A few days ago we were invited to a friend’s house for dinner. Now, I was shocked at how immaculate this house was. I don’t mean “immaculate” in a way where it was decorated like it belonged to the front cover Architectural Digest. This home was deeply respected, down to its bones. No webs lurking in the corners, cabinets without random receipts and mail thrown on. There just wasn’t any clutter. That’s not to say that it didn’t feel lived in, with photographs lining almost every surface, kitchen appliances filling the counters, and blankets thrown on the sofa. I’ve been meaning to do a deep clean at home, at a spring cleaning level, and this gave me just the push I need to start on my own project. There’s a point where you just get fed up digging through drawers to find what you actually need.

We all know that saying that “a messy space is a messy mind.” From my own experiences, this could not feel more true. I always feel like I work better and feel more calm when I have a cleaned up desk, but what does the neuroscience say about this? Is there any scientific basis behind the statement, or is this just another marketing phrase for minimalism?

I. A Short History Of Minimalism

Minimalism rose as a response to how consumerism had ended up filling our homes. From dozens of random kitchen gadgets to stuffed closets, consumerism led to homes that felt suffocating. What’s fascinating to me is that philosophers criticized consumerism, before it was actually termed as consumerism, for decades. In Ancient Greece, Diogenes had rejected social conventions and built a philosophy around disowning all material property. He believed that the more possessions one owned, the more tied down that one was. By surrendering physical possessions, he argued that we can find more geographical and personal freedom. Today his philosophy feels both radical and extreme compared to our societal ideal. We live in a world where ‘more is better’ and excess has become glorified. Hauls, walk-in closet tours, garages with several cars, this is what we are shown to strive for.

As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. —Thoreau

In the book, Walden, Thoreau also reflected on the culture of consumerism in the mid-1800’s. He urges people to ask themselves; what is a home actually for? Is it a shelter where we find refuge, eat, and take care of loved ones or is it the competition grounds, where we compare all our possessions to others? By continuously trapping ourselves in this vicious cycle of competition, we continue to invest in superficial comforts that keep us from actually experiencing life. This obsession with material goods has long surpassed Thoreau’s time. We continue to spiral into the thought that there’s always a better product out there; something else we can put on the wish list.

II. The Stress of Excess

Before we get into how clutter takes up space in the mind, it’s important to touch on the very real psychological and physiological effects of living in a messy space. CELF ran a huge study in the early 2000s looked at the home-lives of 30 families across California. What they found was that the mothers who had given house tours and used “messy” or “cluttered” to describe their home spaces were also more stressed out in the evenings. The researchers took it even further and measured their cortisol, also found to be elevated. Cortisol is known as the stress hormone and it causes a cascade of physiological and psychological changes in the body. It leads to an increased rate rate, blood pressure, anxiety, and may cause difficulty sleeping. Our home is meant to be a retreat from the world, a place where we can comfortably rest. When our homes start piling up with items, we feel a heavier responsibility to care for them.

It’s believed that a big part of this stress is driven by decision fatigue. Decision fatigue happens when you’re overwhelmed by the choices you have to make. This looks like constantly questioning; “should I keep this?” “where do I put it?” “when am I going to have the time to clean this out?” A big part of what drives decision fatigue is how confrontational and unavoidable it becomes. For example, you may be trying to quickly get out of the house and when you’re just reaching for the car keys on the windowsill, you just can’t help but notice the random clutter on there. You keep telling yourself that you’ll get to it later. But you have to remember that the mind keeps score, it remembers. Because when you live in a home full of clutter, this thought process rewinds and plays over and over again. The same decision-making conflict happens each morning again and again, adding to the mental stress of your day. Rather than just going about your routines, you get consistently interrupted by these small stressors. These objects that you own, become objects that own you. They act like anchors and begin to weigh down the way you move through your own home, through your own life.

III. Mess On The Mind

Neuroscience tells us the exact same story. Studies have shown that clutter can distract us during attention-focused tasks. There are two big pathways in the brain that mediate information, this includes bottom-up and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing begins when outside information received by our eyes, nose, and other senses, is then processed in the mind. Top-down processing happens when we use our prior knowledge and expectations to act on our outside world. We process visual stimuli through bottom-up processing and our focused attention to a task moves through top-down processing.

This study by McCain and Kastner was actually able to show that information from visual distractions not only competed with each other for neural processing, but also with top-down processing. This led to decreased performance on tasks requiring focus, because clutter in our visual fields end up competing for our attention. When you put that together with decision fatigue, then it can get pretty difficult to actually focus on a task that needs your fixed attention.

IV. The Messiness of Life

Ok so if you made it this far into the article, you’ll recognize that these arguments all sound familiar. They’re the same ones that drove the minimalism trend years back. Other than minimalism being devoid of any character and individuality, are white walls and beige furniture really what’s best for our health, mood, and productivity?

Mess is just a part of living, it’s the natural product of experiencing and creating. From the same study that looked at the home-lives of 30 families across California, they interviewed a family about the dozens of photographs and memorabilia tacked up on their fridge. The dad mentioned that there were a lot of times that when they’d chat together in the kitchen and their family would reminisce on different pictures on the fridge. It ended up being a conversation starter, they would point and say “Remember when…”

I guess that’s why I feel so happy when I see how photographs, polaroids, and just random pieces of personal history become decorative pieces in homes. When you look at the neuroscience, you realize that we’re hardwired to feel this way. Feeling nostalgia for these small, warm memories actually ends up decreasing our stress. They activate reward circuits in the brain, releasing dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter.

