On patterns old and new, the slightest buzz of worry, and accessing the memory of this time
January 8, 2021
Dear Eva,
Well, the new year has started off with a bang. Literally, unfortunately. As we have said so many times in these letters, what a week! I am still processing the political events of the week, and I must admit that my current mood has me feeling like sitting down to write a thoughtful letter on this Friday evening is an impossible task. But at this point, pre-Movie Night pizza is imminent and it is do-or-die time so this letter shall be written now, one way or another! (Whether it ends up being a thoughtful letter is anyone’s guess; I can make no promises at this time.)
I appreciated your reflection back on our out-of-the-ordinary year in last week’s letter. That mental exercise was something I had planned to do as we turned the corner into 2021, but which I had not yet done. Like you, I think there is much about this strange pandemic time that I have actually relished. I didn’t have to worry if she liked her own food. I just had to sit there. This stripping down of interactions, and of our lives, has been clarifying in many ways. This past year, we have largely whittled life down to the bone. For those of us for whom the pandemic caught us at points in our lives when our homes are full of people we love, this kind of simplification is largely welcome. There have been times where my contentment during this locked-down life is almost disquieting. I don’t need much from the outside world to feel like my quiet little life is full. Paradoxically, I think there is also an element of control or certainty that the pandemic has wrought in our lives. Our wee family is all here at home, nearly every day, all day. I didn’t realize until it was gone, but I think I must constantly have the slightest buzz of worry when the kids are at school or otherwise away. There is a certain steady comfort to nearly always having the chicks in the nest. I can sense there will be quite a mental transition required when this is finally over. On the other hand, what a joy it will be to finally spend unfettered time with friends like you in real human life!
You really hit on something powerful with your discussion of seasons and the ways that patches of time can become steeped in particular feelings when we center them around particular activities or circumstances. This can happen whether or not the patch of time is one that recurs. As I have mentioned in letters past, we have been watching the HBO show Treme over the past few months, several evenings per week. We finished the series just after Christmas, and I felt like a meaningful period of our lives was ending. Maybe we should start watching it every year and officially make a Treme season in our house! But whether or not the season comes around again, it has given me another way to access the memory of this time in our lives, another layer of texture upon the days.
Recurring seasons have a different level of meaning, one that ushers in some predictability and familiarity with the passage of time. This gets at the notion of rhythms, which was another theme in your letter last week. When we develop a practice of something, when it recurs with some regularity, it becomes etched in our days in a different kind of way. Somehow it becomes more meaningful, too. Clearly, we have both felt that with this letter writing practice, and again with our writing project with J. I have tried to take the learnings from these creative and connective rituals of ours and apply them in other places in my life, too. In some ways, the pandemic has made this easier—Friday night drinks over Facetime, end-of-the-week happy hour bike rides, cold snowy walks for coffee with a friend; new patterns to give the days of the week more crescendos and diminuendos.
I am delighted to hear that last January’s daily writing commitment culminated in a 108 page document! What a rich text from which to draw in the days and years to come. Between your daily writing, our weekly letters, our bi-weekly(ish) essays with J—we seem to be mastering the ways to pace small amounts of dedicated energy, spread out over a long period of time. What if we experiment also with shorter, intensive bursts? I wonder if this would create a different kind of seasonal feeling, marking the time in an immersive way. Something to ponder!
It is now late Friday evening (I paused for pizza, movie, and a chocolate and peanut butter malt so I guess it wasn’t do-or-die letter time after all), and I will end this letter so that you do not have to wait any longer before starting your Friday night wind down. I look forward to reading what is on your mind this day and week. Happy Friday to you and yours!
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday January 8 2021
Dear Sarah,
It is once again fully Friday night — it’s almost 9PM and I’m just getting my fingers on the keyboard to type my letter to you! I’ve been thinking of you and my letter all this week as we’ve started a new year, and yet the act of writing the letter itself, and the end of the week, snuck up on me. I would say it’s been an out-of-the-ordinary week except it seems like we’ve had too many occasions to say such a thing in the last few weeks, months, years. The roof of my mouth is raw and scalded; M and I just gorged ourselves on much of two cheesy pan pizzas, from a recipe which came highly recommended by the internet people, and now I highly recommend it to you if you’re ever seeking a new pizza style on some future Friday night!
