ON PELOTON WISDOM, TAKING A BOW, AND REALIZING THAT REALITY IS MADE UP OF CHOICES
Thursday December 23 2021
Dear Sarah,
It’s Thursday evening, Christmas Eve-eve. I’m lounging in a hotel room in downtown Chicago in a king-sized bed, momentarily distracted by the television that I assured M would not distract me as I wrote to you.
Last night M and I both conked out early in the evening after gobbling down the latter half of a bag of Kookaburra Strawberry & Cream Licorice Bites from my favorite shop in Chicago, Merz Apothecary, alongside drinks and the digestion-in-process of a deep-dish pizza. Aside from strawberry & cream licorice bites, there is nothing sweeter than the first official day of a long vacation!
I understood your words in your letter of last week about how doing or planning to do even the things you enjoy can end up with those activities getting logged in a sort of to-do brainspace. Preparing for the holidays has definitely taken on this tone in the last week or two. Now I am officially on holiday: the bags are packed, the house closed up, the away messages on. I mentioned last week that this holiday season feels different than usual. I said that I am drawing nearer to living life in the particular way I want to live it, and that continues to feel true. I think that 2022 is going to be a year full of choices and change: choices made, and the outcomes of those choices manifested (at least as allowed by the span of a year). Of course every year is full of choices and their consequences, but somehow the fact that my reality is actually created by my choices is becoming clearer to me this time around. No time like my fortieth year to finally understand that I’ve been making choices, and that I’ve got choices to make!
You mentioned the mystery of the letters, and the fact that you want to write a letter each week, and that still it often ends up being a Friday to-do these days. You said This is less about the letters specifically, and more about what it means for how I prioritize the things I love and want to do. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that commitment—of any type—cannot ever be wholly untangled from obligation. I wonder! Lately I am thinking about leaning into the things that feel the least like obligations; what will this mean for the new year? This week, as we write our second-to-last letter to each other, I think we’ve landed at a place where it is both time to end the letters, and where it feels like it is time to end the letters; they have drawn us through a series of transformations, perhaps helped instigate the transformations themselves, and their specific function in our lives and in our relationship is ready to take a bow. As you’ve described elsewhere in these letters, the end of the letters in no way means the end of our friendship; it’s simply the natural end of a certain kind of project. You like endings! Or at least completion. We didn’t rush here (I’m recalling your big bowl of cereal eaten in order to hasten the end of an almost-finished box!) but here we are, an ending that has come in its own time.
I think I was supposed to share the loosely formed ideas I had about how we might end the letters next week, but instead I find myself thinking this week about their impending end. Perhaps that means that a bit of the weight of next week is lifted, and I will feel less inclined to share your mantle in summing it all up. How will we go about it? Should next week be our hello, goodbye! letter that we’ve been teasing this whole time? What were my loosely formed ideas, I wonder? Let me refer back to my text messages with you…: Ok, all I appear to have said is Maybe we want to intentionally keep our last letters brief??? It will be New Year’s Eve! Not that we need a particular strategy… it’s hard to think of what the last letter should be like! Perhaps it shouldn’t be like anything except another letter — so this letter will do some of that work!
Since I started this letter a bit earlier this evening, M and I have acquired and eaten a wealth of delicious Chinese takeout in the comfort of our king-sized hotel-room bed. I’m longing for more strawberry & cream licorice bites but I have been advised that it would be a bad idea to buy a 17-plus pound bag on the internet. We’ve watched half of the final-final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the other half awaits. I’m not sure this letter sums anything up, but I look forward to reading your words tomorrow!
Wishing you and yours a very merry Christmas filled with all the goodies!
Until soon,
Eva
December 24, 2021
Dear Eva,
I must confess that in the busy-ness of this holiday week I completely forgot about writing this letter! I think I let out an audible gasp when I saw your note in my inbox yesterday with your letter. Part of my memory lapse is connected to too many irons in the fire as I wind down the j-o-b for the year, grade 44 final exams, and finish last-minute Christmas shopping and preparations down to the wire. But the other part, I think, relates to something a little deeper connected to my relationships with transitions. To sum it up, once a change is afoot, I am ready to run to the finish line. (death drive) The last several months of these letters have challenged that instinct of mine, forcing me to linger in this goodbye state. This is hard for me! And since there is likely no such thing as closure, I continue to cycle through various emotions in a non-linear way. Sadness returned recently, though it appears to have largely disappeared again as I dabble with a life-without-letters mindset.
To an outsider, I suppose it might seem a bit strange to grieve the end of a letter-writing project. But there is something you wrote recently that got to the heart of it—the sustained attention of another human being is a rare gift. And of course, it is not as if I will stop paying attention to you once we complete this project! But it will be different, more diffuse, less consistent. To circle back to last week’s letter, it will also yield a certain kind of freedom. Today, I heard a wise man say, “Anything worth doing has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” (I am not going to lie, that wise man was my Peloton instructor! I will take my wisdom wherever I find it.) I am taking this workout wisdom to heart. This project was very much worth doing, and as such, it must eventually end.
Right now, I am sitting alone in the dark by our twinkling Christmas tree, adorn in red and white striped pajamas with green trim. We just got the kids to bed, though they are most certainly awake in their beds chattering. S may very well be at peak Christmas in his life. B described it perfectly the other day to me; he said he is like a bubble, every day expanding as he develops more theories about how Santa conducts his impossible globe-trotting feats and grows more and more anticipation about all that awaits on Christmas morning, only to eventually pop once his knowledge and logical reasoning grow too big to continue to prop it all up. Amazingly, J has relished his position as the older brother who is in on the secret, and he hasn’t let on a thing. I am happy that S is going to make it through at least one more Christmas with the magic alive and well in his heart. We will see what next year brings!
Is it as warm in Michigan as it is here, I wonder? It was balmy enough for B to go on a real life bike ride on the trails today. This made our annual luminary set-up about as pleasant as can be, and we had an extra helper this year (S), at least until it was “TV time” at 4 PM and he abruptly abandoned his post. Every year our neighborhood lights up with rows and rows of luminaries for blocks and blocks on Christmas Eve, and it is such a delightful tradition. After a dinner of “Christmas soup” (tradition!) with my parents, we always go for a tour through the lit-up streets. Tonight, it was a quick one because J and I then rushed off for the candlelight service at the church I went to as a kid. This is my guilty pleasure, if you can call going to church such a thing, and I was shocked and overjoyed that J wanted to join me this year. As you know, I am not religious. But I am a sucker for singing carols by candlelight in a dark majestic sanctuary. It warms my insides, and it was all the more special sharing it with J. (One highlight: J leaning over to ask me why the pastor was swearing. He said “Jesus Christ!”)
Hey, lookie there, I appear to have written an entire letter! I thought for sure this would be the time I finally “hi, bye’d” it after forgetting to fold this into my schedule in the leadup to the holiday. There is a part of me that thought perhaps that might be a fitting almost-end, but I snuck in quite a few words on this Christmas Eve after all. I am imagining you cozy on your inlaws couch, perhaps with some eggnog in hand. Ohh, egg nog. I think it may be about that time around here. Merry, merry Christmas, my dear friend! I hope your day is holly and bright, as they say. Wishing you a joyful one.
With love,
Sarah