Over-preparing

I used to think being prepared was a good quality to have. Someone’s kids would be unhappy and I would shake my head (inwardly only of course) and think… they didn’t prepare enough. ‘Cause, I confess, I was pretty good at being prepared with kids: snacks, drinks, entertainment, favourable time of day, amount of stimulation, after-activity plans.

I used to think this sort of planning was brilliant! But then, two people have made cases to the contrary: first, Ellen Hendriksen on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, who, 25 minutes into the episode talks about three aspects of social anxiety - perfectionism, attention as a spotlight, and safety behaviours. The safety behaviours “essentially what that is, is its any action that we take to try to “save ourselves”. It’s like a life preserver that actually holds us underwater. We think it’s going to save us, but really, it sinks us. So these are all the actions we take to compensate when we feel anxious. So we might over-explain, if we think we offended someone, we might write a nine paragraph explanatory e-mail saying what we really meant. We might over-prepare! If we’re feeling anxious about a presentation, we might rehearse it 25 times. We might be overly-friendly and put triple exclamation points at the end of sentences in our e-mails. (…) We might point out flaws.” (This last one is about using self-deprecation in order to elicit a reassuring response.)

She argues that safety behaviours “get the credit for the worst-case scenario not happening.” And scary as it might be, dropping these safety behaviours leads to a feeling of ease and freedom.

Second, George Saunders. At one point in A Swim In a Pond In The Rain, Saunders compares a writer who follows a pattern to someone who brings index cards on a date. “So, why the index cards on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date’s eyes because we don’t believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer.
”Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.”

So yes, preparation is fine, but, with time, building confidence in yourself is better!

Imperfect blog posts are defiance and joy

It’s too easy for me to be serious. Named after a saint whose portrait at nine featured a furrowed brow, I’m prone to pondering. It’s an affliction that holds me back from writing here, bogged down too quickly with a preoccupation about meaning. I’m like a beaver, constantly building dams that impeded the flow of water. But then, along comes someone like George Saunders with A Swim in a Pond in The Rain and I rediscover how refreshing the movement of water is. Right from the start, I am soothed with a line that reads: “the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.” Defiance and joy!

This morning, listening to Terrible Thanks for Asking, Anne Lamott described how our desire to help can keep someone from finding the solution for themselves. Describing something she’s learned for herself, she says “I try not to get my goodness all over people because it just keeps them shut down from the only thing that ever got anybody to wake up or get sober or get therapy or learn to eat in a healthy way which is; the willingness comes from the pain and if I’m medicating their pain for them out of my own disease of co-dependence I’m keeping them from the one thing that might help them find a much much better life.”

Years ago, our friends’ baby was born into the Neo-natal intensive care unit and, being myself young at the time, my life changed and adopted a frenzied mission to help. I drove too fast on an icy road and hit a car that cut me off, I rushed every second of my lunch hour to deliver fresh scones made the night before and all this to prove I could help (nay, improve!) the lives of my friends.

Now, in my thirties, I catch myself not rushing in to help so much as needing to provide for myself and others a satisfactory explanation, only to be stumped by the futility of the exercise. Turning to art, reminding myself what art is, is a huge comfort when faced with Life Events. Borrowing from Anne Lamott, I still need to learn how “not to get my explanations all over people” and cure myself of wanting to control the discomfort. The discomfort becomes so large in my mind that I lose the ability to find joy and consequently, the ability to write freely, for fun, for no reason. I guess that is where I need the defiance: I should not pretend to myself that I can improve anything by giving up the dutiful practice of writing imperfect blog posts.

I highly recommend A Swim in a Pond in The Rain.

Attention please

I was an only child for six years and lived a cozy life perched on the 19th floor of an apartment building in downtown Saskatoon. At some point in that period mom paid a magazine subscription for me, to some innocuous title I don’t remember which happened to print reader submissions. My five-year old self felt inspired one day to put words into a poem shape after a rain shower with the express purpose of sending it off to see if it would be returned to me on a magazine page. It was.

Once I heard, or maybe read somewhere, some offhand comment to the effect of “if you only knew how many people send in poems about rain!” and I blushed for my five-year-old self.

