Less impressive, more impressed
I turn another year older next week, so naturally, I’ve been reflecting on the last year: what changed, what didn’t, and what expectations were upended altogether.
In terms of change, it’s been quite a year. But in trying to get my head around what really feels different about this birthday, even all the big-ticket items — love, Covid, home ownership — taken together don’t seem to come close to it. It wasn’t until I picked up Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times at the local library that it clicked.
Everyone was raving about this book in the lockdown of December 2020 through to the early spring this year, as its publication uncannily coincided with a pandemic where we were all forced, for better or worse, to “rest and retreat.” I made a mental note that I would return to it as winter descended in the back half of this year. I’m so glad I did.
Katherine writes:
“The problem with everything is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away. Time has passed so quickly while I have been raising a child and writing books and working a full-time job that often sprawls into my weekends, that I can’t quite account for it. The preceding years are not a blank exactly, but they’re certainly a blur, and one that’s strangely devoid of meaning, except for a clawing sense of survival.”
The paragraph hit me like bitter January air. That is what’s different. In the last year I traded my clawing sense of survival for something else. My life is much quieter, smaller, self-contained, but somehow, it also feels more meaningful. I sound far less impressive to others, but I have more time to be impressed by the world around me. On my last birthday, I feel like I was tentatively testing the waters on this way of living, seeing if it was actually feasible, assuming at some point soon I’d get bored. A year later, I’ve nearly forgotten how to do things the other way.
Next week, I was supposed to go on a work trip, which would have been the first one post-Covid. Had 2020 gone as planned (lol) I would have spent a significant chunk of it on work trips — to places as far flung as Puerto Rico, Singapore, and Madrid. In July of 2020, when my nervous system finally began to settle back to some kind of baseline, I started see how that amount of travel was a major ingredient in my perpetual survival mode. But nevertheless, when the opportunity popped up in my inbox last month, I felt that once-familiar buzz of validation and ego. It sounds something like this: OH, SOMEONE WANTS ME! I AM SPECIAL! My partner and I discussed going, and that maybe he’d join me for part of it, and I began to put things in motion to attend.
In the week or so that followed, I noticed that I started to contract around the idea. I worried that I’d be forced to take a plane, rather than a train, to a climate-related event, and how I really didn’t want to do that kind of thing anymore. I imagined myself trying to spend some time on my birthday not conferencing, and feeling stressed about that seemed absurd. I thought about how I would be on the hook for placing an article in a prominent publication in order to justify accepting this paid-for trip, and for that considerable amount of work I’d be paid like £200 — probably six weeks late after chasing the invoice three times.
Then I realized: Wait, why am I doing this? So about a week later, I decided I wasn’t going to go. I felt immediate relief. Less impressive. More impressed.
It’s true that there are ways this trip may have good for my career, good for this newsletter project, interesting and fulfilling and enriching. But I know now what it would have taken from me in return. The nervous system disruption of travel. The performance of professionalism for 8 hours a day which absolutely destroys my energy levels. The fact that I was trading a couple of quiet days off work with four harried ones. It just didn’t seem worth it.
The weather turned suddenly in the first week of October, and ever since, I’ve been relishing the work of “getting your house in order,” as May calls it. It’s tiny work. Planting daffodil bulbs for a hopeful day in January or February when they might bloom; putting up an extra curtain to fend off early morning draughts; making soup; placing candles and fairy lights in the dark corners to brighten up the shortening days — a tip I learned from May.
It’s not that I wouldn’t have done these things before, it’s just that I would have underestimated how important they are. How they add a punctuation mark to a year, and by extension, to a life. How the ground-level, cyclical work — the “deeply unfashionable stuff” — is way more interesting and even energizing when you give yourself adequate time to notice it. When you're not just surviving on the inside, while dazzling the outside world.
Things I enjoyed reading
“The moral structure of work is up for grabs.” [NYT]
A truly fascinating read about the work of turning human remains into nutrient-rich compost — and how our discomfort with that idea is really a discomfort with life’s only certainty: death. [Harpers]
Succession is the most emotionally-attuned show I’ve ever watched. This profile of its unlikely British creator goes some length to explain why. [New Yorker]
Journalists are leaving their jobs because being a journalist right now all but guarantees reaching “extreme burnout.” [Digiday]
On the absolutely stupid, senseless luck of real estate. [The Millions]
On “re-wilding” your attention to a pre-algorithmic era. [Austin Kleon]
Why you should plant native wildflowers in winter and what to do with your autumn/winter squash.
Things I enjoyed listening to
The folks at the app Knowable asked to turn two of my articles about personal development for Forge into audio lessons. I love to talk, and so naturally I said yes. You can listen to both in browser without downloading the app. [Knowable]
I’ll admit it: I have found it nearly impossible to find any understanding of or compassion for people who won’t get the vaccine. This conversation was the first thing I’ve listened to or read that helped me do that. (However, I still think you should get the vaccine). [Honestly]
“[Solitude] is the practice of creating an inward autonomy within ourselves, an inward freedom from the power of [our] overwhelming thoughts and emotions.” On finding ease in aloneness. [On Being]
Paid newsletter interlude
ICYMI, this newsletter has a paid version! This month’s Q&A for paid subscribers was with Avni Trivedi, an osteopath and person who has taught me a lot about my body, and by extension, my life. We talked about the ways that listening to our bodies can lead to richer, more integrated lives. Here’s a quote from our interview.
I work a lot with the feet. What’s your relationship with the ground? Are you settled, let yourself be held? Or do you contain everything? You know when you say “dipping your toe into something” — to me, it’s very literal, it’s not just a figurative thing. You can feel sometimes someone is being tentative with their toe, they’re not really trusting the ground beneath them.
You can update your subscription to the paid version at the button below.
Other Miscellany
As the days get shorter, I decided to restart teaching my slow Sunday yoga classes on Zoom. They’re roughly every other Sunday at 6:30 UK time. All bodies, timezones, and abilities are welcome and you can book here. If you think you are decidedly Not a Yoga Person, I would love the opportunity to convince you otherwise (with the help of some yoga props). Email me with any questions.
Word Soup
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” —Michel de Montaigne
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