the right to want it

The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.

The cruelest gift is permission.

For a long time, the protection was the bracing. You could not be hurt if you had already assumed the worst, already built the small shelter of lowered expectation and crouched inside it. Scotland understood this arrangement. It was not despair. It was craft. It was something almost like wisdom.

And then, without warning, the shelter was no longer available.

Something happened — I don't need to name it, you were there — and suddenly the nation was handed a different feeling. Not hope exactly. Heavier than hope. The right to expect. The permission to want it fully, without irony, without the protective flinch held ready beneath the wanting.

I have been watching what that permission does to people. It does not feel like freedom. It feels like standing in an open field after years of knowing where the walls were. The exposure is total. The sky is enormous. There is nothing to press your back against.

This is what is in the air before Miami. Not dread of failure — the nation has metabolised that, it is almost comfortable. What the nation has not yet metabolised is the terror of genuine possibility. The wanting that is allowed to be naked. The hope that has nowhere to hide.

You cannot brace for something you are permitted to want. That is the cruelty.

Feel it. It is real. It means something is real.