ON VERY MEANINGFUL METAPHORS, TAMPING DOWN HORMONES, AND FLITTING ABOVE LIKE A HUMMINGBIRD
Thursday October 7 2021
Dear Sarah,
0. I am looking over my notes for this week and feeling like… it’s time for another listicle!
1. I am finding it hard to care too much about work right now; feeling like I want to steer the ship in some new direction. Never satisfied, tired of all the same old flows!
2. I’ve been thinking again about how I spent nearly 20 years on the pill; thinking about my bodily rhythms, managed and calculated for nearly 20 years. Now I am renewing some natural flows, monthly and otherwise; revealing some feelings that I may have tamped down a bit as I tamped down my hormones.
3. I am savoring our long letter goodbye! I feel it as an extra opportunity to reflect and to enjoy what we have wrought. I don’t have any particular reason to push to the end; I like to push to the end of the things I’ll be glad to see end, but I feel happy to be bobbing along in these latter days of our letter project, paying tribute as we continue our conversation on the page. I like a plan with some logic, however tenuous — e.g. when I suggested we could end the letters at three years and three weeks; I am also pleased when I send out emails on the fives, e.g. 5:15, 4:25, etc — and our end-of-the-year plan has a pleasant logic about it.
3a. Perhaps this is as much about rhythm as logic; I am aiming to seek and enjoy an aesthetically pleasing rhythm in the moves and choices of my daily life.
4. This week, for the first time, a care manager joined my father for one of his medical appointments; how glorious to know that another responsible adult was out there picking up the thread.
5. Maybe this new year will really be the year that everything changes! It definitely feels like things are changing; hard to say right now if they’re exclusively changing for the better.
6. In the last week I saw that friend and former colleague Manjula Martin is working on a nature memoir and that she had a piece along those lines in The New Yorker. Exciting!
7. I’ve been wearing work like a too-heavy, too-warm blanket, telling myself I’ll get out from under here eventually, when all I want is to throw off the whole thing, kick it away. At the same time the heavy blanket is like a secret cloak; instead of reading by flashlight under the covers I’m tucked away to plot what’s next. Kicking it all off by taking some fluffy career quizzes and trying to pay attention to the things I like to do and the things I don’t. One quiz told me that my interest levels for the Thinking career area and for the Creating career area are high, while my interest levels for the Helping, Persuading, and Organizing career areas are low; in some ways it feels like all my work right now is persuading and organizing in some form.
7a. Another survey in the same product family, a career personality profiler, told me this: Your top interest area is Creating, which indicates that your primary drive is to use your creative talents and express yourself artistically through your work. You have a strong aesthetic sense and seek work that allows you to connect with experiences that stimulate the senses. You enjoy art, music, drama, dance, architecture, and literature, and seek work that exposes you to various art forms and allows you to communicate your own vision among them. My answer: Yes.
8. I haven’t been able to upgrade my computer operating system because I can’t quite delete enough stuff to make space for the new system! (This is feeling more and more like a Very Meaningful Metaphor (VMM™) as I re-read my letter before sending it off to you.) Now my old operating system is starting to interfere with the design programs I use (VMM™) and it is prompting me to figure out which digital detritus I can actually get rid of. (It’s all backed up, but I still hate to formally delete folders of miscellany. Even if I haven’t looked into folders in ages, I hate to delete!) We talked in the past week or two about why it feels important to have books, to own books; books and papers and all my buried digital files feel like all kinds of tangible markers in the world (literally, book marks), markers of memory; every file I see or open, wondering what is occupying so much space on my hard drive, reminds me of something that I feel I haven’t thought of in years. I hate to prune my memories, even though they’re actively pruned all the time so I can keep existing!
9. As you mentioned in your letter of last week, it is definitely just about time for boozy nog! I’ve got a note on my calendar (have potentially had it on my calendar, in fact, since M and I drank the last of our 2020 nog batch) to get it going next weekend in order to potentially enjoy a sip on or around Thanksgiving. Here, a toast to the upcoming toast! It’s October and we’re climbing the slide to the holidays!
