ON PURE PARTY MOVES, GENTLY PLACING DOWN THE PUZZLES, AND THE TIME TO MAKE CHOICES
Thursday July 11 and Friday July 12 2024
Dear Sarah,
It is Thursday and it has been a nutty day! Every day has been a little nutty lately — I want to be able to slide away and quietly do my own thing for a few days, but that is not what this visit to Michigan has been about — every day there are things to do — the task at hand, that of helping my mother pack and prepare to move, is one that must be chipped away at bit by bit in a consistent way — it cannot be saved for the last minute, even though I love to save things for the last minute. There are a number of things in my life I have learned over time cannot really be saved for the last minute. It is hard because the desire is so strong to put things off, to compress the work against a fixed endpoint or deadline into a tinier and tinier sliver of time — but I know well by now that many projects need more than a sliver. I think in some ways such procrastination must be tied to the fact that I want certain projects to only take up a sliver of time. My time is precious to me. Instead, perhaps as a form of compromise, over these past few weeks I have allowed myself the feeling at the close of every day that that is it for now — as the day ends, the work is finished. I can stop thinking about it. It will begin again in the morning, but when the evening comes, it is no longer time to think about the day’s work, or yet to think about tomorrow’s work. It is all done.
This is somewhat in contrast with my avid google calendaring habit — I love to look ahead to the future to put things on my calendar, love to arrange my calendar in an aesthetically pleasing way, love to color-code it. In fact, I think I showed you my color-coding when I visited recently. Pure party move! This is how I g-cal! But I really do love to fill it, tend to it like a garden — love to know that I marked something I need to do, so I will remember to do it. Perhaps in some ways I love to map my time as a way of accounting for what needs to be done so I know that all the remaining time is mine. I also love to fill a day with tasks in advance, and then as the day comes around I love to compress multiple tasks into a single time period, or remove certain tasks or relegate them to some other time or space; duly noted, not yet to be done. The calendar lets me know I haven’t forgotten what I have to do — but I also try not to let it control me — I don’t need to think in the evening about what I will do tomorrow — I’ve mapped it out and now I can stop thinking about it. My time has been more mapped than usual while I’m here in Michigan, because there have needed to be chunks of time for packing, and chunks of time for working, and occasional time for meetings, and time for seeing friends, and even time to see a movie (one). I like to use my calendar obsessively particularly when I have things that need to be calendared — but I am looking forward to exiting this time in order to enter a time that will be slightly less calendared. The end of this month will still be a little hectic, but I’ll make it through.
Even as I obsessively calendar my time and the to-dos I must strike through in order to reach the end of this time — sometimes it feels like running a gauntlet — there are some things that cannot be calendared. Guess what happened to me today. I was getting tea with a good friend’s mother who I hadn’t seen in quite some time — this part was calendared — we had a very nice time catching up, sitting outside in the shade under an umbrella — and then. We were wrapping up. A bee started bothering us. Suddenly the bee stung me right on the tip of my nose! I have never been stung by a bee before! Its stinger was dangling from the tip of my nose! I ran inside to the bathroom and pulled out the stinger. I looked online — I was supposed to wash my nose with soap and water — I did that — I asked someone behind the counter for a bag of ice, telling her that a bee had stung my nose — she apologized — of course the bee was not her fault — or was it! Then I went to my friend’s mother’s home — she lives nearby — and applied Benadryl to my nose. The sting hurt! I had an instant headache but I appear not to be allergic to bee stings because I did not die. My nose was red for a while like a clown’s — my nose is always a little red but this was extra — and then the redness faded and the day continued, even though I felt slightly bizarre into the afternoon and evening, as if I needed to tell everyone I met that if I SEEMED A LITTLE WEIRD TO THEM it was BECAUSE I HAD JUST BEEN STUNG BY A BEE squarely in the center of my face. Now it aches a little bit but my nose is otherwise as it was. (Friday update: the site of the sting became a pimple overnight?! Not sure if this means it was a hole in my face that got filled with my evening facial oils, or if I was supposed to… squeeze out bee sting venom right when I got stung?!)