If you’re a creative, the mess of media, of photographs, magazines, and books, is a huge part of the creative process. We’ve all seen those Pinterest photos of artistic workshops where books are stacked up against the wall and magazines are littered across the table. Francis Bacon himself constantly kept a small collections of photographs and magazines that became a huge part of his painting process. To create, you need to consume. Then, inspiration becomes a starting point that you can build from.

Even if you’re not a creative, mess is unavoidable in any project you’re working on. If you’re researching a topic or finishing up an article, then you’re probably going to have 15 tabs open. You’re going to have notebooks and pencils out strewn across the table and that’s just a part of the working process that has to be embraced, not shamed. In the book “A Perfect Mess,” the authors argued that mess actually improves your working efficiency by avoiding unnecessary time on organization. But I feel like it’s fair to say that the authors really mean ‘mess’ as a functional network, rather than random arrangements of clutter.

The take home…

You don’t need to hold onto things only because it makes your life feel more concrete. You need to be completely honest with yourself and look at the monsters that are under the bed. What’s piling up in there? Be honest with yourself and ask, is it part of the story I’m building now? And if it’s sentimental, why hide it away? Find a fun way to put it on display and let the nostalgia brighten up your day. As Kondo said: If it doesn’t spark joy, throw it out. This essay wasn’t meant to shame or trigger anyone, and I understand that life sometimes gets too busy to have the time to properly maintain a home. This article was meant to give a push to anyone looking for an excuse for another spring cleaning, but also to raise some awareness of how consumerism feeds into a stressful life at home.

Sources 📚

1. Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century by Jeanne Arnold

2. Walden by Henry D. Thoreau

3. A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by David H. Freedman and Eric Abrahamson

4. Interactions of top-down and and bottom-up mechanisms in the human visual cortex

"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop." Rumi.

The term “butterfly effect” is thrown around in everyday conversation. It refers to the wildly unpredictable outcomes resulting from small, initial changes. All the resulting changes are connected to each other, yet it blows up in such a way that the final outcome feels illogical. When we use the phrase ‘butterfly effect,’ I don’t think we realize the true scale of what it actually implies.

Edward Lorenz coined the phrase in 1961, after discovering it by sheer accident. He was studying meteorology and hoped to use mathematics to predict the weather. To do so, he created a computer program where by inputting the initial conditions, he could develop the forecast for the following months! But on another random day at work, the course of his research changed forever. He wanted to re-run a simulation. Rather than completely restarting it, he took some slightly modified values for the initial conditions. These were very small changes. Instead of 0.506127, he inputted the value 0.506. This wasn’t on purpose, it was just because the report from the previous simulation was shortened. He couldn’t believe the forecast results! Just from these small changes, he had two completely different weather predictions. He found absolutely resemblance between them. To scale it to real-life weather systems, these small changes were equivalent to a puff of air! And thus famous the famous metaphor was born; just one flap of a butterfly’s wing is enough to cause a hurricane.

The butterfly effect became a staple in what’s known today as classical chaos theory. It basically echoes Lorenz’ findings and applies them to several complex systems with non-linear dynamics. Examples of this would be weather, as mentioned earlier, but also planetary movement, fluid dynamics, epidemiology, and even the brain. Henri Poincaré, one of the earliest mathematicians to discover Chaos theory, found that even a system with three moving objects was enough to be considered a complex system. To predict the outcomes of these systems is beyond the deterministic mathematical models that came before. Any long-term outcomes are impossible to guess.

So let’s scale down even more, looking at what is happening on a quantum level instead of a systems level. On the quantum level, particles don’t have fixed locations in space at certain points of time. Instead, they exist in a wave-like space. Energy, and matter, simultaneously exist in multiple locations. However, even on this scale and a different assumption of physics, they found that the butterfly effect still holds. They call it the quantum butterfly effect. Similar to what Lorenz found, small initial changes in the conditions resulted in deviations of the resulting wave functions. Any small change, even on the quantum levels, leads to unpredictable outcomes.

Whether it is a system or an observation of quantum mechanics, it’s clear that everything is connected in an intricate, intertwined relationship. Despite how we perceive the world in separation, there are millions of invisible threads tying everything together. Nothing works in isolation. Any single movement leads to the shift of millions, and millions, of waves and particles.

This is where chaos theory stops being just physics homework and becomes personal. Because if unpredictable, outsized ripple effects are considered in our weather systems and quantum particles, it’s worth asking: where else are they hiding? Turns out it’s even closer than you’d think. In your own relationships, your mood, even your Twitter feed.

Our brain circuitry says that we are literally built to be influenced by other people. Emotions are in fact, contagious. So no, it’s not really whether you’re an empath, it’s just part of being human. A highly cited article from Wild and colleagues has shown we both match a facial expression and feel the related emotion within 500ms! Just compare that with object recognition, which takes around 200-300ms. That’s how quickly it takes for us to not only process someone’s facial expression, but also mirror it back and feel it ourselves.

