ON KEEPING TRACK, SHIFTING CONTEXTS, AND COMFORT WITH THE CERTAINTY OF UNCERTAINTY
Friday September 6 2019
Dear Sarah,
I started typing this letter this morning (after starting to write it last night) and nearly wrote August again as I typed the date. Nope! We’ve crossed into September, the unofficial start of the fall season, back-to-school time, a shift even the trees are feeling as swatches change here and there from green to yellow, with hints of orange and red.
Last night I started writing my letter to you, having earlier in the day eaten a luxury donut and a pizza dinner, so again my brain was a spongy noodle afloat on a carbohydrate sea, as it was last week. Such carbs! I’ll quote from what I eked out last night: I don’t know if my brain can squeeze thoughts right now but I’m applying my pencil to paper so that if there’s anything going on it’ll have a capillary path to follow, graphite already streaming across the page in its thin line. The end!
Today I’m back and awake-ish. It’s been a tiring week. For some reason I haven’t talked about it much in our letters, though we’ve talked about it with our spoken words, but next week will be my final week in my current job at CC, at which point I’ll break off to work as a freelancer and to focus more time and attention on writing. That’s big! It feels big and it also feels comfortable, which I think means that now is a good time for it, and the right time for me. It also means these last couple of weeks have been hectic and I’m not quite recouping my full energy with each night’s sleep.
This will be the first time in twelve years — since late 2007! — that I’ve stepped away from a job without a clear full-time position to catch me on the other side; that I’ve had a period of somewhat undefined, unknown time ahead of me. Ten-plus years ago I was leaving my first “real” job, moving from Tucson to San Francisco, not sure exactly what would come next. Now I’m twelve years older, with twelve years of work and job experience and life happenings in the mix. I recently talked with a friend whose partner was job-hunting about how it can be hard to enjoy these kinds of open undefined times because you want to know how long they’ll last, how to plan for them, know for sure that they won’t last forever. I think this kind of wanting-to-know was more true for me twelve years ago than it is today. Twelve years ago, fairly recently out of college, I was on the front end of who knew what, with no particular feeling that things were guaranteed to go a “good” way. Perhaps it was safe or necessary to think in that way; now, in the future, I can look back and see that on the whole, things went just fine, and part of the reason they went fine is because I pushed during those years and aimed for the unspecific “good” thing I was after. Now there is a safety and stability in those years having gone well, which allows me to step into this next period of my life with a sense that even if I don’t know exactly what it will look like, it will go all right, and I have tools and ways of thinking and friends and colleagues to talk to to help me move through it.
Twelve years doesn’t sound that long, twelve isn’t a big number! But twelve years multiplied over 365 days — 4,380 days — that’s a lot of days. Now I’m reflecting on what it would be like if we all talked about our lives and careers in terms of days instead of years. By next Friday, I will have been at my current job three years, three months, and two weeks: 1,199 days! Even just counting to 1,199 would take a while, as it would to count to 4,380 — and I’ve lived through those days. I’m ready for a break! We don’t learn in year-long chunks but we like to measure things in that length, that amount of time it takes for our Earth to make a lap around the sun; I’m reminded how we like things in fives and tens, these numbers built into our hands. Let’s look again when the Earth has come full circle and see where we are: back where we started, yet not quite so!
I’m reminded of the designer Stefan Sagmeister, who takes a year-long sabbatical every seven or so years to reflect, take stock of things, creatively recharge. It’s almost odd now to think about how a series of decisions that began more than twelve years ago would continue to play out and unfold today, so many days later. I’m looking forward to taking some days to look back and look forward and think about what may come next, with all that daily wisdom here inside me. And I’m looking forward to seeing you in person in just three days, and reflecting back and forward together!
Until soon!
Your friend,
Eva
P.S. What if instead of measuring the number of years or days we spent doing things, we measured the number of minutes! There are 1,440 minutes in a day, some of which we’re all sleeping, but we know good things happen in our brains while we’re asleep, sifting and sorting and filing and hiding and revealing. So it’s been 6,307,200 minutes since I last didn’t know what my next full-time job would be! That’s a lot of minutes, my friend. And you and I have worked together, known each other, all of 1,726,560 minutes! More than a million minutes! What a treat of this life! We’ve been writing these letters in the space of just more than eleven months — around 330 days — 475,200 minutes! Now that is an amount of time that I think starts to do justice to this epistolary experiment!
September 4, 2019
Dear Eva,
Hello on a WEDNESDAY night! I’m an overachiever this week, getting my writing done early.
I have been itching to write this letter ever since I read your words on Friday night. I am glad I waited a few days though because your words keep bubbling around in my brain, making their way to new connections and ideas. I am particularly fascinated by this idea of Pancakes and its smallness and what this all means. In some way, isn’t the fact of that little micro-memoir feeling and being small connected to me feeling and being small myself? This is objectively true, of course, for me, and for any of us. The end of my life will be world-changing for a few, and wholly inconsequential for most. This is being human.
It sounds like a tiny and common sense thing to say, but I think it’s one of the hardest things to grasp — our insignificance and significance, both true at once. I have always struggled with this, the way shifting contexts makes it obvious how differently we are perceived by others. I am big and important here, a random stranger there. Things that are obviously this way in one setting are obviously that way in another. Sometimes I find this unsettling, like the ground is shifting beneath me. But all it really means is that the color changes with the light, life looks different next to different things. I suppose it is just another reason why new experiences, new people, new contexts are critical. It reminds us that what we take for granted as truth and reality are just a construct of our own tiny orbit.
I completely agree with you that these letters over the past year have changed the course of the year. I love your description of writing as a way to “feel time.” It is so true. Of course, part of me then starts to pine for all of the time I failed to feel over the years, but that is neither here nor there. The important thing is to appreciate the texture that writing about life adds to life when it does get done. I am deeply grateful to have these weekly letters to give me cause to systematically reflect on life as it passses.
Over the holiday weekend, we took the boys and two of my sister’s kids to a baseball game. It struck me as I gazed at the scoreboard that baseball scorekeeping is a more rich way to keep a record of a game. Rather than just seeing a running total of each team’s scores like you do in basketball or most other sports, in baseball you get a snapshot of how the game flowed over the course of the nine innings. I want to remember this as I think about how I decide to archive time as it passes in my own life. For me, memories tend to take on an airbrushed quality with time. I look back, and I mostly just see the running total.
This past week I have been working really hard to teach Jonah how to ride a bike. This might sound like a simple task, but in this particular case, it is not. We waited too long to start, and Jonah is naturally a cautious kid anyway. Because riding a bike requires a good dose of trust and unthinking, it is proving to be a real challenge for the kid. And for me! I see this as a real test of my patience and perseverance. I’ll be damned if my kid is one of the few on earth who doesn’t learn to ride a bike! Anyway, the other night after a particularly trying session on the bike in the muggy heat, Jonah declared once again that he will never learn to ride a bike. I reminded him of another activity he once thought he would never do — swimming. He does not remember it now, but we spent many grueling summer days trying to coax / force him to get his head under water when he was younger. Now, he jumps off the diving board with abandon. Hearing this factual story about his past struck a chord for Jonah. Suddenly, what seemed insurmountable became achievable. His mindset changed, his body language changed. In other words, reminding him about his progress with swimming was an example where keeping track of life events can change the future.
Our experience of life is affected by how we record it. How powerful! These letters become more important each week.
Your friend,
Sarah