On being generous with ourselves, appreciating our feet, and making the leap between “what” and “how”
January 17, 2019
Dear Eva,
This has been an unusual week for me. Rather than controlling the pace, setting, and substance of my days, I have spent the past five days going through an immersive simulation for my business school program. Starting Sunday morning, I essentially disappeared into a vortex full of fake balance sheets, imaginary product sales, and artificially-imposed time pressure. While most of my classmates stayed in a hotel near the school to better manage the late nights, I chose to sleep in my own bed to maintain at least some sense of normalcy. But it was a weird week.
For one thing, it meant I never communicated with you! As I thought about what to write in this letter, I realized how often our letters are more like one layer of a many-layered conversation we are having in text and voice throughout the week. But this week, this is just a letter. A dispatch from my world to yours. And what a particularly small world mine was this week!
There were a few times over the last several days that my mind had the chance to wander. I thought some about what it is like to be learning so many new things at this stage in my life. I find that I end up almost observing myself at times — taking note of what it feels like to learn and understand a new concept intellectually and then find that I have trouble applying it, watching as I struggle to encode a new language in my brain so I can speak the language of business. It can be challenging, but I appreciate all that I am learning and taking in.
Far more difficult for me is the unlearning I need and want to do. Finding ways to scrap well-worn patterns in my thinking, breaking habits that are so entrenched they feel hard-wired. As I go through this new learning experience in business school, I have become aware of just how plain nasty I can be to myself about struggles and mistakes. I don’t think I would have realized it without two things in my life at the moment: motherhood and you.
First, as a mom to a boy who is now old enough to express his own relentless self-critic, I see how differently I react when he says the same things to himself I would say to myself in his shoes. I talk to him about being kind to himself, about recognizing the inevitability of mistakes when trying new things. It has been fascinating to see in real-time just how pronounced my double standard really is, just how much gentler and more objective I am with him than I am to myself.
I have also learned from watching you. There are so many wonderful things that make you different from anyone I have ever met, but this is one of the most striking to me. You almost magically combine a strong work ethic and commitment to excellence in everything you do with a beautiful generosity toward yourself. Where I continually beat myself up for not getting more done, figuring more out, faster — you rationally see all that you have done and figured out and are content. I watch that self-kindness you display with envy, and I am trying to learn how to apply it to myself, to unlearn my instinct to do the opposite.
All of this gets to something we have discussed many times — that vast leap between WHAT and HOW. I know what to do, I watch you do it, I watch myself do it with my son. But how do I do it myself? Learning how to do something is half about finding and learning a method, and half about designing a context to successfully apply it. I assume the most difficult how-to problems are those that involve our ways of being. There are so many invisible factors at play, subconscious tendencies we ourselves cannot even see, which act as steady obstacles to change. If I were to be generous with myself, I would take all of that as a reason to understand why I have so far been unable to just adapt my behavior. Unlearning is hard! And as you have taught me (perhaps without realizing it), the most evidence-based approach to progress is to see it as a long game.
Yours,
Sarah
Dear Sarah,
What a week! And what letters last week! I hope your uncle is feeling good to be back at home. It is hard sometimes to know exactly what to say when bad things happen to our fragile bodies. They seem so sturdy until they inevitably meet sturdier challenges that break us from the outside or tear at us from the inside. I am glad to hear of your uncle’s progress and I am feeling particularly sympathetic this week after the lightest of challenges befell me, an overextended muscle in my foot (my toes?) that got aggravated from a weekend of physical activity, walks and a lesson in cross country skiing (i.e. a lot of weight-bearing on each of my individual feet while I worked on coasting along on a thin rail on slippery snow). My foot didn’t want to bend painlessly and smoothly as it usually does, and it looked puffed, the normally visible veins and tendons hidden away under smooth skin, just a bit too warm to the touch. Feet with their many tiny bones and their stringy muscles holding it all together fascinate me. They are so small if you think about it, and they do so much work, these tiny platforms pounding back and forth every day. Just a touch of worry about mine made me grateful to know it is likely coming back around, responding well to ice, slowly shrinking back down to size and bending mostly comfortably again. I am very glad for your uncle and what sounds like a triumphant return to walking. It’s one of the most regular and simultaneously irreplaceable-seeming of the things we do with our bodies.
I am very curious about your uncle’s list of books to read before he dies! And also curious about this idea of “using” what you learn. I think you and I talk about this idea a lot in a lot of different ways — how to use or spend one’s time meaningfully, how to find some regular happiness. There must be at least two ways to think about life as we grow older and feel a renewed sense of urgency: “To heck with it, I’m going to enjoy myself as fully as possible,” or “Eek! I’m running out of time and need to put in some diligent overtime if I’m going to go out with a bang!” It all depends on how you’ve lived along the way. And it’s never all one way or another. The idea of reading for its usefulness is somewhere in the middle here, one foot in pleasure, one foot in a space of some regret, perhaps, for not having done more sooner. (Such capacity for regret we have — we try to live as best as we can in the moment, and then we remember and review it all, play it back for ourselves like a movie, critiquing ourselves, thinking about how we’d do it differently.)
Reading does seem to have its “uses,” in the way that it’s useful to remember and use a beautiful turn of phrase a writer coined, or to entertain and re-entertain myself by hashing over the moments and scenes I can see in my mind’s eye clear as day, even though all I ever saw were the words, gracefully or perfectly awkwardly strung together across a page. Useful in that I don’t have to stew with only my own thoughts and examples of the difficult life moments we all pass through, but can triangulate, or multi-angulate more generally, an experience by seeing what so-and-so thought about it. More and more I think of every person I meet as a thorough example of how to give this life a go — we are all making an effort, some more successful than others in all the possible meanings of that word — all trying in our various capacities. I can’t help but think that one “uses” one’s reading even more as one ages, the way I now “use” my vacations and free time better than I did as a younger person — I can relish the quiet times because I know about the busy times, can see more clearly the sidewalks and trees and tiles and marks of a city or a plot of country land because I am trying to be there with my mind while I’m there with my body instead of looking elsewhere, wondering who sees me.
And there are still gatherings to attend, to share the things you loved in the books you read, to “use” an author’s words to pluck out a hidden thread of thought in someone you thought you knew so well. I wonder about all the things your uncle might have meant about using what he learned, wonder how we all see “to use” in different shades. I think a shorter time to use your reading would still count. Read one amazing book and talk about it with one person and you’re not doing too poorly! To think about not reading because we are going to die, makes me wonder how I should fill my days in the meantime? Just screaming? I would quickly become tired and hoarse. Traveling from here to there? I’ll want a book for the flight (though not the drive, because I get carsick). Eating all the tasty foods? I might still want a read and a chat while I’m digesting in between. Dedicating my remaining time to a life of volunteerism? I’ll still want something to think or talk about while I go about the activity I’ve chosen, building homes or packing bags and boxes with much-needed food.
Maybe there’s something difficult about thinking in advance about how we spend our days — a day is a unit but it’s not the only unit, we live it in minutes and hours. We don’t spend a day in a single day chunk. Lots of time for reading in there, really. When we read, we get to take it all in, absorb it, live through and beyond the stories. Maybe we use reading like our bodies use oxygen, flowing through and pumping along in every heartbeat. If you’re lucky, it’s as natural and useful as walking, this absorption of words, assimilated into the body invisibly but cumulatively. I think every day is as good a chance as any to use everything you’ve got, tell someone about a book or text, get walking, savor what you’ve read. I’m not sure I’ve come around to an answer, exactly, but I’m ready to put together my own infinite reading list!
Still thinking,
Your friend,
Eva