On more than 400 tags, knocks at the figurative door, and putting our monies where our mouths are (gross)
May 27, 2021,
May 28, 2021
Dear Eva,
I am pleased to report that my experiment with a 6 AM daily writing (or sometimes reading) habit continues to stick. No, this does not go far enough. Let me try again.
The 6 AM daily writing habit has quickly become something disproportionately generative in my life, like I folded in some magical layer into my days that allowed me to find a hidden pocket of time, maybe even a hidden pocket of myself. Now I am getting dramatic! But it is true. This quiet, dedicated but obligation-free hour before the house awakes has had a profound effect on me. This fascinates me because this is not the first time I have tried this technique, but it is certainly the first time it stuck. What is different? Why have I never even had a flash of impulse to hit the snooze button when I am jarred from my slumber? Why, last night for example, did I feel a sense of delight when I thought about how I would be waking up at this early hour to curl up with a blanket and an iced coffee and words? I think there is a way in which the steady cadence of this earmarked time in my day makes me feel, finally, like I am putting my money where my mouth is (wait, that’s gross! Money is dirty and it should not be near one’s mouth). Without making this kind of writing time a priority, it rarely happened, so it felt a bit like how I used to read Runner’s World magazine despite rarely going for a run. After nearly five weeks of this, it feels legit and I feel a newfound kinship with past and present writers of this world—with everyone asking questions that most people are trying to avoid.
I was excited at the thought of you reaching a new frontier in your own personal writing, setting out to sort and curate and index various bits into larger wholes. (Along these lines, one project I have been noodling on is collecting snippets of our letters on various themes and compiling them in ways that demonstrate how a single idea or concept can morph and reverberate over time.) Like you, I find the curation process deeply satisfying, particularly as a stage in the creative process. Maybe you and I should have been archivists? Although I think sometimes my instinct to organize can go too far. I have more than 400 tags in my email inbox, which is a level of specificity that eats up the practicality of the entire system. It can be hard sometimes to know how finely to sort! I think I mentioned this to you over text message, but I have adopted your organizing system for to-dos (NOW, LATER, DONE) and have found it to be a really useful frame. Sometimes three simple categories is just the right amount. There is a fairly famous organization method called Getting Things Done by David Allen, which is so elaborate that it requires a fairly long book or hours of consulting from Allen in order to adopt it. (A quick google search tells me that Allen has a registered trademark on the phrase “Gettings Things Done” which is amusing me right now.) I read the aforementioned long book and picked up a few solid tactics along the way, but it always felt to me like the system crossed the line into an excessive level of detail. But then again, maybe this is why I do not always Get Things Done®.
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I feel like it is necessary that I fess up right now and admit that it is now Friday and today, in fact, I turned off my alarm and stayed in bed when it rang at the early hour. What a difference a day makes! To my defense, I have the day off today and knew that we are not leaving for our drive to Chicago until midday so there would be plenty of time to find writing time later this morning. But still, this is a good lesson in not taking one’s sentiments at any given moment as anything more than present sensations. We never know how tomorrow will feel.
Recently you mentioned feeling rusty at in-person conversation. In contrast, lately I am realizing I am rusty at the process of bringing people along with me in my own ideas and arguments. While deep conversation and discussion nearly always energizes me, striving to convey a series of ideas in ways others can follow and get behind does not interest me as much. I would rather spend my energy soaking up the perspectives of others, bouncing my own ideas off of those perspectives until together we get somewhere new. When I frame it this way, my interest in conversation suddenly sounds like a self-interested strategy in pursuit of my own curiosity. Perhaps I am not as interested in persuasion because I don’t need other people to follow me in order to let new insights enrich my own interior life. This is an intriguing notion, especially for a [good enough] lawyer.
Well it is now nearing the lunch hour, and I am needing to shift gears for a quick flurry of packing for a weekend away. I am excited for a change in scenery, and even more excited for a lazy weekend with friends. One of our plans is to watch movies we thought were “deep” when we were teenagers to see how they hold up to our wise adult selves. (Mine is Contact, which at the time I recall thinking captured my version of spirituality and the afterlife at the time. I have a feeling it may provoke a different and possibly humorous reaction now and I’m anxious to find out.) I believe you are already enjoying houseguests for the weekend, so I hope your holiday weekend is off to a happy start! I will look forward to hearing about it next week and to reading your words later today.
