On bequeathing google docs, insisting upon centering what lights us up, and how we are perpetually in conversation
Friday, April 26, 2024
Dear Eva,
I just went for a stroll to clear my head before sitting down to write this letter. As I walked, I was gathering thoughts and ideas that felt fresh on my mind. It got me thinking about how there are ways in which I am perpetually in conversation with a delightful set of humans, including many I have never met. On that front, I’m thinking about the podcasters I repeatedly listen to, and the writers I follow. I am obviously not in literal conversation with any of them, but the ways their ideas influence my own feels like the same kind of adaptation that comes from a deep dialogue. I am also in an extended conversation with everyone I love. Thankfully, with you, that conversation has a predictable shape to it in the form of these letters (and often more!). Anyway, all of this is a long way of saying that it’s interesting to reflect on the ways our interior lives are shaped by external forces. Crystallizing a snapshot of that interiority in these letters has a way of making that more obvious to me.
You asked about the ways I am gearing up to say No. The most notable is that I would like to say no to being a lawyer. This is going to be a long process so I have no idea how long it will take. In some ways, it is something I have been working toward since the earliest days of my legal career, ha! Don’t get me wrong, I am very glad I went to law school. I met my life partner and future father of my kids! I also genuinely enjoyed learning about the law and honing my critical thinking chops, and I think having that background will be something I draw on and from for the rest of my life. But practicing law has never been the part of my professional life that I most enjoyed. The stuff I have loved is the strategy, the teamwork, the synthesis of new ideas, the planning and project management. Why not move toward what I enjoy? This feels, somehow, like a revelation. That I could insist upon a job that centers on what lights me up!
I have been thinking lately about how following through on this feels like an important way of modeling for my kids. Both of them often say they would never want to be lawyers. (This makes me think back to a sub-heading of a book I once read titled: Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Lawyers.) Part of that is due to kids not wanting to sit at a desk all day, but I think at least some of it is because they have heard the way I talked about my work over the years. I want to take some risks and make some changes in my life so they will think of their mom as someone who refused to give up on her imagination of what was possible.
You have certainly been an inspiration on that front! Your words last week about your pre-tirement plan were striking in the clarity of purpose they represent. It is deeply subversive to decide for ourselves what type and pace of life we want to live and to then endure the consequences necessary to follow through. It also just plain takes a lot of work to figure out what we want! I think it’s easy to discount that side of things. Your insight about recognizing energy depletion or restoration as a signpost in that effort is profound. It’s stunning how easy it can be to forget that our bodies have so much to tell us.
We have family from Michigan en route, and I imagine they will be arriving within the next hour. We have a weekend full of rain and thunderstorms ahead of us, so I expect there will be lots of board games and movies in our future. Cozy!
I regret that we didn’t get the chance to talk this week. I meant to reach out to schedule a time for a chat, but the week got away from me. I am eager to read your words tonight!
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday April 26 2024
Dear Sarah!
I just received a notification on my phone that you sent your letter to me! And I am just getting started on mine! A little bit of a fib, because I have handwritten notes that I started yesterday and continued today. But I am just starting to type now. I have been doodling around in a post-run, post-yogurt-snack gentle haze — running leaves me slightly bleary until the good energies are compounded by a cup of afternoon tea, which I have just made for myself.
I spent some time this afternoon packing a couple of USPS boxes I am going to send to myself to arrive at my destination in Minneapolis, where I will travel on Monday. This week I’ve been spiritually existing in the long lead-up to my departure from SF to the midwest; my head is neither here nor there, or it’s in both spots. I’m sending myself boxes for my convenience — I typically check two bags and carry on a third, and I have acquired just a few extra and-or heavy things that are causing me to spill out beyond that amount of luggage. I’ve got some books to send on ahead, and a few articles of clothing I’ve worn rarely even as I’ve traveled with a distinctly pared-down set of garments. Funny to have favorites even among the bare bones, funny to have a couple light sweaters that I just stopped wearing. My boxes will probably arrive just after I do, but I still have the sense that I am saying goodbye to these belongings, even if the goodbye is brief. The goal is to lighten my load, which is helpful — and the resulting feeling is that I have fewer things — but really I am just rolling forward some of the decisions about what to do with the miscellany of my life. I still have plenty of miscellany, I’m just not in its presence as much as I used to be. I will continue to collect books to infinity; no amount of books is too many. I’m using the few garments that I haven’t been wearing to pad the books in the boxes. Sending my pair of black Camper sneakers that I wore all last year and about which I feel a bit wistful; I had left them at a friend’s place for holding since the late fall, having acquired a second pair of the same shoes, and I’ve now reclaimed the first pair. I thought about recycling them but I wanted to let the thought age before I acted on it. Now, seeing the shoes again, I don’t want to get rid of them. They have sentimental value: they are the shoes in which I walked all over during my first year on my own. I’m not going to get them bronzed, but I don’t want to get rid of them either.
