In this post, I bring together fragments toward a collection of thoughts about the present. The brevity of these splintered topics suggests something of this moment for me too—fear not, this isn’t an attempt to take what is inchoate and severed and posture that it is something akin to the great Minima Moralia. (Why do people do that?) These are simply the thoughts I need to articulate right now, that I am choosing to share despite their unfinished quality.
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You’ve got storyline fever, storyline flu
Apparently impairing your point of view
Making horseshit sound true to you
Now it’s impacting how you’re acting too
Now it’s impacting how you’re acting too
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When I think about the possibility of having another child, I am seduced by the sense that I will be prepared by knowing what is a season, that I will know what it means when people say, “this too shall pass.” You see, when you are in the midst of something like a “sleep regression” or one of the many other inconveniences presented while constantly witnessing a new human try to adapt to this world, it feels like things will never change. It’s near impossible to know, as a new parent, that things will look different in a few days. This is due in part to the fact that time feels strange and unending when you are awake around the clock, surviving on tiny bursts of sleep. When I look back on some of the difficult times with newborns, I remember how long and incessant any particular suffering felt, but I have proof in some of my logs that many such “problems” lasted only three or four days.
My non-violent communication teacher describes “coming from curiosity and care” as one of the core practices for meaningful conversations. If we truly wish to understand each other, it is important to let go of anything we bring that is not either curiosity or care. Mutual understanding is an important goal—an urgent one, even—and one way to reach it is to genuinely wonder what matters about something to someone. Curious attention is a form of deep care, but it is often blocked by self-consciousness, agendas, the desire to appear clever, and so on. All the things we can file under fear.
I have been wondering why the idea of knowing that some things only last a season was so appealing to me. I approached myself with curiosity and care, making it possible to dig deeper and understand that I was experiencing a need for some kind of comfort and certainty. Imagining myself as once again a new parent, I imagined a confidence, a clarity of the passing of all things good and bad, that could help me weather the more challenging aspects.
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Lately I have noticed that certain things I’ve done my entire life—ways I have organized my time and spent my energy—do not excite me right now. Arriving at the exact same moment as that realization was a sense that they would be (or at least could be) making an appearance in my future. It was a thrillingly intuitive emergence of “this too shall pass.” It was realizing the season I am in, but more precisely, realizing it as a season. No urgency, no guilt about disappointing people, no fear of missing out. I wonder if I have ever been this intentional and focused about my time and energy.
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The season, environmentally, is for me one of comforting the body. Candles at breakfast, warm textiles everywhere, hot water bottles under the bed linens, soups and stews, poetry, singing, crying, salt-laden baths a few times a week, invigorating walks no matter the weather, and more sleep. It is also about comforting the bodies of other people by sharing my time, my attention, my hands, my culinary skills, my love, and my hopeful determination.
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Having learned recently of terrible things that have happened to several people I care about—things that could have been avoided, things that are born of fear and ignorance and contempt, things that still shock me, things that seem separate but are threaded together, I wonder how we bear a season of anguish and deprivation that everywhere cunningly disguises itself as all-encompassing and enduring. What wears a costume of totality and universality can’t weather every season; with a politics of love, hatred will become threadbare.
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Make time for pleasure, revel in the gift of aliveness, the vitality of protesting despair with the right to joy and dignity.
With love,
Sara
This is absolutely stunning, Sara. Not only the content, but the style and presentation.
As a fellow Substacker, I get wrapped up in the need to have a definitive message or takeaway, but you just offered essentially five seeds ripe for planting.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s inspiring. And on a personal level, it offers me (and other writers, I’m sure) permission to not feel the need to “pause” my newsletter when I get too busy, even. That it’s more than just okay to provide condensed musings, especially when they’re done so beautifully.
I love your writing so much, Sara! Thank you!
Yes, yes, yes to all of the above.
This --> The season, environmentally, is for me one of comforting the body. Candles at breakfast, warm textiles everywhere, hot water bottles under the bed linens, soups and stews, poetry, singing, crying, salt-laden baths a few times a week, invigorating walks no matter the weather, and more sleep. It is also about comforting the bodies of other people by sharing my time, my attention, my hands, my culinary skills, my love, and my hopeful determination. <-- Sounds lovely.