On tide pools and digital ghost towns, how we count time and what counts, and what money is for
November 7, 2019
Dear Eva,
Yesterday, I returned to work (aka fired up my laptop and signed into Slack) after five days on PTO. It was a late start to the day after spending some time with the boys in the morning since we hadn’t seen them since our return from Mexico City late Tuesday night. But when I got into the Slack channel, I noticed there was only one solitary “good morning” post from a coworker. I posted my “hey, I’m back” message and then turned to my inbox. But no replies came. No messages of any kind, for the next hour. The staff Slack channel was a digital ghost town. I was surprised at how disorienting the experience was, particularly after being away and expecting a feeling of reconnection after vacation. I eventually realized everyone had already made the switch to a new Slack channel. When I got signed up, I found a new digital workspace buzzing with activity. There they were, even though I couldn’t see or hear or feel them. It was a pretty surreal way to start my first day back after vacation. But also further proof that closeness / connection are all about perception.
I thought about that a bit during our four nights in Mexico City without the boys as well. They felt especially far away; we didn’t try to Facetime or really talk to them, not intentionally, it just didn’t happen. Add on to that the fact that Jonah got really sick and ended up taking a late-night trip to the ER the second night we were gone, and I felt about a world away. And in many ways, I was. I was surprised just how different the city felt, though I’m not sure why. It is a different country after all, with a different language and culture. We had a wonderful time and saw and tasted and learned so much. But I have rarely felt such a sense of relief upon returning home. My respiratory illness got worse when I was gone, just like Jonah’s did, and I wanted my bed, my home, my family, my world. I am quite content at this moment, sitting next to a curled ball of sleeping dog and listening to jazz piano music while I type. It is a darn good life I lead.
I was enthralled by your letter last week, fascinated by how much your thoughts about time and days resonated. All the tasks of life take time, and many are necessary, even if they are invisible (read: unpaid), you wrote. This is a truth I have been gradually unraveling this past year, trying to readjust my life around it now that I can see it. For awhile now, I have used an organizing system (or “life management” as you call it in your letter) built around the 9 buckets that make up the bulk of my life: my paid work is one, but so are friends, politics & service, wellness, more. Every week as I think through my priorities for the week, I flip through the 9 buckets to determine whether there is anything within that bucket that I want to focus on in the coming week. It helps me assure that I don’t de-prioritize the aspects of my life that are important, but which lack concrete deliverables and the direct external accountability of quarterly goals and performance reviews. It helps me mentally count the time I spend doing things like writing and framing a poem for my mom and aunt at Christmas, just like I would count time spent writing a memo at work. It still isn’t quite enough though, doesn’t quite help me crystallize what it is that makes a life.
This week I settled on a new frame. There are three long-term goals I have in my life: to create, to connect, to contribute. There are several huge buckets of things I must do to sustain myself and move toward those goals: make money, learn / grow, manage my life and home, take care of myself. I only settled on this frame last night, so I could be missing something. But I think this literally sums up my life and centers me on what is truly important to me. And it makes strikingly clear just where money sits in the equation; it is a tool, not an end goal. And shows how things like learning to draw with Jonah, or writing these weekly letters, or knocking on doors at election time—these are investments of time that work directly toward my fundamental goals in life. If I start truly structuring my time and energy around these markers, will it be, as you wrote last week, one possible definition of living one’s life for oneself? It is truly bizarre how much of our days and our identities can so easily end up getting tied into the narrow slice of life that relates to how we get paid.
Now that we have settled the meaning of life, I would like to turn to yet another project I would like to propose we consider for phase two of RogShinch. I wrote last week about how we should focus on the existing output we have—molding, recreating, layering atop. I, one week later, still strongly support this focus. But I also want to add another possible element into the mix, around the inevitable consumption of information and content we will do no matter what. You mentioned in a recent call your ideas about creating syllabi, in using the internet for education in as-yet-undiscovered containers. I think you specifically mentioned the idea of creating a newsletter that is actually a sort of unconventional syllabus. I have been stewing on this, and I think I love it. Here is why—it is essentially a way of adding a narrative / summary to all of the bits we gather over a given period of time. Specifically, I am imagining a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly newsletter (constructed using some sort of template we create, so we don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel each time), where we list what we have consumed [podcasts, blog posts, articles, books, quotes] and organize them around themes / conclusions / ideas. Where we do the work to sort the new inputs, put them into frames, connect dots. As you wrote last week, in these letters and our conversations we are creating and shaping the world we live in, and the world we want to live in. Why not extend that work into the frontier of our lives that relates to everything we are taking in on a daily / weekly / monthly basis? It sounds daunting, but the consumption part is something we are already doing and will always do anyway. Ultimately, this project would mean we consume less, with intentionality, and mull on those things more. It would mean we dedicate more time to fitting the pieces together, rather than continually adding more pieces into the pile.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Until next week,
Sarah
Thursday November 7 2019
Dear Sarah,
It’s interesting how the world looks different from a different point of view. I’ve put my recreational spending largely on hold while I’m making the transition to freelancing and M and I are seeing how our finances look with one full-time income and one differently shaped income coming in. We have a pretty good sense of how this will shake out, and I’d say thus far it feels all right, but I’m still scaling back on spending. While I was working full-time I was much more casual about what I purchased. I would still give myself time to think about whether I wanted certain objects — tried not to buy much on impulse, tried to look at my purchases through a broader lens of what I needed versus wanted, and tried to prioritize among those things so I wasn’t spending willy-nilly. Things I might have casually purchased would include: occasional articles of clothing (since I’d been working from home for the last three years, I’d already reduced this, even as one who never shopped much for clothes, because people see me in full infrequently, so why have lots of outfits?); occasional pairs of creative or colorful or season-specific shoes; magazine subscriptions; art books; art prints; support for occasional miscellaneous Kickstarter projects that looked particularly interesting to me; occasional-to-regular classes like the riso printing and neon classes I took recently; fancier beverages from the grocery store, restaurants, and coffee shops... that’s a fairly good sample. So, now I am just taking a break from a lot of these things. They were things that felt like my reward to myself for working full-time. I would say to myself, if I am going to work full-time on a decent salary and there is some wiggle room for spending after I’ve saved, I am going to spend some of that money on things I enjoy. (And I’ll note that it is a privilege to be able to live in such a way, and to say such things.) Now I have shifted the balance, and I am instead enjoying having more hours of the day in my time-wallet, and I am pausing on the miscellaneous purchases.