Reading your letter last week I thought about the words you relayed from your friend’s husband who said January 1 is just another day, to which you said to me, We humans like stories, and the story of the new year is always a powerful one, but especially this year. I tend to agree with you both! January 1 is like any other day just as it is also a new beginning, as every day is and should be. We’ve certainly oriented ourselves to January 1 as the top of the year, the first in a series of fresh steps, an opportunity to start anew. (I think I felt the newness of the year particularly on the recent solstice, as we all tipped forward into the period when the days get longer bit by bit. I love and miss the sun!) I read an article recently that I’m not going to be able to dig up at this moment, but one of its points had to do with dieting and how people make change in their lives, and how it’s important to think about each new day as an opportunity to get back on the horse if something goes awry — as opposed to, say, overdoing it on a Thursday and saying, well, I’ll start again on Monday and letting any goals fall by the wayside until then. I know that sentiment — maybe it’s also just something baked in about the weekend, the same way we bake in feelings about the new year? — but it’s interesting to think about the assumption that new patterns can only be longer stretches: weeks, months, years. (This fits in with our conversation of the other day about Dry January, too!) It is almost daunting to acknowledge that each day really is the start of something new. Each new day comes so quickly when you think about it like that! I feel that it’s intertwined with our desire to think about the future as something distant to be planned for, a place to deposit our hopes and dreams for our eventual arrival, as if we will be totally different when we get there, instead of our same selves, only changed bit by bit as we’ve moved through our days. But it’s also a real recognition of the fact that it takes time to build new habits, it takes stretches of time… stretches that are still made up of individual days.
I wanted 2021 to feel different and it did, if perhaps only briefly. (I do like to see these early January dates roll out… once we hit February we’re really *in the year.*) I felt grumpy last Saturday as the holiday break wound down. My logical mind knew the year wouldn’t feel completely different, my body and heart hoped it would. It wasn’t only the return to working that made me feel grumpy — I know that generally when I’m working I don’t mind it so much… though perhaps that is also why I felt grumpy, knowing that I would so easily slide back into work brain from holiday-break-relaxed-thinking-and-dreaming brain — it was also the transition back into a certain kind of ongoingness of pandemic living that in some ways feels even more undefined than it did over the past year. 2020 felt like something of a lost year even as we still lived it, it felt like it had to be endured; and it felt like maybe we’d all start 2021 as we had started 2020 — as if we’d be able to turn the clock back, or much further forward. There’s a lot of 2021 yet left to live (we hope) but starting a new year with a year like 2020 still nipping at our heels is hard. I felt disappointed by the slow rollout of the first vaccines at the close of the year, and by news of a conspiracy-theorist pharmacist who intentionally set vaccines out to spoil; I felt deflated even as I couldn’t stop reading a long, long article by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker outlining the early trajectory of the virus and the many varied missteps in acknowledging and acting on its impending severity. I mentioned when we talked earlier in the week that I had had this thought in my head that M and I would be vaccinated by summer (you reminded me that authorities had at one point suggested such a thing might come to pass, rather than me just inventing the timeline), but now I’m not sure what timeline to hang my hopes on, and in reality there isn’t a timeline to count on, because there’s so much that could continue to happen between now and then. I felt sad for a bit to think about it like that, but I suppose I’ve felt better as this week progressed, just trying to roll back into a resilience kind of mindset. At some point we’ll all spend more time with other people in other places again, and it’ll happen when it happens!
There’s been so much that has unfolded in just the last few days and it’s taking a while to settle in with me. The events of Wednesday at the Capitol seemed at first simply predictable, but then I understood that I wasn’t giving the horror of the situation its full due — the reality of what did happen, and also what could have happened. I listened to the radio today as a reporter recounted her story of how things unfolded from inside the Senate Chamber, and I felt viscerally the fear of people in a room being threatened by people outside coming in, those people potentially bearing arms, as shots had been fired. Still digesting.
In complete contrast with the national events of this week, here at home M and I have kicked off a month-long yoga journey with Adriene, of Yoga With Adriene (we’re a little late to the party!). It feels really good and has been a great way to start this new year, ending our work days with much deep breathing and new-muscle stretching. I think deep breathing can play at least some role in getting us into and through this new year that currently still feels a bit like the old one! But there are still many days ahead.
I’m looking forward to reading your letter now, which popped into my inbox just as I fired up a fresh document for my letter to you! Looking forward to the first weekend weekend of the year, and I wish you a very quiet and restorative one!
Until soon,
Eva