I am writing this from my bunker room in the outskirts of London. Bunker room because I hardly ever have to leave it, now that we live in the aftermath of COVID-19, the era of smart remote working. An umpteenth zoom meeting is scheduled for this evening. A facetime call with a friend will happen sometime soon. A decaf oat latte is fuming by my side. I know it will grow cold before the end of this paragraph, as it usually does.

My window displays the same scene every day. Except there’s something different, something new each day. This morning sky offers the full spectrum of blue-violet hues. Yesterday it was grey with clouds. The brown-green leaves of the loquat tree in our garden now blaze in the golden light. The house across the street changes in appearance as the people that live in it change their routines, the curtains now half-open, now fully draped behind the glass doors. …

I apologize for the lousy, clickbait-y title. It’s hard to think clearly when the past year has laid over your head the same foggy blanket the British sky has placed over its roofs. From where I stand, the urban lights are melting behind a thick, white veil of mist, as if filtered through milk. London has never looked more vulnerable, and I have never felt more practical.

I apologize for the title because I don’t know enough to teach anything to anyone, let alone myself. But this is what twenty-twenty has taught me. A non-lesson from a non-year. I am writing it down, pen on paper, fingers on a keyboard, in an attempt to remember. …

When the news of the recent violence at the Capitol reached me in London, it was late in the evening. I had just finished brushing my teeth, the taste of synthetic mint still in my mouth, when my fiancé pointed his phone at me, alarmed, and started scrolling through pictures of the rioters published on the BBC News website. I rushed to check my phone, nine notifications by the New York Times app stacked blunt against the blue, appeasing background.

“Can you believe it?” my fiancé said, his eyes still fixed on the phone.

I could.

In a country wounded by a history of social and political abuses — a country born with an act of violence and raised as a trade colony with the only purpose to generate wealth — Trump’s presidency and its ensuing, nationalistic ideologies come as no surprise. When you grow up listening to your parents yelling at each other, you begin to develop a biased idea of what relationships look like. Civilization is no different. …

When I ask friends or family to repeat what they just said to me, the reply is almost always: “Did you zone out again?” I usually like to answer that being zoned out is my natural state; I just zone back in once in a while.

Although I mean it as a joke, there is some truth in my line — one that hints at the possibility that inviting diverse thoughts in our mind instead of rejecting them in the name of presence can sometimes be good for us.

The first time I caught myself spacing out, I was in fourth grade. It was during an award ceremony of a local writing contest I won. That meant I had to stand on a stage in front of about 60 schoolmates while a lady read my story and a guy behind me would make a live drawing out of what she was reading. …

One of my first childhood memories is my father making unsolicited impressions of Mr. Bean at the dinner table. He was a fan — which made me a fan.

We would spend most Saturday afternoons crouched on the sofa in front of the large screen, waiting for the opening choral theme tune, which always made me a bit anxious and ecstatic. I never really enjoyed any episode as much as I enjoyed those few moments of expectation before it started.

Often, as recent studies suggest, it’s the wait for something to happen rather than the experience itself that excites us. In other words: we revel in the prospect of an event more than in the savoring of that event. That explains why most of us who work a regular 9 to 5 are generally in a good mood on Fridays. Not because Fridays mark the end of the workweek but because they anticipate the prospect of a weekend of fun and rest. …

According to psychological research, putting yourself in new and unfamiliar situations triggers a unique part of the brain that releases dopamine — nature’s make-you-happy chemical. This region of the brain is only activated when we see or experience completely new things. In other words: we only grow when we seek the unfamiliar, the unknown, the uncomfortable.

Few people enjoy feeling uncomfortable. It’s much easier to hide, to stay, to avoid risks, to never leap, to never begin. But the change we are looking for is often in the discomfort we are avoiding.

We tell ourselves that things will change — that we will change. But we don’t realize that change never happens in the future. It always starts in the present. And more often than not, it starts when it’s the only option left. …

This is not an article on how to make your verbs active and your prose less cluttered. Not because word economy and voice aren’t important. But because they won’t make you a good writer. Punctuation and syntax are a must, but they don’t do the work for you.

It doesn’t matter how good you are; it only matters what you leave on the page.

You can make your sentences sing. You can discern an asyndeton from a polysyndeton. You can spot a comma splice. Perhaps you know who Stanley Fish is. You can play by the rules, but ultimately they don’t matter if you don’t have a container in which to put them. …