On tiny dictators, combing the hair of the earth, and an expansive definition of fruits
October 10, 2019
Dear Eva,
I am especially grateful for our letter-writing commitment this week. It has helped me carve space into my schedule on this Thursday to pause and take a pensive look at the goings-on of my life these past several days. From a home life perspective, it has been a week! Simon happens to be in a [presumably temporary] stage where simple, fundamental tasks like eating a meal can become dramatic and emotional affairs. There does not seem to be much rhyme or reason to the outbursts—one minute you are making the “dip egg” he requested and 30 seconds later, he is hysterical that you are not scrambling it. None of this is uncommon or even notable in the context of parenting a toddler, but that doesn’t make it any less trying while it is the constant undercurrent of my time with my family. Needless to say, I am especially thankful to be quietly reflecting at my desk alone on this rainy day.
I have been thinking about what you wrote last week about having a mild yearning for external obligations during your newfound professional freedom and space. I can completely imagine having a similar feeling in your shoes (though, of course, while I am currently wearing different shoes, the lack of external obligations sounds like a real treat!). Having an obligation—being told one way or another what it is you should do with a given chunk of time—can be comforting. It gives us something to do with our time without having to do the work of deciding how to spend it or even wondering whether we are spending it the right way. After all, it was an obligation; I didn’t have a choice! Or so we tell ourselves. At work, I think that is why it is always so tempting to whittle away time clearing our inboxes. Each email is like a tiny little dictator, instructing us how to spend the next few minutes of our time as we reply, forward, or otherwise act upon it. It is the same reason I love nothing more than good ole course syllabus. It is a roadmap to learning something new and valuable, conveniently chunked into manageable snippets that I can gradually cross of the list with a bright yellow highlighter. When we are faced with open time, we have to do that work. We have to decide what is the best use of our time and then create that roadmap. That work is heavy! But it is also, I think, the work of truly living a life. These next few months, you are going to do the work to think about your priorities, what it is you want to think about, who you want to connect with, what you want to do with your hands, and then you will map out just how you will do it. It is a more wise, enlightened form of living than most of us do if you ask me. (You didn’t ask me, but I am telling you anyway.) I am so anxious to hear, read, and see the fruits of your labor during this spacious time, and I say that with an expansive definition of “fruits” that means everything from relationships you deepen to writing you produce to solitude you savor with new eyes. What an adventure you are on, my friend! I am living vicariously, for now.
Last night, Jonah and I practiced his piano together like we do most evenings. His last task on the weekly assignment list was to do a set of note flashcards. We have been doing this for several weeks, each time adding a few new notes higher and lower away from middle C. This was the first week his teacher had not added any new cards; instead, we were to start timing him as he went through the stack. Jonah was excited. We set the stopwatch, and he went through the cards, stumbling 1-2 times, for a grand total of 1 minute, 34 seconds. He asked to do it again. This time, he stumbled only once, briefly, and finished in 1 minute, 21 seconds. “Again!” He shouted, the exuberance at his progress palpable in his voice. Maybe he would be ready for “The One-Minute Club” sooner than he thought! (His teacher has a poster board on the wall of her piano studio with photos and names for kids who meet this milestone.) But this third time, Jonah got flustered. Once he realized he wasn’t going to beat his last time, his frustration compounded, and he ended up finally finishing after 2 minutes, 9 seconds. Devastation followed. Hitting himself, rubbing his bare legs on the rug to try to give himself a rug burn, yelling that he was a failure.
Well, that sure took a turn! Again, nothing terribly notable about a 7 year old’s frustration, but to me, it was fascinating to view the shift that occurred when we added the one new factor of keeping time. Suddenly, there was an objective measure of his progress. How quickly we latch onto these goals and metrics, even as trivial and arbitrary as they often are! But it makes sense, how else do you know how you are doing? I think this gets to something we have been bouncing around in our letters about competitiveness. We were both a bit smug about our low competitive drives, but we also acknowledged that it is easier to be that way when we have gone through enough success in life to vaguely know how we stack up in the big picture scale. Last week I wrote about Robin DeRosa’s keynote, and it is coming up again for me now. One of the things she discussed was a theory that we understand the meaning of a word not so much because of its definition, but because of how we understand it in relation to other words. This resonates with me, and I guess I think this probably applies to our understanding of self, too. We know ourselves, at least in part, because of how we compare ourselves to other humans and because of how other humans react to us. When they judge us, when they commend us, when they love us, we use this to inform our sense of self. Everything—even our own identities—is more interconnected than we so often think. This feels like another reminder of something that can be hard to see as we swim through our lives—we need each other.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday October 11 2019
Dear Sarah,
It’s funny how the weeks pass differently with these letters as anchors among the days. After last week’s letter — which made me feel a bit gloomy, or which I thought was expressing my gloominess, though I think you said later that you only had a sense of my gloominess when I said I was gloomy, rather than that spirit having made it to the page — after I wrote the letter I felt different, and I could have written a whole new letter to you on the other side of that first letter. Yet in some ways it felt like a rewrite would have defeated the idea of our letters (and as you’ll recall I was dawdling over my first letter enough anyway!) so I sent it off to you. On the heels of that feeling of a second letter waiting in the wings, right on the heels of the first letter, I started a draft of this week’s letter last Saturday, which now feels like ages ago.