The ideas we have about something are often depressingly unoriginal. At the same time, we absorb things without even knowing… I’m always worried about how much I miss. I totally forgot I read Loving by Henry Green until I opened the book and started reading the first pages. I’ve taken up drawing, in part, for its attention-capturing quality.

I’m planning a new flower bed in our front yard and returned to a book on my shelf: Perennials for Every Purpose by Larry Hodgson. I re-read an entry for Goat’s Beard, where the author’s comment: “Goat’s Beard will never disappoint you” felt so much like my own thought that it was like recognizing something familiar - my own foot, my own voice. Our yard has 4 of these plants, used like shrubs, just as Hodgson recommends. Years ago, I studied this book when looking for inspiration and here, I’ve absorbed it without realizing.

Urban observer

I’m not any good at observing nature, and if it wasn’t for my husband’s weather-watching hobby, I’d wear sweaters in summer, and uselessly carry around an umbrella when it was cloudy. But there is a thing I can observe that moves slow enough and stays large enough to follow… that is the state of urban shopping centres.

Here in the southern-most tip of Winnipeg I am five minutes from St. Vital mall which took one of its largest hits (in my subjective observation) even before the pandemic when Sears shuttered its doors and the mall eventually filled the vacancy with three new tenants: a gym, a Marshall’s and a Home Sense. I recently walked through the mall, my errands too diverse to avoid doing so, and noted the vacancies like missing teeth in a smile: no more La Senza, Thyme Maternity, Build-a-Bear or pretzel place. Gymboree has long since given up its spot to Petland.

Within less than four kilometres of my house there are two Dollarama’s - reminding me a the grim article I read a few years ago on just this subject. (It might have been this one, in Bloomberg.) The ones here replaced Pier 1 Imports and a local grocer.

Maybe less than ten years ago, a new outlet strip mall was set up on Kensaton with stores like Tommy Hilfiger, Reitman’s, and Danier. Storefronts have changed. Just recently one switched from clothing to skin care. But this string of outlet stores face their own extinction since the appearance of the Outlet Collection on Sterling Lyon Parkway. I’m not sure how retailers managed to conclude that this was a wonderful idea, two decades into the 2000’s. I tend to be of the pessimistic opinion that malls are dying or dead, but somehow developers in Winnipeg have declared otherwise. A beautiful mall with sky-high ceilings and aisles that anticipated social distancing before a single bat ever coughed, opened and became part of the landscape like a giant mushroom. It does feel like the final stages of retail, described here as a kind of canabalization.

There’s a time warp though, and I’m not sure what to think of it. You can find articles that say that retail is dying from years ago, and yet things are still being built and bought and sold here. Are we slow? Are the people who note the trend mistaken in their conclusion? Is it a kind of pessimism, or is it that old capitalist ideas are still being clung to? I don’t know… Hence the observations.

Drawing

I’ve taken up the practice of keeping a sketchbook and drawing in it daily. I felt completely out of my depths at first, but borrowed Everyday Drawing and Sketching by Steven B. Reddy, followed the steps, and immediately felt encouraged enough by the results to continue. Reddy’s tone is so friendly that one can release oneself from the death-grip of perfectionism.

I’ve noticed, as my enthusiasm for the activity has yet to wane, that it‘s the nature of the activity - the practice that leads to incremental improvement - that I like. Maya Shankar explains it perfectly in an interview on People I Mostly Admire:

Fundamentally, one of the things that I love engaging in are pursuits where your inputs feel like they really matter because they’re expressed in outputs. The more you practice, the better you become as a violinist. And that’s not true in every discipline. You can try your absolute hardest on this latest start-up but then all these market factors and exogenous factors play a role and you just don’t have control over the system. But it felt like I could see the translation of my hard work and see it manifested in better playing. And when you choose a pursuit like that, it can be endlessly satisfying because you’re not always concerned with the absolute quality of playing, you’re concerned with the delta: how much progress you’re seeing over time.

So yay for sketchbooks!

