Kina Reflects On When a Good Time Would Be To Stop Doing The Daily Kina

I was just now trying to find old issues of this newsletter that talked about how conflicted I was about the idea of someday no longer writing The Daily Kina, and I couldn’t find anything—which either means that I’m really bad at search engine optimization or really bad about acknowledging this elephant in the room.

It’s possible, of course, that I’ve mentioned it here or there in the midst of talking about Kina’s weird relationship with time or in one of the many anniversary posts, but it’s more likely the case that I just haven’t mentioned it.

I may have mentioned here or there that I originally planned to do this for a hundred days—which is what I consider the high bar of success for a new hobby—and then planned to go until she started kindergarten, or maybe for a year, or until the vaccines came out, or, or, or, or, or…

And now it’s year by year, or school year by school year, or birthday by birthday. Second grade, third grade, fourth grade; six, seven, eight, nine; 2023, 2024, 2025.

I would like to think that I will do this until I am very old and stop only when I take my last breath, but I know there’s a future Kina who will want to live in the quiet a little bit and who will ask me to close the book. Will she be nine? Will she be fifteen? How old will I be? What will this paper be like? What will she be like?

For today, I’m not stopping, and Kina’s last position on this was that I should do this forever. So I will. For now.

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