FINDING NEW WITH OLD, FEELING DIFFERENT WITH SAME, AND BANG FOR KIDS' TRICK OR TREATING BUCK
Thursday October 31 2019
Dear Sarah,
Happy Halloween! I don’t have any deep Halloween topics to dig in on with you today, but I’ve just set myself up at a coffee shop for a bit to work on my letter to you and there is a mother (I presume) across the way with a baby and they are both wearing knit owl caps with googly eyes. They were just joined by another mother (I presume) and a child and they appear to be dressed as an elf (presumed mother) and perhaps a hobbit (child). M and I hadn’t done much Halloween decorating at our house until last night — though we have a nice orange pumpkin and a knobbly green gourd on the stoop outside our home — even though I acquired what is likely a ridiculous amount of candy for the amount of trick-or-treaters I think we might be able to expect, since our block only has houses on one side. (Not a lot of bang for your time investment in our block!) This is our first year ever where we might actually expect any trick-or-treaters, having previously lived in an SF apartment on the fourth floor (and hardly any children seem to live in SF anyway), and before that, in Tucson, we lived in an in-law house behind a larger house (no one trick-or-treats behind houses!). I procured pounds of candy so that if we get kids at our house, they will know that we are a good house to come to, and will not shun us in future years. I do not want to get a rap as a bad trick-or-treating house! There, I had more to say about Halloween than I expected.
This week has been an interesting one, as I settle into what I think will be some of the regular flows of a freelance, even-less-structured work-from-home lifestyle. One thing I’ve been struck by is that I feel relaxed and comfortable. My days are still full, with some of the things they used to be filled with, and with more time spent on things I want to spend time on. In some ways I find myself taking on roles and tasks that I had been taking on previously — things like managing and coordinating my dad’s care, or performing administrative tasks of my home and partnership with M, or making dinner — but they feel different, because they are allowed to have time in the day, instead of feeling like they sometimes or often fell to me even though I also had a full-time job. This has reminded me that all the tasks of life take time, and many are necessary, even if they are invisible (read: unpaid). I recall the phrase “Life Management” that titled a class available to students in my high school, a class that I perceived to be taken by students whose schedule wasn’t otherwise filled with advanced placement or arts classes, but now in hindsight I see as a class or concept we all could have benefited from. These life management tasks are not income-generating tasks but they are required to live life effectively — things like sending a gift to our niece’s 529 account for her birthday, picking up a birthday present for my sister-in-law from an independent bookstore instead of ordering from Amazon, contacting my dad’s doctors to talk about how to integrate more movement and weight-management activities into his day, filing paperwork in conjunction with the purchase of our home earlier this year, emailing and texting with friends and family about life and travel and holidays, washing the dishes that don’t fit in the dishwasher, the list goes on. There is a different timbre to these activities when they occupy the time in the day that they require, as opposed to feeling like they are not allowed within my work day, and that to do them during the work day was sneaking time I didn’t have. This is an unreasonable way to feel, because don’t we all have these things to do during the day? Sometimes they have to be taken care of during daylight hours, and we all have these things, so shouldn’t they be accounted for in the way we work? I think in some ways the eight-hour work day does accommodate for them — depending on where you work your eight hours — but in an unspoken way that lets, or insists that, everyone find their own path to fulfilling their needs, even though there are day-to-day life maintenance needs we all have and share. In general I feel a new sense of balance, that my time in my day is spent doing these life management tasks as well as working in a paid capacity, working in a volunteer capacity, and working on projects of my own. Shifting the balance makes all of these activities feel different than they felt before.
Thank you for your letter of last week. I’ve enjoyed thinking about what the world would look like if more people followed a process, as your dad initially suggested — If you have something you want to say, why not just say it clearly in a way that people can understand? At first glance I pictured how a poet might feel that they were saying things in a clear way, in a way that was clear to them, a clarity appropriate to the type of idea they intended to convey. Then I pictured what the world would look like if we all stated how we felt in as clear a fashion as possible. Would we still want or need poetry or art? I think if we were all able to state what we wanted to say clearly, we wouldn’t be the breadth of people we are as humankind. In all the ways that people are different, just one way is that we aren’t all able to convey our thoughts and feelings in the same way. Some of us can speak and write eloquently, some of us can sing, some of us share feelings and thoughts in physical ways. We don’t all use words the same way, at the very least. At the same time, you might imagine that if we were all able to use words in the same way, things might be more efficient and perhaps better in some ways for all of us at large (would we understand each others’ needs more clearly?) — but somehow less interesting?
