On snapshots of moving targets, puzzling over goals, and lessons in finishing
May 15, 2020
Dear Eva,
I have been reeling from your letter all week. Sometimes I think I could not care less about finishing things, you wrote.
::faints::
I daydreamed about writing you an unfinished letter this week in response, but alas, I have too many things to say to cede the space. I will say it made me reflect upon the many projects you and I have talked about and even started in some small way and then abandoned. Little did I know, I was starting them with someone who has no qualms with unfinished projects! Hehe.
I was thinking after reading our recent pair of letters again last night how it feels like I am often looking for ways we are similar, while you are pointing out differences. You say, We’re two different people! I say, I want to be like Eva! We are both right, I imagine. We diverge and converge, as any two friends should.
I do wonder if a lot of this finishing/leaving unfinished business comes down to what holds our attention and interests us. You are interested in resourcing, less interested in executing. A couple of letters ago, I said it was impatience that repelled me from the sort of word puzzles you were working on at the time. Upon reflection, I think the better explanation is a lack of interest. To each her own!
Of course, there is also something to my attraction to finishing on its own right. Doing is in my blood, and I’ll take a little credit for my doing in the form of a nicely checked-box, thank you very much. I am thinking about that great Frog and Toad story about lists, where Toad diligently crosses off each daily activity on his list (“Wake up”) and then becomes paralyzed when he loses his to-do list. “[R]unning after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!” Toad is slightly more extreme than me and my progeny, but Jonah and I are similarly steadied by an articulated obligation/goal/direction and satisfied when we complete it. I am genuinely horrified by the story of the dead woman who was revealed to have written 16 pages on a project she pursued for 30 years. Either she wasn’t actually that interested in the project (in which case why did she continue to call it her project for three decades!?), or she let some impossible idea of perfection prevent her from just doing a thing. The latter strikes me as a tragedy, or at least a tragedy as it relates to any life narrative I want to have at the end of my days. And while I understand that I may not get a last chance to sum it all up before I die, I am summing it up every day as I go. The desire to complete projects that matter to me is a huge part of what pushes me along.
One such project was the micro-memoir I wrote for the kids a couple of years ago now, which you now have on your bookshelf. I remember feeling an undercurrent of urgency as I wrote it; even the thought of leaving what I needed to say unsaid felt crushing. The funny thing is, now that I have it done and packaged up like a real-life book, I feel a tad bit cringey about it. I feel largely the same way about the book I co-wrote for work. I think perhaps it’s the nature of these things. Assuming you continue to evolve as a person over time, you move farther away from the things you enshrined in text or any other fixed medium in years past. In a way, I guess it’s a relief to know I don’t think and feel exactly like I did in 2017 when I wrote Pancakes After You’re Dead—I am still growing! This gets back somehow to the notion of what is finished/unfinished. If we are moving targets, then anything we create over time is just a snapshot, not some kind of comprehensive summation of who we are. I have been writing and creating more in the last five years of my life, and I find the growing stack of notebooks/blog posts/letters takes the pressure off. No one thing I have written matters too much, it’s just one small landmark along the long road. Finishing has its benefits, yet again!
In my mind, this epistolary endeavor has been a grand lesson in finishing, and simultaneously in the fact that nothing is ever really finished. Each week I sit down at the keyboard and write to you about what is on my mind, sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it does not. But I finish a piece of writing, however unpolished it may be, and I either send it to you or await your letter and then post them both. It feels good to create a small artifact that represents my interior life in a given week, and it feels good to know that next week there will be a new artifact, and the week after that. This builds on what you wrote last week about the power of getting things down on paper/screen. Writing things down gives them a shape they don’t otherwise have, allows us to see them differently (perhaps more objectively?) than we do when they are floating around in our brains. These letters function almost like a form of documentation, among all of the other things they do for us. The many wonders of the letters never cease!
With that, I am finished—until next week, when I start again. I look forward to reading your words very soon!
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday May 15 2020
Dear Sarah,
This week I found myself puzzling off and on about goals. I hadn’t yet visited the link in your letter of the-week-before-last where you touched on Austin Kleon’s newsletter and his reference to arbitrary stupid goals — I have a copy of Tamara Shopsin’s book, and the concept speaks for itself, to some extent — and I just clicked through to see what else there was to see. Austin’s entry starts with his favorite sentence from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning: What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. Aside from the fact that I’m not a man (old standards!) I started stewing over the idea of goals, which we have both been getting into in our letters over the last couple of weeks. Lists, and goals, and what it means to be finished with something, and now Frankl’s words floating up to us from the past. The striving and struggling for some goal worthy of myself. I’m puzzling because I’m wondering what my goals are right now — and if I don’t know what they are, am I pursuing them? What does it mean if I can’t tell you my goal off the top of my head, but I can tell you that I am enjoying myself and my day and my life, feeling satisfied? What is my goal?
I found myself taking issue with the concept of arbitrary stupid goals. Why have arbitrary goals? Why have stupid goals? Why have goals that are both arbitrary and stupid? Am I being a language purist? Aside from the fact that everything is arbitrary because we didn’t ask to be brought into this time, this world, in these particular bodies, and we have to make do (or make change) with all the above — are there not still goals that are not arbitrary, or goals that are less stupid than others? If a goal is small, is it arbitrary? Is it stupid? I feel critical of the language used to describe this idea of setting small goals, or any goals.
