ON RETROFITTING GOALS, THE STORY OF SELF, AND A CHANGE OF PACE AND MEDIUM
Thursday May 30 2019
Dear Sarah,
I’m here at my living room window, the classical radio station in the background as it often is, and a familiar piece is playing. I use an app on my phone to tell me what it is, because even when things are familiar and even when I’ve actually played these pieces before — sat with an orchestra where we’ve together brought the music alive — I have a hard time remembering exactly which piece it is, which composer. The tunes themselves are distinct to me, but the labels can be difficult. Confirmed: tonight I am listening to Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.”
Today I was thinking about your letter, and your bike riding, as I took off on a bike ride of my own. This week and onward I’m in my new (old) place, facing a green plot of park and lake land dotted with trees, and I have a new (old) bike, a lovely turquoise-green-aqua Raleigh Super Course with lizardy green tape wrapped around the handlebars. I was thinking about your letter from two weeks ago, and your letter from last week, and thinking about how important it is to move (or not move) in different ways throughout the day — to sit, thoughtful; to walk, a gentle step-by-step pace; to ride a bike, wheels faster than human feet but still a speed at a human scale; to drive, a machine steered by a human, not necessary in any given day, but covering ground with a vehicle (road trip!) has its own particular charm. When you move in different ways, you think in different ways. Things lodge or dislodge in the mind; unnecessary layers fall away.
I’ve been thinking lately of the story of myself, and the things I like to do, the classes I like to take, the craft and art and design experiences I like to dig into. Sometimes these things feel disconnected from each other, and I critique myself for always finding new ways to be a student rather than one who teaches, who tells others how to do a thing. I’ve studied, or dabbled in, many ways of making over the years: woodworking, metalworking, drawing, architectural drafting, design layout, letterpress, watercolor, calligraphy, clothing construction, loom weaving, risograph printing, computer coding, darkroom photography, cyanotype process. I’m currently signed up to take a class later this summer working with neon glass. I used to think each class was a possible portal into a new me: if I really like this particular way of working, maybe it will become the thing I do, the medium in which I pursue true expertise. What’s stood the test of time is my return to words and writing — and I’m thinking about a past letter of yours, and cultivating a lifetime studying, choosing, weaving words — and the thing I’ve come to believe is that while every new medium explored is an end in itself, rich with possibility, it is also something that, for me, flows back into writing and words. Every medium is a different process with its own nuances; there are ways of understanding how to work in each medium that teach new ways of seeing the world. Watercolor requires thinking in advance about the areas you want to remain light or untouched by color; you build up your color layer by layer, waiting in between for the paint to dry, working on other layers of other paintings, moving between wet pages until you can circle back on a dry page. The edges of painted space in watercolor are darker (at least for a novice), these places where the water dries first. Water on the page is prone to join up with prior rivulets and droplets. A dried watercolor can be reactivated, reworked, with a fresh wet brush.
When we primarily live and work online, in front of a screen, in a space at once infinite and flat, we “optimize,” we work for efficiency, we streamline. We chip away at our communications to make them tight and to the point, readable for eyes that we think will rest momentarily on the first few lines; we try not to address too many topics at once or they won’t all get seen, heard, considered. I say we are different when we watercolor, when we knead clay, when we plane delicate curls of wood, when we press a sharp pencil to a toothy piece of paper. And when we write meandering letters to each other!
I have a good friend from elementary school with whom I also have a letter-writing tradition, one that’s been alive for many years, I don’t recall quite how many. The pace of those letters is different than the letters we write here; this friend and I end up exchanging letters every two or three months, so that in a year I might read two or three or four letters from her; we see each other in between, and occasionally email. But this is the flow of our letters. We each might work on a letter, set it down, come back to it minutes, hours, days later, until some ground is covered and we fold up the pages into a thick flat package and send it off. This is the pace we’ve set. I think about these letters often, even when I am not writing mine; I think about what I’ll share, what’s new, what’s old, what’s changed. I don’t keep a record of what I put in those letters, and I sometimes wonder if I’m saying something I’ve said before, and there’s no real way to know, only to warn her, I may have said this before! A long pace makes you think about your story in different ways, just as a long-distance runner thinks about their pace differently than a sprinter; and just as you see things differently when you’re walking, approaching the world step by step, or biking, moving faster but powered by human strength, or driving, breezing past details and grasping at lengthy stretches of space and time. How do I think of our weekly pace here? Perhaps it’s like a bike ride, powered by our human energy, faster than a walk, slower than a drive, still with plenty of time to meander.
