Category: Life

Walking. With my Religion.

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4:00 a.m. I check the weather app: 18° F, wind speed 15 mph from the North, wind gusts up to 28 mph. Temperature feels like – 1° F. Winds from The Great White North, a reminder of Home. Add the presence of high tide, cloud cover of < 5% and there would be less-than-zero reason to be going out this morning, except one of the three requirements of a great morning trifecta being present, No Humans. Wally snuggles close, belly so warm, he snores. I tip toe out of the room, wood floors cold, body and bones resist, this Earth won’t stop spinning if I take the day off.

Last Night. Rachel asks if we would drive into the city to pick her up. Luggage, Sully, Christmas gifts, just way too much to haul solo on Metro North. The response was swift: Absolutely Not. Google Maps estimates ~90 minutes in both directions, if all goes well. Holiday traffic snarling. Tolls subject to surge pricing add to the misery. Now, why would anyone subject themselves to this? Well…It’s 8 p.m., and here I am, in the car, driving into Manhattan. Madness. 30 minutes to travel 30 miles. 60 minutes to navigate the last 10 minutes into Gotham. Think Mad Max in Thunderdome. Eastside highway traffic moving 55-70 mph, along NARROW, I mean a NARROW three lanes on something closer to a gravel country road than highway. Reach out your window and touch the yellow cab next to you. Reach out the passenger side, you’d be skimming the restraining wall of the East River. It’s less than one hour from bedtime, and here I am, bleary-eyed, hands clenching the steering wheel — the body knows, stomach cramps signaling high anxiety. I shift in my seat conscious of one errant move right or left and there is a pile up of massive proportions — followed by a 2 hour delay with cops, and accident reports. But, there’s something to prove here. Man-Child from small town Western Canada still has it — can make it on these tough streets of NYC. Cab driver behind me has his hand on the horn urging me to speed up, I’m going 60 mph. He passes giving me the bird, must be the Connecticut plates. I reciprocate with genuine kindness, turning on my high beams and tailgating him for the next mile or two, high beams flickering in his rear view mirror. Don’t mess with Country. He turns off at Exit 15. Still got it. Man-child.

4:30 a.m. I settle into my office chair. No longer reading the papers, nothing uplifting there. No longer following politics. I check the box scores. Check blog posts. Read another chapter or two, and then close my eyes reflecting on the drive into Manhattan, operating on < 5 hours sleep. “Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.” — Hanif Abdurraqib

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Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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The main aim of Meditations for Mortals is to acquaint readers with a broader perspective on what drives our mania for controlling our schedules and inboxes. We fear the present moment, the way that we are “confined to this temporal locality, unable even to stand on tiptoes and peer over the fence into the future, to check that everything’s all right there.” I’ve felt, more times than I care to admit, that despite my heartbeat and mortgage and two walking, talking children, I’m not yet inside my life. Someday it will start, I imagine, the part of life in which I’m really engaged, really moving forward, really jolted with the electricity of having a mind and body that can interact with this wild world. I’ll leave behind this practice life for the real one.

— Hillary Kelly, from her interview of Oliver Burkeman in her essay: “You Are Going to Die.” (The Guardian, October 4, 2024)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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I have always resisted anything that smells a bit self-helpy. Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty content with my pretty average, relatively low-stress life, where days seized and squandered pass in fairly equal number, attended by tides of frustration or mild satisfaction… Floundering is living, too, Burkeman explains. And if there is any key to success, it’s giving up altogether the quest for super-productivity and rejecting the nagging impulse to get on top of things. Instead, we’d all be happier and more productive if we did what we could – and no more – while embracing our imperfections. Now that’s the kind of pep talk I can get on board with. […]

Meditations for Mortals could be read as a slacker’s charter, or as rehab for burned-out high achievers. For me, it fell somewhere in between. I have been grappling with my own middle-aged productivity wobbles. It can be deeply frustrating to know how much more you could earn or achieve if you could only find another gear, or rediscover the one you seemed to zoom along in as a care-free youngster.