Other research has shown that you don’t even need to see a facial expression to be infected by emotion. As some of you may have guessed, emotions can even be contagious through the screen. Wilke and his team looked at 60,000 Twitter interactions to see how negative emotions impacted interactions over 8 weeks. They found that negative emotions quickly spread among tweets, with anger garnering the greatest collective response and disgust leading to the most long-lasting changes. But unlike contagious emotion through facial expression, this comes from the fact that social media allows us to share experiences with others. By reading about each other’s stories, we no longer experience it alone. I think that’s the incredible part about social media; just from a screen, you can literally experience other people’s lives.

So yes, emotion is contagious. And according to neuroscience, so is our behavior. Why are we able to imitate other people so well? How does that happen in other species? Based on initial research on Macaque monkeys, this is because of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a specialized type of neuron that fire when we are doing an action that we see another person doing. They’re believed help us figure out how it feels to perform an action. They form large networks across the brain, crossing several different cortices involved with decision-making, movement, emotions, and languages. Studies have confirmed the hypotheses that they are play roles in understanding people’s intentions, empathy, as well as language and motor learning. So basically, we're able to not only feel other people's emotions but also have our brains react to an action as if we're performing it ourselves.

From a butterfly’s wingbeat to a shared glance across a room, the pattern is the same: nothing exists in isolation. Lorenz’s stray rounding error and Wild’s 500-millisecond mirrored expression are really two versions of the same truth. Small, seemingly disconnected inputs ripple outward into outcomes far larger than themselves.

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” Einstein.

We like to think of ourselves as separate, self-contained units moving through a world of separate, self-contained things. That everything exists in a sort of vacuum. But chaos theory suggests otherwise on the scale of storms and quantum particles, and neuroscience suggests otherwise on the scale of a smile, a tweet, or a shared story. We are not observers standing outside these systems, we’re inside them. We’re just one more variable in a web of feedback loops we can’t fully predict or control. Maybe that’s the real takeaway: influence doesn’t require force or intention. Sometimes it just takes a flap of a wing, or a flicker across someone’s face, to change everything that comes after.

Sources 📚

1. The Quantum Butterfly Effect

2. This Month in Physics History, Circa 1961: Lorenz and the Butterfly Effect

3. Seeing the Quantum Butterfly Effect

4. Emotional contagion on social media: pathways, effects, and insights for marketers

5. Are emotions contagious? Evoked emotions while viewing emotionally expressive faces: quality, quantity, time course and gender differences

6. Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical modular brain
   

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It’s officially the first half of the year, making it a perfect time to take a moment and reflect on the first half of 2026. It’s a good time to look back at the wishes, promises, and resolutions that we made at the beginning of the year. Did we cross some of these off? What new experiences or realizations did they bring us?

For me this feels like a bit like a cosmic joke, because I started writing this article at the beginning of the year with a promise that writing would become a consistent habit. It’s only now that I’m coming back in the second half of the year looking to finally commit to writing on Substack. I’m leaving in some of the introduction I wrote in January:

Making new years resolutions is a ritual we keep coming back to, both out of societal expectations and as a way to meet our regrets from the year and strive towards our best self. It’s a promise that by the end of the year, if we follow these resolutions, we will be happier, healthier, and more successful. If resolutions are meant to be a commitment to our best selves, then why do they feel so daunting and why do so many people give up on them so quickly?

What if we look forward to what we’re doing tomorrow, rather than simply looking forward to crossing off our resolution at the end of the year?

Rituals have recently become a huge trend in self-care circles on social media. In a fast-paced world, they are moments of calm that anchor us to the present and ourselves. Rituals and routine look the same on the surface. However, there’s a keen distinction on their intention. Routines and habits are simply repeated to serve a function in meeting our physical needs.

Rituals are different; they are actions performed with an emotional or spiritual promise. They bring us back to ourselves, to our inner resolve. They can also bring balance to our lives. When days seem too repetitive, they can imbue them with meaning and intention. When days seem too chaotic, they can serve as an anchor and ground us.

From an anthropological standpoint, rituals were practiced to meet, and celebrate, the unpredictability of life. They tie human culture together through its generations. They transform with changing social and religious beliefs, becoming part of both private everyday routines and communal celebrations. That said, there has been significant discussion of how we can even begin to define a ritual:

1. Consistently repeated

Rituals are actions that are performed repeatedly, and not usually for the function that they provide. They breathe into our schedule, rather than being something that is imposed onto it. Unlike habits or routines, which do serve an inherent function, rituals can come and go, coming back when we need them. However, they are consistently repeated over time, enough to become performed without too much mental or emotional resistance.

2. Multi-sensory

They’re often combined with the senses, blending sound, smell, taste, touch to become a complete sensory experiences. In many traditional and community-involved rituals, these can involve certain costumes, foods, and incenses. This is part of what makes rituals so compelling. Even without the intention behind them, they’re pleasurable. They make excellent memories, are easy to become nostalgic for, and make it so easy to come back to. In a world where most of our day-to-day pleasure gets reduced to whatever’s on a screen, I think a sensory-rich ritual is more than welcome.

