On faux urgency bombs, taking action to mitigate suffering, and what won’t save us
July 30, 2021
Dear Eva,
This week I have been enjoying the thought of you on vacation, reveling in family time and, I hope, some alone time in-between. Were your travels uneventful? I sure hope so. I thought of you on Monday and rather than bothering you with a text, I chose to assume that you made it without incident and were well on your way into full vacation glory.
I have also been thinking this week about some things you wrote about in your letter last week, including your impressive display of diligent caretaking and devotion to Baby Huey the bunny. It is remarkable to me that you would question yourself for taking the wee creature in and watching over him. To me, this strikes me as going above and beyond what most would do, which is to say aww, what a shame, and move on with your day. If anything, your efforts have me questioning myself! I am quite certain my instinct would not have been to think I could or would try to rescue the little guy and for this, I now feel the tiniest bit of shame!
I have also been thinking about what you said about this notion of “saving” topics or ideas for the letters, which is generally a fascinating thing to ponder. I am trying to recall exactly what was going through my mind when I have said that before on a call, stopping myself from diving into a topic that I planned to write about in that week’s letter. I think perhaps there is an element of not yet knowing precisely what it is I have to say, and wanting to preserve the mystery until the words hit the page and I start to see where they lead. There may also be, as you say, some element of needing something to be left for the letter. But I think this is what you were inclined to poke at, and I think I agree. Is there really a finite number of topics for words within us during any given week? If we address something in one medium, does it mean we cannot address it in another, that it has been depleted and there is nothing else interesting to say about it? I don’t want to be too hard on us, but I do think that some of these instincts we have may be rooted in the cultural tendency to always value the new. (I should note that in my search just now for the link to that past letter on the topic, I briefly followed the current of our prior idea exchange and marveled at the terrain we have covered over the past 147 weeks. Everything to me feels like raw material from which to learn about life and being human, and these letters feel like a gold mine for that purpose. It is satisfying to know that such an archival exploration awaits if I ever find the time and space and desire to dig into it.)
In a few hours, I will be packing up a few clothes and a toothbrush and picking up my 15 year old nephew to drive off to the east end of the state, where we will be leaving my car to wait patiently for us overnight until we bike to it tomorrow during the last day of RAGBRAI. My parents will be making the trip tonight, too, in a separate car, so they can then drive us back west to the small town just over 30 miles away from the border where we will camp tonight. It will be an adventure! I am especially looking forward to the time with my nephew. We spend a lot of time with him and his family, but I almost never have the chance to really talk to him. Two and a half hours alone in a car should certainly give us that opportunity! Yikes! What do teenage boys like to talk about? Or rather, what (if anything) do teenage boys like to talk about with their 41 year old aunts? We will find out soon enough.
Earlier this week, the kids and I drove B to a different small town in Iowa where he joined RAGBRAI with two friends from Michigan. On the ride home, we had the common Iowa experience of driving through some vile farm smells for a spell. This sparked a conversation, led by J and then supplemented by me, about factory farming. In short order, S’s voice got shaky and with tears in his eyes, he said, “Please stop talking about pigs living in poop factories because it is making me sad.” I love this kid’s big heart. I can only imagine how he would react to the story of Baby Huey! But it also got me thinking (again) about what suffering we choose to see. This topic is especially on my mind as I continue to read the book I mentioned last week about climate change, We Are the Weather. There are so many horrors we can and do ignore, including our own unfolding existential planetary crisis. In this book, Safran Foer explores what it is that can make us see and even more importantly, what can make us act. As he writes, “Intellectually accepting the truth isn’t virtuous in and of itself. And it won’t save us.”
These thoughts have been haunting me, and watching S fall into distress at the thought of suffering pigs brought it again to the fore, particularly because his reaction was to want us to stop talking about it, to return to a blissful state of artificial ignorance. I do not blame the 5 year old! This is the same child who started sobbing at the thought of not being able to buy a stuffed shark at a Nantucket gift shop. (“It is going to be so hard not to get it,” he said through tears.) S has the excuse of this being the emotional range of his natural developmental stage; us fully-formed adults do not. This leads me to think about my own hypothetical answer to one of Krista Tippett’s standard interview questions, What does it mean to be human? At the risk of a spoiler alert if Krista ever comes calling, my answer is that being human means spending a lifetime grappling with the fact that each of us is a wholly inconsequential blip in the universe, with an almost non-existent ability to make real change. And at the same time, knowing in our bones that our moments matter to some other living beings in this world, and that in itself is meaningful beyond belief. Squaring these two contradictions, both of which are as real as the rain, is what it means to be human. I hope we/I can use that framework to find it within ourselves to take action to save lives and mitigate suffering in the face of our current climate crisis. As I write these words, which are sounding far more dramatic than intended, I am noting the dreary haze outside my window, which is the result of smoke from the Canadian wildfires. I woke up to a notice on my phone that the pollution was so bad that they recommended no outdoor exercise. (It is supposed to clear by tonight, so I should be okay for the bike ride, in case you are reading that and wondering what on earth I am doing!)
