essays

Thursday Essay

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I hadn’t read any Helen Macdonald before I came across this essay in the Times Magazine about swifts. The writing is astonishingly good–a mix of science, research, memoir, and meditation. It all hangs together so well it was hard to pull out a quote, kind of like just humming the tune of a Bach fugue and leaving out all the rest of it, but this is from near the end:

…surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday. To take time to see the things we need to set our courses toward or against; the things we need to think about to know what we should do next. To trust in careful observation and expertise, in its sharing for the common good. When I read the news and grieve, my mind has more than once turned to vesper flights, to the strength and purpose that can arise from the collaboration of numberless frail and multitudinous souls.

It’s not that long, so give it a read: The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down (I think the Times editor got their hands on the title for the web; I believe this is actually the first essay in her next book Vesper Flights and is titled as such in the book.)

Wednesday Read

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Anne Helen Petersen is back with a longer piece about spending less during the last couple months of lockdown. She unpacks a lot in it–the economic boom of the 50s that still imforms today’s thinking, the amount of debt Americans have, how “supporting the economy” got to sound noble. Check it out: I Don’t Feel Like Buying Stuff Anymore

An interviewee sums it up:
“The thing that’s staying with me is how many of these bad shit purchases are attempts to create control and satisfaction from circumstances where I (seem to) have little,” he continued. “…If our jobs and commutes weren’t wringing us emotionally dry on a daily basis, we’d be much more ethical consumers, maybe?”

 

Near the end, Petersen says this:

In this moment, the primary tension in America is how, and when, life is going to “return to normal.” But that “normal” was an economy that, even before COVID-19, was built on a form of consumption that felt compulsory, with household debt as normalized as the exploitative work conditions that make those daily consumption habits possible. A “normal” in which the vast majority of people still felt economically precarious, burned out, and swallowed by their student debt, and most still struggled to cobble together enough savings to protect them from medical or financial catastrophe. A “normal” in which the various manifestations of the gig economy—and the lack of healthcare, labor protections, or the general safety net that accompanies them—have been, well, normalized.

So what if we don’t actually want to go back to that?

Reminds me of this piece I linked at the beginning of the year/a century ago: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed.

Thursday Reading

By in essays, feelings

The headline of this Vox piece–It’s okay to be doing okay during the pandemic–doesn’t really prepare you for the contents of it, which is learning all about Buddhist mindfulness.

I’ve been a sort of Buddhist dilettante since high school but I hadn’t encountered “The Arrow” teaching outlined in the article:

The Buddha taught that when we experience something painful—a physical illness, or the news that someone we love has died, or witnessing suffering all around us—it’s as if the world has shot an arrow into us. It hurts! That pain is totally normal, and it’s fine to acknowledge it.

But often, what we then do is shoot a second arrow into ourselves. That second arrow is any thought we use to spin up a “story” around our pain, as a way of resisting simply being with the experience of pain.

This is pretty much exactly what I’ve been learning in therapy (!): Get comfortable with the uncomfortable feeling and don’t use your thoughts to deflect the feeling.

It’s still hard to do, but, as GI Joe–and maybe the Buddha–says, “Knowing is half the battle.”

Happy Earth Day

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For your reading today, here’s an essay about resisting the great marketing push that will accompany the “return to normal” and making sure we remember what we realized during what the writer calls “The Great Pause”:

This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all. We care deeply about one another. That is clear. That can be seen in every supportive Facebook post, in every meal dropped off for a neighbor, in every Zoom birthday party. We are a good people. And as a good people, we want to define—on our own terms—what this country looks like in five, 10, 50 years. This is our chance to do that, the biggest one we have ever gotten. And the best one we’ll ever get.

Thursday Reading

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How’s everyone doing? I slept with the emergency go-bag and a flashlight next to the bed last night, but so far <knocks wood> no more earthquakes. Back to worrying about plague instead of natural disasters!

I’m assuming that, like me, everyone needs distractions and reassurance. Something that distracted and reassured me on Monday was Robin Sloan’s March newsletter. It’s rambling, it’s full of links, it has C.S. Lewis quotes about hard times, and tells us how to keep going when nothing seems to matter:

 

We’re entering a stretch during which no subject, no task, other than this pandemic and its prevention will seem to “matter,” and I am here to insist, as you contemplate the next level of the video game you were building, the next stitch in the fanny pack you were designing, the next edition of the newsletter you just started:

It matters.

