On staying resolute in the things we want to do, writing in a room full of mirrors, and the end of summer
August 6, 2021
Dear Eva,
I am sitting underneath my gloriously unruly Boston fern plant that hangs from the ceiling in my office. The plant has become so lush that the long leaves, which splay out in every direction like the hairs that emerge in an old man’s eyebrows, dangle down so far my head bumps against them depending on which way I lean. I love it! There is something truly fantastic about being surrounded by greens, and it makes my daily practice of curling up in a blanket on this chair to write or read all the more satisfying.
(Sidenote: last week during one of these morning sessions, I peeled open my peanut Lȁrabar—a treat that has also become a part of this ritual—and the first small nibble tasted like the inside of a horse stable smells. I am not exaggerating! Has this ever happened to you? What could it have been? Such a mystery. It threw me off of the bars for a day or two, but I am now back to savoring the rich peanut-y goodness each morning with my iced coffee. I do not know if my sense of smell/taste went temporarily askew, or if there was something wrong with that particular bar, but it was strange!)
How was vacation?! I am disappointed to be missing our weekly chat this morning to hear about it from the horse’s mouth. (I am laughing out loud at my use of that expression right now; you are certainly no horse! But I have equine accommodations on the brain so you’ll have to excuse me.) When I read your letter last week, and again this week in advance of this letter-writing, I was thinking about how you seem to rejoice in vacation even more than the average person. This sounds like something a robot would say, but I wonder why you like vacations so much? My own [probably unhelpful and certainly uninformed] assessment, after thinking also about your thoughts on the tyranny of email, is that maybe you simply want control over your own time. Although as I write those words, I am pondering whether and how independent a vacation to visit family really can be, in comparison to your daily lives. So maybe that’s a bunch of hooey, Sarah. You just plain like vacation, and this is not a complicated feeling to dissect!
It is not as if I am a stranger to enjoying Vacation Land. But I do think there is nearly always a part of me that is happy to return home when it ends.The one recent exception to this rule was our pandemic staycation in 2020. I remember having such dramatic post-vacation blues when it ended, which seemed counterintuitive at the time but which I quickly recognized made perfect sense. Most vacations, if you leave home at all, have an otherworldly feel to them, in the sense that you are away from the comforts of home, pulled out of normal routines, enjoying different foods, beds, and settings. These things can be wonderful, but they are designed to be and feel temporary. A staycation, on the other hand, is just home, minus the j-o-b. Pretty sure I could do that forever! It shall be called retirement someday, and I look forward to it.
I am in love with your phrase, spiritual indigestion, describing the ways in which we can consume too much of various aspects of life and offset our balance. It is remarkable how easy it is to fill our containers back up with all of the things until they overflow, even when it comes to things that we were very happy to have less of in our lives during Pandemic Time. The hard way, as ever, is saying no. This has me thinking about your out-of-office reply, and how the beauty of such an automated device is that it completely offloads the burden of saying not now, maybe later. In some ways, email seems like a funny thing to hate. It is just a communication mechanism, after all. But like you and the millennials, I too detest spending too much time battling my inbox. I guess it goes back to what is undoubtedly an official theme of these letters at this point, which is that everything takes time and energy, even things that do not feel like they “count.” I was realizing lately that I have a horrible habit of completely ignoring certain essential activities that feel too mundale or trivial to spend any time on, but which are in fact part of a functioning ongoing life. Case in point: for days last week, I refused to stop and change the batteries in the automatic soap dispenser at our kitchen sink. Instead, I went to a different sink to wash my hands every time, even though it surely took more time and energy to do that than it would have to go to the closet and get new batteries. I have a feeling that unfortunate tendency of mine to ignore some practical bits of life would persist regardless of what load I was bearing, but I do generally recognize that my perpetual state is to try to take on too much in life. So far, knowing this fact has not been enough to break me of it. Ironically, part of my effort to get better at saying no involves taking on something new—signing up for a new little course offered by none other than my good pal, Krista Tippett, and team about how to live the kind of life you want to live. This strikes me as something M might chuckle at, similar to the idea of paying for a budgeting app in order to save more money over the long term. But sometimes we (or at least I) need some constant reinforcement, and some structure, to help me stay resolute in the things I want to do. Every day contains so many moments for different choices!