As I thought about my letter to you last week, and thought about your letter, and thought more about what I was thinking, I was considering how the act of list-making, as well as some portion of the act of writing, is an aesthetic pleasure for me: I make lists in part to get things out of my head and to assess what really needs to get done and when, but I also make lists because I like how lists look, and I like how lists look in my handwriting, and I like how I make lists, and I like looking at my lists! You mentioned in conversation a project for which Jonah made a list, and then added boxes to be checked, so that you two could check things off when they were completed. I too have used checkboxes in the past! I currently mark something done on my lists by putting an x next to the item, and circling the x. That is my current fashion. If I am organized I think it is because I enjoy the aesthetics of organization, of order. I like knolling my objects, placing them in a right-angled context with each other, though I also like putting objects at other angles or arranging them just so, even the boring everyday things of this life, the coffee mug on the counter and the lid on the pot. I like grids of photographs. I like geometric patterns. I like lines. I like stacks. The beauty and serenity of a well-drawn list is a joy in and of itself. I also get things done, because they are required (I meet deadlines), and I feel a sense of accomplishment — I like when weeks end with a certain amount of things finished, out the door, or some progress made on an ongoing project. But am I meeting goals? Are these goals I have established for myself? I am not trying to be facile, I am genuinely curious if I am living without goals (and enjoying myself) or if somehow my goals are embedded in my way of living such that I am no longer referencing them as goals. Have I accomplished the things I set out to do?
I think I just might not be in a goals moment in my life. Not only because we are riding the early and presumably long wave of a global pandemic, but also because I have recently accomplished some goals. I left full time work for freelancing, I’m working from home (as most of us are) and it’s going well. M and I are growing sprouted tomato plants that he rescued from death’s edge by replanting them in earth scooped from our yard (we think something must have been wrong with our original potting soil, mysteriously). We are cooking new foods, or cooking familiar foods in new ways, and are thus tasting new things. Maybe this mood is also because of the pandemic — what kinds of goals make sense right now? In pandemic life, the goals that you can control, that make you feel good, that make you feel accomplished, are the goals of the moment. You can call them arbitrary stupid goals if you want! Who knows what big goals the world can handle in the near term. Personal goals are just right while we see how the future takes shape, or while we help advance the big things that are called for at this time (I’m thinking about political campaigns, even though those aren’t typically something I get directly involved in, other than when I vote).
In that same post Austin Kleon quotes Julia Louis-Dreyfus quoting her mother — you always have to have something to look forward to. It can be a very minor thing, and it can be a major thing. But you always have to have something you’re looking forward to next. This, I have no issue with, and I agree! I am finding this letter to be getting longer than it should, based on the shapes we’ve set for ourselves with past letters, but I’m going to press on just a bit to tell you about something I’ve been particularly looking forward to (is it a goal? I don’t think so): I’ve been thinking this week about jingalov hats. Jingalov hats are an Armenian flatbread filled with herbs and greens. I first learned about the food in a New York Times recipe (it was featured in the magazine at one point) and then I secured from the library a cookbook of recipes from Armenia called Lavash, from which this recipe was drawn. When I first learned of jingalov hats I thought they sounded amazing but possibly beyond me in some way — too elaborate, too many elements to include to “get it right.” But lately I have been thinking again of jingalov hats and I have been having a very pleasant anticipatory experience just thinking about making some. They are a toasty flatbread enclosing many types of greens — the recipe in the cookbook says that some bakers claim they use more than twenty types of greens to achieve optimal flavor. Perhaps because M and I have been eating more greens lately, the flatbreads are on my mind. We’ve been buying an array of vegetables which we are then compelled to use, more than in the past, because we are here at home all the time, and there is no excuse not to use the food we buy. In the past we have bought certain vegetables — a symbol of a goal, an ambition — with the intention of learning how to make something new or different than the usual, but then a night out at a favorite restaurant might come calling, or drinks with friends followed by some casual snacking, and suddenly the greens are beyond wilted, slimy and too far gone to prepare. Something better called — or something more immediate called — and the greens got left by the wayside. Now there is no excuse, if there ever was one, for letting food go bad in the fridge; it is time to figure out how to use those greens, figure out how to prepare collards and mustard greens and turnip greens and to keep eating spinach along the way. Now the jingalov hats feel enticingly possible. You need to prepare eight cups of finely sliced greens and herbs, including a mix of neutral greens; what are referred to as herbal herbs; and sour greens and herbs. It says that the number of greens is less important than the mix; sour and sharp herbs balance the herbal ones; the neutral greens carry the flavor of the stronger herbs. I have been enraptured by the jingalov hats. I like to sing their name to myself like I am singing Jingle Bells. I look at the photos in the cookbook of the jingalov hats being prepared, a woman’s hands and plump wrists forming the dough around the greens like a pocket sealed down the middle with pinches. I savor the idea of prepping the greens, finely slicing all those ingredients with a sharp knife. I can smell the dough toasting like a savory pancake, I can taste the tangy greens and the herbal greens playing off each other. I want to make jingalov hats, and the anticipation of making the food is a kind of full-fledged sensory experience in my imagination. I even experience a slightly different feeling when I am looking at the photographs in the pages of the recipe, versus when I am looking at the photos on the page in my mind’s eye, looking at my memory of the photographs. Both moments are part of the anticipatory feeling. I am sure the jingalov hats will taste good, will be enjoyable to prepare. And at the same time I have already enjoyed myself, imagining making them. Is it a problem to be able to enjoy myself inside of my own head? I’m not only enjoying myself in my head, each day, but it is a big part of how I enjoy my time. I think it is the right balance for living this life in a way that feels good. Anticipate the greens, use the greens. Savor the cooking, savor the photographs, savor the memory of the photographs.
With that, I am going to close this winding letter! Now I shall read your words and see what has been on your mind this week!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva