come back to yourself this week

solange, cleo sol, and the case for closing 46 tabs

If you have started four things today and finished none of them, sit down. This one is for you.

Here is what we are doing here, briefly, so you know what just landed in your inbox. Every so often I am going to read the sky, read the room, and send you back a feeling with a soundtrack attached. Not a horoscope that tells you a stranger is going to call. A transmission. The cosmic weather, translated into how it actually feels in your chest, plus the exact songs to play while you feel it. That is the whole thing. Welcome.

Now. Gemini season.

Gemini season is the season of too many tabs open. The Sun just moved into the sign of the scattered, the curious, the easily-bewitched-by-a-new-idea. Which means if you have woken up this week with the urge to start a podcast, rearrange your entire apartment, text three people you have no business texting, and learn a language all before noon — that is not a personal failing. That is the weather.

The trap of this season is mistaking motion for progress. You will feel busy and behind at the same time, which is a specific kind of crazy-making. You will pick up your phone to do one thing and resurface forty minutes later having done six other things, none of them the one thing. The cure is not more discipline. The cure is choosing one tab and letting the other forty-six wait. They will still be there. They are always still there.

So this week, the assignment is to come back to yourself on purpose. Not to do less, necessarily. To do it from the inside instead of getting dragged around by every shiny ping. Here is the music for that.

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The soundtrack: come back to yourself

Solange, “Cranes in the Sky.” We start here on purpose. This is the entire thesis of the season — the song about trying to clean, shop, run, and read your way out of a feeling instead of just letting it sit with you. Play it first. Let it catch you.

Cleo Sol, “Sunshine.” The exhale. This is the sound of someone older and softer than you putting a hand on your shoulder and telling you to slow your breathing. Let it.

SZA, “Good Days.” Permission, in song form, to let today be enough. To stop tallying what you did not get to.

Erykah Badu, “Didn’t Cha Know.” For the part of you that is lost right now and pretending not to be. Being lost is allowed. This is the anthem for wandering on purpose.

Jhené Aiko, “Spotless.” A soft place to land when the noise finally quiets down.

Snoh Aalegra, “I Want You Around.” End here, warm. A reminder that being chosen and being still are not opposites.

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Play it top to bottom. Phone face down. One tab.

That is the transmission. If it landed, I want to know — hit reply and tell me your moon sign, or just tell me which tab you finally closed. I read every one.

See you next season, the management