ON TIRED BRAINS, THE ACT OF THROWING IT BACK, AND THE BEAUTY OF NOT SUMMING IT UP
Thursday April 4 & Friday April 5
Dear Sarah,
Lately I feel like the week is hot on my heels when it comes time to write my letter to you! Where did the time go? In your letter last week you talked about feeling like your thoughts were swirling and you wanted a bit more time to connect the dots. I feel like I am running alongside my thoughts — I'm going to type my letter to you this week, rather than writing it by hand and then typing it up in a separate sitting, as I have been doing — somehow time has been slipping away! What will come out of my head and my fingertips this week? To reference your letter again, in which you wanted to get comfortable with having something to say, and saying it, before every point is fully formed, I feel like I've got no fully formed thoughts waiting in the wings! I'm just getting started mixing my dough here on the page (to mix my dough with my metaphors?).
When my mind is a bit tired I find myself more inclined to respond to your letters in a paragraph-by-paragraph, word-by-word way — responding, while not easy, is accessible to my tired mind, more so than forming and presenting crisp, new, never-before-discussed thoughts (do they even exist?). I was thinking about a past letter where we were talking about collage, and putting together materials from multiple sources, and (I'm paraphrasing) you said there was a time in your life when it would have felt like that was an incorrect way to do things, somehow untrue to an idea that creativity is a solo act emerging from your brain and yours only.
I was thinking about the impulse to respond to your letters — to respond piece by piece — and then I was also thinking about ball sports like tennis. I don't play tennis but the whole point would seem to be passing the ball back and forth, hitting it to each other, seeing how the other person will respond (or not!), seeing how they will dive and contort and fly across the court to pick up the volley and send it back. Of course, I am sure there are solo ball sports — I'm thinking of that paddle with a ball attached by an elastic, which you're supposed to play on your own and for which I could never quite muster much enthusiasm (it hardly seems to count as "sport") — but even in team sports the key is what an individual brings to the game, and how a group of individuals turns into something new when they work together. Tennis players are finely tuned, strong, nimble, flexible, resilient. It wouldn't be a sport if a tennis player were hitting the ball by themselves endlessly. (Forgive me if an imagined solo tennis sport does in fact exist.) The magic comes in the match. (I'm also thinking about this article by David Foster Wallace about Roger Federer, which made me think that maybe deep down I was a sports fan, but really I am a fan of good writing, even good writing about sports.) (I am also a fan of solo sports like running and swimming, but we can discuss those and their related metaphors in another letter!)
I'm also thinking about your letter from last week and our mulling on some wider human inclinations toward the overarching narrative, final impact, "summing it up," rather than the doing and being along the way — this feels to me like a kind of shorthand, an acknowledgment of the sheer impossibility of tracking all the details of all the lives with which we interact along the path of our own. It can be hard even to track and understand our own journeys in detail, seeing the meaning along the way. Summing it up gives us points along the path to track, even though the points are simply that — moments in time that are representations of cumulative happenings, though they are not always recognized as such.
Do these things go together this week? These letters give us the chance to look at every detail we put on the page, to think on it, to return to ideas again and again over time. We are doing it together, engaging our muscles, hitting the ball back and forth. And there is no one letter that is THE LETTER — they are a series over time, turning over ideas in our minds, sharing them, letting them ferment and age, and attaching new words here and there to see if the ideas are better illustrated and understood in any number of different ways. We’re not summing it up! We’re not doing it alone! And the page is a fine place to be mixing the dough, together.
Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva
April 5, 2019
Dear Eva,
What a week! I’m having that treadmill feeling lately, and I’m not a fan. What I can’t tell, however, is whether it’s all a mirage or whether I really do have too much I’m trying to do at the moment. A couple of weeks ago, I did a silly little experiment where I told myself I was going on a reading hiatus for one week. No books, no news. The only reading I did was what I had to do for work. (I think it was right before my China trip so I didn’t have any reading for school since we were between classes.) The funny part was that it had virtually no impact on how much reading I did during the week. But it had a very big impact on the amount of guilt I felt about all the personal reading I am not doing. How ridiculous! And illuminating.
I’m sure I have said this before, but I’ll say it again — it is wild to me how much of our mental states are dependent on the way we frame things in our minds. I can’t decide whether it’s pathetic or inspiring, or maybe a little of both. But regardless, it is nice to know how much we can manipulate our realities by changing the way we think about something. Last semester, I took a class about change management, and we talked a lot about the critical role that framing plays in how people react to our ideas. In one of our readings, scholar George Lakoff defined frames as the “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” This connects so closely to the thread we have been following in our correspondence lately about where we should fix our gaze.
I love so many things about our weekly letters, but one of them is how we deconstruct different experiences, feelings, events, and ideas into their component parts in ways that help me see them from new angles and discover water I have been swimming in without realizing it all these years. For example, I don’t think I’ll ever think about fears that stem from social risks the same again. I thought about that this week in my offline life when I had the brand new experience of watching Jonah get a laugh from a friend at my expense. It was only a matter of time! And apparently age 6 is when it shall begin. A neighbor kid was over at our house, and the two of them were getting their shoes on to go outside. I walked downstairs to say something to them, and Jonah said, “Shoo, Mom, shoo” inspiring lots of giggles from the neighbor. After the boy left, I told Jonah that saying what he said was a way of being mean to me in order to make someone else laugh. His behavior sounded so small, so pathetic when I framed what he did that way. But just think of all that we do for the approval of other human beings! It is not something that magically disappears when we age, and I suppose, on the whole, that’s a good thing. The force of social pressure is probably what keeps the whole structure of society more or less upright. But sheesh, it can also lead to a lot of ugliness.
As I write this letter — typing and deleting, starting new lines of thought and then deciding to save them for later, going back to old letters to make sure I’m not being unduly repetitive (though I recently heard some shocking statistic about how 90% of the thoughts in our brain are repeated thoughts), stumbling over words — I am realizing this busy, treadmill-like week has left me with a general brain fatigue. So, whether it’s all a result of some faulty frame I’m using to view my life this week or not, I am tapped.
With that, I will cut my losses and try again next week, hopefully with a bright new take on the same old view.
Your friend,
Sarah