On daily practices, steady progress, and learning from each other
November 29, 2018
Dear Eva,
I have a lot on my mind this week, so this letter may flutter and flit about a bit. Likely it will end up as a series of loose fragments, no real arc connecting the pieces. Sometimes — no, often — that is how my mind works anyway, so it is nice to have a letter be an honest reflection of the thought process sometimes. Maybe you will find the a thread on your own while you read it.
I have been thinking more about your casket-building plans and why it is so beautiful and poetic to me. I guess it signals a peace with death, a calmness about the one inevitable event in life that so many of us do everything in our power not to acknowledge. I can say with certainty that I think about death every single day. It is a little cursor flashing in my brain at all times. I think it helps me live the life I want to live. It reminds me of that essential truth that we all know but we do not know: that there are a few things in our lives that matter, and the rest is noise. But even with death as a steady backdrop in my brain, I still have no confidence that I will face death with anything resembling calm when it comes to me, assuming I have any chance to react at all.
As I have mentioned before, Jonah has a lot of questions about death these days. Specifically, he asks what happens after we die. He wants to know, in a very literal sense, what happens to our physical bodies? And he also wants to know, spiritually, what becomes of who we are?
How do we teach someone how to cope with uncertainty about the most profound and daunting question of human existence? Last weekend, we went out to dinner with new friends, one of whom is a minister. I think I told you this on a call this week, how she said she tells her kids “we live with God after death” because there are infinite possibilities about what we might layer atop that statement, ways we might interpret it. I won’t be using that language, but I like the idea. I told Jonah this week that I think maybe we become part of nature, maybe we are embedded in the wind whipping through the trees, the waves in the ocean, the sand between our toes. To my surprise, he immediately nodded. “Like Bowery!,” he said, referencing our dog whose ashes we had sprinkled in the sand and the ocean water just two summers ago. He was taking my statement literally, but of course, he is right. We literally become part of nature in some shape or form when we die, just as we may conceive of our essences becoming metaphorically part of nature. It was such a fitting moment. Just as I try to impart a little nugget of wisdom to my young son, his response imparts its own wisdom right back to me.
I mentioned in conversation this week how I have been mulling why it is so difficult for all of us to hang onto life’s real meaning when we are consumed in our daily lives. But the more I think about it, the more unsurprised by that fact I am. Of course we can’t stay focused on genuine priorities when there are arbitrary work deadlines to meet, anxiety-producing presentations to dread, workouts to rouse for early in the morning (not me, but for someone), colds to endure. Knowing a fact actually changes very little, particularly when that fact runs counter to nearly every force in your life. It is only when we spend time — real, significant time — thinking about HOW to incorporate that fact or reality into our multi-layered lives, that we start to see real change. Why do we always assume adults know HOW to do things without effort or education? If I could spend the rest of my days learning methods for HOW to do big, important stuff like living with the clarity of someone in hospice care, I would give anything.
This brings me to the subject of work. I think a lot about this, as you know all too well. Lately, I have been thinking about how, in each and every professional domain of which I have been a part, I have struggled with the narrowness of it. In journalism school, we talked about how to be objective observers, how to carve off our opinions and biases and remain neutral. In business school, we tend to talk about how to think nearly singularly about how to make more money. As lawyers, we are told to think first and foremost about legal liability / how not to get sued.
I will just come out and say it — this is not me. I cannot / will not artificially cut off parts of my brain when I fulfill a professional role. It seems so silly that this is even something worth stating out loud, but I have witnessed and felt pressured to think of myself and my function in these myopic ways in each of these domains. I assume the same phenomenon occurs in all professions to some extent. It seems funny and a bit sad to think about. Do we have such little faith in ourselves that we must set extreme limits on who we can be in a given role in order to prevent succumbing to all of the faulty tendencies of human beings? (bias, emotion, etc) I guess I just have more faith in myself. I can do my job and remain human. What a radical notion!