3. Intention; connection with the sacred and an emotional change

Throughout time, rituals serve to connect us to a certain state of mind. The most significant example would be religious rituals. Religious rituals, such as prayer, often connect us to higher, meditative state of mind. But again, they can go beyond a religious perspective to reaffirm any mental state we wish.

Rituals can also be greatly supportive of our mental health. They can help us through anxiety, depression, and grief. This is because in the face of the unpredictability of life, they are predictable anchors. They’re there are reminders that despite feeling like we’re in the storm and caught in a whirlwind, we are still standing. Athletes for example, turn to small pre-game rituals to help reduce their mental stress and improve their concentration. If you’re procrastinating on an important work task, maybe it’s the small ritual of cleaning up your space, lighting a candle, or even brewing a coffee that sets you in the mood.

4. Connect us with community

Most historical rituals are grounded in community. They bring communities to together in the aims of celebrating change or praying for it. In this way, people are brought to each other in ways beyond necessary daily transactions to pray for something beyond themselves. Social orders are also either reinforced, or changed, during these rituals. Traditionally, this could be marriage ceremonies or coming-of-age.

Research (Hobson et. al) on how rituals impact performance and anxiety

There was a study done in 2017 where they actually measured how rituals impacts both performance and anxiety. They looked at how rituals affected the ERN (error-related negativity) signals in the brain, which influence how sensitively we react and predict to our own mistakes. When ERN levels are lower, our emotional responses to our mistakes our lower and we feel less anxiety. The researchers sought out to answer; do our ERN signals actually decrease during performance with rituals? If they do, does that mean that our performance is blunted? They actually found that rituals ended up decreasing ERN signals in the brain and performance was improved. These results reinforced the long-standing belief that rituals decrease levels of anxiety.

How we can use rituals to bring back third spaces

Third spaces need your help. These are your local public spaces which include the library, parks, community centers, but also small businesses in your area. The reality is that due to social shifts to online spaces and commercialization of many spaces, third spaces are starting to disappear. Third spaces play an important role in society; their services not only create a space for people to connect, but also provide services that underprivileged people would not have access to.

If third spaces aren’t already in your life, then rituals are how you can introduce them in. By incorporating rituals in third spaces, your life can expand in so many ways, both emotionally, physically and mentally. If there’s any lifestyle changes that you were waiting to make, whether that was a sport you wanted to enjoy, finding ways to romanticize life more, or just find ways to connect with others, than rituals are a way that you can feed into that.

Rooting rituals in community can bring you so many new experiences but also a different level of commitment to the life you want to live. When you connect with people who have similar interests, it makes them so much more enjoyable to come back to. The repeatability of your rituals also grounds you more deeply in your local community. Recently I was really surprised by this article on SIMIs, the “seemingly insignificant minor interactions” of everyday life. What fascinated me was learning how these daily interactions played such a huge part in maintaining mental health, especially against feelings of anxiety, depression, and grief.

Here are just some ideas to get you started:

• Journaling and reading at parks and cafes

• Working at your local libraries

• Playing sports at public fields

• Long walks in a local conservation/park

• Joining run clubs

• Weekly meet-ups with friends at a local diner

• Book clubs and language learning courses at the local library

In this essay, I attempted to try and reframe routines as rituals. Why build rituals over routine? Rituals are motivated by intention and become flexible to your schedule, they can breathe and change over time. They usually start as a one time thing, and as we begin to enjoy it, they start to stick. They are also not inherently productive, that’s not what they’re here to do. Their purpose is experience, both on a multi-sensory level and mentally.

Sources 📚

1. Rituals decrease the neural response to performance failure

2. Does ritual exist? Defining and classifying ritual based on belief theory

Proust’s introduction of In Search Of Lost Time has become famous as being one of the earliest depictions of how strongly scent intertwines with memory. By blending literature with cognitive psychology, Proust creates a hyper-realistic example of scent-induced nostalgia. For me, what was particularly interesting about this passage was how relatable it felt. Despite the fact that I’ve never dipped a madeleine into milk in a family member’s countryside cottage, his experience of nostalgia feels completely universal. Scent-induced nostalgia is completely different than your usual, eerie feeling of deja vu, the sense that this not your first time experiencing this. Instead it bends time and space to bring back a vivid memory from the past.

How my obsession with perfume started

As we’re now on this topic, I thought I’d share an experience that first sparked my interest in fragrance. I wasn’t the girl to have a lineup of Victoria’s Secret body mists, as much as I wish I had been. So when my mom brought back a small vial of Fragonard’s Verveine from her trip to France, it became a treasure that I kept close and saved only for the fanciest of occasions. To little me, the fanciest of occasions was apparently the Halloween dance in the elementary school gym.

I remember keeping the vial in my desk and feeling that there wasn’t enough perfume on me, so I just kept going back to dab more and more onto my skin. After the dance, it went into the depths of my makeup drawer, disappearing only to be found again years later. By then, I had already begun my bachelor’s degree. After rediscovering this perfume and catching only a sniff of it, I was sent back into the years of the past. I remembered exactly how that stuffy synthetic sweater felt on me, the route my class took from the classroom to the gym, the neon-bright lights overhead. But I also remembered the anxiety that came with this entire experience. This hyper-realistic ability to transport you directly to the past is what scent-induced nostalgia looks like.

