ON QUICK BODIES VERSUS SLOW MINDS, DOING VERSUS THINKING, AND THE VARYING DIGESTION OF WORDS
Thursday August 8 2019
Dear Sarah,
Hello! Is it possible I’ve aged more than a week in the last week? I was going to make a reference to the past week as an astronaut’s kind of week, but upon a bit of research it appears that astronauts on the International Space Station age just a little bit slower than people on Earth, rather than faster. This is due to time-dilation effects expressed by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the concept of space-time… Sarah, this has been a busy week and for some reason right now instead of writing my letter to you, I am reading a Business Insider article to try to explain to myself and to you some concepts that Einstein had to be Einstein to figure out. Let’s press on!
I was thinking about your letter of last week, and I thank you for your kudos about the glass- and woodworking I’ve been up to! I was reflecting on your reflections and thought I would add a shade to the work you described as physical and serious. It is physical and serious, but I was thinking about how it almost sounds more dangerous than it is, if that’s possible. It is certainly dangerous to act frivolously around a power saw, and anytime you’re going to make a cut, you want to understand where your hands are in relation to the saw blade, because you could fail to notice that your finger is in the path of the blade if you’re not maintaining an awareness of all your fingers. But when I was thinking about glass and working in front of a flame, I started thinking about how your body knows how to react to potential hazards — hands know how to snap away from the edge of a hot metal burner or a recently bent piece of hot glass. There’s something about thinking about it (and, I suppose, writing about it) that makes it sound worse or simply substantially more dangerous than it is in reality. The mind is slow to snap away from its dangers — the mind likes to roll them around, think through possibilities in minute detail to try to stave off bad things ever happening. It’s easy to forget the body’s skill (can it even be called a skill? and have I used these precise words before?) in preserving itself, skin reacting to heat, sensing danger a fraction of a second before it manifests. I think this is one part body trust and one part working on living the concept of crossing that bridge when I come to it. I burned my hand in the first class and I popped it into a bucket of water and then the teacher looked at it and said, Go put your hand in the freezer, and I did that, and nary a blister appeared! I stopped my skin from burning by touching a freezer pack. Done and done!
I am captivated by your thoughts on our letter exchange and the way that letter writing gets at things that don’t often come out in person. I find myself thinking a lot about the difference between speaking and writing — the way that even when we speak complex thoughts, they are generally digestible at approximately the pace we’re speaking to each other. It might take some mulling over, but a spoken thought generally seems to have a certain duration, the flow a bit shorter perhaps than a written sentence. So then writing is more dense, sentences longer than what a person would generally say in conversation. We’ve had our share of dense conversations, but it’s different! And written words are composed, whereas our spoken thoughts intertwine as something you say jogs a memory of mine or sparks an idea, and then new things flow from that, and on and on at a clip. In writing we exchange ideas the same way — just more ideas at once, perhaps, or ideas fleshed out in longer sentences, and then we offer each other the opportunity to digest the long sentences linked together in letters, and to respond. I wonder if there is a real digestion comparison to be made here: maybe our letters are like complex carbohydrates, they take more time to digest, and spoken words are like high glycemic index foods — you take them in for an energy boost and they spike your blood sugar. I am liking this analogy — have been, in fact, chewing over some digestion analogies lately — and I’m going to keep working on it. Still digesting!
And now, look at me getting this scrappy letter over to you on a Thursday night instead of sometime Friday! I’ll take my reward in gold bullion!
Until next week!
Yours,
Eva
August 8, 2019
Dear Eva,
I just reread your letter from last week, and I was filled with delight yet again. Does it sometimes feel like perhaps we have stumbled upon something a bit magical with our weekly correspondence? Maybe we should prosthelytize! Get yourself a penpal, folks! Letter writing, this ancient mode of communication, is a nice little jam, especially with someone as multi-faceted, contemplative, and generally magnificent as you. (I am curious to know how many times and in how many different ways we have proclaimed our love of this project in our letters over the past 45 weeks. Regardless, I regret nothing!)
Part of the joy of writing you each week is that it forces me to stop and reflect, even during weeks when it would all too easy to glide through time going from commitment to commitment looking through rather than at my life. This is certainly one of those weeks for me. Here it is, Thursday night, and I am weary from a sleepless night tending to two sick kids while Bill is away. As I look at it now though, I can actually see how there was something about the visceral experience of caregiving last night that kind of snapped me back to life. It was shaping up to be a strange and stressful week at work, and my mind had been stuck in a haze amidst it all. Suddenly, when I went upstairs to answer the call of a scared child last night, I got out of my head and stepped fully back into my life, where I spent the next 6+ hours cleaning up vomit and comforting suffering young boys. It was dreadful, of course, but it recentered me, put my attention right back on my life in the flesh. Maybe it is about presence, maybe it is about feeling alive. I don’t know, I just know I somehow feel almost grateful today for the experience.
This reminds me slightly of your comments last week about the pleasure of writing with a pencil on the page. That satisfaction of physical feeling vs. brain feeling, it is something that fascinates me. Is this yearning to use more of our senses more acute for us because we spend most of our days working in digital spaces? Maybe it is a basic human need that we didn’t know we had until increasingly larger chunks of our daily lives are devoid of it. This feels like yet another layer to the ongoing conversation we have been having about remote work over the past year. I dare say there is a book - maybe many books - tucked within all of these layers. Writer Austin Kleon always says you should write the book you want to read. I say he is right! Are you game for another writing project with me? I feel inexplicably inspired today. Why the heck shouldn’t we dive right in with abandon?
I am thinking about the essay I wrote about in last week’s letter, Thick. One of the quotes that struck me like a hammer was, “With the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility.” I can see so many different ways to fulfill my responsibility, some big, some small. One of them feels as simple as choosing to act rather than just considering options. Playing a note rather than continually running my fingers over the piano keys the way I so often do when I am thinking about how I should spend my days/years/life.
Let’s write the book(s) we want to read, Eva! We each have things to say, things to learn. I feel more eager than ever to put the pencil to the page.
Yours,
Sarah