ON THE PERFECT MIRAGE OF A HUMAN, TIGHTLY WRAPPED IDEA BALLS, AND NO ONE TELLING EVA WHAT TO DO
Friday June 14 2024
Dear Sarah!
It’s been a couple of weeks — perhaps a couple of weird ones?? — I don’t say TGIF to myself very often these days, but I felt a true TGIF when the day began and I am feeling it now as I settle in to write to you, which is the beginning of the fun part of my day. We wrote a few weeks ago and I have notes from a couple of weeks ago and also from this morning, which had me feeling so weird. Several hours later I am feeling significantly different and better, but let’s just say among all the things I briefly had a pain in my back today and wondered if I had a kidney stone?? Mystery brief pain?? I did some yoga and that made me feel significantly better, but with the way things have been going I thought, Well now it’s a time in my life for kidney stones and we’ll just move forward as best we can. Instead I did that yoga and I drank a bunch of water and showered and ate lunch and did some work and now I do not think I have a kidney stone. But that’s just one feeling from today and this week.
I have some notes from the end of May that I’ll start with! It was a Thursday night, I think May 30. [My notes are in the immediate tense but just know that they are from a couple of weeks ago!] I am starting my letter to you as a centering move. My mind is buzzing — possibly because I ate candy after 830PM — and yogurt with a raft of honey — I am back into work mode pretty fully this week and it is strange. Last year when I was stepping away from work for my sabbatical, my running pace picked up without me making any other notable changes. This month I’ve run the same amount of miles over the same number of runs as I did in November, but this month those runs took me a cumulative hour longer. Back at work, my energy is literally being funneled in new directions. Even though I’ve been getting the usual number of hours of sleep, it feels not quite as restorative — work wheels spinning in my mind again. I am trying to remind myself not to get overly invested — I think there is a way I can let my muscle memory take over in order to do good work and I don’t need to think about it quite so hard. I need to do work to earn money, and realistically I have done a good job of building a skill that allows me to work fewer hours for greater pay. It was my long-game plan and it’s working! And still I sometimes feel that the hours have been taken from me in some way. Even when it sometimes feels good to be occupied — I resent being occupied with work. Even when the work is interesting! No one tells Eva what to do!
I am re-reading your letter from last week [now a few weeks ago!] [I hope these time-based annotations are not sounding passive-aggressive, I didn’t mind taking a break, AND I saw you in person, AND I am glad to be writing now, AND I just like to make sure any time-based language is rooted in some reality of whatever time it is indicating!] and it feels like it was so long ago — I have aged a million years in this week in my room in gloomy downtown Saint Paul. [If it’s not obvious, I’m not there anymore!] I have found a way to bring rhythms to my days — it has been a victory, in a way, making it through an unexpectedly challenging chapter — but I am ready for this chapter to end. It was a short one and I’m glad to see it go.
[Still looking at notes from this period a couple weeks ago — let’s say I’ll update you when I get to the new material.] I appreciate that you see and understand my plight of “moving away” from something instead of “moving toward” — I think you are exactly right about why the last year hasn’t felt unsettling — moving away from is my natural tendency — moving toward something is actually a little alarming — to want something and to move toward it — I have an almost visceral sense of being a ball in a physics experiment: thrown up — the rate of acceleration slows as it reaches the peak of its arc and pauses in its turn — then begins to race back to earth — the pull of gravity at work.
I recently found myself reading an old letter, one from October of 2021, when we’d just begun discussing ending the letters — I am thinking about Simone Weil this morning — from the limited amount I know about her she lives in my mind as a serious intellectual who was incompetent in the acts of daily living. Sometimes I return to thoughts of her when daily living seems a bit much. Sustaining the body, having belongings. And our letters — begun in 2018 — 2021 was an end point for those letters but is now a midpoint for the time that has passed since we began. Letters from another life.
Okay! Sarah! Now I am pulling in the notes I started to write to you this morning! Some similar bits still swimming around inside my head.
