One of my most popular blog posts year in, year out, is the one I wrote on the joy of “Saw this and thought of you”. It’s just six words, but it can spark a thousand butterflies; all because of how lovely is it to be reminded of the fact that people think about you, and have bothered to learn about you, and think — nay, know — that you matter.
This is, then, a sort of follow-up post to that, but Missy-Elliott style flipped ‘n’ reversed (sing with me now: hnynflipndipnyamyam!) That is to say, this post is about those instances where I don’t have those words spoken to me; in fact, they’re not even spoken at all. Instead, it’s those times when I’m doing something specific yet pedestrian and I think of a particular person that I always relate to it, but only very tangentially.
Let me paint you a picture. I think of a lady called Carole-Ann every time I see nutmeg, because I once shared the best recipe for chocolate chip cookies on my instagram, and she replied to it thanking me for sharing and extolling the recipe’s virtues. It’s the nutmeg, she said, it really makes the difference! That was it, the entire exchange, and now my brain will always fire off nutmeg>CAROLEANN.
Or take my friend Alice, who I always think of when I’m in the shower. She is an exceptionally talented young businesswoman, blah blah blah, but that pales in comparison to an all-important question she posited once on her stories that really took off: which way do you face in the shower?
It’s nice, I think, to ponder this sometimes, because it brilliantly connects the micro (you, your immediate surroundings) with the macro (the infinite web of connections throughout the whole entire world). It is, as Daisy Buchanan so brilliantly put it in her interview in VORACIOUS Issue 2, that paying attention the smaller things makes ‘everything feel gloriously enormous’, while paying attention to the bigger things makes the small stuff feel so special.
So - what are your instances of this? I’d love to know! (And remember; it can’t be a connection that’s really fundamental to that person’s being. For example, thinking of Alice every time I think of business coaching and marketing wouldn’t work, because she’s a business coach and marketing whizz).
I love this! A few of mine...
Pick n mix will always remind me of my uncle, who used to take me every weekend to get a fiver’s worth (a LOT of penny sweets in the early 90s)
Any horror film featuring twins (of which there are a surprising amount) reminds me of my best friend rosie, and the first one we watched together in our hostel in Sydney!