Spice the Love No.5

In a warm, unhurried conversation with a friend I hadn’t known for long but had quickly grown fond of, we found ourselves agreeing on how difficult it had been to carve out a breathing space amid the year-end rush, just to sit together like this.

That phrase—a breathing space—made me pause. We need to search for such spaces in one another’s lives because they matter. A meaningful conversation with friends or loved ones, or simply sharing a moment of joy in its entirety, can replenish our energy and restore our sense of inspiration. Yet before we arrive at such encounters, we ourselves must be mentally prepared—relaxed enough to give one another our full attention. That readiness, too, is part of what I think of as a breathing space.

Each week, when I sit in front of my computer and type these letters to you, I’m creating a breathing space for myself and for you—people I may never have met, yet who, somewhere, are sharing a similar state of mind, a small corner within the richness of everyday life. How soothing it feels to breathe slowly, to write slowly like this. I hope you’ll also allow yourself a breathing space to read this letter at an unhurried pace.

My friend confessed that it had been a long time since he last felt truly immersed in something he found fascinating. So he decided to buy a one-year subscription to The New Yorker. Hearing this, I realized it had also been a while since I’d given myself that sense of immersion. The stack of books on my shelves continues to grow month by month, yet lately I’ve been reading in fragments—just a little each day, rather than losing myself in the pages. Films are waiting their turn. Half-finished manuscripts inch forward at a sluggish pace. Most of my time recently has gone into newspaper writing and media projects for partners.

And so, I decided to read The New Yorker as well—moving from one article to the next, purely to savor that sense of immersion. To my surprise, it proved genuinely helpful. I had assumed this plan would make me even busier, but instead, immersion restored my energy, allowing me to work more effectively and manage my time better. I’ve grown deeply fond of this feeling of immersion.

Among the articles I read was one about friendship. The author described conversations with adolescents and young adults—listening to them talk about friends, parties, trips, shared activities—and noticed a stark contrast with their own life. The older we become, the harder it is to sustain friendships; we lose more friends than we gain. One major cause of this erosion, the article suggested, is marriage. When friends marry, their spouse becomes their closest companion, inevitably reshaping friendships. What we share with a friend is likely relayed to their partner—someone we may know, but not intimately. And if we dislike our friend’s spouse, tension creeps into the friendship. Things change yet again when children enter the picture.

The piece addressed an issue that is both deeply personal and broadly social. It was simple in tone, yet it left me contemplating the complexity of human relationships. Much of what the author observed resonated with my own experience. Despite the author living in the West and myself in the East, across different cultural contexts, adult friendships unfold in remarkably similar ways—rare, fragile, and difficult to hold onto. That is why, when someone is willing to offer me their breathing space, or to share with me a sense of immersion, I feel profoundly grateful.

P.S.: The friend I mentioned is Minh Red—a master’s graduate in Psychology and a wonderful barista. You can read more about him in an article I wrote HERE, published in Đẹp Magazine.

With love,