Sketchbook artists

I’ve recently become entranced by the idea of improving my drawing skills and consequently picked up books on the subject of sketching. I like how artists, when interviewed about sketching, have such varied habits around keeping a sketchbook:

Some have drawn since childhood and other started in adulthood.
Some sketch daily, others can go through phases.
Some plan their sketchbook pages, others don’t.
Some draw from real life, others draw from their imagination.
Some use their sketchbook for experimenting, others use it as a journal.

I don’t know what kind of sketchbook person I will be, but the only way to find out is by dedicating time to it!

Freedom to explore

Writers of non-fiction, like journalists, will sometimes leave reality behind and dip into the “freedom” of fiction. I’ve heard them use that word: freedom. Lucky so-and-so’s I’d think… I only wish I could feel freedom in inventing a story. In fact, I’m very much like Mary Karr who wrote: “I just have zero talent for making stuff up. While I adore the short story form, any time I tried penning one myself, everybody was either dead by page two, or morphed back into the person they’d actually evolved from in memory.” (The Art of Memoir, p. 21)

Lately, I’ve been reading Amy Tan’s memoir, Where the Past Begins. She describes her talent for realistic drawing, and I’m annoyed… here again, a writer who is an artist besides? Harrumph! Put a marker in my hand and I freeze the same way one becomes immediately self-conscious before their picture is taken. But Tan explains why she chose writing over being an artist and it has to do with her childhood trauma:

It has to do with what does not happen when I draw. I’ve never experienced a sudden shivery spine-to-brain revelation that what I have drawn is a record of who I am. I don’t mix water-colour paints and think about my changing amalgam of beliefs, confusion, and fears. I don’t do shading with thoughts about death and its growing shadow as the predicted number of actuarial years left to me grows smaller. When I view a bird from an angle instead of in profile, I don’t think of the mistaken views I have held. With practice, I will become better at drawing the eye of a bird or its feet, but I can’t practice having an unexpected reckoning of my soul. All that I have mentioned - what does not happen when I draw - does occur when I write. They occurred in the earliest short stories I wrote when I was thirty-three. Then, as now, they are revelations - ones that are painful, exhilarating, transformative, and lasting in their effects. In my writing, I recognize myself.

Discovering and being able to explain why one writes is fascinating! I enjoy collecting these writerly “raison d’être”s because it shows how in one profession, there is such interesting variety. It also highlights how expanding a talent is linked to personal development. I think that ideas about freedom, in fiction or in art, suppose a kind of ease. I immediately associate art with freedom, but that is not really the case… art in one form or another is exploration and it is work just the same. The method used for the exploration is irrelevant.

Ahistorical

There is this thing, when you’re a historian, where you have to be careful not to project onto the past a feeling you have in the present. Recently, I read in a methodology textbook how a researcher can misunderstand circumstances in the past because the written records provide only fragmentary information. This is the case, when (in centuries past) for example, lots of mothers suffered over the high rates of infant mortality. These deaths might be recorded in a parish register, but few accounts can be found of the sadness they provoked. Historians are left to puzzle over what this means… Were mothers less emotional? Did they hide their grief? Was the society such that this kind of written record was thought unimportant? Etc.

As we are making our way through a pandemic, I think of the future historians who will have the advantage of perspective, but will, probably, not have been participants.

When I sit down to write, I don’t often concentrate on my feelings about the pandemic, the new government orders, the worries, hopes, deceptions or general ennuie. And then sometimes, that future historian pops into my head.

Take for example Nellie McClung. I thought it would be neat to know what she thought of the Winnipeg Strike of 1919, since she was around when it happened. Luckily enough, she left evidence of having grappled with the event… but there are other instances when you imagine that some event will have an impact on a person’s life and find nothing.

Today, the announcement was made that schools here in Manitoba are to remain closed until the end of the year. I do not count myself among the mothers who are overly concerned about their children’s getting Covid-19 or passing it on. The evidence of cases so far backs this up. The government’s decision to keep schools closed therefore feels unsubstantiated. And writing about feelings? That seems quite useless. It’s enough just to keep one’s head above water.

