6 Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
In search of lightness
Calvino, Saturn return, throwing spaghetti at the wall
It is August 2019. You move every year. Every time, without fail, you stare at your box of art supplies, wondering if this is the year you will finally purge them. The broken pieces of wood. The bottles. The jars. The expired paint. The charcoal. The stacks of colored paper. The crayons of only the colors you don’t use. The canvas you painted on already but want to cover up. The photo paper even though you haven’t been in a darkroom in a decade. The broken point and shoot cameras you intend to fix. The fabric markers your friend passed on to you while they were doing their own purge. They all have potential.
Potential has never felt so heavy.
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It is March 2020. A big world event is happening. No, not that one. Saturn is entering Aquarius. You are around 27 years old. You will spend the next 3 years being asked to define yourself for yourself. The entire world will be asked to reevaluate and restructure their relationship to limits and boundaries but you will be on many journeys at once. You will be required to purge what is not working anymore. The goal isn’t to rebel against your own limitations, it is to find freedom within them. You will be asked to look at those limitations from new angles and see their depth. You will be asked to restructure a system and find out a doorway has been there this whole time. You will be asked to walk through that doorway.
The growth that will happen in these 3 years will be immense. You must pack light, for you will be taking many triumphant leaps. If you don’t, you will be forced to shed layers regardless of the weather. It will be messy. There will be tears. There will be depressions and rock bottoms. There will be epiphanies and moments of clarity. There will be wins and even more losses. You will be asked to do many things without knowing why other than a feeling in your gut telling you ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ You must learn to trust yourself.
You will be asked to fly.
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It is mid-2022. By now, you have achieved many goals. You realise they were never yours to begin with and as it turns out, this is not what you wanted. You should have known better––what works for others was bound not to work for you. Now you are exposed. The things that usually bring you joy don’t anymore. You have outgrown these joys and have not found their replacements yet. Certain people are still in your life but not the way they used to be. Other people are here to stay. You feel like you go through a death-rebirth cycle every 24 hours. Feeling like a new person every day is hard to keep up with. Sometimes you like that person. Sometimes you don’t. Most of the time you just feel like a shell of a human being.
You miss who you used to be.
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It is January 2023. You have taken many leaps. You are exhausted. You have let go of so much, you don’t even have money. You got rid of the materials you lugged around with you all those years and you cannot afford to buy them back. Sometimes you wish you had kept that expired paint. Maybe this is when you finally would have made use of it and sold the thing you made with it. Wouldn’t that be nice? But no, you work with what little you have––a pen and a notebook. You try to summon feelings out of thin air but you are bored by your own ideas. You throw spaghetti at the wall, trying to see what sticks. Strand after strand. They fall to the ground. You throw handfuls now, desperate. Please stick, you beg the spaghetti. Not even a strand. You throw the pot.
It breaks.
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It is the end of February. Saturn will leave Aquarius in a week. You reflect on the last 3 years. The roots you exposed are starting to callous. You rub your fingers over them, not sure how to feel. Going into this, you thought you’d come out on the other side with something to show others with a feeling of pride and accomplishment, a talisman for how much you’ve grown. Instead, you have nothing. The calluses will eventually blend back into your skin. And it’ll be like nothing ever happened.
Except that’s not true at all. You look at the empty shell you have become and realise this transit was about letting go. By letting go, you have made space. There is finally room for you to sit at your own table. Some parts of yourself excused themselves, recognising their time had come to move on. Others had to be asked to leave and put up a fight. There were parts of you who you don’t remember inviting. And parts of you who aged better than others.
Now it is you and you alone who sits at your table. You decide it is best to get rid of the table all together. You wander around this new empty space, recognising it is full of potential.
March 2023