ON PREDICTABILITY, PAUSES, AND BEING INTERVIEWED BY KRISTA TIPPETT
Thursday July 16 2020
Dear Sarah,
I have a desire to pin down and understand the particular feeling I have these days, a kind of semi-infinite open-endedness that comes of knowing generally what the days will look like. Things could happen, and will happen — inconveniences, troubles, illnesses in our home or in the homes of our friends and families — but the pattern of the days is, for now, predictable. It’s odd that on some days this feels like a comfort, on other days an opportunity, and on yet other days it weighs heavily. Also, pointing to the predictability feels like I am inviting an upset; whether that would be good or bad is hard to say.
My brain is dull and full this evening; even on those mornings, seemingly rare now, when I wake thinking I have had an acceptable night’s sleep, I find myself tired in the midmorning, or the late morning, or the after-lunch hour, or the afternoon, or the hour when the workday ends. A current joke in our household is: at what time in the day will I say I’m sleepy, how far will we get into the day before I say it, will we make it through the day without me saying it at all? I’m often saying it first thing in the morning after just waking, but is that still the sleepiness of the night before, or is it the sleepiness of the day to come? Today I feel like I might be cosmically tired, something different from just tired.
In a desire to do something mildly productive with my sleepy head, I am trying to tidy up the tabs I have kept open in the browser of my phone, a task I haven’t performed in months. Seeing the searches I performed and articles I read over these weeks and weeks is like looking down a long aisle filled with the touchstones of the many phases of the past few months. Meaningful articles and stories I halfheartedly tried to read, recurrent fresh tabs checking in on the state of the weather in my town, how hot will it get, will there be rain.
What would refresh me these days? I think some time away from the computer screen and the phone screen might help — I’m curious and excited to hear how your staycation week has been, thankfully removed from the most immediate worries of your letter last Friday. I am also hoping your friend is doing all right. My current worry, if I find myself going down the virus worry path, is that the effects of the virus on people will be long and lingering. I think this is the case in some cases, and I hope not for your friend! (After I re-read this I am thinking that of course the effects of the virus will be long and lingering, in so many ways; but I was thinking specifically of its effects on people in their person — this worry that the virus is not just something you have and then recover from, that it might leave some permanent damage or weakness.)
I just finished clearing all my tabs, amid a relocation to the backyard and its breezes and cicada sounds. A sense of closure on some of the questions that have hovered over the past few months, plus a pause on recipes for daydream desserts like banana pudding with vanilla wafers...still to be made someday. The browser tabs are weightless, but I imagine my phone felt just slightly lighter as I closed the lingering windows, like pieces of paper fluttering off the top of a ream one by one.
I just heard my first peeper of the season, a little frog voice in the yard. I saw a fox in our driveway today and thought at first that it was a baby deer, young and gangly. These days I am looking forward to more peepers in the evenings, a distanced bagel brunch with friends this weekend, tomatoes on our vines that will soon ripen, an appointment next week to see about framing a photo print by Jenny Odell that I acquired three years ago. A tentatively planned road trip to Michigan at the end of the summer. The idea of moving furniture around to convert our “third room” library / guest room into M’s office for the winter, so he doesn’t have to work in the basement during those dark days as it comes to seem more likely that his workplace won’t have folks returning to the office anytime too soon. Who wants to go back to the office just to pack it all up and return home again for another quarantine stretch? In an absence of leadership and clarity we seem to be collectively struggling with how much to hope for. I imagine people are hoping for some kind of triumphant return to pre-pandemic patterns; the idea of returning would seem to mean that once we return, the pandemic will be over, but that kind of return still feels a way off.
It’s a smattering of thoughts that I pass along to you this week — looking forward to reading your words soon!
