Franklin Farms Five: October 23, 2026

Live

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

James built a whole novella around a man so busy bracing for his life that he skipped it, and the cruelty is how reasonable he sounds the entire time. The line that sticks: it wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt or hanged, ‘it was failure not to be anything.’ Read it before you put off one more thing.

🌱 Try this: Notice the next time you say ‘after this is over,’ and write down exactly what ‘this’ is.

Love

Other people

A housemate goes into labour upstairs, and Oldfield ends the day pouring bleach on bloodstained towels, thinking it didn’t even feel that full. She ran a think tank, found every policy problem led back to disconnection, then did the inconvenient thing about it. It’s a case against the dream home ‘with far, far fewer people in it,’ from someone who has binned a stray catheter.

🌱 Try this: Count the people outside your home you could ask to borrow towels at 7am without apologizing first.

Learn

How to Unself in Order to Be Who You Really Are

Murdoch pictures herself at a window, brooding over some damage to her prestige, when a kestrel shows up and the hurt vanity simply evaporates: ‘There is nothing now but kestrel.’ The useful catch is that you can’t strong-arm it. Self-directed enjoyment of nature, she says, is forced, which rules out looking at birds while secretly grading yourself on your inner peace.

🌱 Try this: Find one bird, stone or tree that has zero interest in you, and stare at it until your grievance gets bored.

Laugh

Write Your Age

A novelist argues with her manuscript, which is sarcastic, uncooperative and asks whether it would kill her to throw in a little masturbation. Under the bit sits a partner’s mother with Alzheimer’s, a ‘crone’ necklace from Etsy, and the discovery that handing care to Memory Care is different but not a relief. The jokes don’t lighten any of that. They just make it readable.

🌱 Try this: Notice which part of your life you leave out of conversation for being ‘uncool,’ and tell one person about it.

Labor

Portraits of another life: Nemo Gould

As a kid, Gould discovered that most things are held together by screws, which is bad news for every GI Joe and household appliance within reach. He never got over it, and now discarded objects become machines that whirr into motion on their own. The argument is that much of the joy lives in the hands-on mess, not just the finished piece, a dangerous idea to show anyone with a deadline.

🌱 Try this: Take apart one broken thing you were about to throw out, just to see how it was held together.

Leave

Essays in Idleness

Kenko wrote this some seven hundred years ago and already had our excuses catalogued: ‘Let’s just wait until after this is over,’ ‘While I’m at it I’ll just see to that.’ He asks whether anyone with a fire close behind him pauses before fleeing, and observes that reasonably intelligent people do exactly that for a lifetime. Brutal stuff for a book called idleness.

🌱 Try this: Write down the step you keep deferring, and next to it the specific ‘after this’ you’re waiting on.

Legacy

Since my daughter moved out of home, my household has shrunk. A yearly tradition brings us together | Nova Weetman

After her mum died, the family tried Seville orange, apricot and plum, and the jars sat unfinished in the fridge for months because none of them tasted of any memories. Then came a cumquat tree in a yellow pot, a first batch overcooked to the wrong colour, six jars this year, and mother and son silently rationing the last one. Legacy, it turns out, needs four people and a trolley every move.

🌱 Try this: Name one recipe that will die with someone you know, and ask them for it while asking is still possible.