ON THE FREEDOM OF LOW EXPECTATIONS, SMOOTHING OVER THE SHAME, AND THE INEFFICIENCY OF WHAT MATTERS
Thursday April 18 and Friday April 19
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been thinking about your letter from last week — new contexts, and the floundering that comes with learning something new or being somewhere new. I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of seeing being brand new, and possibly being acknowledged as brand new in some space or context, as a special kind of moment — where you’re not expected to know everything (or anything). (This line of thought is largely about expectations, which I’ll get into in a moment.)
It brings me back to the idea of sight-reading I brought up in our letters in week 5 (we were such letter babies then!). One of the great joys of sight-reading music with an orchestra, for me, was that it was brand new to everyone. You could careen through runs of notes with no expectation you’d hit them all. You were generally expected to be able to follow the conductor time-wise — to stay with the group, to follow the beat — but there was this feeling of freshly cutting your path, alone and for your instrument section, as if you were in a great wooded or grassy or bushy area (all of the above, in a many-layered orchestral piece), and every section was flailing a bit together, mowing down the stems of notes and ending breathlessly in essentially the same spot, a clearing, looking at each other and thinking We got here together. Eventually a piece would become a finely tuned manicured garden, every section tending its plot neatly, the landscape harmonizing as required, flourishes placed where they belonged and everyone following the same path through from beginning to end. But sight-reading was just fun, barrelling through, with none of those expectations of tidiness and precision. You’d bring your skills to the page and the piece, but there was a particular joy and a freedom to each of those first applications of old skills to something new.
You mentioned that you could imagine that your children may feel silly as they fumble along the way, but wonder if they do? This strikes me as something we’d feel as adults thinking about all we didn’t know as children, but of course kids don’t know it all, and they don’t know all they don’t know! They’re new, learning pretty much everything for the first time — and as we know, even as adults, when we think we’ve “learned” something it still usually takes much repetition, time and time again, until we really know it. (In one small example, there are words I consistently have to look up, words I have a hard time embedding in my brain no matter how many times I see them and have a sense of how they’re used. I’m sure if I actually learn how to use some of these words in a sentence of my own then they will stick a little more firmly!) I know I’ve shared these kinds of thoughts with you before — even moments earlier today! — I feel like a challenge with kids is simply remembering that they are kids, even when they say wise things or somehow know exactly what to do in a given situation — they’re still putting it all together bit by bit.
I find sometimes that I feel less tension or anxiety in new moments because there are no expectations — or at least low expectations — for what I’m supposed to know and do. For me, as time passes, that’s where shame creeps in: am I supposed to know exactly what to do in this situation? Or, am I supposed to be the expert on X right now? (Even the things that I am pretty darn good at, “expert” in some senses, provide me with moments of learning, which seems to me like a desirable state — what would be the fun in knowing all the things? See my letter from week 24 and the infinite castle rooms to be explored!) I think the most dangerous, and my least favorite, kinds of people are those who try to present like they’ve got it all figured out, and aren’t willing or able to say that they don’t know something, and to understand that it’s okay not to know everything. That’s (at least one reason) why there is more than one person on this earth!
I don’t exactly disagree with the idea that some small dose of shame is part of learning — but somehow shame feels too strong, too powerful. It has negative connotations for me that I’m not quite sure that the learning moment has, even while it does have those flashes of the embarrassing reveal of what is not known. I’m going to turn to the dictionary, where I go to shore up my gut feeling and see what I might not be thinking of — shame is “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” Okay, wrong behavior — to get it wrong is uncomfortable, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But never foolish!
I’m having the sense in this letter that I’m doing a thing I sometimes do — I’m somehow uncomfortable with you having moments of shame, or thinking about shame, and I’m trying to talk you out of them! “Don’t feel this shame, Sarah!” I find myself looking at an idea or a thought process — here, yours from last week’s letter — as something to be solved. And it’s also a moment where we seem to feel differently, and I’m curious about it, and I want to dig in deeper. (Aside from the fact that we are clearly two people, different people — why are we different, in what ways? In what million ways have we diverged in our years, in what ways do we diverge every day?) So, just to be clear, I don’t want to talk you out of the shame moments, or talk you out of thinking about shame! And yet my impulse is to smooth it over, find a way to make it feel better. ACK! I’m letting myself do it here and I’m trying to acknowledge the habit!
I’m going to end there and see what transpires in your letter, and in the next week!
Until then,
Your friend,
Eva
April 19, 2019
Dear Eva,
I started this letter by hand while sitting at my favorite coffee shop in town with Jonah, both of us writing our notebooks. This has become a weekly ritual for us. One day each week when my work schedule allows it, I pick him up from school and we head to Zanzibar’s Coffee Adventure, order one of each kind of homemade cookie they sell, and one lavender Italian soda without cream for Jonah and a cafe mocha for me. While I pay, Jonah finds us a table and carefully splits each cookie in half. While we eat our crumbly cookie halves, he tells me about his day at school. “How was your day, Mommy?” he often asks. When we are done eating, we write quietly, save for the occasional question about how to spell a word. Alone together. Doing something I love with someone I love.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that these outings are truly one of the greatest joys in my life.
This time I was marveling at how interesting it is to watch him learn to write his own stories. He’s currently working on a story about a young boy who goes off to travel the world alone. Along the way, he visits France, has a near-death encounter with a tiger in the jungle, and meets a man whose body is covered in mustaches. And this is all just on page one! I love the way Jonah’s brain works, the way he speaks authoritatively about things he doesn’t really understand but has no problem when you correct him, instead just seamlessly incorporating the new thing you told him into a new explanation. It is perplexing to me, though, how words and ideas that flow so easily for him verbally come out more stilted and simple on the page. This is natural for all of us. We tend to be more literal in writing, less playful, more artificial somehow. I wonder why?
Words in general are quite mysterious to me. I know I have spoken before about wanting to learn a new medium, and I still want to. But I also think I could probably spend a lifetime just studying words and the ways we can put them together on a page to convey meaning. The choice of words matters. Animal or beast? Wet or moist? The space between words matters. The font, the pacing, the tone. It is funny to me how long I believed that writing was primarily about communicating an idea. We may wrap the idea in a story or layer it into poetic language, but the concept / truth / fact within is what matters. No.
Concepts, truths, and facts surely matter, but it was ludicrous of me to think we can somehow judge them separately from the way in which they are communicated. It’s all a big messy stew. It can’t just be about efficiently imparting one idea to another human. The edges, the connective tissue, the stuff we cannot even consciously see — these things matter, sometimes more than anything. I feel like all of this connects to human life more generally, the way we always seem to idolize efficiency, the way we undervalue the incidental. Maybe humans just aren’t that good at understanding what it is that makes being human meaningful?
I think about my coffeeshop trips with Jonah. What is it that makes them so special for me (and, I hope, for us)? It is not that he tells me things I wouldn’t have heard later that evening. It is not that he confides in me, or that we are writing anything worth preserving while we are there. It’s the chuckle we share about who gets the bigger half of the peanut butter cookie. Or the simple pattern of how the trips go. Or the way I look up and see his focused gaze on the page, and I am filled with warmth. Here again, words fail me. I have so much more to learn about my one and only medium.
Until next week, my friend. May your weekend be full of a few crumbly cookies and a little quiet companionship!
Yours,
Sarah