I have been watching the paint dry.
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
January unfolds with the quiet patience of watching paint dry. After months of travelling, I returned to my apartment and decided to paint. So I sat and watched the paint dry.
After years of scrolling through endless feeds, I've stepped back from social media, and the silence is deafening yet oddly comforting. Like watching a wall transform from wet sheen to matte finish, this detox reveals subtle changes in my daily rhythm that I wouldn't have noticed in the chaos of constant connectivity.
My grandmother used to say that patience was a lost art. She'd sit in her room for hours, listening to the radio and teaching me that life's most profound moments often happen in stillness. She passed away on the last day of 2024, taking with her a generation's wisdom about slowing down and savouring time. She was a teacher who inspired me to want to be one. I am still trying.
There's news I'm bursting to share—the kind that would typically warrant an immediate post, a flood of likes, and congratulatory comments. But holding this joy close, letting it simmer like Grand-mère conversations, has given it a different flavour. The achievement feels more personal and honest without the immediate validation of social media. It's teaching me what I knew all along: that some moments are meant to be savoured privately before being served to the world.
In these quiet January days, I find myself doing things my grandmother would have appreciated: writing letters instead of sending DMs, calling friends instead of liking their posts, and yes, quite literally watching paint dry as I redecorate my space. Each act becomes a meditation on presence, on the beauty of watching something transform slowly and deliberately.
The bittersweet truth is that while I'm learning to embrace this slower pace, I deeply wish to share these insights. I am glad I was able to see her in November. The first person I visited back home. The lesson to me so far is that sometimes the most meaningful connections happen in silence, in the spaces between updates and notifications, in the quiet act of watching paint dry on a January afternoon.
