ON THE DAUNTING NATURE OF THE TASK AHEAD, SUMMER GLORY, AND BEING A JUDGMENT-CALL MACHINE
Friday June 28 2024
Dear Sarah,
It’s 840PM and I am sitting down for perhaps a third time in the last 48 hours to work on my letter to you. I started notes yesterday evening — I picked it up this afternoon — but this afternoon I was in such a strange headspace. Thankfully it feels distant now but I was in a very weird space. I think it’s time for me to be seeing a therapist but I need to do some work to round one up! Being back in Michigan and in proximity to family for longer than usual is throwing me for a loop. I got a good night’s sleep last night, and I went for a run this morning, and then had lunch, and by the time I was sitting down to write to you my body and mind were buzzing in a strange way. I think part of it was that I had orchestrated a false timeline for my day and it was making me nervous because I was falling off the timeline. I was planning to write my letter, then go to my mom’s for a couple of hours to help her pack, then I was going to go to a movie at 630PM. However, the letter was stuck in my buzzy brain and I kept feeling the window of time before the movie closing in on me. Eventually it clicked that I did not need to squeeze everything time-wise in order to see the movie tonight — I can see it anytime I want, it just came out and there is no hurry — and I did want to go pack some boxes with my mom, so I stepped away from the letter and went to do some packing and now I am back, fortified by a box of Trader Joe’s ravioli and a glass of vinho verde. I was in a dark portal earlier and I cannot quite explain it! Or, I have thoughts about it, but I cannot put them all in this letter at this time. I will tell you more when we speak!
I packed four boxes of dishes, glasses, and ceramics at my mom’s place and that has me feeling like the task of packing and moving that is ahead of us is more feasible. I needed to get my hands in there and get started — that was at least partly why my mind and body were buzzing: I could feel the daunting nature of the task ahead but had not yet begun, so I had no real sense of how it would feel. I often need to feel a task in my body so I can understand the pace at which the work is going to unfold or needs to unfold. I feel better now having packed those boxes and assessed what lies ahead. I also inherited a lovely little round, hand-formed ceramic vase that my mother made many years ago, perfectly the size of a ball of clay held between your two hands. So I am feeling significantly better now than I was earlier today.
As I was re-reading and thinking about your letter from last week, I was thinking that it’s interesting that your job has you making judgment calls with such regularity. It basically sounds like your job IS making judgment calls. This feels like a good muscle to have and to build, making judgment calls and moving on. It is helpful to see that decisions are made (by you) and things keep moving. I was thinking about how this kind of job sounds like it is about bringing one’s personal integrity to the work overall. You were hired as a person who could make decisions. Your goal would appear to be to make decisions consistently. Interesting to think about choosing a person (you) for a role and assessing how you go about making decisions. How does Sarah think? How does she decide? Interesting to think of you as a kind of judgment-call machine — I pictured scenarios being fed into your mind on one side, exiting like a ribbon with a decision and some kind of clarity on the other side. You are not a machine, of course, but this is how I illustrated you in my mind as I read your words.
I loved hearing about your New York trip (even though I know now about your difficulties in returning!) Your feelings about watching Wicked for the first time resonated for me and made me think about how much I love marching bands. I have sat in a stadium to watch a marching band competition and have had to fight back tears. Marching bands for me gather some particular qualities of music-making with the physicality of marching in unison and forming shapes that grow and flow and change. I feel the music very viscerally, percussion and low notes and high notes all resonating in my body in different ways. I will have to see Wicked or a Broadway show sometime in my life! It sounded amazing. It is very interesting to think that not everyone feels deeply moved by art and music! It does feel like the kind of experience that would be universal. But perhaps many fewer things are universal than would seem to be!
I have more to say and write in response to your letter, but I think I’ll wrap this one this time around and wish you a very good weekend! I am going to settle in with some fancy facial products and the copy of Pride & Prejudice that I have just begun reading, and call it a Friday night! Looking forward to hearing your voice soon and talking about the ideas we’ve been simmering! I too love that we have been circling these ideas since before the letters — in my mind, the letters emerged as a kind of answer to the ideas we were circling — and it is exciting to have found our way back around in our orbits. Perhaps we needed to write the letters so that they could become the future ground for all the other ideas we are wanting to dig into. Everything is a journey! Much love to you!
