On leaving breadcrumb paths, understanding our mysterious brains, and other kinds of work
October 9, 2020
Dear Eva,
Your letter last week was a marvel. I read it again on Monday this week and took notes, thinking I would make a point to try to follow it up by responding thoughtfully and comprehensively. But here we are now on Friday night, and I’m typing on my phone while squeezed on the couch during family movie night, trying to be subtle as if the kids might not notice I am not here when I am here. Spoiler alert: this letter will not be the reply you deserve. As is abundantly clear to you by now, I am having trouble not getting swallowed by the days lately. My commitments at work right now are interesting and challenging, but they are also filled with emotional labor and I am finding that they deplete me in a different kind of way. I am craving more practical and straightforward work tasks, leaving me more capacity for other kinds of work—the non-paying kind of work that fills me up and regenerates me like these letters.
One of the things you said in your letter that really struck me was that there are different forms of doing, which are not all equivalent. This is a profound truth, and one I really needed to hear right now. It is a bit funny how many of us get this wrong and start to conflate checked boxes on to-do lists or books read or emails sent with meaningful progress. Dare I say capitalism relies upon on us doing just that?
My experience reading those words of yours and soaking them up may be an example of what you described in that letter, of having moments when you can receive certain ideas and how they will bounce off you until those moments come. A related but slightly different phenomenon is the way in which you can take in certain ideas and then, over time, they are digested out of your brain as if they were never there. This probably speaks to how much of our thinking patterns are based on habits and heuristics. If we don’t really stop and integrate a new idea into our thought processes in a way that will stick, it will move in and through, like a breeze through the window. I love your language about the accumulation of new possible nodes of connection, though, maybe every idea that pops in creates a new potential for future wisdom, even if it doesn’t yet stick. Someday, I would love to study a bit of neurology so I can actually understand our mysterious brains, rather than speculate!
—
I am sitting here now after the kids have gone to bed, thinking about how hard it is to formulate sentences in my depleted state. This reminds me of your love of writing about writing, which you have mentioned in recent letters. I share this love. I think the genre is really about the task of being alone with your thoughts and examining and forming them with rigor. Most of the time, we do not have to go through this exercise of putting one word after another in service of what we think. We just know what we know and feel what we feel! It is fascinating to hear how different people undertake this task of wrestling and wringing out what is known and felt onto the page. I cherish this letter writing project for so many reasons, as you know. But one of them is because it gives me a window into how you think, how you process your days, how you use words. You are writing about writing even when you aren’t!
I have so much more I want to say about your letter last week, but it is late, and I know you are waiting for this letter and that our friends in Chicago are waiting for our Facetime happy hour. I hope you have a relaxing and replenishing weekend. I plan to!
With love,
Sarah
Friday October 9 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’m starting this letter at the very end of the day but I take comfort in the fact that I could use the sort of free-pass of an exceptionally brief letter we’ve both imagined exists in this exchange, if need be, if for some reason the words aren’t flowing. But I’ve got a few pages of notes here at my side and I think there will be plenty I could tuck into the lines of this page and more, so I’m not worried! It’s Friday night at the end of a fairly busy but enjoyable week, I’ve just eaten Friday night spaghetti (our somewhat regular tradition using frozen leftovers of a big pot of delicious pasta sauce we like to make whenever we run out), and I’m drinking a Wild State Raspberry Hibiscus cider (from a company out of Duluth, MN; it tastes a little like a sparkly cidery rosé, which is what I had hoped for) and eating a Speculoos chocolate bar from Trader Joe’s. If this isn’t a perfect setting for Friday-night letter-writing, I don’t know what is!
