On protecting each other, occupying our bodies, and microscopic acts of resistance
December 5, 2019
Dear Eva,
First, I want to mark this day—a blue sky, warm [for December], sunny, glorious day. It is the kind of day that needs to be marked, the kind that I need to remember on darker days, in darker moods. I went for a two mile walk for a break from my desk this afternoon, sans dog (he is at daycare), sans podcast in my ears. It is funny how working from home I often think I get enough silence that I don’t need to take walks or even shower in silence to get my requisite quiet time. Bill often marvels at how I find enough time to listen to all of the podcasts I consume, and my secret is that I cram podcasts into every non-working or talking moment of my day. But not today! Today I walk alone—physically and intellectually. I have nothing grand to say about the event, just that it happened, and the stillness that came with it—the pause on new packing material filling my skull as you put it in a recent letter—was/is lovely. Perhaps writing it here will help me remember it tomorrow and the days that follow. As you and I have written before, we do not always need more.
I have so many things swirling in my brain these days; themes that you and I keep dancing through and around from different angles and to different beats. What problems are ours to solve? Who are our people? When and with whom do we join forces to solve which problems and how? How do we spend our days, our money, our lives? I think you were right when you wrote last week that these things are all connected. I am still unpacking all of the ways they connect, trying to carve a frame in which they all can sit. This sounds like a lifelong project. I have time.
In the meantime, I am wanting to describe a little anecdote I heard on yet another one of my many podcasts that has proven sticky in my brain. It was Hasan Minhaj on Death, Sex, & Money talking about his experience as a Muslim in the aftermath after the mosque shootings in New Zealand earlier this year. He said it took him a few weeks to get the courage to go back to his own mosque in Manhattan for prayer. When he did, there were masses of people gathered at the entrance with signs that said things like “We will protect you.” He said those groups slowly dwindled over the months but that there is one woman who remains, holding vigil there every Friday night with her WYNC tote. Her presence there at the entrance has mostly symbolic effect, of course. She cannot singlehandedly prevent a mass shooting. But she is there showing support, greeting Hasan and others when they enter the mosque. I cannot get the image of this lone elderly woman out of my mind.
There are ways in which we alone can have power—maybe not power to change systems or lives en masse, but power nonetheless. This feels like it needs to be said, maybe to me especially.
Tomorrow I embark on my final weekend of class in the MBA program! It has not really hit me, even while I limp to the finish line with dwindling motivation these last few weeks. It sounds too good to be true that I will soon have 20 hours per week returned to my life to spend as I choose. They are 20 hours I used to fill in all the ways I fill the other hours of the week, but getting them back in this way—regifted to me—allows me to fold them back into my life with intentionality in a different way. I declare here and now that I shall not use even a minute of that time staring at social media. Let the record show! Just today, I finally took the action of permanently deleting my Facebook account. I stopped going to Facebook more than a year ago, but I realized sometime in the past few months that I hadn’t actually erased my account. For reasons I do not fully understand, that item rose to the top of my to-do list at about 3 PM today. It was funny to feel how the act of clicking “permanently deactivate” somehow felt dramatic, like a microscopic act of resistance and reclaiming of my time and my online identity. Take that, Zuckerberg! I have found other exponentially more rewarding spaces of social media.
I look forward to reading your words tomorrow, and I hope you have a weekend full of merriment and a bit of silence.
Until next week,
Yours,
Sarah
Friday December 6 2019
Dear Sarah,
We’re in the thick of the holiday season now! I felt cozy as I imagined the scene you set last week with your tree and “Christmas peaceful piano” piping in the background. It did sound like it should have been the perfect letter-writing setting! And yet, I know just what you mean about the sensation of not having enough space in your brain to enter writing mode. Peaceful relaxation mode requires its own space, it would seem! Maybe it’s better that way. Relaxation deserves its own space! And festive party time deserves its own space, too. Just as writing time deserves its own space!
I’ve been feeling in the last few weeks that the threads of my thoughts and our letters have been swirling around me. I keep wanting to find a way to grasp all the threads at once, to pull them together into something dense and complete. Perhaps I’m trying to compress the full tapestry of our process into the single window of one of our weekly letters (impossible!). (Do you ever have the sense that we are somehow aiming for some future letter that is going to be the pinnacle letter, a letter that will “solve” all the questions we’ve been posing? I have some of that sense, if only because it feels like we have been posing questions and also answering questions over these weeks — so perhaps if we are finding answers to some of our questions, we will find answers to all of them!)
I sat up in bed last night to scribble some notes about how the question how much is the right amount of shared knowledge connects up with something we’ve written about elsewhere in our exchange (week 15 and week 16, for example) and throughout — around reading books, why we read, how more books exist than any of us could read, and thus we have to make choices. I also left myself a note about my grad school thesis, which was about information visualization in this time when we have more and more information and data that we could visualize — and my note was about how our phones are one screen through which we can access near-infinite content.
When I sat down to write my letter today I was feeling pent-up so I went for a walk around the neighborhood in the 20-degree weather. I didn’t bring my phone with me, because it’s cold and I didn’t want to expose my fingers to poke at my screen, and it’s slippery outside so I didn’t want to get distracted, and also because I went on a walk to get my body moving a bit, so why bring my screen with me anyway? My walk helped weave together a few thoughts: my late-night note to myself about how you can’t read everything (via books or screens), and the oddity of having essentially one device screen (thinking about my phone, rather than my computer) where I can look at everything, as if everything is somehow one thing that I could feasibly read or see from start to finish, and then I remembered your letter from a couple of months ago where you talked about email and how each email is like a tiny little dictator — and I was thinking about how my phone can be like a tiny dictator too, like a tiny boss I report to even though I don’t need to. It is not my boss, it is an object. In the midst of our project of collecting what we’re consuming, as I find that my habits are changing (or are at least more apparent) as I review them (observer effect in action?) — I’m noticing more and more when I’m just picking up my phone for something to do, looking at the news for something to look at. I’m snacking all across the day on empty calories!
I was also thinking about your words last week about mindful living, and thinking about my phone as a machine that creates out-of-body experiences — I’m somewhere else even while my body is physically in place somewhere distinct. When someone is talking to me I might think I’m hearing them, but if my eyes are looking at and reading something else, then I’m not listening, and my mind is in another place. As I said above, my phone is not a boss, it is a sliver of an object — and yet the single object is a portal to many different places, a channel to many different conversations. We’ve tried to multiply ourselves, to be in as many different places at once as we can, participating in dozens of conversations, reading everything, seeing all the television and movies, checking in on the details of so many people’s lives. I’m thinking about what it looks like to reduce myself back to a single self, to one person inhabiting one body, interacting with people in real life or on the phone one by one, or reading and thinking about books or stories or articles one by one. The other day, a pen started rolling off my desk and I caught it, and I had the odd feeling that perhaps my reflexes had improved; perhaps I am occupying my body more fully already.
As I mentioned when we talked this week — I’m in a state of mind these days where everything looks and feels a little odd, like I’ve peeled away shiny layers I didn’t realize were there, and exposed the viscera. Now things that once seemed like the way things are have started to seem strange. I have the regular desire to say, Wait — why, though? Sometimes the why may be a good one, but sometimes it’s useful to spark a reminder that everything that seems “regular” about how we live our lives was once a decision or an idea or a movement of some kind. The world is ours to shape even as we are shaped by it.
On that note — I’m looking forward to reading your letter momentarily! What’s been on your mind this week?
Your friend,
Eva