The scent processing pathway in the brain

Forming a memory relies strongly on your emotions as well as on multiple senses, from vision to sound, touch, and scent. However, research has shown that scent is unique in being the sense most intertwined sense with memory. To better understand why this is the case, I believe it’s important to define some of the main components of the olfactory pathway. When information from the nose is sent to the brain, it first encounters the olfactory bulb where it is initially processed before being sent to the olfactory cortex. The olfactory cortex is then responsible for decoding, identifying, and classifying the thousands of odors that our brain has to make sense of. This information is further sent to the amygdala, hippocampus, and orbitofrontal cortex. The amygdala is known as the site for emotion-processing, the hippocampus where long-term memories are formed, and the orbitofrontal cortex is a subdivision of the prefrontal cortex where decision-making and action-planning take place.

Through this pathway, scent becomes a fixed, evolutionary part of the formation of a memory. This relationship is more intertwined with memory formation than other sensory pathways because it has the strongest functional connection to the hippocampus as well as bypasses the thalamus when sending information to the prefrontal cortex. By bypassing the thalamus, the odor information is less filtered and reduced compared to other sensory inputs. Rather than simply summarizing the odor’s specific fingerprint, the odor signal remains as specific as possible. This intricate integration is what is believed to be the main reason why scent-induced nostalgia feels so incredibly vivid.

The neuroscience behind the relationship of scent and emotion

Beyond the relationship between scent and memory, scent is also known to correspond to, and influence, different emotions. Studies throughout the years have been trying to answer questions like, is aromatherapy actually effective in influencing our mood? If it is, can we use essential oil aromatherapy as a treatment for chronic stress, anxiety, and insomnia? Several research studies looked into this question and found that essential oils such as lavender, citrus oil, and damask rose actually did help reduce the perception of anxiety and its physical symptoms. This review found that on average, there was a decrease in systolic blood pressure and heart rate.

Modern perfume trends today

Today, marketing takes advantage of a scent’s ability to influence our emotions. Fragrances are commonly added to lotions, skincare, and makeup, usually with scents associated with florals or sweets. The perfume industry is also growing at an impressive rate, with projections suggesting it will grow by around 3% annually over the next 5 years. This has been fueled by increasing trends of perfume collections and a growing relationship between perfume and attraction and identity. Feminine perfumes are beginning to lean more and more into the gourmand side, associated with romance with roses, vanilla, and caramels. These scents are tied to comfort and safety. After all, who doesn’t love to be reminded of a warm pastry in the oven or a rose in the garden? Middle Eastern perfumes have been riding this trend, becoming popular for these sugary sweet perfumes, and you only have to look at Sephora’s best-selling perfumes to see that vanilla fragrances have become clear fan favorites.

Creating your own unique relationship with perfume

Instead of following trends and recommendations, I invite you to enjoy fragrance in a different way. Is there a place that feels just right to you, a place that feels like home, somewhere grounding and re-energizing? It’s best if this is a real place and has a memory that ties strongly to you. What does this place smell like? How does it present itself to you, and are there any specific notes you can identify? Once you recognize these notes, you can find perfumes that feel uniquely comforting and grounding to you.

Sources 📚

1. Essential oils for clinical aromatherapy: A comprehensive review

2. Essential oils for treating anxiety: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials and network meta-analysis

3. Human hippocampal connectivity is stronger in olfaction than other sensory systems

4. Meditations on scent

5. Plasticity in the Olfactory System: Lessons for the Neurobiology of Memory

6. Scent-evoked nostalgia

7. The Proust effect: Scents, food and nostalgia

8. The Neurobiology of Olfaction, Chapter 15: Memory and Plasticity in the Olfactory System: From Infancy to Adulthood

9. Threat Memory in the Sensory Cortex: Insights from Olfaction

10. What the nose knows

this book took a long time to get through. i started reading this between some busy periods in my life and intended it to be a comfort read. i actually struggled reading the first half of the book, mainly from the constant changes between seemingly unrelated characters in various time periods. it felt like chapters ended without purpose and there was always such a distance to each character, it was difficult for me to connect. imagine you’re standing on the shore and your only role is to observe. sometimes your feet get wet in the water, but that’s alright because you can just step back if it gets too cold. you feel comfortable where you are, never wandering in, and simply waiting on the shore observing the endless sea before you. this distance was particularly felt reading kafka on the shore, switching between characters just when we came too close, marukami only showing us what we needed to know when we needed to. slowly and slowly, the needle weaves throughout the different perspectives, through small coincidences, tying each of the character’s together into a patchwork blanket.