I am reading again through your letter of last week, thinking about how you dislike when people say “time flies,” particularly around children growing up. I think I might say this all the time! Maybe those of us who use those words need to refine our commentary. The words spring out of my mouth on the strange and regular occasion of being reminded that people keep growing and changing even when we are not looking at them. We all know they do, of course, yet it is most markedly demonstrated when we see kids we haven’t seen in a while. There’s a big difference between a child who was 6 months old and is now 18 months old, for example, or two years and four years, or six years and ten years. We can forget this as adults (especially if we don’t spend every day with children) because adults go through a lengthy stretch where we’re essentially the same — our feet have stopped growing, we might wear clothes we’ve owned for a long time, we haven’t grown out of anything in a while (at least in the up direction). I suppose time flies is a statement better spoken inside one’s head — it acts as shorthand for the paragraph I just wrote, and sometimes we need more than shorthand. I try to say the full paragraph when I can.
As you said — We can choose to watch. We can choose to reflect. A treasure of our letters, among many treasures, has been to see what it looks like to live in the space of a sustained conversation, a space where we are thinking together over time, picking up the threads across phone and text and email conversations that we then draw through our letters. One of my favorite experiences of grad school was the simple fact that I had a creative “thing” of my own to think about in an ongoing way, a “thing” to which I could turn my mind while I was brushing my teeth or washing my hair or going out for a run or wandering grocery store aisles, a “thing” I could even think about while spending time with others, not in a distracting way, but like a comforting mind-layer buoying up and perhaps inspiring the conversations I might have with others. Work, job-work, can act in some of the same ways, can flow into the free spaces in our minds when they feel a bit hollow, waiting for something to knock around and chew over, but it’s not always as satisfying as having a project and a thought process that originates with you, that is yours to tend.
Speaking of tending — I mentioned the other day that I had a massive amount of leaves to rake, and I did rake them, for about two hours! The healthy ash tree in our front yard is dropping its leaves and they drifted all over the hill of the lawn and the driveway. I took pleasure in the raking for a couple of reasons. One: raking is like combing the hair of the earth. What a nice feeling. It is sweet to tend to the earth in this way. I have on occasion combed a child’s hair, my niece’s, or further in the past, the hairs belonging to the children who I worked with (around? for?) in a preschool once upon a time. Combing hair is a delicate and tender act. (For another letter: hair. It’s weird.) So there I was combing the hair of the earth, a feeling which may have been augmented by the fact that I was raking down the hill, gathering leaves on the driveway, and the roundness of the hill made me feel even more like I was combing. Two: I was savoring the fact that it was fine if I did an only okay job of raking. I’m certain there are people who meticulously trim and maintain their yards and I think I may never be that kind of person. I felt pleased the rake the lawn in an okay fashion. There have been few activities in my life where it felt safe to me to just perform okay — I find that I’m usually trying to excel for any number of reasons: for my own satisfaction; because the task at hand somehow deserves or requires excellence; to ensure my membership in a group of those who excel; to guarantee my inclusion in certain areas of work and society. But guess what: it hardly matters how well I rake the leaves. I felt like a teenager, lifting wads of leaves to load into giant paper bags, a dusting of every handful gusting away on the wind, drifting back to the ground to be raked once more. I wasn’t in any particular hurry, it was a Wednesday night with a burrito and a Negroni in my future. What a moment of total relaxation, to feel like a lazy teenager there in my own driveway, the last warmish breezes of the early fall wafting over my skin. It is pure satisfaction in such moments when nothing is pushing or pulling at me, nothing calling my name, nothing waiting around the corner with any urgency at all. Just me and the rake and the earth and the ash leaves in its hair.
I started reading Robin DeRosa’s keynote transcript and need to return to the second half. I love the insight that our closeness with or distance from others is purely a matter of perception. I think it is perception and in some cases it is about time (there is an equation hiding in here that I’ll have to mull on a bit) — the time we spend with each other, the time we spend in shared mental spaces… as you described in last week’s letter and the week before! I will finish reading the transcript, and then I have some half-baked thoughts on this that I want to bake fully and send back to you, cookies instead of raw dough! In fact, I have a number of leafy thoughts fluttering about right now, and more I thought I might write this week about what I’ve been reading this week and how it fits in with all of the above — the time we spend with people, the way we are close with them or not, and what it means to spend time in writing and reading — and I think I’ll tuck it away for a future letter. Most likely next week’s, though who knows exactly what will transpire over the next 168 hours, more than 10,000 minutes, to send our thoughts and words in new directions. So many possibilities!
Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva