ON SMALL BATCH SHARING, COLD WEATHER RUNNING, AND EDUCATION THAT STARTS FROM WHAT MAKES A MEANINGFUL LIFE
Thursday November 14 and Friday November 15 2019
Dear Sarah,
I’m starting my letter on Thursday, later afternoon. This week M and I have been exercising in the evenings after he is done with work, at the smallish-mediumish gym that is located in his office building. It was exceptionally cold on Monday and Tuesday — on Monday I went for a short run just to get out of the house, a mile and a half, and I bundled up well, and it was a little hard to breathe, functionally speaking, because I was wearing a balaclava around my face, and otherwise it was pretty manageable, though I do think I was tired in a different way afterward. I think the cold weather makes your body work harder. It was refreshing, though. There is a woman who I presume lives in my neighborhood who walks by most every day — our home is on a loop around the lake nearby; it’s a loop I follow and I also see others loop by on our street — and she is diligent about her walks, wearing bright active wear in the summer, a rain coat when such a thing is called for, and lately she’s been wearing a heavy coat and what may have been two scarves wrapped around her face, with a hat on top. All to say, it’s been very cold!
I’m writing now before I work out this evening, and I plan to come back around to my letter to you thereafter, because I’ve been finding the endorphins seem to hit differently in the evening. I think I am chattier after our evening workouts. Perhaps I’m building on all the awakeness of the full day that’s come before the workout. With morning workouts, you have the benefit of not having had to think about the impending exercise beforehand, because you are asleep and then you wake up and go running. I don’t think about it all day long when we are doing these evening workouts, of course, but I know in the back of my mind that a workout awaits me at the end of my day. In theory it shouldn’t matter at all — as much time passes between workouts as it ever did — but so much awake time brings a different perspective to exercise in the evening. I will say it’s nice to get out of the house at the end of the day and then to return home as if I’ve been away all day.
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All right, now it’s Friday! I didn’t end up working out yesterday evening because my stomach didn’t feel well (I’m feeling better today!). Instead, we went for an outside run this morning. I find the outside exercise preferable when it’s possible. The temperature was around 31, which feels like generally optimal winter running weather once you are dressed for the concept of winter in the first place. It is just warm enough that you’re able to breathe through your mouth without freezing your lungs. When this time of year comes around, I find that I quickly start to set new boundaries for what kind of weather warrants, or enables, inside vs outside activity. A long stretch of five months of inside workouts, give or take, in the same small workout room, starts to feel a bit interminable, and the outside beckons! Although I’ve definitely been taking fewer daytime walks as the weather has cooled, and I miss them.
You and I have talked in between last week’s letter and this letter today, and we’ve started a process of gathering, sharing, and thinking about the things we consume (content- and information-wise) as we begin to think through RogShinch Phase II and the process of what it would look like to channel the things that pique our interest into something like a newsletter / unconventional syllabus. I’ve been excited to start in on this project this week — exciting when a new idea grabs my attention and holds it! — and I’ve been stewing on it as I’ve been reflecting on your letter from last week. I’ve been thinking on the frames you have been working through to determine what it is exactly that makes a life, and I’ve also been thinking about an email you sent ruminating further on what it means to be human. I’ve been thinking again about work — what is meaningful work, why do we (at least in the United States) work so much, what impulses and real or manufactured needs have pointed us toward the standards we aim for and apply to our lives and work. I’ve been thinking about education, and certification, and in what ways our lives today are fundamentally different from the lives of people who came 100 years or more before us, and in what ways we may still be applying old (perhaps foggy!) lenses from so long ago to how we shape and judge our lives today. One thing I am trying to think through is where work comes from, where jobs come from, if the pace of the creation of new areas and spaces of work matches the pace at which there are new people on the earth reaching adulthood and wondering what to do with themselves. This week I feel more and more that, in addition to what seem to be the practical things we all learn in school, we should all have greater and greater access to the arts, to music, to creative practices of all kinds. I have the nugget of a sense that as time marches forward and more and more people inhabit the earth, the way for people to find meaning and to then perhaps contribute back to the world in which we live is to follow the many creative paths we all have inside of us, rather than to tamp our creative impulses down in service to whatever seems to be the workforce boom or top product of the moment. Why such regulation, why such synchronization of all the learning that takes place? I should do more research before I say more but I am curious about what it is that qualifies as required core knowledge or common knowledge these days. I don’t know what makes up the “common core” but I am willing to guess it’s not as generously inclined toward the arts and creative processes as it could be. It seems like if we (the collective “we”) were able to refocus from the start on the question of what makes a meaningful life, we might find ourselves thinking in new ways about creativity, education, work. These are rambling thoughts but I’ll chew on them some more and come back to you next week (with your letter at my side)!
