On the liberty to meander, looking life in the face, and naming what we want
July 18, 2019
Dear Eva,
Each week as I write and complete my letter to you lately, I have been having this feeling like I am writing something safe, something different from what I really want to say. It feels like that thing I sometimes do to postpone or avoid hard conversations — filling the air with perfectly reasonable but non-substantive words while my mind thinks about what I want to or should say but I don’t exactly know how. The funny part is, in this particular instance, I am not sure what precisely it is that I am feeling the need to say. I think maybe it’s less about what I write and more about how. I have been waiting until the last minute to write my letter these past few weeks, so my writing has felt rushed or mechanical somehow, like I don’t have the liberty to meander and experiment and try a few different ideas on for size.
So tonight, although it is Thursday evening and I’m determined to send off this letter before I retire for the night, I am committed to letting myself follow my thought-trains wherever they lead me, even if they run me right into a dead end or off into unknown terrain. It’s a hot, sticky summer night, and I’ve got a playlist of folksy female singers crooning out the TV speaker as my soundtrack. Let’s see where my typing fingers take us!
This week I have been coming off my beachy vacation high, recalibrating to daily life. I’m spoiled, of course. Monday morning just means rolling down the hall into my quiet home office with a cold brew. It is surely a softer landing than it would be going from ocean-gazing to cubicle-sitting. But no matter what, a vacation always gets me thinking about what it means to work, how we spend the bulk of our days, why we end up in the jobs we have. Like so many hugely consequential aspects of life, we tend to act as if finding a career path is straightforward. Find what you’re good at. Find what motivates you. Find what will make you money. Hope that these things overlap, and focus there.
After having had many different jobs in many different contexts in many different parts of the country, I feel I can safely say that there might be a hundred different answers to these questions for me, even within a single job. Things rarely stay in neat little categories — you can have a fascinating project within a boring company, a shitty task in an interesting subject area. To complicate things further, who you work with and how you work — these things matter just as much as what you do. All of this is actually a big relief to me; it means there are a lot of different roles that could be fulfilling if you’re surrounded by good people. It’s not about finding the one true career path.
In her blog post announcing her departure from Creative Commons, Jane Park wrote about using envy as a way to determine career goals. I have spent a lot of time thinking about that since I read it, and for weeks, I have been stumped. I admire all kinds of people for what they have done in their professional lives, but envy is something different. It really is a perfect metric because it gets at what you want, as opposed to what you appreciate. I have deep admiration for people who give everything to creative and/or purpose-driven careers; people like Ira Glass, who I recently heard say in an interview that, for years, he spent all of his awake time working. But it’s not what I want.
I envy the people who are able to find meaningful jobs that do not define them. People who are excellent at what they do but whose life’s work is far bigger than their day job. People who get up early to write poetry before going to the office. People who volunteer at a homeless shelter on Saturdays. People who make time for regular gatherings with friends.
When I was a kid, my parents always encouraged (required?) me to do a whole slew of activities: basketball, school newspaper, piano, volleyball, band, more. I used to complain that I was good enough at many things but not great at any one thing. Looking back now, I would swap out many of those activities for different ones (more art, fewer sports), and I’d carve out a bit more space to slow down and just be. But in an important way, my parents were right. I am happier with a full, multi-dimensional life, even if and when that means there are levels of achievement I will never unlock. My ambitions are horizontal.
With that, I need to end this rambling word journey and make myself physically horizontal. (Oh dear, will you forgive me for that one?) It’s after midnight!
