While wandering through the little souvenir shops during my holiday, moving without much purpose the way we sometimes do when we want to feel a place before we try to understand it, I stumbled upon something I wasn’t expecting at all.
Spinning tops!
I collect them, so finding a handful of brightly painted wooden ones felt like discovering a tiny treasure hidden between postcards and seashells, tucked among all the usual things people bring home to prove they were somewhere beautiful. They were simple and familiar, the kind of object that asks for nothing and yet stirs something immediate. Of course, they came back to the hotel with me..
That evening, in the quiet hour when the day had already exhaled and there was nowhere left to be, I cleared a space on the table, wound them up one by one, and let them loose together.. It wasn’t a race to see who was the fastest, but a race to see who would grow dizzy and surrender first..
The yellow one lost. It wobbled, leaned gently to one side, and accepted gravity with surprising grace, as though it had understood from the beginning that resistance would only make the ending clumsier. The green one carried on as if it had unfinished business, determined in a way that felt almost personal.. The purple spun quietly, almost thoughtfully, keeping its own company in the middle of the small commotion. The red refused to admit it was tired until the very last moment, holding itself upright with that stubborn dignity some things seem to have even as they are clearly about to fall..
I watched them longer than I expected to. Long enough for the game to stop feeling like a game..
Watching them, I realized that spinning tops have always understood something we spend our lives trying to learn, and often make unnecessarily difficult..
No one spins forever..
Not a career.
Not a love story.
Not youth.
Not even happiness.
Everything that moves with enough passion eventually slows down. Not because it has failed or it wasn’t worthy of continuing. Simply because this is the quiet law of being here: energy rises, holds for a while, and then changes form. We know this, of course, and still we resist it every time. We are always a little surprised by endings, a little offended by limits, as though momentum should be proof of permanence..
And yet… that isn’t the end of the story.. Because a spinning top never blames itself for stopping.. It doesn’t call its stillness weakness. It doesn’t mistake rest for uselessness. It simply waits.. Patiently.. It knows that one day, someone’s hand will find it again. Someone will brush away the dust, place it back into the center of the table, give it one small twist, one gentle push, and suddenly the whole world will become a blur of color once more. Not as a repeat of what came before, but as its own new turning. Brief, maybe. Beautiful anyway.
Perhaps we humans are not so different..
We whirl through seasons of ambition, heartbreak, excitement, ordinary Tuesdays, impossible dreams, and quiet healing. We throw ourselves into work, into love, into plans, into reinventions. We give our energy to things that matter and to things we only later realize did not. We lose momentum. We stand still. We look at our own paused lives and wonder if something essential has left us. We wonder if our brightest days are behind us, if the room has gone too quiet, if this stillness means the story has already said what it came to say..
But maybe stillness isn’t the opposite of living, but simply the pause before the next turn..
Maybe a life does not have to remain in motion at all times to remain alive. Maybe there is dignity in the intervals too, in the waiting, in the gathering of strength we cannot always see from the inside. Maybe the parts of us that seem dormant are not gone at all. They are only listening, recovering, preparing for whatever small touch will set them moving again.
That’s why I keep collecting spinning tops.. Not because they’re toys.. But because each one quietly reminds me that life was never meant to spin endlessly. It was never meant to stay at its peak, or keep proving itself without rest, or avoid every fall through sheer effort. There is mercy in that, I think. A kind of permission.. It was only ever meant to keep beginning again.
Tatiana,
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