10. I’m going to be offline and out of range for a while this weekend and I can’t wait! Countdown to 4PM on Friday! I hope you have the most delightful weekend with the S clan!
11. Until soon!
12. Yours,
13. Eva
14. P.S. I started making a list of 25 things I want to do before I die, and I came up with nine eleven! …? Still thinking on it!
October 8, 2021
Dear Eva,
Tonight is one of those nights I am really feeling sad for the future version of me who will soon face letter-less Fridays. I suppose instead I should just feel thankful that tonight I have a little letter waiting for me in my inbox when I finish writing these words. It is and has been such a treat to end the week with a thoughtful letter from a dear friend!
It is not even 9 PM, yet I feel like I have already had a good gulp of weekend. B and I took off on our bikes around 3 PM today, and then beer and nachoed the happy hours of this Friday. We covered some good terrain—physical (about 18 miles), but also figurative (started dreaming/planning our 15th wedding anniversary travel plans for next year—Amsterdam!). It is trite to say, yet oh so true: we have not regularly had this much time alone together since J was born. A delight!
We just finished a family dance party, which was perhaps not the best pre-bedtime activity if the metric relates to sleep-readiness. But if the metric is fun, we hit it out of the park. S was already bouncing off the walls (literally) with excitement because their buds and ours are on their way from Chicago as we speak. Their ETA is close to midnight, so they had to settle for going to bed and hoping to be awakened to say hello and then goodnight a few hours into their sleep. I am shocked to report that I hear no sound coming from their room, so it seems perhaps they actually settled down enough for sleep already! This from a child who just an hour ago said, “I like the cozy part of it, but sleep is so boring.” I disagree.
In other news, I have been thinking lately about another way in which the echoes of literalism sometimes manifest in another sneaky way in my life when I get too focused on “the answer.” Do you ever get asked a fairly nonchalant question and rather than just answering, you get lost in thinking about the exact right answer to the question? For example, what is the best advice you have ever been given? When faced with that question, I might think of lots of advice in that moment, but is that particular word of wisdom I am thinking of the best? What about that other advice so-and-so gave me once? I can’t say for sure that wasn’t actually better advice. Ack! Of course in moments like those, people do not usually want the precise answer to the question and even if they do, how would they ever test your answer for accuracy? (“You once said that so-and-so’s advice was the best; I am sensing some inconsistency here, Sarah!”)
All of this ties back to a bit of wisdom that someone dropped on me this week that I cannot stop thinking about: that the personal writing I do might seem like something cerebral, but perhaps it is actually about embodiment. I put words on the page, capture thoughts and ideas that come from within and pin them into place. This is actually the opposite of head in the clouds, where everything swirls in scribbly loops in the shape of the dust that trails Pigpen from Peanuts. You may wonder what the connection is here to my senseless rumination about mundane questions. I think it ties back because it is about finding answers in bones and muscles and organs (brain!), rather than searching for answers out and up. In short, I am trying to be better about staying in my body, rather than flitting above like a hummingbird.
You wrote last week about your experience of helping your friend carry wood from garage to home. It sounded a bit grueling and sweaty, but also satisfying. Using our bodies can be surprisingly refreshing. (Why is that surprising? I guess I am perpetually astounded by the way that simple things can have profound effects.) You also wrote about your page-turning novel, and I was genuinely jealous. I may be due for a novel myself. I cannot think of the last time I contemplated staying up all night to read. What a treat!
I was amused by your silly self-assessment that you are too fast, too busy, and too slow. I do not know how such a combination would even be possible, but all it tells me is just how hard we are on ourselves. Imagine if we were all as critical of each other as we are about ourselves! I shudder to think.
Well, it is nearing 10 PM and I am ready to close out this letter and read the letter that awaits! Are you settled up in Duluth? Your long weekend away sounds like a fun adventure. Our short little 48 hours with some of our chosen family sounds pretty darn lovely, too. Cheers; let’s both enjoy!
Yours,
Sarah
p.s. Today I officially made the first step toward the next chapter of my career!
