On dominating in West Des Moines, wheels in the grass, and nighttime in our world
September 13, 2019
Dear Eva,
Hello from the airport in your city! I am connecting through here on my way back from Seattle, trying to move my mind back into reality. Does this happen to you when you travel for work, that you start to feel like you are operating in an alternate universe? When I called home yesterday, I mentioned to Simon that it was sunny here, and he replied, “It’s nighttime in our world.”
Speaking of different worlds, it was completely bizarre to know that you were running around Seattle for three more days after we said our goodbyes as coworkers in your last staff event on Monday. There were Eva sightings by colleagues – at the hotel breakfast spot one day, a restaurant at dinner another day. But when I walked to the staff meetings on Tuesday morning along the same path we had walked together on Monday, it felt like you and I were suddenly in parallel universes. Which is to say, I miss you! And I missed you even while you and I were still staying in the same hotel. It is going to be really hard to readjust to this Eva-less workplace. I remain hopeful we will be professional colleagues again one day; in the meantime, I will be content as your creative collaborator, and friend!
One part of my recalibration back to my rightful place in Simon’s world is preparing myself for a day full of class tomorrow. I genuinely love being a student, and these two current classes are no exception. Nevertheless, sitting in a classroom on a Saturday after 7 days of being away from home will be a challenge. One of my classes is about negotiation strategy. As an assignment recently, we took a quiz about our bargaining style. I was a bit startled to see I scored a zero (ZERO!) on the assessment of my competitiveness. I was aware that I don’t feel much of a competitive drive these days, aware that this is a shift that has happened sometime along the way in these last few decades. It was still stunning to see I was not even competitive enough to make the chart. This has me thinking about what it means to be competitive. It seems that it is easy to conflate the drive to win or be the best with the drive to want to do what you are doing well. When I was young and thought myself to be a highly competitive person, I think it was this that I was really feeling – a desire to do well, and then judging whether I accomplished that goal by seeing where I stacked against others. Sometimes, competition can be a rough but loosely accurate measure of our own performance.
But this feels quite different from being competitive as an end in itself. I am thinking back to a memorable exchange with a coworker I had a couple of years ago. He was talking about how much he enjoyed a spinning class at the gym that was structured as a race. The faster he pedaled, the higher he moved in the rankings on the TV screens at the front of the class. I told him that I had recently been going to a strength training class, where we lifted, pushed, and pulled light weights around to the beat of loud music. I explained that I was often one of the youngest people in class because I went on Friday mornings around 10 AM. As I started to say why I loved the experience of moving and sweating while surrounded by retirees, he interrupted me to blurt out his guess, “Because you dominate them?” It still makes me chuckle to consider because the answer was quite the opposite. First of all, most of them handled the class far better than me because they were regulars and had built up endurance for the class that I didn’t yet have. And moreover, it was the communal experience that I relished; it was joyful and made me feel alive.
Surely there are things I miss out on by not being competitive. When a larger purpose at work is absent, competitiveness can probably fill in to motivate. There is always more money to win, more people to beat, more power to gain. Maybe I could have even been the best athlete in my Body Pump class at the YMCA in West Des Moines, Iowa!
I am content to live in a different world.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday September 13 2019
Dear Sarah,
I just saw you on Monday but it feels like ages ago and I wish we could have spent the day together today! It’s Friday the 13th, and a full moon, and my last day of work at my full-time job — my last day as a full-timer for the foreseeable future. (Full-time, even this concept brings a whiff of offense, for why should any one of us give our full time to anything we’d call a job?)
It was a day that ended quietly, a bit lonely, although M joined me for my final hour as I tied up remaining loose ends and as the work machine otherwise rolled slowly to its close. It’s a little sad to end a period of one’s life alone. M and I have since had a tasty dinner that involved cocktails and fried cheese curds to start, but I still feel a bit melancholy and introspective. Change feels strange. I’m reminded during a moment of change that it’s easier not to change, easier to just continue pushing on in the same direction.
I’m thinking of your letter from last week and I fear I may not do it justice in this moment, even though it filled me with emotions last week when I read and reread it. I am not a regular participant in nor watcher of baseball but I have seen a few games, and I loved your insight into baseball scoring and the snapshot of the whole game over nine innings. Interesting that this could be, as we say, one of America’s favorite past-times, and yet, how many people take away this particular message of keeping track along the way? I suppose there are ways in which we’re all always keeping track — grudges held here and there, chores done last week and traded next week with the reminder that so-and-so did the last batch. I prefer our form of time-tracking, this thoughtful process that has steered us into new territory, created new paths by virtue of us showing each other and ourselves what we were seeing along the way, hashing it out together. Are many others documenting their days and weeks in letters with friends? I would hope so, and I imagine some are, but perhaps not as many as we might hope.
I felt tenderly toward you and Jonah as you talked about teaching and learning how to ride a bike. I could be misremembering, but I am not sure anyone taught me how to ride a bike, even though it seems like a quintessential thing to be taught by one’s parents. I recall that I had a bike that I needed to learn how to ride, which would have meant that my parents or someone bought me that bike. The main memory of the process that stands out to me is that I learned how to ride, at the age of seven or so, in my backyard whose grass was filled with red mulberries dropped from the bushes. It’s a messy way to learn to ride a bike — not least because of the mulberries, but because it’s not a smooth ride taking your bike for a spin on the grass, and when you’re just getting started you’re looking for those sweet, smooth moments when you pick up just enough speed to realize that’s where the fun is, that’s why you’re trying in the first place. I chuckled at your statement that I’ll be damned if my kid is one of the few on earth who doesn’t learn to ride a bike! I chuckled because I think this won’t happen — something tells me he’ll learn if he hasn’t already! — and I chuckled because I pictured people from here on out using that phrase, It’s like riding a bike, you never forget! and that he might feel a pang of emotion because he’d never learned! You can’t forget what you’ve never learned, and you can’t forget what you have learned, either. I was thrilled for you in that moment when you reminded him what was possible, when I pictured you combing through your toolkit of things to say and remembering the story about his success with swimming.
Tonight M has been seeing me and my need for some sympathy with my lonely emotions, and he’s been queuing up some juicy tunes since our ride home from dinner to give me a little channel for my emotions to flow along, some Kate Bush and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Wagner’s Pilgrim’s Chorus. Is it still change if no one’s around to see it? I’m greedy at this closing moment for some extra hugs even though I had the special benefit of time together with you and with colleagues at work this week, a farewell in person that is oddly rare at this place where we’ve worked together these last few years. I think it just means we all need each other even more than we say or think we do, all the time. We know what it’s like to be human, alone and together, and when you’re feeling human you want another human to see you and understand! Much work may be a construct but getting to know real people is real, and it feels good, and it’s sad to say goodbye to people even if they were seemingly rarely with me in the first place. Maybe this is a general metaphor for the fleeting nature of things anyway! Savor your moments with your people, and I’m counting down until the next time we’ll see each other again, even as our letters are nearly as close as we can get to being together each week. XOXO and talk with you very soon!
Until then,
Yours,
Eva