There’s something oddly energizing about discovering shared dreams with someone you only sort of know. That was the spark the first time I sat down with my friend Agalia in June, talking about all the things we’d always wanted to do but hadn’t yet. We talked about constantly being in search of third places, looking for spaces that could hold us, and were big enough for our dreams and rolling conversations amongst fresh faces and new ideas. That afternoon, half past was born. Over the months, through intimate dinners and questions that went straight for the core, we realized vulnerability is a rare currency, and people are eager to exchange it when they feel safe.
At its raw and unfiltered conception, half past is a notion of self-identity and journeying.
- halfway mark of who we are
- halfway past what we know
- half past selves, what we are to become
- halfway towards an arrival
All we are today is a loose (or tightly woven) configuration of past lived experiences and a narrative of stories we have told ourselves about ourselves, and others about ourselves. It seems to me sometimes the past has a fixity that the future only looks on with some ambiguity and some disenchantment. I am halfway past the life that I have only lived. I am only halfway past the life that I have lived. There is so much more of me to meet and to know. Agalia and I wanted half past to be a third space where people could come together and meet in open dialogue.
In the meeting of another, so too do you meet yourself.
In reflection, after six months of dinners (look at us go!), we were surprised by the commonness of the intensity and intimacy of evenings. An invite-only seating meant that there was a level of trust and expectation that even amongst strangers, people were safe to bring all of themselves to the table. All we did was a nudge and an invitation to come as you are, uninhibited, for an evening. In the first three editions, we asked questions around the self: our drives, our desires, our intuition. People sat around the topics:
- “What are you dying to talk about?”
- “What would you do if you had permission?”
- “What type of intuition do you want to hone and why?”
We designed opening conversations to skip the small talk and go straight to the core of what someone had to say. And we found vulnerability that people not only responded gently to, but they welcomed and wanted. A conversation led with kindness and trust had far more meaning than chatter, and we’d like to think that after those evenings, people felt good about themselves. They felt real to themselves.
As we wind down the year, I find myself wondering about how I want to show up in 2025. This introspection comes from a place of recognizing how much I’ve grown and evolved. Growth is usually experienced as an externalised event. Something happens to you, someone tells you something about you. But what if you took a pause and looked inwards, made time for introspection and looked at new ways to identify growth? What if you could look within you for growth?
Where will you go when you let the self lead? You, arriving and becoming.