Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but "steal" some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

When a physicist falls in love :)

"I think I mentioned that there was a gramophone player and a record among all the things brought from Brasov. Just one record. I don’t know why he’d got hold of just one and why it was that one. On one side was a Hungarian dance by Brahms and on the other a Spanish dance by Granados, both played on the violin by Jascha Heifetz. It was a red His Master’s Voice record and I can still see it perfectly, though for some reason I haven’t bothered to look for it since. For two weeks, in the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening—mostly in the evening, after dinner—waiting on the veranda for midnight, we listened to those two melodies, which became so familiar to us that they ceased being pieces of music and became a kind of domestic ritual, an integral part of our life there, similar to all the other household sounds—familiar footfalls on the porch, the ticking of the clock on the wall, the noise of a door opening and shutting. See, so many years have passed, I’ve forgotten so much and will forget so much more, but I think I’ll always remember those songs. Not because they’re beautiful—I don’t even know if they are—but because the holiday is contained so deeply within them that not even Andrei, who only knows tangos, has ever forgotten them."

In myth, women’s boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait […] So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”