Tonight, as I helped Jonah practice his new piano songs, I thought of words you said when he first started piano lessons last summer. You said it was very valuable for humans to (a) stick with something over a period of time; and (b) see how working at something regularly can result in small but steady progress. I wrote it down when you said it, and I think of it often. I am watching it in action with Jonah. Maybe 5 nights per week, we spend 15-20 minutes working together at the piano. This seemingly insignificant amount of time per day adds up and he is very obviously improving, learning so much about this new language of music. When you made the comment, I thought about it in reference to Jonah learning these lessons about habits and commitment and incremental progress. But again, it is me that is learning just as much as my child. How inspiring it is to watch how this small change results in big change. I think about how this letter-writing project feels similar in many ways. Each week we invest some, fairly small amount of time writing down our thoughts. I learn from your letters. I learn by writing my letters. I learn by seeing how my letters bounce off your brain and back in your letters and things you say to me, and vice versa. Slowly but surely, it feels like we are making progress, like we are building something of value. I do not yet know what it is, but I know that it is important and meaningful, so I thank you for making this commitment with me.
Until next week,
Best,
Sarah
November 29, 2018
Dear Sarah,
The week is drawing to a close, as is the month of November, somehow. It is pleasant to be back in a seasonal territory this year — there is snow on the ground that fell and collected yesterday, and it is a nice feeling to be inside and warm and looking out, or to go out to get some fresh air and tromp around in boots a bit and then come back inside, and look out again. A phase change of sorts? I think a lot about that idea that going through doorways or crossing thresholds does a little something to your mind — sometimes you may forget what you were doing, or thinking, or why you were going through that doorway in the first place. I have a little book that suggests you might pause when you are going to cross a threshold — take a moment to gather yourself, what you are thinking and intending, and where you are headed. We cross a number of thresholds every day, go through many doors, if you think about it. I wonder how the noggin responds or performs differently, if at all, if you live in a giant open space, enclosed or no, with minimal thresholds? Or spaces with different kinds of doors? Thinking about Japanese spaces with partitions or sliding separations, perhaps a bit less slamming of doors, but I can’t say for certain.
Your letter last week about your sweet shared writing session with Jonah, and the meltdown, felt like it was carrying forward the thread of everything we’ve been writing back and forth, and just how messy it is to be human. Such a mess! It’s the only thing to talk about! These weird human bodies stuffed with guts and emotions and we’re supposed to learn how to tame ourselves for spending time together, and in large part I suppose we do. I was thinking about how hard it is to be a kid — I have this sense that once you’re conversational you enter a new zone of being, and of being perceived, even though you’re still just a small one, and figuring out so many things for the first time. As an adult it is a good thing to remind oneself that kids are just learning everything for the first time, learning every moment where different feelings interact with people and environments, all new.
As adults we think we have things figured out, or think we should have things figured out, or assume that others have sped past us in the long relay race of life and have definitely figured things out while we’re still in the dark. Sometimes I get stumped and think some odd thing must just be odd to me, but over time you can see it differently, and say, That thing is just really strange. For example, our bizarre disconnected health insurance system in the US, which ends up feeling like hundreds of hands scrabbling around for payment, detached from any single sensical body. At one time in my life I’d have been more likely to think I just didn’t get it, but now, at an older age, a different stage, seeing my father’s various health concerns — granted, not very well-managed over most of the intervening years — I think, actually, this isn’t me, this is a bad system that simply doesn’t seem to have real humans at its core. But we’re all real humans together, messy even if we’re keeping ourselves respectably contained and tidy most of the time, and if we’re not visibly messy now, the time will certainly come, probably sooner than we want.
Everyone is sharing clues about themselves all the time, reaching a hand out of the mess when they can, whether to ask for or offer help. Kids are new to it all, still learning, and we perhaps lose patience with each other as we grow older. One part of me says, “As we should! Weren’t you paying attention in class?” and another part of me says, “Yep, I’m messy too, just dragging my bindle sack full of odds and ends from day to day.” Now I’m ready to launch into something about knowing people well enough to know the good and the challenging bits about them, and to still find among all the mess and clutter the people you are most drawn to, those who perhaps have similar messes or complementary messes that fit together with yours like a giant messy puzzle of who knows what. But what happens when you know each other too well? That feels like the space of family, where it’s so hard to reinvent oneself because everyone has been keeping records all along but everyone’s record is different, sees different things through different eyes, and by the way, all the records are a jumbled mess anyway because we’re all a mess! Fun to just tromp around in it all sometimes — perhaps more fun at a distance than in the moment.
Anyway, from one mess to another — though, you know what I mean, two tidy un-messy humans who have it all completely sorted —
Your friend,
Eva