Greatest sporting getaway ever. But… they serve duck in the canteen. 🙃 

The Paradox of Now

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Grieving the Living

Note: As you read this piece, I invite you to fully immerse yourself in the journey he is on. Step into his world, embrace his experiences, and see if you can find pieces of yourself within his story.

He knew of someone attending grief counselling recently. Not because they had lost someone to death, but because grief, as the friend later explained, comes in many forms.

The loss of a career, the loss of a parent to alcoholism, the loss of a friendship group, or even the loss of a relationship with someone who you thought may be your forever.

The Contradiction of Contentment

His life sits at a juxtaposition. A strange feeling of ambivalence toward his own existence.

He is the most content mentally he has ever been. His mind, once his own personal playground bully, now stands as a sanctuary, clear and unburdened. This newfound clarity propels him forward in ways he never thought possible:

15kg lighter and feeling the best physical version of himself.

An international athlete whose body now matches his ambition.

A career that feels like childhood wonder, where LEGO becomes both profession and passion.

A newsletter birthed from promise to himself, finally breathing in the world.

The list of achievements extends beyond what he once believed possible - trophies of personal triumph that line the shelves of his rebuilt self.

And yet.

And yet it all just feels a little bit empty.

A gap on the shelf. A trophy missing.

He's filled his trophies with the champagne of self-love and is finally ready and able to offer the overspill he has in abundance. All he wants is someone to share it with - someone to clink glasses with, to toast to something real.

Someone who feels close enough to taste the bubbles on his lips.

But perhaps the champagne will lose its fizz before it ever reaches her, because who he wants is on the other side of the world.

The Shifting Landscape of Friendship

He has one of the best friendship groups on the planet - no exaggeration.

They've started going on stag-dos in recent years, practically filling airports and planes, boosting the GDP of whatever country they land in for that long weekend.

Thirty-plus people every time and incredible weddings to follow.

Each stag-do and each wedding as fun as the last.

But each one a constant reminder of how lonely one can feel surrounded by their best friends.

He acts as the cameraman for all the couples at the weddings.

He doesn't mind it.

He quite enjoys it in fact.

He loves love and he gets to be a part of that moment with them.

But he's also grateful to the friend who asks if he'd like a photo together.

These weddings and stag-dos seem to be the only times they truly get together as a group in their late 20s.

Before, it was nearly every day.

Drive aimlessly with windows down, send footballs arcing across empty fields, sprawl carelessly on sofas passing hours in comfortable silence, exchange meaningless conversations that somehow held all the meaning in the world, and lose themselves in the glow of television shows no one would remember.

A simpler life. An easier life. A great life.

All the signs were there to say that this is not forever, and yet he still holds on to this thought.

Holding on too long becomes painful. His hands becoming redder and more blistered the tighter he grabs the rope of friendship slipping out of his palms inch by inch.

Each friend slowly going off one-by-one finding a partner, settling down, getting married, having children, buying houses, dogs, new rattan patio furniture.

Because that’s what everyone does, right?

Thursday evenings spent walking around supermarkets rating different baby foods now feeling like fever dreams. Non-existent because of “date night” commitments and partners curled up under electric blankets watching Love Island together.

Fair enough.

He doesn't blame them. He’d disappear into those same domestic rhythms without hesitation.

He yearns for that quiet belonging, yet his last “firepit chat” or “Hideaway” moment was over a year ago now.

(Excluding the most horrific catfish story, but that's for another time – some wounds need time to heal before they can become anecdotes)

The Person Whose Name Appeared Most

Her name fills his journal pages like constellations - the most written name of his past year, a fact she'll likely know.

He wonders sometimes if there exists some metaphysical connection, like the folk belief that you shiver when someone walks across your future grave.

Does she feel a sudden, inexplicable aliveness whenever his pen traces the letters of her name?

The thought that she might be reading these very words follows him - he knows she's among his subscribers, another thin thread connecting them across impossible distance.

The Moment

He realised he loved her when he watched her dip a mini egg in mustard with no hesitation.