The idea, as you described in your letter, that Donald Hall might wake up every day and spend the morning writing and editing words that so many people may not even understand sounds like one possible definition of living one’s life for oneself instead of for others. Perhaps this is part of the question at hand — for whom do we live our lives, or, in what percentages, in what decisions we make, do we live our lives for ourselves versus for others?
I appreciated that you felt that your dad wanted to be persuaded, and I loved your description that poetry is doing something similar to music, though the medium of poetry is words, and the words are more like paint. So many possible mediums other than and including words to show what we think and feel about this world, and to show ourselves to one another. And you convinced him! At least in that moment. Something that I perceive in your life to be fixed or sturdy — your dad — became a bit more flexible, stretched a bit in some new direction, it opened him as you said, and not only that, but he showed you how he was stretching. We’re all stretching along the way, I think, but perhaps we’re not always showing it to the people around us. Expressing our narratives, constructing our realities, framing how we see the world — telling stories or making poems or painting or making music or... — this is us in and outside of our bodies, us defining ourselves instead of only reacting to the world, instead of letting the world define us, letting the world say this is how X typically looks, this is how women typically are or couples typically are or cities are or relationships are or work is or families are. Telling our own stories broadens the range of possibilities for us all, as we frame ourselves and reframe the world at large. In our letters here, in our conversations with each other and the people around us — we are creating and shaping the world we live in, and the world we want to live in. It is a slow and detailed process! It all takes time, and is worth doing!
Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva
October 28, 2019
Dear Eva,
Lately, you and I have been alternately discussing and independently pondering the next phase of our creative partnership. It feels like a natural time for us to think deeply about what is next for a whole host of reasons—your departure from our shared workplace and entry into a solo creative practice, meeting and blazing past the milestone of one year of weekly letters, and my imminent completion of the MBA program I have been going through the past two years. In other words, you are and I soon will be enjoying the gift of more time to spend as we choose, and I think we both feel like doing something together with at least some of that time would be time well spent. We also have the fact of our growing stack of letters; proof that we can create something formidable together if we put our minds to it.
As we contemplate what form our next project will take, I keep thinking about how easily that question spills over into so many of the questions we have collectively pondered in these letters and in our conversations—about the nature of work, the nature of art, the nature of friendship. Are these letters part of our life’s work? Are these letters art? Are these letters a physical manifestation of our friendship? It does seem to me like the letters take on many characteristics of a human life when viewed as a whole. I have written about this before, but I keep thinking about it. Each letter represents a particular moment in time, insubstantial on its own, insufficient to understand the whole. Just as you wouldn’t expect a new friend to sit down and listen to you tell your life story, we cannot expect people to read the letters from start to finish. And yet, reading a few letter exchanges will not enable someone to know our friendship.
I always have some sort of subconscious resistance to spending much time looking back, at least to the extent that doing so prevents me from doing what is next. This was never more clear to me than after Paul Stacey and I finished the Made with Creative Commons book we co-wrote through work. I felt so resistant to spending time and energy packaging up what we had learned to convey in talks or articles about the book. Instead, I just wanted to move on to start researching all of the new questions the book unearthed for me. But lately I am realizing this was the wrong frame. Learning does not only come from new inputs; it also comes from looking again at what was already gathered along the way. In this context and in so many others, we do not always need more.
If you think this is all leading up to me saying we should stop writing our weekly letters, you are quite wrong, missy. The letters feel to me like they have become part of the regular rhythm of life for me, for us. The show must go on! But what I want to propose is that we start to create new layers atop the steady and growing stream of letters—layers that are designed to provide frames for viewing and getting a sense for the whole, layers that are about looking back and making sense of and deriving meaning from what we have built thus far. These meta layers may include but are not limited to lists of common themes, equations of truths discovered, maps of insights developed over time, synopses, collections. Part of this is about organization and curation, but part of it may also be about finding different ways of expressing what has already been expressed—a collection of visuals that somehow say what we have said in words in a different medium? Audio bits that tie together ideas in new ways? I guess one way of stating this is that we should use our stack of letters as if they are clay or cut-outs for collage. We will make new with the old. In doing so, we will better understand the old. We will learn more and create more by reusing and recycling the existing outputs of our friendship. Sustainable art! Maybe this is somehow my rejection of or reaction to the overwhelming onslaught of information we face these days. It is always good to keep eyes and ears open to new inputs, but it is also perfectly possible to subsist/grow/thrive on what you already have. I like the idea of carving off some space in our lives not to read and ingest more (because of course we are already reading and ingesting all day, every day), not to create new ventures or business models (because these things may appear through the side door anyway), but to slow down and tend to the garden we have, as it gradually grows toward the sun.
Yours,
Sarah