On juggling all day with great concentration, experiments in digital geological layering, and one security line’s worth of time
June 19, 2024, June 21, 2024
Dear Eva,
I felt relief reading your letter last week. Sometimes, when I am mentally exhausted after a stretch of work, I feel frustrated with myself. I want to have energy reserves so I can do the things I want to do after doing the things that I must do. To hear that your same jogs have gotten slower once you completed your sabbatical somehow feels like the evidence I need to cut myself some slack. I do not have a particularly stressful job in any way, and yet it takes a significant amount of energy day in and day out. I was reflecting recently about one gift of this job — yes, a gift! — has been the way it has caused me to become more decisive. Every day I face at least a handful of scenarios in which I must provide a judgment call based on imperfect information, often about situations and issues I know very little about and under time pressure. The stakes are not high on every single one, but nonetheless there are always stakes of some kind. I am being asked to weigh in because there is some element of risk involved. Over the past two+ years that I have been doing this job, I have gotten increasingly comfortable at trusting my instincts in these situations, making a call and then moving on to the next. Still, at the end of the workday I often feel like I have been juggling all day with great concentration and am ready to collapse on the couch.
This brings me to the work of feeding oneself. I connect very strongly to your sentiments about the drudgery of needing to eat. I love food, but I know exactly what you mean about it sometimes feeling extra, particularly when I am alone. If I wasn’t married to someone who was so adept in the kitchen, I am certain our family would be more reliant on food that comes in cardboard boxes. When I am home alone during the workday (a rarity because B usually comes home for lunch), I typically forage and eat just enough to keep my body running. I can’t help but wonder if there is some philosophical piece to this. Is the idea of eating as a burden derived from some subconscious sense that keeping ourselves alive is not a valuable activity in itself? For me, I most often feel that eating is a chore when there is something else I want or need to be doing. In other words, when eating takes me away from doing. Viewed that way, it makes me want to entirely change my relationship to my solo meals. The act of preparing food and then savoring the tastes requires a kind of presence that is much easier to have when we are with others. But I like the idea of trying to conjure some of that every time my body wants to eat, resisting the notion that there is something more important I should be doing than feeding myself.
–
Following your lead from last week of signaling the place and time when words were written, it is now two days later (Friday). I am in New York City with the family, currently horizontal on the hotel bed after a morning of sightseeing in the sweltering heat. We are here to celebrate a family friend becoming a Bat Mitzvah on Saturday, but we flew out a couple of days early to spend some time in New York with the kids. So far, we have devoured thick bagels with lox and a schmear, folded up giant slices of thin cheese pizza, slowly shuffled our way through crowds waiting to get on the Liberty and Ellis Island ferries, sat rapt at a Broadway show, gobbled honeycomb ice cream when our bellies were already full, and predictably regretted walking the kids through Times Square at 10 pm so their heads could explode from overstimulation. Not in that order, but it’s been a blur of touristy delights so the sequence seems irrelevant.
We have visited New York pretty regularly with the kids, but it has been particularly fun this time around given the stage of life S is in. Hot dogs on every corner! Pride flags in so many windows! Everything is a marvel, and S has been plotting future trips here from Port Douglas, Australia, where he plans to live in a cabin in the rainforest as a biologist (area of specialization TBD; there are many contenders at the moment).
Needless to say, my mental state as I write today is quite different from mid-week when I began this letter. It wasn’t that long ago that we entered the vacation vortex for our trip Down Under, yet I still feel pleasantly surprised at how quickly we can slip away into the alternate dimension of holiday life. It only takes about one security line’s worth of time for me to almost completely forget that my job exists. So right here, right now, I have none of my familiar feelings of not doing enough. I am just relishing this time away.
Last night, watching Wicked for the very first time, I nearly wept in the theater out of sheer awe at the creative talent. Sometime in recent years, I remember taking a quiz about sensitivity where one of the questions asked if you felt deeply moved by art and music. How is that even a question? Until that quiz, it had not occurred to me that my common experience of feeling overcome when watching musicals or concerts might not be how everyone feels. I realize how silly that sounds as I write it, but it is true. I just assumed my experience was universal. And frankly, knowing it is not, I feel a little bit sad for everyone who doesn’t have that intense reaction. It is one of my favorite parts of being human, and I was delighted to experience it again last night on Broadway.
