ON THE PERCEPTION OF CLOSENESS, WANTING/NOT WANTING OBLIGATIONS, AND SIMMERING IN DIFFERENT SOUPS
Thursday October 3 and Friday October 4 2019
Dear Sarah,
Happy Week 53! It feels like an out-of-the-ordinary kind of milestone to reach. There must be reasons out there that other weeks have been denoted Week 53 for different reasons, but it feels like generally after 52 weeks we flip the imaginary or real calendar pages back to week one, our new year begun. Now you and I are in a different space: not just a year, but more than a year, a continuation. This week is also the anniversary of my and M’s arrival in Minneapolis. It’s been a year!
I’ve been reflecting on your letter from last week, and I think our rhythms may be changing (at least so far). This feels a little bit sad. Even though we didn’t work in the same physical space, we did share a next-concentric-circle-out sense of proximity that I think I took for granted: by simmering in the same soup we were more together than we are now; now, perhaps, we are simmering in two different soups. I think we are still on the same stove? I think (hope) these changes just mean that the aboutness of our various conversations and communiques will slip toward a focus on more of the things we care most about, together. But I too am missing the daily rhythms and proximities to you offered by a shared workplace!
Your sinus procedure sounded pretty wickedly awful. When you told me that it was worse than you expected, I was horrified. For such a procedure to be worse than imagined — and I imagine that you repeatedly imagined the possible scenario! — can only mean that it was the most awful of the awful. And you laughed about it afterward! I congratulate you on your full-spectrum living!
What has this week been like for me, this 53rd week of our epistolary exchange? I’m trying to tune in to the rhythms in my head and outside of myself, trying to listen to myself when I feel nervy or what have you, and also to console myself as I would someone else who came to me, nervy or in need of other consolation. I’m finding this week that while I don’t miss having someone or something telling me what to do every day, I am having a little early nostalgia for a certain sense of obligation. For the moment, I am largely obliged to myself, to follow through and spend time on things I’ve been thinking about and planning for for a long time. From the outside, the days look similar to my work days, in that I am in my house, in my office, with a cup of tea; in the morning I exercise, I clean up, I spend some time reading, I land at my computer. There should be no more meaning to being obliged to someone else than there would be to being obliged to oneself, and still there is some difference there. I think it is a thread that you and I can bind into the braid or the weaving of all the ways in which we are complex and social animals, wanting what we don’t have at the moment, wanting solitude, wanting connection, wanting no obligations... but maybe wanting some obligations.
This week I pulled a book off my shelf by Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t, that I’ve enjoyed perusing here and there but of which I hadn’t yet read the lion’s share. Her work intrigues me for its seeming simplicity, its frank tone, its step-by-step qualities of writing down the details, the stories, of how we think and feel and go about our days in our particular scenarios. I have a tendency in the last stretch of years to flip books to any page somewhere in the middle and start reading (I don’t even necessarily look at the first page, which is kind of funny, because I’d say there is a sense among writers that one should attempt to draw people in on the first page, in the first sentence no less; perhaps I am trying to subvert that — if I like what I read at a few random spots in the middle of your book, then we’re cooking!) and I found myself in the middle of a letter-essay-story about an award the narrator had received (I don’t think you’re necessarily supposed to assume Lydia Davis is the exact narrator of every one of her stories, but I operated under the assumption that this was a story of a happening in her life) and how she thought the award would completely change her life: that she would be able to stop teaching (she did not like teaching); and that her finances would be completely altered; and that, with the affordance of more time in her life to dedicate to a research project, she would be able to get lots done, etcetera. Instead she found variously that the award was not such that she would be able to stop thinking about money forever, and that it was not such that she would be able to stop teaching, and in the midst of the commitment to the research that the award was to support, she found herself stretching certain deadlines on and on, or turning other projects down, as a sense of laziness began to set in for a time. I haven’t received a financial award but in some ways I have given myself an award of time and space, and this week Lydia Davis’s letter-essay-story particularly resonated with me.
There are ways in which I miss the fact that regular work obligations get the gears turning for application in any number of ways. M used to own a Hammond organ that you would start via one switch, and once it was humming you’d then flip on a second switch, and turn off the first. This has seemed like a good metaphor for lots of things in life.
Essentially, I think I am in an adjustment period, and am giving myself kudos at this time for not napping my days away! Though I will admit that for some reason I have decidedly been dawdling on concluding this letter to you. I’ve been sitting with it for hours now! Am I trying to restore our regular rhythms by keeping you waiting on my letter? That’s not very nice. And yet perhaps I’m holding the thread between us taut for just a few more minutes this way. In any case, I miss you!
Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva
October 4, 2019
Dear Eva,
It is exciting to embark on the first letter of year TWO of our project! I must start with a disclaimer, which is that I feel physically crummy today (congested, achey, low energy), which means I may produce crummy words. That said, I have so much I want to write today in response to your epic, lovely letter last week.
First, the color of trees. I never knew this fact about the vibrant fall colors always being there, just masked by the chlorophyll most of the year. There is something remarkable about this, isn’t there? It feels like a metaphor for lots of things, one of which being the way a slight change in mindframe can dramatically alter our realities, even when nothing has actually changed about the context. The colors are there — contentedness is within our grasp — at any time, with just a slight change of view.
Next, the gas filling the container. I love the analogy of your thoughts spreading out within its newfound space in your brain now that you don’t have to expend brainpower on that which a full-time employer dictates. I think I mentioned when we spoke this week that I am having trouble lately finding even little nibbles of space in which to release a few thoughts that are trapped in my mind. It is disturbing just how easy it is to be so focused on what must be DONE that you forget to think about how / what is being done, fail to reflect on life as it is lived. These letters demonstrate the value of reflection, and the fact that we have been able to maintain the weekly habit for one year and counting demonstrates it is possible pause and reflect no matter the chaos of the week. Even while I feel stretched pretty thin between work, school, family, I can safely say I have a settled, calm feeling that I am not letting life pass me by. I’m not sure if I have gone on my rant with you before about hating how people say “time flies,” particularly when it comes to children growing up. It is true that children give us very prominent, visible evidence of the passage of time. But it is not true that it has to fly by while we live it. We can choose to pause. We can choose to watch. We can choose to reflect. As someone who thinks every single day about my own mortality (who are these people who do not?), it is a deep comfort to know I am doing everything in my power to feel time as it passes. Thank you to you, Eva, and to our letter-writing adventure, for helping me do that.
This brings me to something else I have been mulling this past week after reading the transcript of Robin DeRosa’s keynote about distance learning, a rich, profound piece of work that I will be chewing on for many weeks to come. In talking about online education, she wrote about how our closeness / distance with others is purely a matter of perception. You can be in the same room with someone and feel a wall between you; you can be thousands of miles away and feel close. This harkens back to my reflections in last week’s letter about feeling a distance from you that was new and unwelcome after your last days as a full-time employee at our shared workplace. It is not that you are any farther away, in fact may even be closer in terms of having more space in your life for our shared creative work. But it was / is perception that shaped the distance between us. The color of trees emerges again!
As we settle into new rhythms of communication outside of work, I imagine we will alter the distance between us once again, even while the literal distance between us remains the same. I want to think about what we can take from this to apply to long distance communication writ large. What slight tweaks / changes in view can make us feel more connected with the important people in our lives?
In the meantime, I will look forward to feeling closer to you when I read your words as soon as I finish typing. An incentive to wrap it up, Sarah! I love our shared ritual of not reading the other person’s letter until we have completed our own. Another tiny tactic to increase a sense of closeness.
Your friend and penpal,
Sarah