“All kinds of things are happening to me,” I begin. “Some I chose, some I didn’t. I don’t know how to tell one from the other anymore. What I mean is, it feels like everything’s been decided in advance— that I’m following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn’t matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It’s like my identity’s an orbit that I’ve strayed far away from, and that really hurts.”

the story itself is grown on greek themes of tragedy, fate, and myth. the protagonist kafka is prophesized to follow the footsteps of oedipus himself. tamura, kafka’s father, was the one who brought this prophesy onto him. it was believed that he did so in order for kafka to become an extension of his own desire. throughout the story, this prophesy drove kafka to run away from his home in terror of the prophesy becoming true, but also in fear that he would become like his father, whose tyrannical desire was imposed and forced onto others. kafka and oepipus inherently know that they are caught in a terrifying, unavoidable situation from this prophesy. what makes a prophesy so terrifying is that the outcome is determined. unlike kafka, oedipus doesn’t accept this inevitability. he trusts that he can make choices, such as leaving his adoptive parents, in order to escape this outcome. tamura’s prophesy bleeds into kafka’s consciousness, shaping his identity and choices. kafka becomes suffocatingly warped through the prophesy, leading to its fulfillment not through fate, but out of his own actions. kafka’s also familiar with the outcome of oedipus, which further feeds into the inevitability of his anxieties about his prophesy. for kafka to free himself, he feels he has not other choice but to face his fate through his own, conscious action. of course, most of his choices were never confirmed as ‘real’ actions in the story and were more about his personal, internal experiences. it was never confirmed whether miss saeki was actually his mother, sakura his sister, and there was also never confirmation that he actually met his sakura in his dream.

“I’m a butterfly, flitting along the edges of creation. Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and present form a continuous, endless loop. And hovering about there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

marukami could not better describe the confusing emotions part of growing up, especially that of of identity, belonging, and purpose. through kafka, murakami demonstrates youth as a constantly filled vessel of experiences and emotions. unlike some of the other key characters in the story, like sakura, oshima, nakata, and miss saeki, whose behaviours remain relatively fixed throughout the story, kafka’s continuously changes and evolves in response to the how others interact with him. his desires are superfluous and towards the end, so is his identity. i appreciate how crow was used to describe this everchanging, individualistic character. after the losses of his family members and abandoning his father, kafka continues to move through one of the most difficult periods in his life where he finds himself completely alone. i like to think of the crow as the personification of his motivations and emotions, particularly that of anger and loneliness. the crow also mirrors his actions in continuously leaving. kafka similarly eventually leaves all his relationships in either disappointment or fear in himself or others. towards the end of the novel he changes in this way, rather moving onwards to the next part of his journey

“I wasn’t alone, but I was terribly lonely. Because I knew that I would never be happier than I was then. That much I knew for sure. That’s why I wanted to go— just as I was— to some place where there was no time.”

towards the end of the novel, it becomes incredibly clear how disassociated the main characters are. miss saeki and nagata are both generally functional in society, they’re able converse with others and survive in the world. but they were also isolated and struggled to form deep relationships. as the story progresses, the narrative exposes that these individuals are actually missing a piece of themselves in another world. the feeling of loss and confusion is only echoed through the setting in the story, particularly through the characters being continuously drawn to the forest and sea even as they find a temporary comfort in the library. both the forest and the sea are equally depicted as all-encompassing environments, drawing everyone into a sinkhole of life, death, and mystery. what’s also interesting is that these locations are also associated with memories and apparitions of people long gone, whether that was miss saeki’s love on the shore or the missing soldiers in the forest. murakami builds on pre-existing anxieties of the vast mysteries of the ocean and getting completely lost in the woods to feed into dream-like, surrealist feel of the text. throughout the novel, we see how different characters encounter these environments with either relief, like miss saeki as she finds time to stand still, or surrender, like kafka who continues to go deeper into the woods. for me, i found these environments to be an beautiful way to parallel yearning in it’s overwhelming and heart-wrenching ways.

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Scene 1. I’m on a roadtrip and the air is stale inside the car. I’m dazing out the window, falling in and out of sleep, watching the cars go by on the highway, and I feel like I’m floating, not going 110km/hr. Everything blends in together, time space, cement, white dashed lines, the background of trees. Light floods in and I’m facing a lake, boundless blues opening up in front of my eyes, no longer is everything a blur. There’s a primal need, beyond myself, which needs to let it in though the window. I open it, and there floods in the humid, hot lakeside wind. I finally feel like you’re home. The smell of the whole ecosystem of the lake, hot algae, the fish and billions of little creatures, and decay, makes itself home. The lake itself, always in movement but simultaneously still, a whirlpool of life and death itself.

Scene 2. I’m in a peach picking farm. The air is sticky and smells like the dirt underneath my fingernails, overly ripe fruit fly kissed fruit, like everything is caving back into the Earth into this one melting pot. Green, on green, on green. It smells like nostalgia, like a childhood fever dream, an innocent dream with no expectation, nothing to give or to be. The wavering balance of sinking into the earth but also pushing back on it, more present than ever before. Warm peach juice gushing out everywhere, all over my hands, my mouths, back into the earth, nothing contained anymore. The moment smells sparkly, champagne-like, like the star-like reflections on a still ocean.

Scene 3. Night falls over and the sound of crickets wash over the land. It’s completely dark, except for this one little epicenter of light, inching and kissing up towards the heavens. Wood cracks, ages, decays, Heavy, thick smoke filling up the lungs just as it breathes out into the sweet, sweet night air. Suffocating, but addictive, and so wonderfully nostalgic. Memories of good food, the urge, probably unstopped, to roast a marshmallow to the golden it’s meant to be.

Summer, my beloved, a living silence.

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Night town a glass.

Color mahogany.

Color mahogany center.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

Loveliness extreme.