Masks

I used to think I could only read one book at a time, but have since become a promiscuous rifler of pages. Reading multiple books at once can lead to idea collages across genres. Take for example Amy Tan’s thoughts on photographs in Where the Past Begins:

I used to think photographs were more accurate than bare memory because they capture moments as they were, making them indisputable. They are like hard facts, whereas aging memory is impressionistic and selective in details, much like fiction is. But now, having gone through the archives, I realize that photos also distort what is really being captured. To get the best shot, the messiness is shoved to the side, the weedy yard is out of the shot. The images are also missing context: the reason why some are missing, what happened before and after, who likes or dislikes whom, if anyone is unhappy to be there. When they heard “cheese,” they uniformly stared at the camera’s mechanical eye, and put on the happy mask, leaving a viewer fifty years later to assume everyone had a grand time.

Now compare that to a similar idea in a completely different context… In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam is explaining how the communist regime changed its citizens’ lives. Here she describes how people had appear uniformly fine:

It was essential to smile – if you didn’t, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit – if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience. (…) But while wearing your smiling mask, it was important not to laugh – this could look suspicious to the neighbors and make them think you were indulging in sacrilegious mockery. We have lost the capacity to be spontaneously cheerful, and it will never come back to us.

Look how both authors use the word “mask” - Tan, a “happy mask” and Mandelstam, a “smiling mask”. It’s funny how, now, in the pandemic, the use of a mask in public has both robbed me of the ability to smile reassuringly to strangers but also provided me with the convenience of not having to make the effort if I don’t feel like it.

One way or another

I was listening to Phuc Tran’s book Sigh, Gone, in audio version, and there’s a part in which he describes how his mother was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, if I remember correctly. His parents, who are Catholic, up and decide to travel to the shrine of the newly-sainted John Henry Newman to beg his intercession. The mother is cured because the doctors find no trace of the cancer in her body in a subsequent appointment.

As I understand it, from Phuc Tran’s point of view, there may or may not have been a miracle, and either way, the Catholic religion was a minor key bass line in his growing up - underpinning everything rather sombrely. What Phuc Tran offers the reader is a delightful example of how this possibly Divine Intervention was but an anecdote in this story. This thing that people pray for, that people can literally die or live on, has no greater repercussion in someone’s life than eating out on a Tuesday at McDonald’s. Just imagine the opposite… that this poor immigrant family, recently come to America, does pray to John Henry Newman and that the situation is not reversed and the mother dies anyway. The author would be no more Catholic than he is today with the miracle having happened.

It strikes me that when it comes to desires, it is the immediacy that counts. It also seems to me that when it comes to decisions, our human nature wants two things: to avoid suffering and to feel right. Basically, a request for Divine Intervention is a request that says: “please do something!” But say that a an indication is granted for a decision to be made. Or rather, say that clouds part, a voice is heard, and a command is handed down: “get the vaccine” or “don’t get the vaccine”. Assuming that the instruction is followed, our human nature would then be all puffed-up with the idea that our adherence to the instruction made us good. Instead, the instruction-less among us have to stay humble, have to search for calm and find peace and follow their own heart and then, even more importantly, have to give up their idea of what is good, in order to accept and understand the intentions and actions or inactions of others. I think this is the greater challenge. It’s not making the decision itself. Rather, it’s accepting that, free to choose, there is no immunity to suffering and no guarantee for the future, and that our choice might never find universal approval. Furthermore, in the future, the immediacy of this issue will have disappeared and we will struggle to remember what it was that we talked about so much.

inspiration

Beau Miles has published a book. Now would you look at that cover photograph? I sigh. I admit, I’m a fan of his Youtube videos, my favourite being Run the Line: Retracing 43 km of hidden railway because it touches on history. But often, after watching any one of his videos, I want to go out and shoot my own adventure. I get a feeling akin to jealousy…

While thinking of this post, I started wondering why I found Beau Miles particularly inspiring, and thought of other YouTube videos I’ve enjoyed, a bit dismayed to come up with Casey Neistat’s channel, which I followed for awhile when he was living in New York. I panicked a bit… Aren’t there any women’s channels I like? Yes! In fact, Bernadette Banner’s vlogs on the subject of Victorian and Edwardian dress offered a fascinating glimpse into corsets, for example. And Ariel Bissett introduced me to “book tube” a few years ago. Liziqi blends a kind of tireless productivity with almost graceful romance in her vlogs, in which furniture is built, fields are sown and harvested, harvested materials are transformed and every day ends with an extraordinary meal.

So what is it about Beau Miles that I find so inspiring? I think there are two things: the first, is a sort of recklessness unfamiliar to me. I was raised with carefulness. That’s neither good nor bad, and I don’t mean Miles goes and risks his life for views. Rather, I think, I grew up feeling like things around me were fragile and that things had to be handled properly. This lent itself to ideas of perfectionism and scarcity. So, when Miles assembles things using found materials for example, the viewer gets to feel both the freedom of experimentation and a mastery of the tools that are handled. The results is therefore satisfying without being caught up in ideas of perfection. The older I get, the more I am intrigued by this idea of patina and lived-in spaces. (I mentioned that here.) Eventually, there comes a point, I think, when you’re not striving for an ideal image but rather, having acquired experience over the years, skill replaces self-consciousness. And this brings me to the second point. I think Beau Miles is an extraordinary storyteller. This is something you can glimpse in an interview he recently gave here, specifically, when he says: “As a storyteller, I know that you can come across a bit more loose and ad hoc and it’s just a bit more fun that way. But in my heart of hearts I kind of know what I’m doing.”

If you are unfamiliar with Beau Miles, I highly recommend his videos! See if you find them as inspiring!

Making decisions

I think the subject of decision making is neat… Neat in the sense that there are, for it, a variety of strategies that can be employed and a variety of pitfalls to be avoided.

To be avoided:
- Drift
- Decision fatigue
- Regret

I think most strategies can be boiled down to a form of mindfulness. Take, for example, Stephen Levitt’s advice on a recent episode of “People I Mostly Admire”. He divides decisions into two categories: the ones in which you lack information, and the ones where you have lots of information. For the first, he advises to be wary of self-interested experts and find, instead, a friend or family member who has faced a similar decision, has done research or knows more about it than you, and follow their choice. For the second he imagines the outcome of both choices and aims for the one in which he would feel the least regret. If he is still uncertain about the choice to make, his advice, based on research, is “to take whatever path is the biggest deviation from the status quo” because people who have done so, who have made the biggest change, “are on average happier than the people” who haven’t. (You can listen to the whole explanation at 23:36 into the episode.)

Levitt’s advice is neat: count on someone you trust, imagine a future self in one decision scenario or the other, or take the opportunity for the biggest change.

The latter part of his advice seems related to one of Mother Teresa’s tips for humility… She wrote that when faced with a choice, “choose what is hardest”. I often think about this during the day. Faced with little choices, it’s in my nature to pick what is easier, what is lazier or more comfortable. But building up a tolerance for what is harder, or more uncomfortable, is more rewarding in the long run.

While there might be a tendency to look at decisions as a vast field of research, I’m tempted to look at decisions as a form of friction… Being mindful and observing the tensions that arise from the choices at hand is interesting!

About exertion

I keep returning to this bit of an interview with Greg McKeown on Gretchen Rubin’s blog, which is a good sign that I should take note of it here. He talks about how, in the case of a health scare with his daughter, he was confronted with a decision:

All we wanted in the world was for Eve to get better. That wasn’t just the most important thing. It was the only thing. What came into view for me was two paths for getting there. One made this challenging situation heavier. The other made this challenging situation lighter. And we had to choose which path to take. Maybe this choice seems obvious. But it wasn’t. As parents, our instinct was to attack the problem, with full force, from all directions: worrying about her 24/7, reaching out to every neurologist in the country, meeting with doctors one after the other, asking them a million questions, pulling all-nighters poring over medical journals and googling for a cure or even just a diagnosis, researching alternative medicine as a possible option. What the gravity of the situation called for, we assumed, was near-superhuman effort. But such an approach would have been unsustainable, while also producing disappointing results.

Mercifully, we took the second path. We realized that the best way to help our daughter, and our whole family, through this time was not by exerting more effort. In fact, it was quite the opposite. We needed to find ways to make every day a little easier. Why? Because we needed to be able to sustain this effort for an unknown length of time. It was not negotiable: we simply could not now or ever burn out. If your job is to keep the fires burning for an indefinite period of time, you can’t throw all the fuel on the flames at the beginning.