I love to hear about your experience of motherhood, last week’s letter being just one particular flavor. It feels important and also difficult to remember that nothing is ever all one thing or another, motherhood included! All the emotions are to be had. I have a genuine and deep appreciation for mothers and fathers taking on the huge task of stewarding small humans through to being larger and hopefully more developed humans. Like so much in life, there is no way to know how it (parenting, and other its) will go from start to finish; you can’t imagine all the side roads you will take on the (hopefully) long journey as a child goes from small person to big person, all the variables you will encounter. There is the unpredictable nature of how people change all the time, crossed with the nature of how the world is changing all the time — an endless experiment we’re all simultaneously performing and participating in. I appreciate your need for some alone time as well as time away from the sounds of other people’s activities; I have these needs and feel these feelings too!
Your transition from being an adult, a solo being in the world, to a parent on whom two smaller humans (and another adult!) rely, seems like a transition that can take place many times within the space of a day or even an hour. In regards to the in-your-face-ness — I think it is special and meaningful that your kids feel comfortable like that with you. I am intrigued by your ability to have it both ways: to have made your children aware of your desire and capacity for closeness, and also to still want — and attain! — your solo time.
I had a conversation this week with my mother that illustrated more clearly something I already knew about her, which is that we perceive time differently. An upcoming appointment or event can occupy the mind-space of her day(s) even if the event itself may only require a time commitment of a manner of minutes. There are preparatory activities, then the event itself, then the act of winding down from the event. I recall my mother, in my childhood, as always needing that wind-down time; after a day at work she would need time to herself, to transition out of the work headspace. I was a child who liked to spend my time with myself — I am my mother’s daughter — so I’m not actually sure that my mother’s wind-down time would necessarily lead to some moment when we would all reconvene and spend time together; evenings could be a bit solitary, in my current recollection. There was homework and television and reading and eating, and then reading some more, until it was time to sleep (and to try to read some more!)
Thinking about my mother and her time these days did make me think about how any of us find our ideal calibration, the “right” speed at which we want to operate and to interact with the world around us. If I’m thinking again about finishing and about time, what does finishing mean but that it is time to start a new thing; that the number of things accomplished or finished can be measured. I am reminded of how flabbergasted I felt when I heard about your four-books-a-month reading goal! Setting numerical goals also sets a pace, a self-established pace. I find that work sets a pace as well; with eight hours a day and 40 hours a week and somewhere in the realm of 50 48 46 (?) weeks a year (let’s be middlingly generous with our vacations) committed to work, there are all kinds of ways to think about what the products of that amount of time should look like. Perhaps I’m feeling that wherever we can — both in work and in all the other settings of our lives — we should be able to set the pace at which we want to live. If we physically rush around from place to place (less likely these days) or mentally rush from idea to idea or project to project, are we doing it because it is demanded of us, or have we set a pace we either want to maintain, or don’t have an interest in maintaining? My mother’s pace is a little more staid than mine these days, and yet I see some others and their paces, and am glad to be able, for the time being, to hold the reins myself and set my pace as I like it. Sometimes a speedy clip can be enjoyable if you know it’s going to be short-lived; a relaxed stroll is more enjoyable if you recognize that you’re savoring slowness in contrast to those busy times.
One day this week I had two work-related calls in a single day — honestly, unheard of for me during pandemic time, even though I am grateful to have had enough work going that things are proceeding comfortably — and those two calls left me amped up! It took me a couple of hours to come down from them, which sounds silly to say now that I am sitting relaxedly at my desk writing to you and peacefully eating chocolate and drinking cider. There is an unpredictability to using voices to ask questions of others and to be asked questions in return; there is an energy required to listen carefully to responses; it’s important that we talk with people from time to time, but I’m glad to do many things in writing! At another time in my life I would have thought I should make myself do more of what I disliked, a form of professional cod liver oil, i.e. vegetables, but these days I think it’s just fine to acknowledge what I like and am good at, and to keep following the breadcrumb path I’ve left myself to keep moving in that direction.
With that, I’ve meandered my way well beyond a free-pass hello, goodbye kind of letter! I shall wind it down there, and look forward to your words!
Until soon,
Eva