ON KNOWING WHY BUT NOT WHAT, PEELING APART, AND WRITING WITH A GLINT IN HER EYE
Thursday May 21 and Friday May 22 2020
Dear Sarah,
It’s another week, and I have scrabbled out another set of sprawling paragraphs to choose from and share with you as I wait to see how you’re thinking about things! Last week the first version of my letter to you was full of notes that were too lengthy or squishy to include, half-baked blobs of dough waiting to be incorporated into a loaf (but which loaf?).
One thing I had in my notes from last week that didn’t quite make it into the letter but that has still been on my mind over the week, is that the concept of goals can sometimes feel like one of those ways that the language of work — as in, the language of our paying jobs — can seep into our ways of thinking and being. Your stories of your grandmother may contradict this theory, but perhaps not. I am thinking again about doing, and the possible difference between doing things, and having goals.
I also thought about what inspired my words of a few weeks ago on not always feeling the urge to finish projects, and I think I may have written that letter to you with a bit of a glint in my eye. Last week you said I was thinking after reading our recent pair of letters again last night how it feels like I am often looking for ways we are similar, while you are pointing out differences. I think this is true, but I hope it doesn’t feel bad. In my view, as I stewed on it, I think that there are many ways in which we are similar, and know we are similar — I think our similarities are what drew us to each other in the first place, as friends and collaborators. Sometimes I think of this as known territory. We say and write more words to each other than many other people say and write to us or others, I am sure. We have so much in common, and so I feel inclined to peel us apart, to expose the ways in which we are different, to draw lines between us — to figure out who you are, and who I am. Perhaps it is like a certain kind of sibling relationship, a need to distinguish between us in tangible ways even though we clearly have much in common.
As I’ve been stewing over our thoughts of the last few weeks, and the last many weeks, and figuring out how to maintain the integrity of the weaving as we pick up thread after thread, like a braid with dozens of strands instead of just three — this morning one thing clicked into place for me in a certain way.
I think it is possible we have different ways of thinking about doing: in my mind, there is a difference between doing, as a process, and doing, as a path to completion. I think I am in it for the process, less so for the completion. I see this like the difference between points on a path, landmarks, and the path itself — the dots, and the lines that connect the dots. Maybe in our collaboration, in some ways you are like the dots and I am like the lines. I might say that this is a perfect pairing — of course the dots go with the lines! This is how a picture is born! (A connect-the-dots picture, in any case!) I think we are both still talking about doing when we do, but we are looking at it in different ways. You said of your grandmother, My maternal grandmother was so task-oriented that she would literally hang up on people on the phone once she had covered whatever topic she called them to cover. I don’t think you are exclusively a dot, nor am I exclusively a line, but perhaps it is possible that we lean in these directions. (Speaking of dots, I am recalling your letter wherein you described your competitiveness score of zero, and where you relayed the tale of a conversation with a colleague whose exercise class was fueled by his desire to dominate the people around him, to outrank them as he spun the wheels of his stationary bike. This is a form of pursuit of the dots, I think.) You are welcome to discard or poke holes in this theory — it’s fresh and I’m just putting it down here in the process of thinking about it — but it was sparking my attention today.
In a letter of yours shared many weeks ago you wrote about your dad and how at a particular moment, he had thought about whether he had anything he was anticipating or working toward, and he had realized that he did not really have anything he was particularly focused on achieving or looking forward to. In my reply the following week I wrote some things that I think still hold true, and that I’m thinking about again this week, carrying on from last week: All of our goals are manufactured by us and those around us, anyway, they aren’t exactly real, right? No one has to do anything, if you look at it straight on, and yet we all do so much. I’m certain we’ve talked about this before — enjoying the doing versus the achievement of the goal — and perhaps we are different on this count, though perhaps we aren’t.
I’m also thinking about my letter of two weeks ago where I wondered if I cared about finishing, and of your letter from last week responding, and among many of your sentences I pondered and copied out to think about, I noted this: The desire to complete projects that matter to me is a huge part of what pushes me along. As I thought about this I wondered what is a project? and I wondered if we may even possibly have slightly different definitions of a project here, if we may see different things in our minds when the word project is said. You know what I did! I looked up the word project: “an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned and designed to achieve a particular aim.” There is project, the noun, and project, the verb. The origin of the word is from the Latin, to throw forth. I hadn’t really thought much before about the connection between project, the noun, a project; and project, the verb, to project, and the ways in which they are different words but similar, too. To throw something out ahead of oneself — something to accomplish, something to reach — to project a goal and to run (or walk) to meet the goal. (I tried to find a physical analogy for this and somehow came up with only the most boring-sounding game: throwing a ball for oneself and then running or walking to pick it up, fetch in the absence of a pet. Or maybe a somewhat better analogy is fishing, casting a line out and drawing a fish toward you. But if the fish is the goal, does it need to draw you toward it? I don’t fish but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. What is a better analogy here? Do I even need an analogy?)
As I thought about the verb to project I also thought about my brief experience as a middling shot-putter. I am fairly certain I was not destined to be a competition-level shot-putter, and the track coach’s instruction on how best to put the shot never totally stuck with me: if I rotate my body in this way, release at just the right time, will I have put the shot excellently? What does it take? Just doing what it looks like you’re supposed to be doing with your body doesn’t mean it’s going to come off well. Putting, the putting of the shot, is an act of pushing rather than throwing the weight, an act of pushing a dead weight. It has no momentum on its own; each shot-putter gives it all the momentum it will ever have. A shot is heavy!
More of my notes are yet spilling onto extra pages but it is time to close this letter to you! We will continue again next week! I look forward to reading your words, and I hope you will enjoy a lovely long weekend!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
May 22, 2020
Dear Eva,
I am relieved to now be sitting down with a tasty iced coffee at my desk, ready to write this letter with unexpected sunshine beaming through the windows. I feel a tad harried today, the perpetual sense of being pulled in many directions at once (kids, job, dog, self) feels a little heavier today for reasons that are probably not grounded in anything other than my frame of mind. It feels nice to tell myself that for the next 60 minutes or so, I can concentrate on one thing—writing to you!
I particularly enjoyed your letter last week because it felt like I could watch you working through something in real-time as you wrote. Perhaps because I am so cognizant of my own self-questioning and analysis, I really savor having some way to see inside that process in another brain. You wrote: I am genuinely curious if I am living without goals (and enjoying myself) or if somehow my goals are embedded in my way of living such that I am no longer referencing them as goals. I think perhaps it’s the latter. Goals are not just items next to checkable boxes. I think goals can be about knowing what kind of life you want, knowing how you want to be, and then seeking to live that way. My sense from where I sit is that you are and have been quite successful at that, particularly in this new freelance/independent professional space you are in now. You may not have that sitting on one of your visually pleasing, handwritten lists, but living the life you imagined is quite a goal to accomplish! And it’s a recurring one. If you marked it with an x and circled that x today, you would need a new list with the same item again tomorrow.
It is funny that you are taking issue with the arbitrary stupid goals terminology because I had a similar cringe when I first read it in Austin Kleon’s newsletter, so much so that I decided not to use it to describe Jonah’s fervor for the alphabet scavenger hunt we had gone on that day (I didn’t end up writing about Shopsin’s phrase in a letter to you until one week later). I realize Shopsin is going for effect, but there is some way in which that language gives some false sense that personal goals cannot have meaning, even when they are not meaningful to humanity writ large. I think it is yet another lens problem—we cannot/should not solely view our lives and goals from the lens of a satellite snapping an image from space. Literally everything is arbitrary and stupid from that view! We must also look down at our toes and think about how we spend our time from that perspective. What matters to us? What matters to the humans we know and love? I have some thoughts I am still working through on how the cultural emphasis on “changing the world” and “making a difference” through our lives feels like it warps our sense of what makes a meaningful life. Or maybe it just warped mine. In any case, calling it all arbitrary and stupid doesn’t particularly help, does it?
Speaking of goals, I have been wanting to tell you a bit more about the project I am working on/through for my niece. I mentioned in a previous letter that I was working on an amorphous creative endeavor that was a thing because I was calling it a thing. Well, I continue to call it a thing and it continues to be more thing-like as I go. The entire process fascinates me, even while I have no idea whether the point at which I call the thing “done” will constitute anything anyone might call art. For several months, several days a week I would set my iPhone timer for one hour and sit down with a pen and paper and write. I always knew why I was writing (to create some kind of handbook of sorts for my oldest niece as she enters adulthood in the near future), but I have never known what I was writing. I now know what it is not. It is not a narrative. It is not a book of poems. It is not a graphic novel. Each one hour segment, I would just let myself write whatever came out, never worrying about sticking to one idea or thread or format. This means, of course, that what I am now wading through is a cornucopia of text and doodles. The past several weeks I have been typing everything up into a single google doc, loosely trying to organize the bits into overarching categories. That’s been an interesting process in itself. Some days I end the hour (I’m still structuring my time on the project in 1 hour segments just to keep it manageable) feeling like the bits are worthless and I am cutting an artichoke down to a tiny nugget. (A familiar analogy! heh) I wonder, though, whether wringing a creative rag with persistence over time will necessarily result in something worthwhile along the way, even if it is just a few good drops of something valuable? Or at least that is what I am telling myself. In any case, it is all quite mind-bending, and it has me thinking about what writing is (isn’t it a manifestation of what is inside us?) and what it then means when something you write is crummy and how interesting it is to think about editing your own words and molding them into something that is worth more than the words were when they first took shape on the page. Which version (the raw vomit draft or the polished one) is the real version of a person? Both, of course, which makes it particularly weird how we attach so much significance to the snapshot in time that is the final artifact of any piece of writing. I think perhaps I am working myself into a swirl with this train of thought, but I am hopeful I conveyed enough of it clearly that you can get on the train and lend your insight.
I hope you are having a happy Friday, leading into this luxuriously lengthy holiday weekend. We will all be home, of course, but it still somehow seems glorious for the time to be called weekend time instead of weekday time! I look forward to starting my holiday weekend by reading your words later today. Maybe we can end our holiday weekends with a leisurely phone call/walk together on Monday? It would be a treat!
Be well, and have fun!
Yours,
Sarah