Have a great one!
Yours,
Sarah
Thursday May 27 and Friday May 28 2021
Dear Sarah,
This has been another week in which I’ve felt the incredible importance of eating and drinking when I am feeling stressed or unsettled. That doesn’t sound quite right — it sounds like I’m advocating for snacking through problems, which is not what I’m thinking. But multiple times this week I have felt my emotions spiraling and I realize it’s time for a meal or time for some water or another cup of tea. It is important to remember to eat and drink even in the midst of busyness and powerful emotions and difficult situations. Sometimes before lunch I get into the mode of “I’ll just finish this thing and then I will get up to make lunch” but the thing takes too long, or becomes a second thing or a third thing, or the phone rings, and lunch is getting pushed back and back, and my frustration mounts as to why I can’t finish the things I wanted to finish before I ate lunch. It’s because I haven’t had lunch! Arbitrary “finish X before lunch” rules are hooey! Lunch helps me finish the things I need to finish with a nourished and rebalanced mind.
Today is a green rain kind of day, rain forecasted to continue for the majority of the day. I like the glow of my computer in a rain-dimmed room. The page of my letter to you is a cozy invitation to chat and see what you’re up to, even if the invitation is asynchronous! I send it out to you across time.
The last couple of weeks have been full of family stressors for me, asymmetrical demands on my time that I am less and less interested in fulfilling. I’ve been thinking in particular about how there are people in my life whom I want to be there, want to see more of — those people I wouldn’t mind exclusively interacting with. (Essences of I wish more people were like us…?) There are also other people in my life who fill the next few tiers out, who are a part of my life but aren’t precisely the people I would choose to spend the lion’s share of my time with. Then there are people with whom I don’t want to interact at all!
I’ve recently settled more firmly into the understanding that there is not actually any requirement to allocate my limited life time to people with whom I don’t want to spend it. But I always have this sense that I owe people something, perhaps simply because they have opened up a line of conversation with me. When someone knocks on the figurative door, one tends to answer. Perhaps the pandemic has helped reshape my feelings about this metaphor: during the pandemic, if someone knocked on my door I typically waited for them to go away, assuming they would leave something behind if they needed something from me, something I could then deal with in my own time, on my own terms. In the world of apartment living, if someone knocks on your door, they may actually need you in some more personal way, because they live right there in your building and you may know them. Now, if someone knocks on the door of my home, the odds seem to be greater that I do not know them, that their need is random in relation to my presence on this street (or, perhaps, that they need me more than I can imagine; a need too great to contemplate). They may seek my attention but I do not owe it to them. This metaphor may not carry over precisely and it seems rather to be unraveling as I try to clarify it… but I like to take my learnings where I can get them!
Last week I was so excited to hear about your choice to be a “good enough” lawyer, and I laughed out loud when you said it felt naughty even to put it in writing! This process of seriously reviewing one’s priorities with clear eyes and making decisions that align with those priorities seems so obvious and yet can take so long to get to (speaking from experience!). Working as a freelancer has helped me see more clearly how we often dedicate ourselves to our work as though it is the primary relationship in our lives. Work has importance — we all need to pay the bills! — but it is easy to accidentally slot it into an overly meaningful place in our priority matrix. I will say that as I’ve reflected on the freelance lifestyle I’ve seen that it’s more and more about relationships: with whom do I want to be working? Not only the institutional who, but the personal who. I spend my days working with people. I want to spend my days with people who are interesting and important to me, and that’s that!
Now it is Friday, M’s parents are in town for the long holiday weekend, and I’m one strong cocktail + a hot shower into the evening after a day spent selecting ornamental grasses and digging in the dirt out front to populate the garden boxes shaped by our retaining walls. The summer sun is casting in through my west-facing window; my keyboard is dusted with pollen from warm winds earlier in the week. I’m thinking about the plan to have you out here for a visit soon and I am excited about the prospect! I hope you have a glorious long weekend, and I’m looking forward to talking with you soon and reading your letter sooner!
Until then!
Yours,
Eva