On crumbly days, limbo states, and familiar places
February 20, 2020
Dear Eva,
There are days when it all seems to generally make sense, and there are days when it crumbles. It has been a crumbly day, and I will admit that although I have dozens of lines written in my notebook about what to write in this week’s letter, I feel like I have nothing much to say.
I had a clump of notes replying to your letter last week, about how I tend to most often say “It’s not that simple” when I am consciously or unconsciously criticizing and judging someone for taking a position, doing a thing, trying. Notes about how sometimes that someone I am criticizing and judging is me, and about how effortless it can be to poke holes and find flaws and how effortful it is to give it a go ourselves, flaws and all. About how nuance can be a deflection tactic, as you say, and finding and studying all of those layers yet another way to endlessly be “preparing for a thing.” About how, despite all of this, complexity is still nearly always the true state of things.
But it feels like none of this really wants any more attention. As you wrote, we are wrestling a small nibble here, working to finally pin something down long after the referee has called the match.
I have been thinking today about ambivalence, which feels related. Ambivalence: (1) simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (such as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action; (2) a continual fluctuation; (3) uncertainty as to which approach to follow. This definition sounds like it describes both the rational human condition in our unduly complex world and a kind of agonizing limbo state between perfect knowing and imperfect doing, much like we were describing above and in past letters. I am always so thankful when I finally just do. Take these letters, for example. This project was a leap—would we have anything to say worth reading every week? Would anyone care? Depending on the day, I’m not sure I have unequivocal answers to those questions, but I can say for sure that I am glad we went for it. Doing a dang thing! That’s so much harder than it sounds.
Last month I read a book about how to draw. This month I am reading a book about how to write poetry. With these new-to-me perspectives on seeing and knowing and communicating, I am testing the plasticity of my brain, trying to reshape the well-worn grooves and make them more stretchy and nimble. It turns out the heuristics I use to live are flimsy and thin, even when they are right. We have written before about the challenge of unlearning and unknowing. I am learning again just how difficult this is. How we can think we have moved past something—escaped to some enlightened other side—only to make a wrong turn somewhere and end up back in an old room. It is tempting to sit back down in that old room because even while the scene is flawed, it feels familiar.
Tomorrow is Friday, which is Movie Night in these parts. (You know this because you were here for Movie Night not too long ago, trapped in our abode after a surprisingly enduring snowstorm!) On this crumbly day, I feel almost tingly with excitement at the thought of our cozy Friday evening family ritual. Thin crust pizza, a kid’s movie, buttery stovetop popcorn, vying for room on the couch between the kids and our ridiculous 95 pound lapdog. I feel no ambivalence about that!
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It is now Friday, and I am returning to this letter to see that I have really not ended our tiny wrestling match with these ideas despite my earlier promises. Things look different today, though.
Many moons (and letters!) ago, we wrangled for a bit with Pico Iyer’s understanding of happiness as requiring absorption in something outside of ourselves. This must be why ambivalence can feel like such a purgatory—it makes this kind of absorption impossible, instead creating a maze of ideas and options and facts that we can’t think our way out of, no matter how hard we try. And in the meantime, we are still standing at the starting line, or worse, back in that old familiar, flawed room.
When things are crumbling, when we feel stuck or, even worse, self-righteous, the answer must simply be to do.
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday February 21 2020
Dear Sarah!
It’s another late Friday night and I’m just sitting down to put my letter to you into type! I started it earlier today in a more relaxed hour, writing by hand as I sipped my morning tea. Then the day got busy as I was hustling to finish a project. Now it is done, and I have stress-gobbled some trail mix, and I am ready to relax into my letter to you!
I laughed reading your letter last week, at your reminder of my two-faced haughtiness about the nothing-burgerness of Valentine’s Day, followed by my swift and sweet long-distance celebration of the holiday with M! I am not surprised that I teased you! Sometimes I get a bit righteous about such things for absolutely no reason. Your warm childhood memories of celebrating the holiday with your parents (and with white chocolate, no less, that bastion of chocolate for young tastes, only the pretense of chocolate among its sugary creaminess!) warmed my heart as well. (Let it be known that I still like white chocolate!) Perhaps there is a way in which it is sad to spend Valentine’s Day apart from your loved ones, while the day can fade into the background when you’re together; last Friday M and I didn’t do anything we would call a Valentine’s Day celebration, but we had a lovely day in San Francisco. (We played frisbee on China Beach with our good friend Ben, and I laughed until my belly ached!)
I returned from our trip this Wednesday, and I’ve been reflecting on place and space (again!), the way we move through places over time, the way our relationship to places changes as we age. I’ve been thinking about the particular feelings of this visit to San Francisco and am realizing that it is a new kind of visit — an adult, professional kind of visit, to a place where there are no parents of ours! (Nothing wrong with parents, they just don’t live in SF!) When M and I visit Michigan, we see family, and we return to the places where we each grew up, the homes with which we are familiar. When we go to Ann Arbor, we visit the town and the university where we met, and it is a bit nostalgic — a look back at a time when we were so young and fresh, with so many days ahead of us. When we visit Tucson, a place we lived as adults, we almost always stay with M’s parents, which is delightful and also different from staying somewhere on our own. Now, visiting SF for the first time since we’d moved away — we were visiting the city where we’d spent a quarter of our lives so far, where we’d become adults in a professional sense, where we have friends and where we have acquaintances, the people we know around town and in the neighborhood. We stayed with a good friend who lives in the Outer Richmond, so the sense of visiting our neighborhood (we lived in the Inner Richmond) was intact. The sun shone bright for our whole stay, just like it always (rarely) does in SF. It was a lovely kind of vacation — dropping down recreationally into a place that we know quite well, know exactly where to go to enjoy ourselves. It was a treat! San Francisco… I’ve heard some people think it’s a nice place to live.
Today it was publicly announced that sharon maidenberg, the director of Headlands Center for the Arts, is moving on to helm the Contemporary Austin in Texas. This is a huge deal, for sharon and for Headlands and for the Contemporary Austin. (Looking forward to making a visit to Austin later this year, I hope!) I’ve been thinking about her departure, about how she is a friend, a colleague, a mentor. It’s put me in the mood to think about change more generally, how it can be unsettling, but how it is also the natural way of things. I must feel unsettled by change, occasionally — I imagine there’s evidence in these letters, just as you had evidence of my Valentine’s Day teasing! — but sometimes I find that I am comforted and reassured when I see others making change in their lives. It means we’re all moving through this life — not just going with the flow but creating our own currents, pushing the water ahead and behind us in a grand wave. To see others change is a way to see how I too have changed, and it shows me that I have the capacity for yet more change. If we are lucky, we will see ourselves age. At Jason’s funeral in January and at his memorial next week, I’ll see people I’ve hardly seen in fifteen years. They’ve kept on, have been living lives as dense with happiness, sadness, surprise, and joy as I too have been living mine. One never quite expects that things will stay exactly the same from year to year, and yet, when for a bit they do, it seems that perhaps they’ll just keep on keeping on for a bit longer. Reflecting on my return home from SF, I am glad to have lived there, and glad as well to have made the change to move to a new place. In the midwest the change shows itself all the time in the seasons, as the green blooms, then fades away, and is replaced by snowy white. In California it seemed always to be one season — though I suppose the days shifted from longer to shorter and back again — and the passage of time could come as a surprise. Better, I think, to have a firm sense of the fact that time is always on the move, just as we are! Until next week!
Your friend,
Eva