[His daughter, he notes, is almost completely better now.]

What did I learn from this experience? Whatever has happened to you in life. Whatever hardship. Whatever pain. However significant those things are. They pale in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now. You can make the choice to continue to work harder and harder, wearing yourself out in the process. Or, you can choose a more effortless path. One where you try and make each day a little easier.

Reading this, it might be easy to think that the decision to go “easier” is a selfish one. Isn’t there merit in sacrificing for someone? Doesn’t the Bible say, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”? I think there’s an interesting nuance here. Taking the first path could be falling into an illusion, or perhaps a misunderstanding of love. Because the appearance of total dedication, the self-imposed sacrifice is a distraction from what is even more important: a recognition (and acceptance) of vulnerability.

Tutoring

As the second term as a writing tutor comes to a close this week, I want to bask a moment in the delightful variety of requests I’ve seen over the fall and winter semesters that services have been offered.

Sometimes it begins with the assignment. I suspect professors have a whole variety of reasons for giving assignments, but some of the time, assignments are meant to forge new neural pathways or develop new skills, like the challenge of close reading and analysis, or developing an argument based on source readings. In all these cases, I become re-acquainted with past experiences in which I had to get comfortable with stating an opinion, with learning to avoid summary when it wasn’t necessary, with familiarizing myself with events and people that were completely foreign to my experience. It is now an exciting thing to be dropped into a historical scene and to feel the drive to scramble to find reference points.

Sometimes it’s the writing. I realize it has taken me years to get a grip on academic writing and it doesn’t come naturally. For one thing, writing can feel extremely personal, and a tutor can help remind a student that an essay is just a product of your thoughts on a subject. For another, essay-writing is a skill that can be perfected over time. I feel bad for students who write with a kind of desperation about their marks… “I need an A” is terrible pressure to put on yourself - just as if an aspiring athlete were to declare to their coach on the first day of practice: “I need a gold medal”. Assignments are best viewed as exercises, in my opinion. With time their complexity becomes manageable and the lagging bits catch up to the stronger bits to compose a reliably good whole.

Sometimes it’s the detail. Academic writing requires citation and there are three kinds and each kind has a strict set of rules that lay out a finicky amount of detail. I’ve discovered that finding the right format and then applying it throughout the essay takes a surprising amount of time. It is also somewhat mindless work during which I can have Netflix playing while formatting the details.

What I most enjoyed this year is noticing how tutoring has changed for me… instead of thinking of myself as a person with all the answers who will tell a student how to write a perfect essay, I now think of myself as more of a guidepost. A student is somewhere along the path to writing good essays and they come visit for the next nudge in the right direction. I have left my lofty place to melt myself into that particular student’s challenge and try to hand them the most practical tool for meeting it. It’s just as much an exercise for me in anticipating what could be most constructive and useful at a single point in time, versus the tendency to overwhelm or the temptation to generalize too broadly.

Swedish death cleaning my social media

I decided to go through some of my social media and delete old posts… Here are a few things I noticed:

1. I’m turning into a private person, or at least a more private person than I was before. I’m struck by how, in my own youth, I had an eagerness to share and to be open. I don’t think I’ve changed too dramatically, but the need for third-party approval has diminished a little.

2. Taking down old posts feels like taking back a bit of control. It might be an illusion, but given how onerous it is to do on some sites, doing so feels good.

3. Old pictures and craftily-worded thoughts give me a false pang of nostalgia… I say its false because a) I don’t like dwelling on nostalgic thoughts and b) social media represents a small percentage of my life and c) the people and the relationships those posts present/represent, are with me, in albums in my house, in the phone calls and visits we continue to make with each other.

4. The exercise highlights the importance of being in the present moment. The accumulation of posts made are all bits of past me… past efforts, past struggles, past happiness… and “saving them” would feel like taking away from the importance and beauty of the present. We’re here, I’m here, let’s be here today!

Silence vs screaming

When confronted with suffering, fictional or real accounts, in books or on screen, I get the perverse temptation to imagine what I would do in the victim’s position. A hero or heroin faced with violence either screams and fights or bears the trial in silence. I am averse to noise and always imagine myself a stoically unwilling to waste my breath.