Pause.

This is no open love-letter that he writes, but instead a letter of acceptance and processing the loss of a potential someone who would celebrate every small victory as if it were their own.

He grieves for the living.

Continue.

He saw a person that would add to and not detract from the things he is already doing.

And at times maybe that has been at her detriment and to their detriment, and for that, he is sorry.

He wishes for her to live a life as full as she knows she is capable of.

No, one better.

As full as he knows she is capable of.

Because he saw and can still see greatness that remains invisible to her.

He thanks her for being part of his life for that short period of time. A blessing he will forever be grateful for.

A few months that lasted a lifetime. The moments together felt infinite.

Living proof that all love is never wasted. No matter how small a dosage.

Because they were both better off for it.

A Letter of Thanks

This becomes his thank you to her. In his own personal way. Through words on a page.

A thank you to this individual, but also a reminder and a place for readers to reflect and grieve for relationships that just weren’t meant to be.

Relationships that can take any shape.

Find Someone

Find someone who loves you and cherishes moments with you like he did when he saw that mini egg mustard moment.

Find someone who gets equally as excited as you do when they make a 50p with a dinosaur on it.

Find someone to laugh hysterically with you as you both say the word 'RNLI' because you think it sounds funny.

Find someone who sprinkles the perfect amount of sugar on your pink grapefruit for breakfast every morning.

Find someone who promises you trips to awful caravan parks, knowing all you need is each other’s company, a static caravan, and an old bingo hall.

Find someone who stutters over the words "I love you" whilst holding a saveloy in the back of a car boot, looking out at a sunset over the sea.

Find someone who gets as excited as you do watching a receptionist draw on a map of the hotel.

Find someone who makes you three different flavours of mussels because the ones you wanted in the restaurant the day before were sold out.

Find someone who could watch you forever, trying to master the diabolo on the beach as if nothing else in that moment mattered and the world stood still.

Find someone who will write you postcards for years, filling each one with the minutiae of his days, the shape of his thoughts, the colour of his dreams — knowing they may drift into the void, unread, unreceived, but writing them still.

Because some loves are like that — real, powerful and raw, yet destined to end up in the ‘Dead Letter Office’.

What She Meant to Him

And here are some of her own words to him:

His answer to that comes in one line written in his journal after a little time getting to know her.

 A line that will stick with him forever and needing nothing more:

"You made me feel more than equal."

The first time he ever truly understood what that meant in a relationship.

The first time he truly understood what love was and yet still couldn't define it.

His mustard to her mini egg.

A synergetic relationship.

He later wrote:

"I'm now ok with a forever looking like it is without you…"

The hardest sentence he'll ever write.

Thanks Dr Pepper x

So what?

This piece was written as a reminder that sometimes we need to look beyond our immediate emotions and consider the context in which we feel them.

If you’ve grieved in this life, it’s a reflection of how deeply you’ve loved.

Grief, in its rawest form, can be unbearable. But perhaps there’s solace in knowing that such sorrow exists only because something once brought us joy, connection, and meaning.

To feel the ache of loss is to know the depth of what once was.

And that’s why, in its own paradoxical way, grief is a blessing — a testament to the greatest force that has inspired artists for centuries, one they’ve tried to capture but never fully define.

An empty signifier.

Four letters…

Love.

🐥 Haiku’s Haiku 🐥

Haiku’s flock just got a little bigger!

Congrats, Mr. Rose’Meyer, on winning your very own Haiku in our first-ever giveaway!

More Haikus and fun ideas are on the way, so stay tuned! 💛

🌴 Palm Tree Euphoria 🌴

I played pickleball with a dentist last weekend — someone I’d never met before.

True to my word, I avoided the boring small talk.

One of my first questions:

What a mouthful!

And you can bloody well pardon that pun too.

I now pose the same question to you.

Are you an incisors, canines, premolars or molars sort of person?

Leave your answers in the poll section, DM me on social media or you can reply to this email.

See you dashing ducks over on the socials! 🐥 

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