Burkeman’s insight – always clear-eyed and jargon-free – backs up, in a reassuring and constructive way, the other sense I have on more forgiving days (going easy on yourself is the theme of day 16): that it’s better for you and everyone around you to work with, rather than fight against, who you are now. After all, Burkeman says, quoting the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson (who gets a free pass as a tech guy because he’s both Canadian and self-aware): most highly successful people are “just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity”.

— Simon Usborne, from his review of “Meditations for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman. (The Guardian, September 12, 2024)

Collective effervescence

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From the outside, it’s easy to roll our eyes at devotees of everything from Taylor Swift to “Star Trek.” We deem them nerdy or frivolous, judge their costumes, the time they waste on Reddit, the money they spend on concert tickets.

What if they’ve figured out something the rest of us haven’t?

After all, so many of us lack community. Data from Cigna finds 58% of Americans are lonely. Religion is fading. Work doesn’t love us back. Maybe letting ourselves be obsessed with that highly specific and possibly weird thing we love is the answer…

“If it brings you joy, why not do more of it?” the 33-year-old architect asked, clad in an “Aladdin”-print dress. A photo of her and her husband wearing mouse ears hung on the wall behind her on our Zoom call.

More than six in 10 Americans said hobbies or recreational activities were extremely or very important to them, according to a 2023 poll from Gallup. That’s up from 48% in 2001 and 2002. Meanwhile, the share of people who said the same about religion dropped 7 percentage points, to 58%.

Picture a crowd swaying in unison to a beloved song. Everyone assembled feels the same emotion simultaneously, says Paul Booth, a professor of media and pop culture at DePaul University. The euphoria catches and builds. The experience, known as “collective effervescence,” can feel transcendent, he says, almost telepathic. “I think it has to do with wanting something in our lives that we can lose ourselves in,” he says. At a time of increasing polarization and cynicism—not to mention that coming election—it’s an especially wondrous connection, he adds…

“That’s the heart of a fandom,” says Tara Block, who fell in love with the “Harry Potter” books after graduating college. “You care a lot.”

— Rachel Feintzeig, from “What Superfans Know That the Rest of Us Should Learn.” (wsj.com, August 19, 2024)

Photo: Anna-m. w., London, England. People enjoying concert.

I am not summer people

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I neglected to make plans for the summer. This obviously should have been worked out months ago…All around me people are busy relaxing. Somehow, they arranged to spend their weekends in July at the beach and are away in August…

As for me, I didn’t key into any of the warnings — the lists of must-try ice cream pop-ups and which beach towels to buy. The internet sets up a constant swirl of seasonal prep and appreciation — get ready, get ready, enjoy it, indulge, it’s the last gasp — and then suddenly, it’s gone, and it’s time to review the highs and lows.

Maybe seasonal shape shifting has knocked me off my pegs. Winter is snowless, spring is short, summer seems to have stretched outward, its oppressive heat hovers over the full calendar year like a threat. Now — who knew? — August is here and I haven’t begun to make the most of the season…

I haven’t been to the beach or the pool or the lake. The Weber grill is covered in dead leaves and there’s a wasp nest back there that I’ve been meaning to call someone (who?) to remove. I’ve spent no time on a boat, on an outdoor chaise or nestled in a hammock. I’ve worn neither gingham nor seersucker nor floppy hat. I forgot to obsess over Lyme disease, but it doesn’t matter because I have yet to venture into a summer meadow or grassy field…

I am not summer people, something hard to admit because summer is also the pushiest season, the most insistent that it be reveled in publicly. I’m not sure I have the time or energy required to pursue it, at least not in real life. I marvel at people with second homes when I can barely stay on top of my one, and summer traffic stresses me out…

And what did I miss, really? I got my insides churned to the point of nausea by the summer’s political cycle without going to Six Flags. The Olympics arrived online, no need to sweat it out in oversubscribed Paris. My nonexistent summer was if nothing else cheap…

Is this just regret masquerading as smug superiority and earthy thrift? Perhaps. But I can focus on that in the fall, which is apparently next month, and it is past time to get ready. I’ve seen the Halloween candy on the shelves.

— Pamela Paul, from “It’s Too Late for Summer Now.” (NY Times, August 15, 2024)