I was fascinated to read your words on how lawyering has cultivated the worst-case scenario generator within you. When you said you had been doing some worst-case scenario thinking about — of all things — these letters — I gasped. What would be the worst-case scenarios pertaining to the letters! I thought for a split second that you might be going through a refreshed wave of worry about when the letters would end (for a second time). Then my eyes kept reading. As I mentioned briefly over text — my sense is that you’ve not written anything deeply shocking or damaging about your family — the private made too public — though the fear that any words could be taken out of context and misrepresented is real; somehow my sense is that if you’re ever going to be misrepresented by the letters it will be related to some sentences you never would have expected! I don’t have a lot of grounding in how to think about the AI training situation — it’s the kind of thing where I end up feeling daunted and bogged down, because it seems like we’re supposed to consider everything, every possible outcome, before doing anything at all! This is me wondering if we should have considered AI before we got started! Ha. I’m glad we took the plunge in 2018, AI be damned! I’m not sure what it would mean if AI were trained on our letters. Would AI systems become increasingly thoughtful and nuanced in their communications? (Me complimenting us.) I assume the larger issue is that we don’t want AI to be trained on our words without our consent, which is what I think may be happening widely. More generally — your worst-case thinking made me want a kind of test to exist, wherein you (or any one of us) would answer a set of questions, and then we would be able to guess your job. I suppose in a way that is what the Myers-Briggs and Enneagram type tests are about, but I am thinking of something more like a game show and less like a tool for personal or career growth. Guess! My! Job! And thinking more broadly about worst-case scenarios — I do sometimes see their specters unfold before my own eyes. Perhaps running through worst-case scenarios is a version of preparing for death, even as its goal would seem to be to avert the possibility of death. Here is mine: sometimes at a crosswalk I will stand with my back to a pole or something solid, so that it would be more difficult for someone to spontaneously push me into traffic. (Sorry if this becomes a new fleeting worry for you!) I think this particular way of thinking came about after I heard the awful story last fall of a random act of violence in which a woman was pushed into a moving subway train in New York, her head striking the train. I had never imagined that I could be pushed into danger (is this completely true? I feel like I’ve stood next to natural cliffs and hoped no one would sneak up behind me and push me) and I still don’t imagine that such a thing is likely to happen to me. When I position myself securely at a crosswalk or near a train I am not fearful; I am implementing my protocols — perhaps I have the momentary feeling of having narrowly avoided my death, this time. Complicated and perhaps strange feelings! As I type up these notes I am thinking about how lately when I’ve been out jogging I have sometimes stopped at a crosswalk to stretch in a forward fold, and in theory someone could still come right up behind me and dump me into traffic. No thanks!
Speaking of mortality — hopefully each of us has many happy and creative years ahead. I’ve been thinking lately about how you were once working on a particular creative project and as you neared its close you feared the possibility that something would stop you from finishing, and you had told B that if something happened to you he was to leave the project in my care. I have been thinking myself lately about how, if something were to happen to me, I am imagining leaving all my words in the shared care of you and another writer and good friend of mine — the idea being that if I die suddenly, maybe the two of you can figure out what to do with my words! Or together you can delegate the task out to someone else! I like the idea of you and this particular friend meeting — and hopefully such a meeting may take place before my death! But I have so many words — and I am so slow about figuring out what they are — and I’m lighting a little fire under my own ass to get going — but I also wanted you to know that if something happens to me, I’m dumping a bunch of google docs on you! (I’ve literally been pondering whether I should set up a specific google drive folder with copies of all my docs and then give you a link that is only to be accessed in the case of my death! I am laughing out loud at this now! And still thinking about it!) I think the feeling is tied to the fact that I’m just coming around to really believing that there is a longer work (or works) to be extracted from all my daily writings and built upon — something like a novel — and starting to grasp that concept then makes me fear that I’m going to miss my chance to make it happen. I won’t! This line of thought might also have been sparked by a recent bookstore trip in which I saw a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (this is not a book that I am interested in reading, I just like math-y concepts) — and I did a rough calculation in my head: 50 weeks in a year times 40 years (lowballing both the number of weeks in a year and my actual age, of course!). I gasped when I realized I was already past 2,000 weeks in my life. This is not a surprise! I know how old I am! But there was something startling about translating that time into weeks, and feeling like a week is such a real unit of time, so tangible, and realizing that we have not so very many total weeks in our lives. A year sounds so long; when you think about the possibility of having 80 years in your life it sounds like an eternity. But a week passes so quickly — and two thousand weeks doesn’t actually sound like that many weeks to me — and to know that even if I’m lucky, that’s probably about how many weeks I have left… it’s time to get to work! Lighting the fire!
I am thinking I’ll eat some Arizmendi pizza again for dinner tonight, and I purchased a gnarly-looking soda at the grocery store yesterday to drink alongside: a banana cream (!) flavored beverage. Once I locked eyes with it I could not pass it up. There was an orange soda in the same soda family that would likely have been a more reliable choice — I love orange soda! — but I couldn’t deny the way the banana cream had grabbed hold of my curiosity. I like cream soda — but banana cream? Anyway, soda and pizza are a match made in heaven and I’m glad it’s Friday! I saw an amazing movie this week called La Chimera — put it on your list for the next time you think about seeing a movie! It might be one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. I’m going to find a way to see it again. I don’t think I’ll go to the movies tonight, but who’s to say! The evening is young! I hope you have a glorious Friday night and weekend and I will talk with you soon — from Minneapolis!
Until then, yours,
Eva