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Now it is Friday morning and in a little while I am going to bring seven or eight boxes of books from my mom’s place to donate to the public library. I thought it was going to be easy to donate the book boxes — it’s easier than packing them up and keeping them, in a way — but every now and then I catch a glimpse of a familiar book cover that I haven’t seen in years, burned into my most interior memory, and I need to pluck it out of the mix and flip through it for a few minutes. It’s hard not to say Maybe I’ll keep a few of these. I’ve pulled a few thinking I might keep them, and then as a few days pass on that sentiment, I end up thinking it’s probably okay to donate them, and am trying to extrapolate that feeling to the boxes at large — but the impulse to keep them all is strong. The impulse not to choose at all, as we've talked about before — to just hold onto them, import them into my life. It makes sense now, when I am nowhere, when there is no real bookshelf waiting in a room that I can fill with the books that mean the most to me — I am in a liminal space, where books exist in an ether of memory and occupy no space at all. Of course they occupy the space of the boxes they are in — but when I think of keeping them I suppose I imagine continuing to “keep” them in a space that is not my own, my mom’s space, where they are somewhat accessible to me but don’t live on my own bookshelves. It’s time to make choices, and it’s time to send the books onward to other people who may read and enjoy them. I’ll rustle through the boxes for a few more minutes this morning before I give them up — time is ticking — and then it’s goodbye. Thinking of your letter from last week — I suppose this is AFGO.
I’m curious to hear what adventures you’ve gotten up to this week! I hope you remembered to bring the notes for your speech! Looking forward to reading your words soon. I’ve taken some vicarious pleasure knowing you are on a pure vacation this week, mentally joining you when I can! Much love and talk with you soon!
Until then, yours,
Eva
Friday, July 12, 2024
Dear Eva,
I am very curious to open your letter that has been patiently waiting in my inbox since this morning. How different will our respective headspaces be in this week’s exchange as we both gear up to end different stints of time out of our normal course? I used to feel a sense of dread at the end of our annual(ish) family beach vacation. I have been searching for that feeling inside me today, and it is not there. It has been a splendid week and yet I do not feel sad to see it end. (To be clear, I certainly don’t feel the opposite either, just pure equanimity.) There are things I am looking forward to returning to, like our cozy bed and goofy dog, and things I will be sad to say goodbye to, like bike rides to the beach. Our tentative plan is to go somewhere else next summer with the kids, so the “there is always next year” vibe is absent this time around. That part does sting a bit, but it’s not set in stone and who knows what next year holds anyway.
I have been thinking a lot lately about middle age. I’m squarely in it. You are close, but those two years I have on you are significant. It has only been within them that I really started to feel palpably older in a way that makes me feel like I am crossing some invisible threshold in life. It is mind-numbingly mundane (happens to all of us if we live long enough), yet it is strange nonetheless when your body starts to look and feel and work like a middle aged body in various ways. I had a moment this week where it really struck me when I saw the family photos we took after our one annual fancy family dinner — the silvery shimmer in my curls serving as visible evidence of change. I want to find a way to freefall into the gradual aging process. I am still figuring out what this means for me. I think it involves finding an aesthetic that feels right at this new stage in my life, and deliberately choosing not to spend much energy or money fighting the evidence of change. There are certain things in life that are supposed to come to an end at some point along the way, like being ID’d when ordering a drink. What is the point of trying to fool anyone? It won’t change the reality of it.
The word that keeps coming to mind for me is molting. I think maybe this relates in some way to the space station cleansing you wrote about a few weeks ago. The time has come to leave many youthful aspects of my life behind, to shed that layer of skin.
At some point in the nearish past, I listened to Glennon Doyle explain how so many of us spend our lives working on various [figurative] puzzles. (I don’t remember the context so I don’t know how to find and link to the particular podcast episode – sorry, Glennon!) She said sometimes those puzzles are about calorie counting, or beauty, or striving of any given sort. Whatever the substance of the puzzle, it is always a distraction from the real stuff of life. I want to gently place down all of the puzzles I have been dabbling with over the years. I want to keep my hands and mind free.
I am on the cusp of some professional changes, and I am planning to use the opportunity to make other changes in my life as well. Most notably, I want to shift my relationship to time. I do not want to think about using time wisely; I want to focus on the experience of being alive, every day and as much as possible. This ties back to our dialogue about the burden of eating. There is arguably nothing more important for me to do in a day than to provide sustenance to my body. Or to sleep my requisite 8 hours. Or to be silly with my wee ones. Maybe this is just another way of saying that I want to put down all of my aforementioned puzzles, or at least hold them more lightly.
It is nearing midnight. I had hoped to write my way into an epiphany or two, but it seems that may have been a high bar for this end-of-holiday letter. I have relished spending an entire week without time spent staring at a laptop, even if it means this letter was crammed in during a short time at the final hour. Some days are better spent without needing to result in output of any sort. I have very little to show for this week, other than a handful of photos and a tie dye t-shirt from a Nantucket brewery. I did not write. I did not communicate much with the outside world. I spent each day in a slow-motion cycle through mild exercise, pool time, beach time, family dinner, ice cream, reading, sleep. Repeat.
I am eager to talk to you once we have both settled into our daily lives! I hope your travels are smooth and uneventful and that you quickly feel at home when you return to Los Angeles.
Sending love,
Yours,
Sarah