I am glad to sit down to write this letter to you, and I am also so tired. It’s the morning and I am so tired! Strange sleep filled with a confused racing mind, leaving myself notes in the middle of the night that mean little or nothing now that morning has rolled around. An excerpt: “I woke from sleep with the sense that something more dramatic was calling to me, for me — but perhaps I have just been feeling weary by everything combined lately. J’s cover and another cover — for each of them, performed while first preparing the standalone cover, then the specific —.” Ok. Ok! I went to a friend’s birthday this past weekend and sang karaoke and that… might be what I was thinking about? Poor tired brain.
I used to have a lot of these kinds of moments — I suppose all versions of something like stress dreams — and they’d let up a bit in the past year, and they are back now during my Minneapolis time — like my brain is furiously trying to make sense of too much info, too many inputs. Buzzing through the night connecting dots like a conspiracy theorist working their red-thread bulletin board — but in the light of day it’s just a tangle, or it’s brain work that never needed to be performed in the first place. Like someone set a top spinning and walked away, expecting it to tip over soon enough, and instead it just kept spinning in the background indefinitely. I must tell the top to rest! It has been an emotionally strenuous week, busy on the work front, busy on the family front, busy on the personal front. I thought I was doing a reasonably good job of balancing it all but to be so tired now — 835 in the morning — it accumulates.
Thinking again about Simone Weil — I was reminded of the movie about the man who I think donated all his money, went to live in the wilderness — was he going to traverse the country and maybe his van broke down? — but I think he died of starvation? — this movie and this man came to mind as some kind of idealization of what a human might think is a possible way to live, coupled with the idea that there could be a piece missing in a person’s head regarding self-preservation. [What movie am I thinking of? One moment: it is called Into The Wild, from 2007. It is based on a true story.] I bring this up to say that I have grown incredibly tired of feeding myself. Don’t worry about me, I have a plan for dinner and a movie after I send you this letter. But on the whole, my meal patterns — admittedly very basic and repetitive over these past many months — now both bore and exhaust me. I also often find myself uninterested in eating out at a restaurant or getting takeout. In this new era in my life — a new era of the new era, even — there is a possibility that I could be charmed into a relationship if, among other things, someone was willing to cook for me most days, or to simply arrange for my feeding in a pleasant way. I get hungry and I eventually make food and as I make the food I think to myself, I feel bad and I wish there were a way I could feel better — and in fact the way to feel better in those moments is often simply to eat — the thing I am preparing to do at that very moment! With the passage of time in these past 18 months I miss the consistent social interaction of eating with another person, sometimes making food together and sometimes eating out. Alone, the repetitive need to eat becomes a kind of burden; together, it is an opportunity for joy. I don’t think I want food as entertainment to become too much the focal point of my life — but I am ready for it to be fun again. What food will bring me back to the land of the living? Everything bores! I loved enjoying bibimbap with you and B and the kids, and I loved your biscuit shortcakes! A direct connection to a childhood pleasure of yours — it was a joy to share it. I miss you and can’t wait until the next time we see each other! So glad for our bike rides and our friendship and the stones along the path that have led us to each other!
This isn’t quite a postscript but I have one more note: I enjoyed Austin Kleon’s newsletter today, in which he spoke of Mary Ruefle and pointed to a typewritten interview he had conducted with her by mail — dreamy — and I learned that Mary doesn’t do Zoom interviews or use a computer! Mary! So special. She is a perfect mirage of a human. She reads her Encyclopedia Brittanica because she “would rather wonder than know.” What does knowing get us all, anyway! Love u Mary
Happiest of Fridays to you Sarah! Cannot wait to read your words later this evening! Now I’m off to feed myself with food someone else has prepared, and to settle into a dark theater for a movie! I hope you are enjoying your movie night too!
Until soon, yours!
