Things That Didn’t Make it to Main

The most important thing that happened to me this year involved a highly-recommended, well-parented near-stranger, my deeply questionable judgment, and the kind of spontaneous decision that either makes for the best stories or those vague obituaries written by embarrassed loved ones.

I had met someone exactly twice, and yet, when I found myself with a ticket to something that might be historic, might be nothing, and definitely required a road trip with no guaranteed parking, no real plan, and a non-zero chance of spectacular failure, I turned to this virtual stranger and said, “Can we do this?”

His response wasn’t “What time?” or “Should I bring snacks?” or any of the normal human questions. It was just “I’m in!” and that too, delivered with the confidence of someone who either makes excellent life choices or spectacularly terrible ones, and honestly, those people are always the most fun.

delightful

We drove. We got there. We were part of it. It was, indeed, historic. We will both be dining out on that story for a good decade. And I realized that some of the best decisions I’ve made this year involved finding my people, trusting my instinct, and taking that once-in-a-generation shot.

I’m thinking about that moment, and so many others, because my social media feeds are becoming populated with everyone’s end-of-year lists. Number of countries visited. Career milestones. Books read. Goals crushed. The whole apparatus of Evidence That I Lived Well This Year.

And the list I would want to make isn’t really something I can track or adequately capture.

How do you quantify:

• the moments when someone gets your completely unhinged reference and you both just stand there grinning like idiots who found their people

• the number of bits you and your friends committed to that are now forever inside jokes

• the rambling voice messages exchanged about everything and nothing

• the dances with kitty, her purring that deep, rumbling purr, both of you spinning in afternoon light like you’re the only beings in the world who matter

• full-commitment face-plants where i didn’t just stumble but fought a battle with gravity i was never going to win

• the times i said “i’m just a girl” to escape adult responsibilities

• the instances i announced “i’m deceased” while being demonstrably alive and usually holding chai

Once again, in the best way, history reminds me I am not the slightest bit special.

Humans have always had this problem, maybe not in the grand, philosophical sense (though we’re pretty terrible at that too) but in the immediate, tactical sense of this moment, right now, what should I be paying attention to?

These days, we have entire industries dedicated to telling us what’s important, algorithms fine-tuned to surface the significant, and yet somehow we keep getting it wrong.

Consider the Byzantine monastery ledgers, which are frankly works of bureaucratic art. Pages upon pages documenting grain stores, candle consumption, the precise schedule of prayer rotations. But tucked into the margins of a 9th-century account book, there’s a barely legible note about a monk named Theodore who carved wooden toys for the village children during his free hours. We know this only because the abbot added a grumpy marginal comment: “Brother Theodore’s hands might be better employed in copying scripture.”

we have too many deloitte consultants and not enough wooden toy makers

Brother Theodore, I hope you made so many toys. I hope those children loved them. I hope you knew, somehow, that a thousand years later, someone would notice. I like to imagine the cranky abbot rolling his eyes at how Theodore chooses to spend his personal time (management, amirite?) while secretly hoping nobody noticed he’d saved one of those wooden horses for himself.

Zip over and back to a Chinese provincial record from the Song Dynasty from 1073 and there’s an accounting of a local magistrate’s year-end expenditures. Most of it is standard: repairs, salaries, tax collection costs. But there’s one line item that clearly annoyed whoever was reviewing it: “Wine and musical instruments for Mid-Autumn Festival celebration, including elderly residents who typically do not attend public festivals.”

Someone spent government money making sure the old folks who usually stayed home got to join the party. And someone else was mad enough about it to write it down, probably thinking it would reflect poorly on the magistrate.

Plot twist: it makes him sound like a goddamn delight even though he was clearly the worst.

You know who did this get right? The griots of West Africa. They memorized the official records (the kings, the battles, the treaties, etc) but they also memorized the small stories. The personality quirks. The jokes. The year when the mangoes were particularly sweet and everyone talked about it for seasons afterward, the way we all still talk about that one perfect week in September when the weather is perfect.

There’s a Mandinka saying: “A griot’s memory is seven times as long as the ancestors.” Because the griot doesn’t just remember the dates. They remember the grain of truth that makes the past recognizable, human, real.

The official record says: “Treaty signed, Year X.”

The griot says: “And do you know, at the feast afterward, the chief’s youngest wife made everyone laugh so hard with her raunchy humor that even the elders forgot to be dignified.”

Guess which one actually tells you what it was like to be alive. It’s so good that I'm choosing to focus on her comedic timing rather than the whole "one of several wives" thing, because honestly, that's a separate historical can of worms that deserves its own essay about ancient marriage customs and the deeply conflicting feelings they elicit.

I digress.

So anyway, here’s what I’m thinking as the year ends:

I’m not making a list of accomplishments. I’m not tracking metrics. I’m not curating evidence of a life well-lived for social media consumption. Because a) who cares besides the people who would already know, and b) more of a.

I’m sitting with the unmeasurable stuff. Because all of us, throughout history, are facing the same impossible task: how do you capture the stuff that actually shapes you? How do you measure love? How do you quantify the moment someone says “I’m in”? How do you track the number of times rain made you feel held? How do you count the moments you found your people over a copper bowl at a house party?

You can’t measure it. You can’t track it. You can’t turn it into content. You just get to live it, notice it, and hope that somewhere, a thousand years from now, someone finds the equivalent of your margin notes and thinks: “This person knew what mattered.”

And on that note, thank you for making me feel like what I’m doing here matters.

Thank you for wandering through this peculiar little corner of the internet where I dump historical anecdotes and ponder the cultural significance of everything from snowflakes to imperial escapades. Those handful of comments you left? They brought me ridiculous amounts of joy, and they’re the reason I’ll keep launching these thoughts into the digital void.

This project is my attempt at a message in a bottle, except instead of contributing to oceanic plastic pollution, I’m just cluttering up inboxes with Byzantine monastery gossip and deeply felt opinions about rain across various civilizations.

I hope your 2024 was gloriously full of the unmeasurable stuff: the conversations that rearranged something inside you, the moments that made you feel less alone in this beautiful, dark, magical, heartbreak of a world, the tiny rebellions against taking everything so damn seriously.

Here’s to a new year of finding your people, authorizing festival funds for the elderly, carving toys when you should be working, and collecting all the stories that will never make the official record but somehow end up being the most important things that happen to us.

Happy new year,*
xo,
Saana

*there are approximately seven different new years approaching and you’ll definitely get posts about at least three of them, so let’s not overdo this one.