With that, I’ll say — until next week!
Your friend,
Eva
May 31, 2019
Dear Eva,
Last night, I read back over your letter from last week and then reflected upon your tendency to put off things you enjoy so you can anticipate them. This truly fascinates me! I am not sure we could be more different in that way. Of course, I love the juicy anticipation of a planned but far-in-the-future vacation, but when it comes to the process of reading a book I love or writing about a topic that invigorates me, I don’t want to anticipate, I want to dive in. I often find I have to carve off specific segments of time (and even set a timer!) to write or research something that is consuming my brain at the moment because otherwise I won’t leave my desk or even turn away until it is done, often putting off even a trip down the hall to the bathroom. Even when I’m away from my desk, I’ll find my mind wandering back to the topic repeatedly, and I’ll relish little moments of my day when I can turn my mind fully back to think on it, like when it is Bill’s turn to read to the boys in the bed at night while I lay there next to them with my mind elsewhere.
I wonder what, if anything, all of this means about you and me? You, savoring the thought of what is ahead. Me, racing to the finish.
It makes me think about a conversation I had with my dad and some other family members at a birthday party a few months ago. He said he had recently read or heard someone say that everyone should have something they are anticipating and/or working toward. After thinking about it, he said he had realized he did not really have anything he was particularly focused on achieving or looking forward to at this stage in his life. As I recall it, those of us at the table for the conversation were a little taken aback. My sister started naming off things he might want to be around for in the future — a grandchild’s graduation, a grandchild’s wedding. My dad responded that of course he would be happy to witness those events but that attending them was not really a goal of his. At the time, I remember being a little stumped by the notion of not anticipating or working toward something in the future, maybe even a little scared by it.
Progress toward a goal is tantalizing to me. As I have written before, I come by my goal obsession naturally. It is in my DNA, and I see it manifesting in Jonah already with his handwritten to-do lists (“brush teeth” - check!). It has largely served me well in life, but there are times it gets a wee bit extreme. I will not hesitate to eat more Frosted Mini-Wheats than I really want just so I can have the satisfaction of finishing the box. Reading your letter last week, I got a pang of gratification thinking about the depleting stack of pages on your physical desk calendars. I am lured by any visible sign of progress, something measurable and palpable, like an Apple Watch notification that I met my movement goal or a crumpled box of cereal.
This all feels relevant as I peer ahead to the end of 2019, when I will finish my MBA and begin life in my 40s. Those upcoming landmarks feel like an occasion to look back at the whole of what I have done and lived so far. As I reflect back, I have almost zero regrets. But do I find myself hunting to find an end game where it all leads, as if everything should be building in a crescendo to some yet-to-be-determined overarching goal. Is this post-hoc goal-setting some grand-scale version of writing down something I have already done on a to-do list just so I can tick it off? (Yes, I have been known to do that, too.)
As I think about it now, I wonder if maybe there is something a bit freeing for my dad to be living entirely in the now. Is it a relief in some way, knowing that today is squarely where to set your sights, rather than going back and forth between future planning and now-living the way we do when we do not have a good sense of how long the road is ahead? I think it is worth a conversation on my next walk with my dad and my dog.
As always, I relish the growing stack of letters that we write each week. Visible progress, certainly, but not pointed toward an ultimate outcome. Rather, a meandering trail of sharing, learning, and connecting. Like life!
Yours,
Sarah