Eva
June 13, 2024; June 14, 2024
Dear Eva,
Do you ever have the feeling that something is half-thought in your brain? Like there is an idea or set of concepts in there, but they are packed in a tightly wrapped ball and unspooling them would take some dedicated focus? Right now, it feels like my brain is chock full of these compact idea balls, and they are just sliding around knocking into each other but never being given the attention it would take to unpack and fully know them.
I am fighting — now, and always — a perpetual gnawing stress that I haven’t done enough. This manifests at work, yes, but not only there. I have it with literally every facet of life, from creative writing I haven’t done, to filing cabinets full of old documents I haven’t sorted, to the pile of New Yorkers I haven’t read. The idea balls are just another manifestation of this. Obviously, the only solution is to change my relationship to the reality that I will never (and cannot!) do all I want to do, but I think the point here is that I definitely haven’t managed that just yet. It’s on my to-do list! (Fwiw, this just made me laugh out loud.)
I was reflecting on your sentiment in the last letter about loving the feeling of being contained and ready to move. This fascinates me, particularly because it is so foreign to me. But then I thought about my own strange yearning to finish things, even if it means eating more cereal than I want to just so I have the satisfaction of throwing away the box. Maybe both of us are yearning for freedom — a release from external and self-imposed commitments that feel in some way like burdens.
I wonder if we can find freedom without leaving or finishing? This feels like next-level shit — to free ourselves from within. I have done some version of this by returning to my hometown. By going home, particularly when I spent so much of my life defining myself as the one who went away, it catalyzed a kind of personal reckoning that was not possible when I lived in other places. To be clear, I am in no way saying everyone should return to their hometowns! I am just observing that it required a different kind of self-work for me. I have had to change my relationship to the place, rather than seeking out a place that felt naturally better suited to me in various ways. I wonder if I can eventually perform this feat with my relationship to my infinite literal and metaphorical to-do lists? Put another way, can I shed the barnacles and space junk while staying still?
–
I wrote the first part of this letter when my mind was bright and active on Thursday morning. Now it is Friday at happy hour time, and my brain is barely sputtering along to the finish of the workweek. I had one of those workdays today that was technically a success under certain definitions. I had a todo list on a white index card with 8 items on it. Amidst work calls and running kids to and fro and making lunches, I managed to tick my way through every single one. I still get a little dopamine hit when I draw the red line through the words on the list, but I can recognize at this point in my life how empty that satisfaction is. How different would I feel right now if I had decided to throw out the list, do the bare minimum version of my job today, and spend the afternoon doing a photo scavenger hunt with the kids (something on another, unwritten todo list of mine)? My mind might feel fresh and alive, less drained. We can’t always throw out our professional todo lists, I know, but maybe I should a little more often.
This is really just about better aligning time with priorities. I am generally trying to fight the frame of using time, but nonetheless there is nothing harmful about keeping Annie Dillard’s insight in mind: What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. I want to be doing as much of what matters to me as possible.
None of this is what I planned to write about today! I had a whole mountain's worth of idea balls bouncing around my brain having to do with the Office of Special Projects, my experience returning to familiar scenes in New York last week, and more. But it is now nearing the time that I am going to gather the little fam and head out for Korean fried chicken before we hit the movie theater for Inside Out 2. I haven’t been this excited about a movie in ages, and I’m a little nervous about having such high expectations. Don’t let me down, Pete Docter!
I do not want to end this letter without acknowledging the perfection of your analogy last week about my self-disparaging comment to fill space in a meeting. It’s like you slapped yourself, and you are feeling the sting. YES! And why, I wonder, would I slap myself? No one was asking me to! It was just a manifestation of the phenomenon I have noticed in several facets of my life recently, where my outward behavior doesn’t match my inner knowing. I suppose my pursuit of todo-list-completion is similar in that regard. I know one thing in my core about what is important to me, and yet I find myself doing another. I suppose this is called being human.
I wonder if you will send two weeks’ worth of words over since I rudely called off our exchange after you had written much of your letter two weeks ago? However long it is, I look forward to reading it!
Wishing you a lovely movie night of your own! We shall compare notes next week.
Until then,
Yours,
Sarah