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to reading your letter! Happy writing, consuming, and collecting!
Your friend,
Eva
November 14, 2019
Dear Eva,
There is something about the fact that you and I both seem to be finding traces of a commons in this project that makes me feel like the universe is winking at us. This project was not about Creative Commons, our shared workplace for three years. To be more precise, this project had nothing to do with Creative Commons or open licensing or copyright. And yet, here we are, discovering familiar but unexpected threads that have followed us here into our small corner of the web. I love it; it feels like a nice little reminder that you just never know what colors will appear in the trees, colors that have been there all along.
These letters—lumped together—truly are a commons. They are shared resources: planted, fertilized, and mined by two fully engaged participants who have developed shared practices and patterns in this endeavor over the course of time. It has been both inspiring and comforting to partake in this commons for two over the past 59 weeks. I tend to do best in small groups. Heck, I guess I have come to firmly believe that almost everything in life is better when done small-batch. So it is stretching me a bit lately to try to imagine what it might look like to bring more people into the fold, to “find ways to pay forward what we’ve learned, in hopes of sending tiny sparks out to others who are pondering as we are pondering” as you wrote in last week’s letter.
I wrote last week about my historical resistance to the act of packaging up. I guess I always sort of dismissed it as an act of putting on gloss / spreading on an unnatural sheen. But I suppose in many cases, it is really about being generous, inviting others to the table rather than shrugging my shoulders saying “wow, that was great, you should have been there.” It takes work to do this, to find ways to describe and summarize what was learned in ways that might resonate for people with less context. It also, of course, involves risk. The people who join the table might not be our people. Worse, they might just pause for a bite, judge quickly, and move on. This last possibility is the one that troubles me. I have never thrived on the pressure of making impressions in short bursts; I prefer the ease of knowing I have lots of chances over time to form a connection, to show my whole self. This might be the root of my fundamental resistance to digital life—the internet and social media are made for side eye and passing glances, not sustained interaction.
On the phone I mentioned to you how I recently heard the best definition of introversion—that it is a measure of how many inputs one can easily handle. Introverts have a low threshold for over-stimulation, and too many inputs causes them stress. Amen, I say! So what does a shared online space that works for introverts look like? We have made one here, but if/when we expand the community within this commons, what will that larger shared space look like? Inquiring minds would like to know, Eva! Are there ways to open the gates while retaining some semblance of privacy? How can we expand our worlds, without opening to THE world? I suppose these are the challenges of 21st century digital life. The internet is a blunt all-or-nothing instrument, and it is has a stickiness at variance with natural human behavior. If each one of us is a dot, I like to imagine that you could pick up that dot and stretch out an accordion-like string of past experiences, past thoughts, past interactions. None of us even fully knows our own string. In normal life, most of the things in our strings do not really follow us, or if they do, we choose when to reveal them, how, and to whom. But with a digital presence, parts of our strings start to get etched into a publicly available record. It creates strange zig zags, where an encounter with a new human may be based on something you wrote long ago, maybe something you don’t even remember writing. Recently, I heard a fascinating story on On the Media about a Cleveland newspaper’s struggle to decide if and when to wipe their online stories of unfortunate facts about real people. Who gets to move on from mistakes anymore? As you wrote recently, we’re all stretching along the way. Is the internet adequately built to accommodate our stretching selves?
If it feels like I have gone on a rambling tangent that has little to do with curating and narrating our letter project, you are correct. But somehow, this all feels relevant to the question of what is next for Rog Shinch. I understand all the way to my bones why writing is important to me, and why writing to you in this weekly exchange has quite dramatically changed me. I can also think of plenty of reasons why sorting and examining the stacks of our output would only accelerate that personal change. I am less certain (not to be confused with being skeptical), however, of why we have felt compelled to do all of it in public. This very big, knotty question tugs at the nature of art and creativity and meaning-making, even while it is ostensibly just about the motivations of the two people we know best. I am hoping you will chew on it and ruminate like a cow this next week, so you can toss back new answers for me to mull next week.
Your friend,
Sarah