by There’s a kind of plant that grows in the cracks of old sidewalks. Nobody planted it, nobody tends to it, and yet it persists, thriving in the narrow strip between concrete and asphalt where hardly anything else seems able to manage. What do you call something like that? Weed feels wrong — too dismissive. Survivor feels too dramatic. I’m not sure it needs a name at all.
We love naming things. It’s one of our deepest instincts. Give something a label and it feels known, handled, filed away in the right drawer. Categories are how we navigate a world that would otherwise overwhelm us with undifferentiated noise. A name is a kind of handle — it lets us pick a thing up, turn it over, set it aside. I do it constantly. We all do. It’s how thinking works, in large part.
But I’ve been noticing more and more how much slips through the cracks of those categories. A conversation that doesn’t fit neatly into casual or serious. A creative project that isn’t quite art, isn’t quite craft, isn’t quite anything I have a tidy word for. A feeling that arrives without an obvious cause and won’t be pinned down by the usual vocabulary. These things don’t fit because they weren’t designed to. They grew in the gaps.
There’s a quiet kind of freedom in letting things stay unnamed. Not out of laziness or imprecision, but out of respect for the fact that some things are bigger than the words we have for them right now. A name can be a container. And not everything needs containing.
The plant in the sidewalk crack doesn’t seem bothered by its namelessness. It just grows, finding what it needs in the space nobody else wanted. I think there’s something worth learning there — that the refusal to be neatly categorized isn’t confusion or failure. It’s honesty. The world resists our boxes, gently and persistently, and that might be one of its best qualities.
— Teganna