Sacred Emily by Gertrude Stein

Throughout centuries, roses have been known as the “Flower of Flowers” all across the world. This obsession has lead to the cultivation of different roses across continents, each varieties of roses being prized for yes, their fragrance, but also their medicinal properties, blooming ability, and appearance. Through continued cultivation and cross breeding, the variety of roses has grown to include thousands of varieties. The most traditionally known and prized for its fragrance, is the Damask rose. Originally from Persia, this rose spread through Turkey, Ancient Rome, and Egypt, becoming famous for its use in fragrant rose water and its petals. The Damask rose has an herbal and spicy flavor profile. Another popular rose commonly used in fragrance is the May rose, which was produced by cross breeders between the 17th and 19th century. Believed to be the cross of the Damask rose and dog rose, it became popular in the south of France and is now predominately grown in Grasse. Compared to Damask rose, it has a honey-like fruity fragrance.

Civilizations have used and perceived roses in different ways, for medical reasons, pleasure, and even as signs from God. The early Persians had extracted the essence of roses into rose water, and had used it to treat inflammation. Interestingly enough, modern studies also found that certain rose varieties have a wealth of health benefits. Rosa Canina, for example, was found to have high levels of vitamin C, quercetin, and ellagic acid, along with other volatile compounds and vitamins that have beneficial effects on our health. This review article featured an interesting study that found repetitive aromatherapy self-massage with Rosa Damascene essential oil prior to a menstrual cycle, had decreased the intensity and duration of the cycle. Uses of roses in medicine extended throughout time and ages, for mental and physical strength in the Middle Ages to being a traditional medicines for several illnesses in Asia. The symbolic meaning of roses can be closely associated with Aphrodite, a Greek Goddess known for love, beauty, and fertility. This concept bloomed throughout the antiquities, with roses becoming known as symbols of desire and secrey in Roman myths. It’s believed that Cleopatra had even ordered a several feet of roses to cover her bedroom floor to seduce Mark Anthony.

There are hundreds of chemicals that compose the well-known rose scent, yet in essential oil, only 4 are really considered. Research shows that the chemical driving rose perception is B-ionine, interestingly not unique to roses but found in flowers and fruits, and it rather smells powdery, floral, and woody. The more rose-specific fragrances are oxylipins and 2-phenylethanol, which are also considered the most pleasing. There’s also other familiar chemicals in roses such as geraniol, citronellol, and rose oxides, which we see as a common perfumery ingredient today. Differences between rose varieties happen from varying compositions of some key terpenes that introduce honey-like notes, fruitiness, and spiciness!

It wasn’t enough to smell the roses outside, we had to alchemize them for wearability and consumption, to be easily enjoyed no matter the time or space. Roses were traditionally extracted as rose water, which is easy to produce and easy to apply. Used in Roman baths and used throughout ancient Persia, rose water was used medicinally and hygienically, binding itself not only as a fruit of enjoyment but also a staple in lifestyle. During Ancient times, there also was the rise of a game-changing perfumery technique from Egypt, called enfleurage. This method involved placing petals to sit in fat, where fats would absorb the volatile scent compounds in many flowers. As perfume became more popular during Louis XIV’s reign, enfleurage became a huge technique in Grasse. This technique would produce a more photorealistic rose fragrance than rose water. What became even more well-spread is the use of steam distillation to capture the rose. It was also successful at capturing the volatiles, however with this technique, it was done with steam particles. It was found that the scent could be replicated even more accurately, with the use of synthetic molecules. The technologies developed so that the volatile compounds in anything could be read and replicated, which made it ever easier to create a realistic rose.

I always found the combination of roses and patchouli attractive, and it seems like I’m not the only one. Portrait of a Lady from Frederic Malle is a spicy, warm Turkish rose. It reminds me of good evening conversation and the warm glow of a candle nearby. Red Roses by Jo Malone is more innocent, a nostalgic memory of shoving your nose right into a rose. If Red Roses is delicately smelling the roses, then Diptyque’s Kyoto is grabbing the rose by the thorn in a wet, muddy Garden.

The scent of the rose is volatile and ever-changing. A rose can smell completely different depending on the time of day, the weather, and the variety. The scent of a rose is highly dimensional; varying in layers of fruitiness, spiciness, and freshness. I suppose that’s why I’m still searching for the perfect rose fragrance, even though there’s hundreds on the market. Maybe I’m still searching for the nostalgic rose from that restaurant I visited long ago, and maybe the best part is that I’ll ever find it in a bottle. No matter your taste, there really is a rose for everyone. The rose, that we’ve tried to define and replicate all these centuries, with countless technologies, remains ever elusive.

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This boutique is a trip back in time; dressers, storage containers, and vases, all which were a trip throughout the centuries. Decorative porcelain vases brought me back to Art Deco and Art Nouveau period. There were display cases immortalizing the everyday moments of this perfumery with little tidbits of history, of perfume bottles, brochures, flyers, and pieces of machinery. The drawers were beautifully tagged with sinuous handwriting on yellowed paper; “violets from nice”, “sandalwood” and other perfume materials where I feel like I’ve transported into Patrick Suskind’s novel “Perfume”, and the endless possibilities are splayed out in countless organized drawers of little magical vials. And there was this light powdery violet scent delicately traced across the room.