Until next week,
Sarah
Friday July 19 2019
Dear Sarah,
I’m thinking about time again this week. (Actually, I’m always thinking about time, and some weeks those thoughts are elevated to the level of writing about them in my letter to you!) I have a habit of filling my time with activity — I love to take classes, for example — and sometimes my weeks will hit a fever pitch where I’m running to and fro, from activity to activity, with hardly enough time in between to process or enjoy the activities in a certain kind of way. Maybe it’s less that I want more time to process these activities, and more that the activities are different enough that things seem fragmented in a way I don’t intend? I love to keep my eyes peeled for interesting events, lectures, and classes, and to get them on the calendar for some moment in the future. This helps me actually get out and do things — my present self is looking out for my future-present self — but I also find that sometimes I am simply enticed by the idea of a thing rather than the thing itself. I am susceptible to words and how things are described. If you tell me about a certain kind of art event or reading or lecture, I am drawn into the possibility that it might be something I shouldn’t miss. I don’t think it’s quite FOMO, in that I think FOMO means a fear of missing out on something that maybe many others will enjoy and be talking about later; my feeling of fear of missing something is that I’ll miss out on some sort of personally transformative moment. This is hard to pin down because transformative moments are everywhere — in regular conversations, in the unexpected confluence of words and ideas. I could have a transformative moment while out for a run or while eating a piece of pizza (highly probable). But it can still be hard to understand, even though I know it is true, that I can’t do it all, and I have to make choices about how I spend my time. I find myself actively working to focus my mental lens on the things I care about, because there are so many ways in which it is comfortable to slip into the idea that someone else needs something from me, someone else’s possible plan for my time is more valuable than my own plan for my time. It requires constant vigilance not to fritter away time on meaningless things! Or, to bring time around to be frittered away on objectively meaningless things that are at least my own idea for how I want to fritter my time.
(Now I am thinking about fritters and the origin of frittering time away. I’m looking at this Wikipedia page and scanning over various types of doughnuts, fritters, and fried foods, and I’m also looking up the definition of “to fritter away”: to squander little by little. I think of apple fritters specifically as a single large doughnut, but otherwise, lots of fritters seem to be prepared more like small bits and nibbles. So, one way of thinking about frittering away my time is that it can get nibbled up in small bites, discrete units… unless, perhaps, I am apple-frittering my time away, spending it gloriously on large delicious doughnut-projects?)
I’ve also been thinking about how much time certain moments or experiences seem to want or need in order to be acknowledged as a “moment.” I don’t closely follow the work of Marina Abramovic but she popped into mind this week, as I recalled her presentation in 2010 of The Artist is Present, “a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. … Abramović sat in a rectangle drawn with tape on the floor of the second floor atrium of the MoMA; theater lights shone on her sitting in a chair and a chair opposite her. Visitors waiting in line were invited to sit individually across from the artist while she maintained eye contact with them.” A fair amount of attention was, understandably, focused on the endurance of sitting all day for hours at a time, but the thing that this performance evokes for me is some desire to have moments marked in life by some sort of intense acknowledgment, some meaningful form of seeing that is more than regular seeing.
I am also thinking about your letter from last week, your beachy sense of life feeling different while you’re on vacation and away from your usual rhythms. I’m thinking about whether and how we can force these perspective shifts on a regular basis, even when we’re not on vacation. We must be able to! How can we make the things that are the same feel different (not, of course, removing the need for actual vacations)? How can we see them in a different light? How can we get away from the things that demand our time, or at least shake them out of priority positions in our lives?
I suppose in all of the above I’m speaking to a running question in my mind: What matters? What matters? What matters? And if I am being honest with myself, I think I’ve been doing my best to pay attention to this echoey question and to do things that do seem to matter — to me, to others, to the “world.” Today I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I found out I had a limited amount of time to live. Would I go traveling? Where would I go? Would I buy hundreds of books I could never read and just thumb through them each one by one? (Would I need to buy them?) Would I gather people around me for a going-away party of sorts? Would I schedule one-on-one last conversations with everyone I want to talk to once more? Would I do things characteristic of me, or somehow uncharacteristic of me, yet interesting to me? (I am picturing buying lots of dramatic clothes, but this would require shopping, and I certainly don’t want to spend my last moments shopping.) You can’t do it all, whether time is long or short, so how would I actually choose what to do in a short period of time? It would seem that the short period should help dictate how I spend my time in the presumed longer period of time we hope we are allotted on this earth. I think I would go again to the places I’ve loved and try to absorb them again into my bones in some way, share them with the people I love. (See my musings on Tucson from last week.) And I think, now, I am creeping ever closer toward giving myself the time and space I want to dedicate to writing and creative projects. It’s hard to think about getting to that moment, that way of living, and looking it meaningfully in the face. I’m trying not to save it for an unidentified future time, trying instead to draw future me toward present me right now!
Your friend,
Eva