I thought about intentions. It occurred to me that last year I did not set intentions here — instead I set firm, yes/no, admirable goals that required the participation of other people and large systems, and that participation was not forthcoming — AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENED.
But I don’t want to add anything, to ask more of myself for 2021 (except to write more). I do not need to improve myself, I need to improve my circumstances, which will, as ever, require the participation of other people and large systems. So it seems kinder not to write about how I succeeded and how I failed, but to write about and eventually look back on, what I discovered this year.
1). Nature. I get it now. Some kinds of outside are more helpful to me than other kinds of outside. I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about the goodness, the healing power, the deep centering effect of nature (fine, Walden, but as an urbanist I’m generally vexed with Thoreau who, by the way, wasn’t at all far from town and continued to benefit from community and the urbanity that was on offer). I didn’t get it before, really. I get it now. I need it now. And I am grateful that my apartment, while lacking private outdoor space, is pretty much on top of an extraordinary network of unpaved trails. This year I walked on the Appalachian trail!
2). Walking. I liked walking instrumentally. (Before 2020, I liked a lot of things instrumentally. I was a one-woman orchestra of instrumentality. That’s another discovery in itself.) It was absolutely my favorite way to move through a city, to learn about a place, to get from A to B. But I didn’t value it as an activity in itself, I didn’t have a practice of walking. It wasn’t hard enough, strenuous enough, I should have been running, walking for its own sake was boring. And then running became fraught and scary, with three significant injuries in 2019. So I walked just to get out (into Nature!), and I left my headphones behind and settled into walking as a thing in itself, as a meditation, as a practice. And it’s something I do with Will, and sometimes with Milo, and it’s lovely. When I walk, I release myself from always having to do the hardest thing. And in so doing, I see more. I feel more. It feels better for me.
3). Baking: This is a silly one that just occurred to me: This year I discovered that my yeast breads failed not because of insufficient kneading but because of insufficient rising time. I haven’t attempted babka again, but I made three (maybe four) batches of challah that were very good.
4). Asking for help: Oh wow. Wow wow wow. I had 100 networking interactions this year, or, about 75 more than my prior lifetime total. I am very sad — sad doesn’t even begin to cover it, exhausted, enervated, despairing, furious, confused — that none of these has resulted in a new job (yes, I know. It’s not me, it’s 2020). At the same time, I recognize intellectually that this is a big deal. This is new behavior for me. This is the result of a lot of work on trusting myself, trusting other people, recognizing that I am worthy of help, that help and collaboration are the only ways to move to change. It’s a sign of curiosity, imagination, hope. I wish the rewards were here now, that my new behavior had been instantly and comprehensively rewarded. Oh well. Seeds, deep roots not shallow ones.
5). Productivity is bullshit: Really, really for this one, I should win an award. The Nobel Prize in Mindset Renovation. Yes, it took a pandemic and a crushing decrease in salary. Yes, it might all go away when I commute again (especially if I’m commuting to an adjacent city for what might be the best job ever). But I no longer thoughtlessly hurt myself by saying “I got nothing done today.” There’s always more to do. I’ll never be most productive. Days are different from one another. Productivity for its own sake is meaningless, or worse (I’m pretty sure I’ve written that before). Sometimes the most productive thing to do is wait. Sometimes the most productive thing is the thing I did 1 or 10 or 100 days ago that I didn’t recognize as productive. Sometimes the most productive thing is a walk. Joy and productivity are on different scales.
6). I am less anxious: I am many, many things, and I feel many difficult emotions. I am very worried, excruciatingly worried, about my professional situation. As I have been since before I started this blog. Reading my posts from 10 years ago made me sad. I want to work till I’m 80, and I am worried that I will instead stumble through the next 15 years until social security kicks in (actually 17, maybe 20 to get the maximum monthly benefit), grasping, yearning and never really finding the right thing, and finally leaving the field in defeat. No one else believes that for me. So what? I am still scared of Daniel, although less so with each day, with each legal motion, with each smile from Will that reminds me that things are so different now. I worry a lot about Milo, who makes decisions I don’t like at all. And with all that… I am less anxious and was less anxious in this anxiety-riven year than I might have ever been. It’s all that nature! And love. Many things I thought made me anxious and therefore unloveable, un-live-with-able were functions of the impossibility of living with a man who wanted only chaos — he was a malevolent dictator of chaos, and think about that for a minute. I don’t do chaos. I don’t find it sexy or enlivening or compelling. It doesn’t make me feel more alive. It only makes me anxious. Will’s love and my own years and years and years of my work and Milo (who always communicates even when he isn’t behaving) and my friends and my family have made me less anxious. And, honestly, once I realized that I had made a terrible mistake about one thing that you kinda have to get right to have a great life, and that that mistake reverberated through 24 years of career decisions and crushed some of my dreams of motherhood and some of the losses are entirely unrecoverable… I realized all that, that in fact I should have known and didn’t, that I did in fact misread every signal that I did in fact fail to figure it out for myself for a very long time… and I am okay on the other side, there seems a lot less to be anxious about.
Another Door 