[…]

Every calamity fractures the world, opens new seams: many economic, some political, still others aesthetic.

In 1816, the gloomy “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley stayed indoors at a lakeside hotel; not quarantine, but maybe quarantine-adjacent. There, bored and haunted, she conceived the story that would grow into her novel Frankenstein, the foundation stone of the genre we now call science fiction.

It’s moderately annoying when people invoke work like that, because it feels like the implication is, if you’re not writing Frankenstein what are you even DOING? That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the big, bright examples help us see it clearly: toil in the shadow of calamity will have its day.

Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.

A crack in everything; that’s how the art gets in.

Too Much

By in essays, feelings

I’ve been working on “taking up space” in therapy lately–i.e., not diminishing my needs or desires, setting boundaries, standing my ground on things that matter to me. Like anything in therapy, it’s hard work to change a lifetime of thinking: I’d better not make waves, this is close enough, it isn’t ladylike/accommodating/pleasant to be direct.

This forthcoming book by scholar Rachel Cote is on my radar, partly because of that excellent cover but mostly because it seems like a cultural exploration of everything I’m trying to work through:

From the first chapter:

Accordingly, when we tell a woman she is “too much,” it is…with a wagging finger and the intonations of a warning. Remember that you, and your desires, must be small—diminishing—preferably nonexistent. Ask only for that which you are invited to receive, which is to say, basically nothing.

 

Do Not Go Gentle

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This essay by an Australian novelist in her 70s (via Robin Sloan’s newsletter) is fire and goals, starting with the title: The insults of age: A one-woman assault on condescension.

I’ll let you read how she got fed up enough to get to this point but god I love her for this:

Habits of a lifetime peeled away. The world bristled with opportunities for a woman in her 70s to take a stand. I shouted on planes. I fought for my place in queues. I talked to myself out loud in public. I walked along the street singing a little song under my breath: “Back off. How dare you? Make my day.”

 

(See also: An Axe for the Frozen Sea for rage in your 40s)

“anything mentionable is manageable”

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I’ve been sitting on a link to an article by Ann Helen Petersen (sign up for her newsletter–it’s one of the best) for a while now, and why not start with an essay for the year? It’s about the Mr. Rogers movie from November, which I guess I need to see, and how adults get so good at not feeling feelings (surprise!).

We swallow existential questions, and the despair or wonder that blooms from them, and work. Fear of losing a job, fear of losing a parent, fear of being a bad parent—instead of sitting with those feelings, again, we work. Because work means money, and money brings a modicum of stability, and relief, however temporary, from that same fear. Work doesn’t actually give us peace or solve our problems. But for a lot of us, it’s what we’re good at and what we know, which is far more comforting than staring at the abyss of what we don’t.

She later quotes the movie:

“To die is human,” Rogers tells Lloyd’s family as they studiously avoid talking about his father’s imminent death. “Anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable.”

That…might be one of the smartest things I’ve ever read. Something to remember going forward.

 

Wednesday Reading

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The Atlantic—with a lovely new brand refresh–has an essay by Tom Junod about his friendship with Fred Rogers. He talks about his essay inspiring the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and what Mr. Rogers would make of society today. It’s just..nice; thoughtful and sad and but still hopeful.

This was my favorite memory he shared about Fred:

Once, when I called to tell him the story of five people stopping their cars to help an ancient and enormous snapping turtle across a highway exit ramp in Atlanta, he asked if I was going to write about it. I said no, and asked him why he thought it might make a good story. And this was his response: “Because whenever people come together to help either another person or another creature, something has happened, and everyone wants to know about it—because we all long to know that there’s a graciousness at the heart of creation.”

 

Thursday Article

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Thinking about being busy but also too overwhelmed to do anything but a puzzle reminded me of this article from ManRepeller, about those same things: The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies Into Hustles.
Unstructured time—especially spent alone—is phenomenally rare in my life and I feel an overwhelming obligation to make good use of it. I should get some laundry done. Meal prep. Ask each item in my dresser if it brings me joy. Figure out how to fold a fitted sheet. Paint my nails. Work on the play I’m writing. Do a face mask. But instead, I deal with my option paralysis in the least helpful way possible: by scrolling through my phone alone in the dark until I run out of battery (literally or figuratively) and put myself to bed feeling like I’ve lost something valuable and hating myself for it. I can’t be productive, and I can’t fully relax, and I can’t possibly be alone in this.
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