Your friend,
Eva
July 17, 2020
Dear Eva,
Hello on a sunny and steamy Friday morning! Today Simon scampered into our bedroom around 7 AM, and then quietly said that he needed to tell me something. He cupped his hands over my ear, and whispered with wonder, “Jonah is 8!” Then he rushed downstairs to give the birthday boy (who I am sorry to say, woke us up at 6:30 to tell us it was his birthday!) a hug. There has been a countdown to this day for many weeks in our household, this day that marks the birth of Joyful Jonah / Mr. Wiggles / Basketball Jones / Mr. J / Joney. I feel wistful today. I guess I always do on this day, remembering what it felt like 8 years ago bringing this being into the world. We have a fun day planned. We rented a huge inflatable water slide to put in my parents’ backyard where we will spend the day roasting in the sun with my parents and my sister’s family. I also bought a package of 400+ water balloons for a family battle. It may be hot enough we will be begging to get hit!
I am so relieved to be writing this letter about birthday plans after last week’s harrowing experience waiting to find out if I had contracted COVID-19. I am still getting my legs underneath me again; it really shook me to know how close we had come. We had not been taking many risks, but we had been taking some. At this point, any time you leave the house or see another human being, there is risk involved. I have spent many of the hours of these last few days trying to work out in my mind how we will navigate the months ahead as a family. We have many decisions upon us—whether to send Jonah to school for two in-person days or whether to choose the 100 percent online option, whether and how much to see my family, how to handle childcare and home school while juggling work, and so on. There are added layers on top of our own decisions because my parents, my sister, and my nieces and nephew are foundational parts of Jonah and Simon’s realities. Every decision we make affects them, and vice versa. And right now at least, it feels like we do not have exactly the same sense of what is a risk worth taking and what is not. This is not a novel or unique experience, I’m sure there must be millions of people around the world facing these kinds of decisions infused with interpersonal dynamics that can make things more complex. But that doesn’t make the experience any less confusing or stressful. I find myself drawing in, yearning to just retreat to a hermit lifestyle where we can fend for ourselves. All of the strange biases, tendencies, and fallacies that we humans are susceptible to suddenly have life or death consequences, and it is overwhelming me because I do not feel like I know how to find my way through, keeping my two children safe and making whatever space I can for them to continue to grow and thrive in the meantime. All of this, and I know very well that I am one of the very luckiest right now. We have the things we need. We have each other.
On an entirely different note, I was listening to On Being recently, and it occurred to me that my project for my niece is essentially an answer to the question Krista Tippett uses to close out her interviews—what does it mean to be human? I have always had a distaste for that question because it feels too big to be answered. Maybe I was just resisting it because I knew I would not know where to begin if Krista ever asked me. (Luckily, I think she is unlikely to invite me on the show any time soon.) My writing project seems to support this. It took me about four months of writing and sorting and pondering to just excavate enough of my thinking to get to a first draft. Speaking of which, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to read that draft and to spend time talking with me about what it is and could be. It was so helpful to me! I came away from our conversation invigorated and inspired. I know now that v.1 was just the very scratch of the surface. I have months ahead of fleshing out and stretching out what is there. What is it about me and my tendency to compress? I have been thinking about that since we talked. Do I do that in my brain so that I can better remember the highlights or takeaways of my lived experience? I don’t know, I just know that I so often reduce ideas so far there is little left to show for it. This inclination to synthesize and distill comes in handy sometimes, but it can be a bit of a liability with my writing. It is easy for me to forget that the reader is not in my brain; the writing must do all the work, there is no context to backfill my words. In any case, I am motivated to get back at it and see what I can carve out of and build upon this initial draft. I love a project, as you know!
This week, however, I paused work on the project and nearly every commitment I have (external and self-imposed) to take a proper staycation. It has been a really nice respite—bike rides, picnics, movies, and other fun. It’s a pleasure to reconfirm that you can create a vacation vibe anywhere.
I am looking forward to talking to you in a few days and reading your words in a few minutes! I see your letter waiting in my inbox adding an jubilant exclamation mark to this and every Friday.
Until soon!
Yours,
Sarah