Art nouveau was what I kept returning to on this trip. Whatever museum or antique store I was visiting, my obsession with art nouveau only grew as I began to understand it more. **I began wondering, how did the Art Nouveau trend influence perfumery?

From the 1890s to the 1910s, the Art Nouveau movement was taking the design world by storm, drastically changing architecture, interior design, and art. The key design features are long sensuous lines, curves, asymmetry and geometric motifs inspired by nature, such as trees, flowers, and plants. Some well-known examples of art nouveau include Gaudi’s masterpieces in Barcelona, Paris metro entrances by Hector Guimard, Gustav Klimt’s iconic paintings (such as The Kiss), and Louis Tiffany’s glasswork. Once I started researching the relationship between art nouveau and perfume, I realized that art nouveau and political changes had simultaneously affected societal views on perfumery, the presentation of perfumery, technological advancements, and finally, the scent landscape in Paris.

The perfume consumer base in Paris had rapidly changed throughout the 19th century. Popularity and widespread use of perfume began during Napoleon’s reign, when he had prioritized hygiene and sanitization throughout the population. He was obsessed with Jean Marie Farina’s Eau de Cologne, influencing a major trend of fresh and citrusy scents across the country1. Napoleon was key to transition societal views of perfumery from medicinal to hygienic. However, the revolutions occurring during the 19th century shifted the perfume industry to appease to even more of the middle and upper class population, and even produce some revolution-themed perfumes2. When the art nouveau movement hit, the middle-class still continued to be targeted, as there wasn’t only a shift in design style during this time, but also one in lifestyle. Art nouveau pioneers believed that everyone, no matter if you’re in the bourgeoisie or the lower class, deserved to live a life surrounded by beautiful things and have a connection to nature. Art nouveau wasn’t only for the people who enjoyed the art pieces, but for the factory workers and artisans who created them3. The concept of introducing little luxuries in daily life further encouraged the use of perfume to the public.

Along with social climates, advancements in technology played an incredibly important role in the accessibility of perfume, how it is used, and the trends in perfumery. During the 19th century, there was the development of several synthetic molecules and the synthesis of common scent molecules found in nature. some of the most popular and used molecules from this period include; aldehydes, coumarin, vanillin, and musks. Synthetic molecules made it easier to mass produce fragrances and increased the affordability and use of perfumes. For example, musks used to be originally found in a deer gland, so you can imagine how much easier it was to synthetically produce musks. These synthetic also became more popular in perfumes, encouraging a shift from fougeres to musky, warm, and even aldehydic fragrances.

Guerlain, still a well-known company today, released their famous “Jicky” at the beginning of the art nouveau period in 1889. It was the first perfume to use synthetic molecules, particularly vanillin4. It’s still available today if you’d like to try a taste of 1889 yourself. Jicky is a herbaceous sparkly vanilla, with notes of lavender, bergamot, and rosemary.

The 1900 “Exposition Universelle” in Paris also encouraged perfumers to experiment and push the boundaries of perfume, further increasing the use of synthetic molecules in perfumes. The perfumery that inspired this whole little rabbit hole of research, Oriza L. Legrand, had presented their specialty perfumes at the Exposition Universelle. They presented some of their most popular fragrances, but also Art-Nouveau period perfumes such as, Foin Franchement Coupe and Relique D’Amour. Foin Franchement Coupe, is a sweet, musky herbal fragrance. Inspired by dry hay, this feels like flying down in a dry grassy field with patches of wildflowers on a hot, sticky summer day. Relique D’Amour is really the opposite, it’s a rich cedar and pine fragrance, almost smells physically “cool”, like walking into the basement of an abandoned church, yet there’s still an underlying muskiness to the fragrance. Musks are still so common in perfumery today, they’re warm, cozy and feel reminiscent of getting close to someone. It’s interesting to see how several perfume trends from art nouveau still persist today.

The early 20th century also marked the rise of Coty, who was such a big hit on his first perfume release “La Rose Jacqueminot”, that he basically became a billionaire overnight. what made his perfume such a industry-changer was the use of several synthetic molecules, not only in a supporting role, but to make up the majority of the perfume to increase the longevity and sillage. “La Rose Jacqueminot” is a simple rose perfume, yet it uses several synthetics to dramatically improve the sillage and strength of the rose scent, which is normally very fleeting. He continued to release several other perfumes based on synthetic molecules and increasingly focused on amber-related perfumes.

I've mentioned several subtle ways that Art Nouveau's living concepts influenced perfumery and how people approached it, but the most striking development I discovered was the evolution of perfume bottles. Art Nouveau inspired an exploration of diverse glassmaking techniques, including enameling, glass blowing, and innovative color applications. Glassmakers across different continents collaborated during this period, revolutionizing the craft entirely. Perfume bottles from this period showcased nature-inspired motifs, exquisite gilding, and gorgeous bright colors56. Perfumers also experimented with packaging their art in Baccarat crystal. Coty, for example, collaborated with René Lalique and Baccarat for some of his earlier perfumes. But no matter how much I describe them, I’d rather you see for yourself:

My dear reader, if you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading! I hope you learned something new and maybe even got some inspiration. This was my first post on Substack and I’m excited to write many more. I appreciate any feedback! Sending all my love <333

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