ON THE WEIGHT OF WORDS, MEASURING TIME AND OURSELVES, AND GETTING SLOTTED INTO THE SPECTRUM
Friday September 20 2019
Dear Sarah,
It’s very early in the morning and I’m at the airport in my city just as you were last week! I’m headed out for a few days that I'll spend mostly in Connecticut visiting family newly settled there, and friends in the NY area, with a touch of NYC and the art book fair splashed on at the front end. It is hard to believe that last week we were in Seattle together, however briefly together-together, and otherwise just spending our days some minutes apart across the city. I had a flush of a particular feeling of existence when you said there had been Eva sightings in Seattle — I knew I had been seen at breakfast because I also saw the people who saw me, but I didn’t know I had been seen at a dinner! It was a funny feeling. I spent the remainder of my time in Seattle with friends who I’ve known were delightful but with whom I’ve not spent all that much time, and it was a very pleasant stay getting to spend time with them and to know them better over a couple of evenings filled with conversation and bubbly water. It was odd to think of being in Seattle while you and the rest of our colleagues were still all together, and it was odd to think about someone from work seeing me in a different context with friends! I wasn’t thinking about work at that moment and it was funny to think that someone from work could see me and think of me. I missed you and I am looking forward to making my way down to Des Moines (or Cedar Rapids?!) before this fall season is out, if you’ll have me!
I laughed about your competitive score of ZERO last week. I think you are exactly right about how easy it is to conflate the drive to win with the drive to want to do what you’re doing well. I’ve enjoyed my share of satisfaction in moments when I was particularly good at something, but it’s hard now to think of those times being about the opportunity to do better than others. I think for me it’s mostly been about doing as well as I could and proving to myself what I could do. Or that is the narrative I’ve constructed for myself now, now that that is the case, whereas in high school for example I was certainly focused on how I measured up against others. There is something funny about the ways in which we are subjected to measurement in our lives whether we want to be measured or not. For some reason I am thinking about the move from horse-and-carriage transport to automobile transport — thinking about the move into a space of speed where minutes (even seconds) could be an integral unit of measure rather than hours. A new need and opportunity to define every notch of possibility along a spectrum. We bump up against conflicting messages — that we’re supposed to be ourselves, pursue what matters to us, and then we’re also measuring ourselves against others and getting measured all the time. Always getting slotted into the spectrum somewhere, I suppose. Perhaps I can reflect on this in this way because while I’m not overly competitive these days, I think generally if I were getting ranked I would fare all right. There are some ways in which I rank or have ranked higher than others in my life (I was an excellent student of geometry, for example!) and ways in which I wouldn't rank at all (I am a miserable trivia player and I cannot remember historical dates). I've stopped feeling competitive as I've found my place in things along the way. Maybe there is also a difference between competing and truly enjoying the thing you're doing? Is the competitive instinct a substitute feeling for enjoyment? Or perhaps very competitive people find competition itself to be the activity, a filter that can be applied over anything.
Another thing that comes to mind as I’m thinking about measuring time — one thing I miss about my apartment in San Francisco is that we had east-facing living room and bedroom windows, and west-facing kitchen windows. M and I lived on the top floor of a four-story apartment and a favorite happening of mine was that the moon would rise in the evening and pass overhead while I slept; if I got up in the night for a drink of water the kitchen would be filled with moonlight, and I could look out the window and see the moon peeking in. There was something special about having a regular relationship with the moon, knowing it was moving overhead every night and that I would be able to see it again in its predictable spot. You can’t really spend any time looking at the sun, you just enjoy its rays and warmth and all that it’s doing for life on the Earth. But you can look up at the moon and stare at it for a while, catch it in a sliver or in a full bright white or orangey harvest kind of glow. Knowing it was passing overhead was a pleasant way to mark time in the night. I’ve just lately been getting a feel for where the moon is visible around my new home, through which windows and when I can see it best.
I wonder how you are feeling as I write this letter? We texted briefly yesterday and I sense that your letter may involve the narration of some dramatic physical experiences this week. I hope you’re resting and taking good care of your one and only self!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
September 20, 2019
Dear Eva,
I just got a little rush of the shivers as I wrote “week 51 - letter to Eva” as the title of this Google document. It feels like the one-year anniversary warrants some sort of celebration next week. Perhaps at least a plan to raise a glass in honor of our epistolary adventure. (Sidenote: I somehow feel strangely guilty using that word - epistolary - because it feels like your word, somehow never making it into my vocabulary into you introduced it to me these past months. So, I am sorry, but I am borrowing your word here today!)
I am really feeling the desire to print the full stack of 52 pairs of letters and comb through the words, highlighting nuggets of wisdom, jotting down connections I have not yet seen. Maybe I should take a letter-combing hiatus from work just so I can sink down into our past exchanges without distraction. As I type this, it occurs to me you can do this tomorrow if you want to, and I feel a not so small pang of jealousy. Reminder to self: I have chosen the path I am on! It is sometimes easy to forget, maybe sometimes easier to pretend it is all out of my control. Full-timer or not, I do plan to take a glance back at what we have wrought. Viewed in its entirety, or just by the slice of each week’s exchange — it is an impressive feat.
Partially as a result of our letters, partially as a result of life, I have been thinking lately about the weight of words — the contradictory way in which words sometimes start out heavy when written down and become light over time as more eyes look upon them, and sometimes, when unspoken / unwritten, grow to become a weight on individual shoulders, on families, on entire communities. (This feels like an idea that would resonate more with a visual, a way to see the words physically evaporate and/or grow huge and all-encompassing with time. Another idea for our future children’s book series?) Maybe it is not contradictory at all, maybe the thread here is that what gets expressed gradually begins to lighten with time. As you wrote last week, “we need each other, even more than we say or think we do, all the time.” Could part of that need be rooted in the way communicating to each other lifts the weight of our words from our chests, helps them travel into the atmosphere where they rightfully belong, absorbing into the air? It seems to me that any sense of heaviness of our thoughts / fears / ideas is just a result of us losing perspective, forgetting we are dots.
Dots from one view; friends / wives / mothers / aunts / daughters from another.
Small, breezy words to most; big, monumental words to a few (and sometimes just to ourselves).
May we keep sharing our words!
May we keep shifting contexts to see our words and ourselves from different views!
A toast for next week’s milestone? I continue to miss you even while you are not technically any less present in my life than you were while you were still a full-time coworker. But it still feels different, and I am still adjusting to the new feeling. I imagine you are, too.
I look forward to reading your words shortly!
Yours,
Sarah