On that dark note, I will close this letter. I am hopeful that you are having a grand time out east, and I very much look forward to reading your dispatch from Vacation Land later tonight. Enjoy the rest of your time and safe travels on Monday!
Yours,
Sarah
Wednesday July 28 2021
Dear Sarah,
It’s the Wednesday of my vacation week and M asked me if I was going to work on my letter to you, and suddenly I worried that it was Friday and the whole week had gotten away from me! Instead, we’re a few days into our stay in Connecticut, heading tomorrow to Beacon, New York to see friends and stay an evening, then we’ll return to Connecticut for another long weekend. At the back of my mind is the sneaking suspicion that, as ever, this vacation *will* come to an end, but for the moment I’m trying to push that thought out of my mind!
On Monday when we landed in Connecticut (NB: we experienced smooth travels from start to finish, and among other #blessings this was the first domestic flight in perhaps 15 years where I wasn’t required to take off my shoes!) I a) instinctively checked my email, and b) realized that I really did need to set an away message on my personal email. It always seems like overkill to do so, but since I work out of my personal email, inevitably something sneaks through, someone reaches out who I wouldn’t have had an opportunity to let know that I’d be out of town and off email, and then it feels like someone is waiting for a response. I sent one person an “I’m on vacation!” direct response and turned on that away message and since then I haven’t peeked into my email. I hope there’s nothing urgent happening there and I can’t even imagine what would be so urgent that someone would be circulating it to me in email exclusively. The idea of what is truly urgent gets refactored when you can step away from email for a few days!
I am reminded of something I started tucking into a letter to you a few weeks ago that I pulled out and saved; at that time it was a dangling thought without any other thoughts to hold onto. I caught an article recently in The New York Times, “Could Gen Z Free the World From Email?” about the general hatred of email, which encapsulated how I’ve been feeling lately and made me want to reconsider how I send email. When I hoped this week that no one was sending me any messages that came anywhere near being “urgent,” suddenly I felt sorry for every email I’ve ever sent asking anyone for a quick turnaround on something over email. No one likes email; no one likes time-sensitive email; in sum, no one likes to open their email to a little faux urgency bomb waiting in their hated email!
Sentiments on email, expressed in the article, with which I agree: that email is “the eternal chore”; the feeling that “every time I get an email, it is like getting stabbed. Another thing for me to do.” When I read and realized that others feel this way about email I felt the slight regret described above for past emails sent, and simultaneously felt slightly more relaxed about my email to-do list — which is somehow a to-do list on top of my overarching to-do list — leaving me with the feeling that it is ok to hate email because everyone else hates it too! If we all acknowledge together that we hate it then maybe we are on the way to breaking its spell over our lives. All to say I’ve been delighted not to be looking at my email even though I’ve now spent a page rambling on about how I hate it!
This week has thus far, instead, been full of things I love: my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, my niece and nephew, chocolates and fresh milk from a local dairy farm, a lobster roll, dinners from the grill, a fresh garden salad with steak on top, buttery salty corn on the cob. (As always, eating is a big part of vacation!)
Last week when I read your letter I felt very familiar with the concept of sensory overload you were describing; in fact I think that’s been a part of my particular transition into the next phase of the pandemic (I have wanted to call this time “post-pandemic,” but lately the pandemic feels like a coiled snake waiting to snap back up at us when we let down our guard). As things have started to open up and as M and I have been a bit more socially active, but still with work and personal projects on the table, suddenly it feels like there are far more things to do than there is time in which to do them, and it feels more serious and obvious than it used to feel to make some real choices about what matters. Not everything that was a part of life before the pandemic needs to be reintroduced after the pandemic; now we are in kind of lifestyle elimination diet, with this being the moment when we start to reintroduce certain elements and see what sits well and what causes irritation or spiritual indigestion. Sensory overload is somewhat separate — I’m still going to have to manage some mix of personal life, work life, and social life — but figuring out how many things I reintroduce into work life and who comes back in on the social front is an ongoing process.
I could hardly believe when I read your letter that you were already needing to think about fall! But with August right around the corner it is true. Somehow I feel that the winter holidays are already sneaking up on us! I also feel I must mention that when I read this sentence in your letter — This weekend I am looking forward to finally having some down time to fully unpack, resituate, clean, and get my bearings again — I kept reading the word resituate as resuscitate, which feels appropriate to me in relation to my impending reentry into regular life in a post-vacation way; such a shock may require a significant resuscitation effort!
As we turn toward August this weekend, I’m wishing you well for this last (official) month of summer! Looking forward to reading your words and talking with you soon!
Until then,
Yours,
Eva