Two weeks ago, I was here in New York for a workshop with former colleagues about subject matter (broadly defined) I spent a decade pondering. I was curious to see how it would feel to return to such a familiar scene after a few years away. Would it be tiresome or energizing? You already know the answer from our text messages, but I am continuing to reflect upon just how nice it felt. A bit like returning home. This makes me think about the next-level shit from last week’s letter, and how I wonder if there is some element of returning to past environments as a changed self in this situation, too?
I am hoping you have not had any more mystery pains or middle-of-the-night frets this week! For me, these things seem to ebb and flow. Maybe the summer solstice will change your vibes if it hasn’t already!
I continue to have simmering pots of excitement on the backburner relating to the ideas we discussed when you visited. Maybe we can plan a phone call next week and pick back up on some of those threads? I like the idea you had about using the space of these letters to continue the conversation. It is so fun to think that we have been circling these ideas since before this letter project began! A long conversation, indeed. I wonder where it will lead? Wherever it leads, I’m happy to have it!
Wishing you a wonderful weekend ahead, my friend!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday June 21 2024
Dear Sarah,
I am re-reading your letter of last week — can I/you shed the barnacles and the space junk while staying still? Splitting hairs a bit — I say no to stillness! but a possible yes to being or staying in place in a larger way, i.e. returning, i.e. not leaving. Movement is very meaningful to me in shaking off the barnacles; a change of scenery is meaningful; this can come in small variations: new seat at a familiar table, new room in the same home, new piece of furniture from which to contemplate one’s existing surroundings, new coffee shop in town, new corner at the old library. I think there could be people with a significant meditation practice who would dispute me on shedding excess while staying still versus being in some kind of motion. I am not skilled at meditation but I have spent a lot of time inside my own head — and movement, movement of the hand across the page while writing, movement of the body in a shake or a stretch or a walk or a run, have all felt important to me.
Thinking about your idea balls — there is something about choice here for me, choice and release; I think some idea balls need to be let go. I’m looking at you, stack of New Yorkers. I have thought on the fact that often, the presence or appearance of a thing seems to create an obligation, an assumption. Presence of The New Yorker seems to demand that each one be read. Presence of an email or a message seems to demand a response, or some kind of attention: reading, seeing, acknowledging. I have had an odd experience with my personal email lately — so many emails and newsletters and lists I’ve subscribed to over the years, and plenty that I haven’t — and they keep coming — and there is a way that my email seems to show me a past version of myself — a person who either wanted to read these messages, or thought she might. That person doesn’t exist anymore. But I also don’t care enough to take the time to empty the inbox. Why would I bother? I don’t show my inbox to anyone. The depth of its sediment doesn’t physically affect me. It’s an accumulated mass of the past, an experiment in digital geological layering. I walk along only the top layer each day. I got a gmail address when it was something you needed to be invited to, lol. I think it was 2003. [Correction: gmail launched in 2004.] Which means my email address is 21 20 this year, which means my email has become a fully fledged young adult. Live long and prosper, email inbox. Let me know of your future adventures; drop me a line along the way.
I’ve been experimenting with alternating-day activities. Have I already written about this? I don’t think so. Maybe I’ve spoken of it. One, I am generally adhering to an every-other-day run schedule, inspired by a friend. For a while in the past few years I think I would consider the possibility that every day could be a running day — and I’m not the kind of person who does run every day, but every day I might assess whether or not I was going to run on that day. A daily consideration. Sometime this year, or within the last year, I’ve turned toward the every-other-day schedule. This is surprisingly helpful. It streamlines the decision-making process. I’m not thinking about whether I can accommodate a run every day, how long it should be, etc. I am going on one day and not going on the next day. Distance I leave to be determined as I am running. This year I’ve gone as far as 7.5 miles, once; have regularly gone as far as 5 miles with an occasional 6ish; more often I run in the realm of 3.5 to 4 miles lately, a distance that accommodates some of my flagging physical energies due to a return to work-work, paid work, which is like taking my energetic tap with its row of handles, closing one tap, and opening another. I can’t do all the things at the same level; I can’t increase my running distance or pace and also add back in the mental energy expenditure of work, at least at this moment in time. Maybe I need to pump up my diet (always chasing protein) and see if I can do more of these things in a same-day proximity. Running every other day also shapes my time in a way that I like: the days are grouped in 48-hour chunks; there is the time of running and recovery, and the space between the end of one run and the beginning of the next. I like to reformat time to suit my needs, desires, interests; every time I shape my time in a way that is not directly related to the American concept of five 8-hour work days punctuated by two days off, I am pleased.
