ON EXTREME LISTENING, HEARING OURSELVES THINK, AND LETTING OURSELVES FEEL
February 7 & 8 2019
Dear Sarah,
I started this letter to you on Thursday evening but my head felt tired and empty after a long week of work. I wondered where the letter would take me, as I often do, and last night's answer was that it wasn't going to take me far. Usually when I start writing, new words and ideas flow out through my pencil (or fingertips), and yesterday I could only scratch out the sentences that I first prepared in my mind. The ones I find more interesting are the ones that come next, once I open the valve and release what I had prepared and see what's hiding beyond. Yesterday, just nothing! So I went to sleep instead, and looked forward to writing you on Friday morning, which is where we are now.
It's been a busy week and it put a spotlight for me on the question of how we make space for all the creative and personal things we want to do in our lives. In the most basic way, we have to really want to do the things we want to do, and give them time and space, because otherwise they simply won't get done. We've talked before about how much of creative work and thought is a cumulative process — if there's nothing to accumulate then it's rare (though I'm sure not impossible) that you're going to have a single day or two in which you work furiously all day and create the thing you've been dreaming of. So, the day is long and short, and we fill it with what we think we must, sometimes to the detriment of what we want to fill it with, and thus the days go by.
We were together this week in person (what a treat!), for work, and in these weeks the attention shifts to being with other people, making use of that time most effectively, immersing ourselves in human-to-human interactions with the people we usually see in a flat rectangle over video calls, or whose voices pipe into our ears through earbuds. They are all real, dimensional people! We saw them this week and the fresh energy of talking and thinking with them each day meant my reserves were quite low by the time I squirreled myself away in my quiet space alone in the evenings. I think that is all right — you wrote recently about working in solitude, something we both value, and the complement to enjoying that way of working is that sometimes you turn all your attention to being present with the people in front of you, all together. It's interesting, satisfying, to do enough of something, anything, that at the end of the day you feel spent.
I'm looking forward to returning to my quiet days where my thoughts bounce around inside my head for a while before they flow out of my hands, or my mouth. When M. and I wake at home we listen to classical music as the background to our mornings, but when he leaves for work I turn it off. I relish that moment, too — the moment when the space is mine and I can make it exactly how I want it: silent, an extension of the space of my skull. The ideas in my head can bounce around more widely in my small, quiet apartment, I can get them down on paper and see how they look and let them move around a bit, like a gas, filling the container into which they are allowed to expand. It is satisfying during my days at home to be quiet and to hear myself think. That phrase — "hear myself think" — a reminder that listening goes both ways, even if our ears are there on the outside. We listen to others, and we listen to ourselves.
So it was a week out of the ordinary, with a hyper-focus on work and the people around us. It was, in fact, a week of extreme listening — the indoor-outdoor space in which we worked had ambient noise and it was warm (also a treat!) so there were often fans running — and it took a fresh layer of attention and energy to draw people's words in through my ears and let them bounce around a bit. Add to that some evenings in loud restaurants working to hear what others were saying, and the tally is an abundance of energy directed toward listening to and thinking about what others were saying and thinking about. It's good to do — life is never all one thing or another, even if I talk sometimes about running away to be a hermit in the woods — and as I look ahead to next week I'm looking forward to a few quiet days and the chance to listen more clearly again to what's inside my head. That listening is one part of my own cumulative process, and I'm ready to pick up that thread again, to turn off even the quietest classical music, and pay close attention to what's murmuring inside.
Your friend,
Eva
February 7, 2019
Dear Eva,
I am in the sky on my way home from Miami where I spent the last five days with you and the rest of our coworkers. It was a good week, but I am spent, just as I always am after these intensive week-long staff meetings.
I am thinking about the different kind of energy it takes to be around humans all day, to be in meetings, to be listening, mulling, speaking, interacting. It is such a different way of spending the days, compared to the solitude with which I spend most of them working at home. I am thinking about how the energy required varies so much depending on who you are around — the way strangers and new acquaintances require a different amount of human energy, no matter how lovely they are. Is it that we are doing a little bit of subtle performing? Is it the deliberateness of our words and actions that drains us? And, on the flip side, the way people you know well sometimes start to feel easy, sliding into moments in a way that doesn’t take up space or require more effort, sometimes even giving you more energy with their presence. Is it that we no longer have to perform? That we can just be?
I am thinking about the energy it takes to write. Each night this week I would get back to my empty hotel room with a plan to write, either this letter or something else, and the mere thought of having to string words together on the page made me tired. I always opted for sleep.
I am thinking about the energy it takes to feel. Hope, disappointment, pain, anger. They can all take a toll, so we look for ways to manage them, to become a little numb. Early in this week together, you mentioned that you like to consider how any personal situation you’re facing stacks up in the grand scheme of things — is your situation really as bad or as strange as it seems to you? who has it worse? This method of zooming out from our lives is highly valuable because it puts things in perspective. It reveals how small our situation always looks when compared to everything else in this big wide world.
I wonder, though, if we have to be careful not to view our lives from afar for too long. There will always be people who have it worse. There will always be scenarios more difficult than those we face. But that shouldn’t erase or invalidate our own reality. After all, our own reality is the only one we get the chance to experience! What a shame it would be to experience it from a distance. Somehow, I guess we have to strain to be objective about where we sit in this world without letting it prevent us from fully feeling and experiencing our lives. Somehow, we have to remember that things could be far worse without letting that serve as an excuse not to make things better.
And so, here we are again, striving to do two seemingly contradictory things at once on the road to wisdom. This, too, takes a lot of energy! Phew, I think it’s time for a nice long rest.
Until next week, my friend.
Yours,
Sarah