Shortly, I will be leaving my cozy, curled-up state and entering a bit of morning scramble to finish up work calls and tasks and then throw some things in a bag and hit the road to Wisconsin. When we got the recent news that B’s upcoming trial was rescheduled, we decided to take advantage of the newfound freedom and partake in one last bit of summery fun. We plan to spend the weekend on a boat, roasting marshmallows, and swimming in a lake (not all at once), with some extended family. It should be a lovely way to close out the summer. And yes, the end of summer is truly upon us here in my small slice of the world! S had kindergarten jumpstart this week, and school starts in earnest on August 25th, which is just around the corner. Exciting!
For now, I’ll enjoy this last drop of summer with a full week of staycation next week. I wonder if I will have the post-staycation blues yet again? It’s a risk I’m willing to take. Take care, and have a wonderful weekend, my friend!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday August 5 2021
Dear Sarah,
I’m back at home (as of Monday) and missing vacation! Yesterday I described this summer as the summer that could never live up to all we had hoped for it. I feel like I had been looking forward to this summer for so long — not just because summer is nice, but because we thought we would all be vaccinated, the current coronavirus pandemic would be a wrap, we would all relax in the sun... and the summer would go on and on forever and we would never have any meaningful responsibilities again. (Retirement, anyone?) It’s been a very nice summer but inevitably it is beginning to draw to a close. I am feeling like my interactions with people are starting to pick up speed as everyone packs their social calendar before the end of August. I’m getting ready for a trip to Michigan on Monday, and am already looking forward to the time when I’ll come back home and have at least a few quiet weeks with no travel. I’m certainly feeling like travel and social time is a bit more taxing than it used to be.
Speaking of things that are taxing, I am trying to be better about saying no in order to make space for projects I want to be working on, and working on holding the space I’ve cleared instead of promptly filling it as if it were a vacuum. I am counting down to my 40th birthday next year and I want to be meaningfully focusing on the things I know I want to be working on. There is still a way in which if someone asks me to do something I often take that as an obligation that must be addressed above what I want to be doing. (A kind of schoolchild’s responsibility hangover!) This is where saying no comes in! I want to spend more time working on my writing projects, and I want to clear the time for them and hold the time for them so that they have room to blossom. Lately I have felt that I, in relation to my writing, am in a room full of mirrors; each time I turn away from my writing it appears again in front of me, multiplied out infinitely.
I've been watching a lot of Olympics this week, following the track and field events most closely. I love to watch the runners — the fastest people in the world running as fast as they can — and I love the solo nature of the sport. There has been some good competitive drama this time around — I’m looking at you, women’s 400 hurdles! — and even in the midst of all the controversy around whether the Olympics should actually have been held or not, I've still enjoyed being able to see and appreciate the athletes and their extraordinary skills.
Last week I had written up my letter before we went on the New York portion of our vacation. We visited friends in Beacon, one of whom is a curatorial fellow at the art museum at Vassar College, and we enjoyed the inside tour there; we revisited Dia:Beacon and contemplated in particular the works by Michael Heizer; and we went to Magazzino, an Italian art collection focused on the Arte Povera movement. Then, back with family in Connecticut, we made our way across the border to New York again to check out the Wassaic Project, a residency program and art space in a seven-floor historic grain elevator. Perhaps the most exciting thing about our visit to the Wassaic Project was that we all thoroughly enjoyed the space and the exhibition on view — from the adults to our five-year-old and three-year-old niece and nephew! A success!
Your letter last week was full of thought nuggets that my evening head isn’t tackling here tonight, but I will endeavor to return to them in a future letter! Until soon, my friend!
Yours,
Eva