The other thing I am trying out as an alternate-day activity is looking at social media. I don’t exactly want to stop looking at social media altogether, or feel that I must. What I want is to break my habit of touching my phone, tapping the screen, clicking icons, just to have something flash before my eyes. God, how I love having things flash before my eyes! Something interesting has happened to me in my relationship to instagram. It could be tied to the algorithm in some way, or it could be tied to the fact that I’ve followed so many different kinds of people, things, projects: When I open it now I peek at a few stories up top and maybe the first post or two or three in the feed. But then I am done looking. I think that while there was some critical mass of people I wanted to actually follow or hear about, I had this feeling that when I looked at the app I should spend time with it to catch up on each of the people and projects I had decided I liked and wanted to follow. But over time, I’ve added so many, I could never follow along with them all now. Something about that, rather than feeling daunting, makes me feel lighter. I can’t look at them all, so it doesn’t matter how many I look at. I can look at one or two posts and that’s fine. Sometimes of course I look at more than that, but I don’t spend even dozens of minutes on the regular looking at instagram. It’s becoming like my simultaneously overstuffed and empty email inbox, an archive of things I’ve been interested in over the years. I’m still interested in some of the people and the things, just not interested in meeting them in that place, perhaps. Where’s our new hangout spot!
I do like to spend time scrolling on twitter, which is perhaps the worse habit, and a place that is increasingly a mess; I like following the people whose words I know I actually like, and I like catching random people saying funny things. It’s like being at a fast-paced comedy variety show. I wrote something in one of my daily documents recently about this: Reading twitter like a parade of brief talent show entries. The people who are talented are invited back for another tour across the stage. If your entry cannot be completed in the time it takes to cross the stage, that is the end of your time. Sometimes people bomb and sometimes they kill. A lot of the time I am intrigued to see people talking about things that are outside my field of vision, or the people themselves are people I would not typically cross paths with IRL. I like to pick up samples of the world happening beyond me, in a low-key way. Maybe it’s a form of personal ethnographic research. I don’t generally get angry or excited about the people who are different from me; I just like to know they are there, to add them to an ever-expanding map of how different people can be from one another. Sometimes the map widens dramatically at one edge or another, other times I add a new data point among a familiar cluster or gently expand the edge of a cluster. But — to bring it back to the every-other-day routine — I found that I was doing a lot of scrolling of twitter while I was eating, which is not really the best thing for my dietary habits or for my eyeballs. Taking an every-other-day break from social media is, on the whole, easier than I thought it would be. It is a bit of a relief on an off day to say to myself, It’s an off day. Find something else to do with your eyeballs. (I’m the boss. Only Eva tells Eva what to do!) The other day, on a social media off day, I found myself looking at silverware sets on eBay. I may in fact be checking my email more frequently, looking for something to read behind the glass. I have looked with brief longing at the array of app icons on my phone, wondering if any of them might have something new to tell me, a fingers-crossed replacement for social media time. The screen appeals. But it is easy to take a break from something for one day when you know you can do it again tomorrow. Refreshing! We’ll see if I feel new things about this as the days go by.
It’s Friday evening and I munched a significant portion of a box of Good + Plenty licorice before finally making dinner. This weekend I will prepare to travel to Michigan for a three-week stay — perhaps the longest stretch I’ll have spent in the state since I left in 2004 (with my newly minted gmail address). Maybe I can cast the detritus of my email inbox over the lands where I was born. What will I feel while I am there? How will it go? I will keep you posted! Miss you + looking forward to talking with voices before you are absorbed into the midsummer holidays!
Until soon!
Yours,
Eva