This is all to say that, having shifted my mindset and my practices, it is especially interesting to observe just how much of the communication I receive or see in the world is about trying to sell me something. Instagram advertises a lot of comfortable, soft-looking clothing and mildly intriguing footwear to me; my email inbox is full of lists I’ve signed up for over the years trying to entice me with a rapid-response, hours-left percentage-off flash-sale deal on some something that will only last a few more hours… only to show up again in my inbox in another week or two. All the urgency drains out of these messages if I let them stop being urgent, if I see them for what they are, which is an attempt to create urgency, an attempt to get me to think about my paycheck cycles as fleeting time periods in which I need to offload money burning a hole in my bank account, and convert it quickly to objects and experiences before the next check comes rolling around.
I have the feeling lately of having stepping out of a river that is still rushing by, carrying many if not most people and things I know. But the feeling I have is not a feeling of missing out — it’s a feeling of having removed myself from the crush, and I am now able to observe it from a quiet post where the water is still but pleasant. I suppose that means I am in something like a tide pool, or an adjacent dip in a boulder, or the land near a river where water can collect and things can grow, undisturbed by the rushing, moving water. It’s simply a different area of the land to be living on, and in. Who’s to say that the rushing river is better than the quiet pool?
I’ve continued to think about how my time feels different, and today I wondered if the “week” still holds sway, and I don’t think it does, in the same way. Days are my units of time now. I continue to be an early riser — M and I wake early most days to run or exercise, and if we skip that, I still wake early to start the day when he does — and I keep finding that I’ll feel productive on a day, and will look at the time, assuming the day must be ending soon, and instead I will see that it’s 1PM, or 3PM, points in the day with plenty more hours still to roll out ahead. As far as the weeks, here is what I’m thinking about today: I see M the most on two days out of every seven; I am alone much of the day on five days out of seven, and those days are quieter.
For me, this all connects up with what you said in your letter last week about the value of learning not only through new inputs, but also looking again at what was gathered along the way. I can’t applaud this enough. We are conditioned as a culture to push forward, to hunt for more and new, to swallow big bites as we go, looking always to fill the hungry mouth again. What if we simply chew longer, what if we ruminate like a cow, send some of the same ideas and objects and X through our many stomachs to get all the “value” out of them that we can, and perhaps we can one-up the cow by coming back to the ideas and objects and X at a later date (pardon me, as here the analogy will break) and chew over it again, seeing how it tastes different at a different time (gross!), in a different light, at a different age? You know what I mean! It makes me think again about dense calories and empty calories — I’m reminded of my letter that compared our letters to complex carbohydrates as opposed to high glycemic index foods (though I may possibly have been mixing my standards as far as the difference between complex/simple carbs and low/high glycemic index foods… forgive me!) — I think most everything we’ve written to each other and talked about together is dense with energy, we can chew and chew on it, and keep finding new flavors. There is something new to be found in words both new and familiar; ideas we thought we broke down as thoroughly as possible suddenly reveal new facets when we shine our light from a different angle or send them through a prism of some other thing we just learned or shared. Infinite possibility remains in everything we’ve talked about and written about, even though we’ve already talked and written about it!
Thinking about what you said about your resistance to spending time looking back — for example with the Made with Creative Commons book — your resistance to packaging up what you’d learned in talks or articles about the book, I’ve been thinking a lot lately along these lines about the importance not only of looking again at what was gathered along the way, as you noted, one step in the layered learning process, but also about the importance of sharing, teaching, and communicating what you and I have learned (together and in our individual practices). My tendency has also been to keep learning, to always keep absorbing the things I learn into myself, to keep taking in. But what is the value of this practice if I always keep what I’ve learned and synthesized to myself, and only continue taking in? I think there’s a way to both move back through what we’ve learned, continuing to learn from it, while cycling it out and turning it over for others in the world. More and more I am thinking about this as a way to complete the cycle of learning, by contributing back to the space of learning from which we’ve drawn. I think this gets at what you were considering when you wrote (or texted, or spoke to me) that you wondered if our letters were a commons. They would seem to be a commons in the making — they are a commons for the two of us, right now — and now it is up to us to figure out over time how we might make what we’ve learned more of a commons that other people can learn from. While we didn’t start the letters in this way, with this particular kind of “outcome” in mind, it seems that we could find ways to pay forward what we’ve learned, in hopes of sending tiny sparks out to others who are pondering as we are pondering.
So much more to say, so much more in your letter to reflect upon, and yet this letter is another long one! There are more weeks ahead! And so I’ll say — until next week!
Your friend,
Eva