In February, Tim and I visited my family in California. We had a pretty dreamy time — perhaps made dreamier in retrospect by the new health woes that impacted me right when we got back — but the last day we were there I became melancholy. It catches up with me every time I visit, before I leave. A dramatic ache just below my sternum. A sense of loss as I watch the sun dip down below the horizon on the last night I’m there.
I’m left feeling bereft. But bereft of what, exactly?
When I lived in California, I wanted to live elsewhere. Now that I’ve lived elsewhere for just as long, sometimes I wish I lived in California.
There are too many reasons for us not to: it’s too expensive, my friends don’t live there, so much traffic, too expensive, too expensive to live in a walkable neighborhood, not great for bike commuting, also, too expensive.
This trip, we went to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and I suddenly felt like an idiot. I love ‘da movies,’ I love them so much. I was struck by the panicked thought that somehow I’d spent my whole adult life doing other things (non profit fundraising, hi) instead of being involved somehow with the thing I love. Why had this not occurred to me sooner? Why had I wasted so much time?
This regret compounded on the usual melancholy and by the time we were back in Somerville I was out of sorts. Sometimes you have the feeling that the life you’re living is the wrong one, and it’s incredibly unsettling.
It’s usually not even true, just a passing feeling. You’ll feel better once you get back into your normal schedule, my therapist encouraged me. There’s a lot here that you’re not honoring. Of course, she was right.1
I think of the feeling that I have when I’m about to leave and ask myself again: bereft of what, exactly? It’s only been two months since our trip but I see that the answer is really: bereft of time. My parents are aging (love you), my beloved cat Pushkin is aging (love you), my nieces and nephews are no longer babies, they are middle-schoolers.
I do the math to calculate how long it will be before I will not be able to go back to my childhood home, because it will not belong to us anymore. I wake up and I’m in my mid-(to-late?) thirties and oh my god I’m having a midlife crisis.
I’ve read two books recently that on the surface are unrelated to each other, one specifically about this problem with time that we all have, the other a novel, but together they encapsulate some of what I’m feeling.
The first is Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I highly recommend you read it (along with the incredible How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell), but the premise is that most of us are alive for 4,000 weeks, and in accepting our “finitude,” we’re able to more completely inhabit our lives and our decisions.
Burkeman does a good job of exploring how much of productivity / capitalist culture is, at its core, an attempt to evade the absolute truth that we all die. There isn’t enough time to do all the things we want to do, and instead of fooling ourselves that we CAN have it all if we use just the right organization methods2 and running around like crazy, we’re better served by embracing our limitations, accepting the hard truths, and making decisions that honor how brief this life is.3
Burkeman writes:
The problem is one of instrumentalization. To use time, by definition, is to treat it instrumentally, as a means to an end, and of course you do this every day…Yet it turns out to be perilously easy to overinvest in this instrumental relationship to time— to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are — with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the “real” value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.
This means not always looking to the future, something that I can be guilty of, but trying to see each day for what it is, not as a steppingstone to some unattainable, better future where all your problems will be solved and you will finally be happy. It’s tough talk but it’s a perspective I desperately needed to hear.
The other book I read recently, which absolutely tore me to shreds, was Roxana Robinson’s Leaving. In the novel, two high school sweethearts meet after forty years and begin an affair with devastating consequences for their families.
It drew me in, partly because I think many of us are familiar with the idle curiosity that can come up about people you once knew well, and the surreal realization that they’re out there having entire lives, marriages, babies, divorces…living their own main character lives.
Robinson writes:
She stops thinking about the fact that he’s married. She thinks of two parallel worlds, two lived lives. She thinks of the universe in which they’d gone to Bucharest…She remembers all this: the blister on her heel, the slate roofs, the water on her face: the summer they went to Eastern Europe. They had never gone to a Communist country.
It was her fault that this had not happened.
Later, the same character describes how she’s lived her life:
She had always looked ahead, as though she did not exist in the present, as though her real self were somewhere in the future.
I mean!!!
I read Leaving first, but after finishing 4,000 Weeks, it’s clear that Robinson’s characters are contending with exactly what Burkeman writes about. They are really struggling to understand if their decisions have been the right ones, while also facing how their time dwindles.
An affair is just another way to try and keep your options open against the grains of sand pouring through the hourglass, which in fact is not embracing your “finitude” as Burkeman would have you do.
How do we grapple with the tender briefness of our time here, especially when even for the luckiest of us, the world can seem so awful some days? It’s very tempting to look back at your choices and find fault in them, to try and punish yourself for your prior decisions.
It’s also the wrong thing to do.
In college, the dean of our residence gave one of my friends some advice that I have repeated to myself often in the years since. She was trying to make a difficult decision, and he told her, “Whatever decision you make will be the right one.”
Just like that — and the decisions I’ve made with my weeks so far, with the information that I had at the time, have been the right ones. Not always the best ones, or the smartest ones, but the right ones.
Or, as bff Lily says, the universe puts you right where you need to be.
The Sew Zone
Working and reworking. I’m working on a quilt right now that I’m really excited about, but it’s a gift for a friend so no photos here until after it’s done! I’ve already gone in a few different directions from where I started and I’m really enjoying the iteration of it all.
Here is a quilt that I’ve given up on for now because it’s not doing anything for me. Sometime’s it’s like that.
I also have started to take apart things that I’m not wearing: a Zero Waste Gather Dress in a really nice linen that I already tweaked once because the Big Dress was just too big for me; a Patina blouse I made in a too-big size, in a cheery check from Fab Rick’s Fabrics, which was giving court jester more than anything else. I gave up on serged seams and just starting hacking them apart. The ZW dress will probably turn into a Romy dress and the Patina fabric will likely be a Romy top.
Saying this here so I stick to it: once and only once those reworking projects are done will I go on to the next garment projects in the queue!4
That’s it for this week… Forgive me while I experiment a bit with the format this newsletter. You’ll have another note from me next week with recommendations/consumptions from the last few weeks.
It would also mean so much to me if you’d share with anyone you think might enjoy!
xoxo
mvp
I’ve gained so much via my steady non-profit employment over the past ten years! I’ve made some of my greatest friends and met some of my most favorite people, absolutely beloveds, precisely because of this job path, people who have made me who I am! I love having steady work and a steady paycheck and health insurance! I am a risk averse person!
I felt personally called out when he referenced the pomodoro method, something that I have used on the days when my brain is mush to middling success.
Resonances here with The Baby Decision, in which by making a decision about whether to have a baby, you free yourself from the in-between times.
Daughter Judy Genra shirt in a nice navy poplin, and either SWS Felix top OR the Anthea blouse hack from Anna Allen in a really lovely cotton blockprint. AND THEN maybe at some point this summer the FPC Saltwater Slip in an electric blue silk (???) or poly that I got for pennies at an incredible thrift shop in Bar Harbor last summer. And then… pants?!? DJ Worship jeans at last?