Catholic saints were often depicted as extraordinarily courageous… St. Lawrence, placed on a gridiron over coals, famously told his tormentors to turn him over, to roast the other side. Hagiography abounds in such stories. As a teenager, I admired Lawrence of Arabia’s secular fortitude.

I’m reading Hope Against Hope by Nadeshda Mandelstam in which she wrote: “Later I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isn’t it better to face one’s tormentors in a stance of satanic pride, answering them with contemptuous silence? I decided that it is better to scream. This pitiful sound, which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the remotest prison cell, is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a man’s way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.”

In the second season of The Last Kingdom, Uhtred and his friend Halig are sold into slavery. As punishment for trying to escape, Halig is tied to the ship’s prow as Uhtred and the other men row. Halig yells each time the prow is raised enough for him to do so. This seems to fire Uhtred’s rowing, and when Halig no longer screams, Uhtred knows that death has released his friend from the torture. Halig’s screams seemed like the final act of bravery and a kindness to Uhtred.

Silence or screams… all to say that it wasn’t until lately that I’ve learned screams could have virtue.

Trivialise

I don’t like committing to words, or quotes - the kind you stick to a wall, or frame, or tattoo to your skin. I no sooner write down a thing meant to inspire me, that I go blind to its existence and the inspiration turns to dust. But things do inspire me! Like, for example, Jack Druce’s advice in a recent Dense Discovery newsletter:

‘Trivialise what you do.’ I learned this with comedy but I think it applies to everything. If you are betting your self-worth on everything you do, it’s easy to crumple under the weight of your own expectations. If you can find ways to convince yourself that whatever you’re doing is just silly and fun then you can simply do your best without dreading the consequences of it not going exactly how you planned.

It corresponds with what Caroline McGraw said in an interview with Gretchen Rubin:

The most common objection I get to “you don’t owe anyone,” is the idea that if we don’t walk around overburdened with constant guilt and obligation, then we’ll just run amok and ruin people’s lives.

What I’ve actually found is that when you live like you don’t owe anyone – when you are free from the weight of expectations, and have a felt awareness of your own freedom – then you are more likely to act in loving ways.

It’s linked to that great concept from Brené Brown, how our boundaries keep us out of resentment. When you set boundaries around your time and energy, when you don’t owe anyone an interaction … then you’re free to give from the heart.

It’s very heavy walking around burdened by your own ideas of how you should be and what you should do. I can’t help but feel that in excess, it can become like Sara Gruen’s tragic rescue mission.

One of the advantages Seth Godin lists as a benefit of writing a book is that “it leaves behind a record of where you are in this moment.” Blog posts are similar. Today, I like thinking about the balance to be found between love and expectation. Because this idea is on my mind, I find it expressed in new ways, everywhere… Last night, reading aloud from Anne of Avonlea, this description made me smile: “Jane was not troubled by any aspirations to be an influence for good.” Pithily, “The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.” (Mark Nepo via)

Feelings path

If I hadn’t listened to the Fresh Air podcast episode wherein Terri Gross interviews Kazuo Ishiguro, all the way to the end, I would not have heard of Stacey Kent.

If I had not heard of Stacey Kent, I would not have listened to her album, retiring early to bed, to lie in stillness to escape the day and the fatigue of obligations.

If I had not listened to the album by Stacey Kent and realized that in spite of being a glib introvert stoically surviving pandemic restrictions without much complaint, I did in fact miss our occasional carefree nights out. And then, I would not have felt that line in the documentary titled Audrey, wherein she describes life resuming again after the war: “All the things you’ve never had, never seen, never eaten, never worn, started to come back again. That was such a stimulus.”

(If I had not listened to the whole documentary, I would not have realized how inspiring Audrey Hepburn was… With lines like: “She most certainly took trauma and transmuted it into love.” Or her own observation: “Humanitarian means human welfare. And responding to human suffering. And that’s finally what politics should be. I think perhaps with time, instead of their being a politicalisation of humanitarian aid, there’ll be a humanisation of politics. I dream of the day that it will be all one.”)

