On finding our calling, what fits inside a minute, and the trajectory of shards
August 15, 2019
Dear Eva,
I have been sitting on the couch with my laptop placed on a puffy pillow on my thighs for quite a few minutes now, waiting for inspiration to strike as I stare at the blinking cursor on this blank page. I am realizing I shan’t wait for inspiration to start writing, or I could be here all night. It’s not that I don’t have thoughts buzzing about; it’s more that following those thoughts sounds taxing, like getting out of a cozy bed on a cold morning. I would rather stay tucked under the covers! But it is Thursday evening and I have a full schedule tomorrow, so the time to write is now.
I don’t think I would feel too tired to chat with you if you were here in my living room now, so I wonder why writing you a letter seems daunting? To play on your digestion analogy from last week, maybe I just need a little blood sugar spike to revive me. Your spoken words responding back to my spoken words, fueling me along. But you are not here. Just Bill, staring at his small phone in the chair across the room. Marlowe, collapsed in a heap next to me on the couch. The “Peaceful Summer Nights” Spotify playlist on the speakers, lulling me to calm.
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And… sleep wins. My body said no. I decided to listen. So now it is Friday morning, and I am buoyed by 9+ hours of sleep(!) and half an iced coffee infusing me with renewed life. I don’t think it is exaggerating to say that my brain actually feels different this morning. Last night, it felt strangely heavy, like it took effort to just keep the power on. Today it feels as if it has returned to its normal weight and is happily on and functioning as it should. Sometimes you just need to power down, I say!
I am thinking back to earlier this week when I saw you in the flesh. Does it not feel like ages ago? I am trying to put my finger on what made this week feel so packed and long. I spent a good chunk of time this week conducting job interviews. It was, in all seriousness, a delightful experience. Interesting people, interesting ideas, good conversation. But it reminded me how strange the norms are for choosing our colleagues. The entire concept that the way someone answers a few questions on the fly is somehow a good indicator of how they will function in a job is preposterous on its face. There is also such a lottery-esque feel to it — who happens to be looking at job listings, who happens to come upon ours, who happens to be chosen to do the interviews, what mood do they happen to be in during the interview, what words happen to flow out when they answer abstract questions about teamwork. It is a wonder it ever works out. The fact that it so often does — that good people find their way to good jobs — makes me think there are probably just a lot of good people out there, and a lot of jobs in which they could pretty easily find some challenge and fulfillment.
I think we do a lot of romanticizing work in our society. We talk about people find a calling; we act as if there is some grand plan for how we end up where we do. In reality, I think it’s all quite random. Heck, I think this goes for just about everything in life — who our friends are, who we partner with, what luck we have. It is a tad unsettling to think about how little control we have; I have always thought that’s why people tend to gravitate toward the idea of fate. If my destiny was to end up doing blah, then there must be some reason for it, some way to wrap my mind around it. I have never subscribed to this way of thinking, but I guess my way of understanding things borrows some elements from synchronicity. To me, it is all completely random, each life a tiny glass shard thrown in a particular trajectory after the vase hit the floor. But we can find/make meaning from the particular place we land.
Until next week!
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday August 16 2019
Dear Sarah,
My mind and eyes are bleary from a long week! How much activity can get compressed into a regular 24-hour period? Perhaps it varies for everyone, but working from home and shaping my own schedule over the last three-plus years, I find I can get more and more done; minutes seem newly valuable when you realize you can easily cover the ground between kitchen and desk-bound video call in 60 seconds; can make and eat lunch on a busy day in under 30 minutes; can capture many sparks of ideas in each of the minutes they appear. It sounds like there is too much going on and perhaps at the moment there is, but I have found I appreciate a stretchy understanding of just how much can fit into the minutes of every day. It doesn’t mean every day should be packed to the brim, of course, but I am always interested in understanding the shape of our containers — where are the farthest edges? What does a day look like at its most full (and at its least full, and most open)? I’m looking forward to a weekend in which I’ll luxuriate in days that will be much less full! Will it rain? Will the sound of raindrops and the smell of rain on grass and pavement waft through my windows? I hope so! The late summer evenings have been full of the sound of peepers in our lawn and in the park across the way — it’s a sound of summer that is familiar to me from M’s house in the country outside Lansing but I don’t think I expected we’d have peepers in the Minneapolis area. And yet they’re everywhere!
I opened up our site to look at last week’s letter and it briefly looked unfamiliar! That’s how you know my eyes have had too much light beaming into them for the last X number of hours. I am looking again at your letter, which I greedily gobbled up with last week’s eyes as soon as it was posted. I agree that we should essentially go on tour touting the promise of penpals! I may not be taking advantage of this week’s letter as I should be, at a late hour on a Friday night, and yet I relished the thought earlier today that my reward at the end of the work day would be to turn my attention to our correspondence, to re-read and refresh my mind on our words of last week, to noodle around in new words for you this week.
Last week you were coming off the visceral experience of sick-day caregiving — while I don’t envy the vomit, I similarly appreciate when things larger than the regular day-to-day sweep in and demand attention. Are there ever good things that do so? Or is it usually illness, drama, tragedy? (Knock wood in case I am unintentionally invoking something here!) I suppose if you were to learn you won a Nobel Prize, that would wipe everything else off the slate for a bit, or, in a more pedestrian occasion, if you won the lottery. What else? Nothing else I can think of at this moment seems both grand enough and positive enough to tip the scale. I’m sure more ideas will come to me behind closed eyelids!
These last few nights before I sleep I have been reading from Joy Williams’ collection of stories, The Visiting Privilege. I have read Joy Williams before but hadn’t owned any of her books, and I just treated myself to a round of a select few new books, this collection being one. The stories are just right, full of detail in the right way. I remember from my fiction classes in college that professors would talk about the importance of detail in our stories, and it half made sense then; I’d try to litter my stories with as many dribs and drabs as I could gather, loose collages of scraps, hoping they made sense, that they came together in that intuitive way I didn’t yet truly know was the product of hard work and many revisions. I recall a peer whose stories regularly featured details from a sector of society of which I was not a part, brand names like Frette linens woven throughout her pages on more than one occasion. Joy Williams’ stories say to me that details live with people, with characters; rather than stories being populated with characters who live side-by-side among the details of the world of the page, the details are theirs, seen through their eyes. This feels important, and I’m working on soaking up that way of thinking as I brush off my scraps and detailed pages and look again with fresh eyes — my own, and perhaps those of some new characters, we’ll see!
Now I’m due to rest my little eyes for the evening! Happy weekend, friend!
Until next week,
Yours,
Eva