Until soon, yours,
Eva
June 28, 2024
Dear Eva,
This week I noticed the color of our garage for the first time after living here for a decade. (You may already know this, but it’s light-gray and not white like our house.) This fact of my ignorance might be alarming, but for the fact that I’ve spent a lifetime not noticing the details of people, objects, and places around me. This feels related to idea balls; observation is not about ideas, but it requires attention and energy just like thinking. My brain decided long ago to just permanently open a shoot for most incoming visual details of what is around me. It comes in and immediately flushes right out. One of my lifelong friends regularly teases me about not knowing what my loved ones look like. And it’s true, I have been known to not know the eye color of family members. (Come to think of it, I don’t know your eye color for sure, either!)
I wonder if this would be different if I didn’t have to work? My hunch is no. I would just find other intellectual pursuits to command most of my energy and attention.
During the course of preparing to write this anecdote, I started thinking again about aphantasia and reading about how it is diagnosed. On a walk with J this afternoon, I quizzed him on what he can see in his mind. I am now convinced I have some version of aphantasia. (Apparently I decided in week 145 that I did not have it, but I think I was wrong.) All I can do when trying to recollect the appearance of something is hope that my brain can remember the details. There is also some indefinable way that I know what something looks like without actually being able to see it. It is as if that Knowing is locked in some part of my brain that I can’t access with my verbal processing. I need either Lynda Barry and/or a neurologist to explain this phenomenon to me. In any case, it seems very unfair that you people can literally pull up mental images? NO WONDER I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ALL LOOK LIKE! I no longer feel bad about this, if I ever really did.
Today is a real shit sandwich kind of day in the world. I woke up to screaming headlines about Biden being too old, followed by the news that the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the law banning abortions after six weeks could go into effect. Apparently the U.S. Supreme Court is on a roll today, too. Beyond a few passing headlines, I have consumed very little of it. Instead, it’s just rushing over me like muddy water. Still, I feel a little like I’m gasping for breath. This harkens all the way back to Letter 1. There, I wrote about reckoning with the Kavanaugh hearings and trying to hold the ugliness of the wider world simultaneously with the beauty of my little one. This is a lifelong project so it’s not surprising I haven’t solved it. But I wonder if there is more I can do to try to hold the line while the discouraging news washes over me, day after day after day.
I appreciated your hair-splitting with my advocacy for stillness. I agree that motion is powerful, in ways big and small. There is a certain kind of stillness that feels like it is more like fossilization or stagnation. But I think the stillness I am talking about sounds like something you are already achieving far better than I am. In particular, I am thinking about your inbox, which gives me low-key anxiety to even imagine. I’m still drawn to the allure of Inbox Zero, the blank slate. Each message that calls for my attention, however softly, is poking at me. The unread stack is a burden, a weight that I have not yet been able to truly put down once and for all. I do not feel like I can truly be at ease until that stack is at least put out of my view. You have achieved the coveted next-level shit by being able to let it be and remaining unbothered. Maybe I will get there someday.
Tonight is a pizza and movie night, which seems especially cozy because it’s been raining all day. There has also been a motion made for homemade chocolate malts, which I seconded with enthusiasm. Tomorrow morning B and I are planning a long bike ride with a brunch stop, and later in the day we are taking the kids to a local arts festival. Sunday we are hosting my family for fried chicken and warm blueberry crumble in honor of my mom’s birthday. In short, a weekend full of summer glory.
I have been thinking a lot about how we were able to create another set of core memories with your short trip here in June. How did we do that exactly, I wonder? It’s fascinating to consider the ingredients that make such memorable moments, though I suspect we couldn’t always recreate it if we tried. But like the original snowed-in weekend in 2020, your visit here made lasting memories for our family.
I am eager to hear your voice next week! I hope the trip back to Michigan is off to a good start and that you have a lovely weekend doing Michigander things!
Sending love,
S.