If I had not spent the evening doing nothing, I would not have appreciated that Radiolab episode on Escape this morning.

Who knows if I wouldn’t have arrived at these feelings in spite of these bits of media, but here they are, gathered in one neat little posy.

Clothes

In the evening, when it is dark and cold outside, my daughter and I spend a few minutes before her bedtime reading a chapter from a book in English. (We’re read through lots of recommendations from Gretchen Rubin’s list of 81 Kid Lit / YA books) Curled up on the couch, we recently read this passage in Anne of Green Gables: “It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable. At least, it is easier for me. I suppose it doesn’t make such a difference to naturally good people.” She goes on to describe her coat and compliment her friend’s hat and concludes: “Do you suppose it’s wrong for us to think so much about our clothes? Marilla says it is very sinful. But it is such an interesting subject, isn’t it?”

I grew up with a mother who, reacting to her own childhood, scarred by other experiences, and fully committed to conservative Catholicism, dressed me in modest cleanliness from my birth to adulthood. When I left home, I had to learn how to figure out my own style. Sometimes the thought this exercise required and the shame it exposed made me feel resentful. I think that is why I find Anne’s quote so interesting, because once I could stop worrying so much about what I wore, there was space to concentrate on other things.

Growing up, clothes were humiliating, because I felt they set me apart when I wanted instead to fit in. Obsessively attributing the day’s good turnout or bad turnout based on what I was wearing felt silly even as I did it throughout high school. Clothing, I was supposed to understand, was a frivolous thing, much like Anne’s obsession over puffed sleeves. Thinking about it was impossible to justify. And yet, it was the clumsy handling, growing up, of “what is important” that still nags at me today. In the place of my mother, I’ve taken to books like Parisian Chic, Women in Clothes and The Sartorialist. They’ve shown me how clothes are “such an interesting subject.”

Humility - again

I wrote a blog post commenting on this idea of humility, which, from my understanding, is a theme in Adam Grant’s book Think Again. His book and his ideas have been bouncing around the cluster of podcasts I listen to, and I suppose that is why I am revisiting the idea. Humility itself is interesting. I think it is vaguely amusing that I reactively dismiss the promotional urgency to read the book based on what I feel I already know. However, Adam Grant recently released a podcast episode that combined two interviews he’d done with Malcolm Gladwell and this latter gets at a point that reflects my feeling. Here is my (lightly edited) transcript of their conversation:

Malcolm Gladwell: I’m always very attracted to religious themes in things, particularly if they’re slightly sublimated. But it always struck me that there was some kind of moral case being made in your books, that maybe you weren’t making explicitly but that there was something about reading your books that felt very comfortable to someone who is used to thinking about the world in terms of character, ethics, morality, those kinds of things. Like if I (I was thinking) if I had a Bible study of Evangelicals and I said ‘this week we’re not reading the New Testament, we’re gonna read the works of Adam Grant’ I think actually people with that kind of worldview would be very at home with the arguments that you’re making. 

Adam Grant: That’s interesting! I love it when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science. And I think, where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is around … for me at least, a lot of the principles and recommendations that comes out of religious traditions are missing the nuance about ‘how do you actually do this in life’. So yeah, of course you want to be a generous person, but how do you give to others in a way that prevents you or protects you from burning out or just getting burned by the most selfish takers around. Yes, I want to be humble, but I don’t want to become meek, or lack confidence and so I think, I guess what I want to do in a lot of my work is try to use evidence to pick up where, where these higher principles leave off, and ask, ok, what does it mean to do this without sacrificing you know, our ambitions.

 M.G.: Yeah, yeah. But even that, I mean, that’s why Christians have Bible studies, and that’s why Jews study Torah, because the original texts, they are only the beginning, they require additional interpretation and understanding. They’re not sufficient on their own, otherwise you wouldn’t need to study them.

A.G.: When it comes to having those conversations about the ideas in those texts, I just, I happen to love the tools of the scientific method as a way to figure out what’s gonna be effective for more of the people more of the time.

I think Malcolm Gladwell highlights what it is in Adam Grant’s latest book that makes me feel like his theme is a familiar one.