New month, so here’s a 31-day challenge to match. (See also: the 28-day, 30-day, and 100-day challenges.)
Here’s a fun video that Alistair Humphreys made about his 30-day challenge:
Happy practicing!
New month, so here’s a 31-day challenge to match. (See also: the 28-day, 30-day, and 100-day challenges.)
Here’s a fun video that Alistair Humphreys made about his 30-day challenge:
Happy practicing!
Dan Sinker is one of the writers who I think is best capturing the fury and heartbreak and fleeting moments of beauty involved in being a parent right now.
I loved this piece about bird-watching during the pandemic and this epic thread of his kid’s drawings:
If you want something nice in your feed, here are posters from the last few weeks of the four-year-olds research projects. pic.twitter.com/QKHCLbHkF4
— ? damned sinker ? (@dansinker) June 15, 2020
He recently published “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Good’ Parent in a Pandemic” in Esquire:
Every parent wants to be a good parent. And every parent, every day, fails at that because, right now, being a good parent is literally impossible. A fine parent? Maybe. An OK one? Possibly. But a good one? We’re eleven months into a pandemic that sent all our children home, laid waste to jobs, killed a half-million people in this country, and sickened many millions more. Politicians like Ted Cruz ensured it would hurt as much as possible by fighting against public health measures and relief efforts that would have made a difference. So no: a good parent isn’t really an option. We’re all just barely getting by.
“Every parent—every single parent—has known the crash this year,” he writes.
Yup.
I have two of these bumper stickers: one in my studio, and one on our refrigerator.
What I hang onto these days is the D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good-enough” mother. “Success” in caring for children, he wrote in Playing and Reality, “depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment.” All the devotion required is an ordinary devotion, as he put it. No particular need for extraordinary skill or expertise.
In Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2016), she jokes about the concept’s popularity:
Winnicott’s concept of “good enough” mothering is in resurgence right now. You can find it everywhere from mommy blogs to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are You My Mother? to reams of critical theory. (One of this book’s titles, in an alternate universe: Why Winnicott Now?)
“If you are satisfied with being a good enough parent, and have no illusions that perfection is possible,” Peter Gray writes, “you see this problem for what it is, a problem to try to solve, not a tragedy, not an occasion for blame or shame.”
Me, I’m trying to see it as a comedy, or a farce, or maybe just bad improv. Making do with what we have.
We might not be able to be good right now, but we can be good enough.
* * *
See also: “Manifesto of the Idle Parent” and “You are forgiven!”
Three weeks ago, my family and I spent a short weekend at Laity Lodge. I’ve been dreaming about it ever since.
We splashed in the Frio. Hiked in the hills. Watched the sun paint the canyon orange then go dark until the moon climbed up over the side. Gazed at the stars.
Ate wonderful food. Played the old Steinway. Explored the library, found one of my books next to Alan Jacobs and Kierkegaard. Stared at the campfire. (“It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story!” Jules exclaimed.) Laid around and listened to the birds and read books.
There’s no cell signal on the property, so you’re just blissfully cut off from the outside world. I found it didn’t take very long at all for my mind to clear out there. Part of this, I suspect, is the 3-hour trip through the hill country and driving through the river before you get to the property. It’s a cleansing.
With free headspace, I thought a lot about my new book. I didn’t anticipate writing at all, but I filled a bunch of notebook pages with maps like this.
After we left, I texted Alan and asked him, “Once you leave the canyon, how do you not spend every day wishing you were back in the canyon?” He texted back, “I totally and absolutely miss it every day.”
Thank you to Gate, Steven, Grant, and the rest of the crew who showed us such wonderful hospitality and gave us such a good gift in a rotten time.
We are living through a disaster down here in Texas, and I am thinking, as I do often, about Mr. Rogers’ mother’s words of advice:
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.“
Texans ! RT pic.twitter.com/V0qOXeJG3Y
— thor harris (@thorharris666) February 17, 2021
I thought about Mr. Rogers when I saw this message from Thor Harris yesterday morning. Thor is one of the helpers. The folks at HEB are helpers. The Texas Game Wardens are helpers. Look for the helpers and you’ll find them.
For those outside of Texas, Mr. Rogers had more to say about talking to kids about tragic events:
Some parents wonder how to handle world news with their young children. [We] have discovered that when children bring up something frightening, it’s helpful right away to ask them what they know about it. We often find that their fantasies are very different from the actual truth. What children probably need to hear most from us adults is that they can talk with us about anything. And that we will do all we can to keep them safe in any scary time.
See also: “How much do we tell our kids?”
“For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.”
—Hedda Sterne
A few weeks ago, when the sun was shining and everything wasn’t covered in ice, my friend Marty Butler and his family masked up and came over to visit Coconut The Owl. We talked for a long time, the way people starved for conversation do, and eventually we got to the subject Texans can’t avoid: Texas. We were talking about Austin, in particular, and how the beauty of this place is subtle.
“Texas isn’t Grand,’’ Marty said. “If you want Grand, you need to go west to Colorado or Montana or something.”
The bright side of this, we agreed, was that here you learn to really pay attention, to track subtle changes in the environment, to fire up your eyebeams and search for beauty.
Yesterday I was reading an interview with one of my heroes, the cartoonist John Porcellino, and he said this, about the midwest:
“It’s not like the Rocky Mountains where it’s going to hit you over the head with, ‘Look how majestic I am,’” Porcellino says. “It’s Paw Paw, Illinois. That beauty is there and that majesty is there, but it’s a thing that you have to learn to recognize. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere.”
This is something he learned from our shared hero, Henry David Thoreau, who taught us that we receive what we’re ready to receive, and that it’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see.
Though I have lived in Texas for 14 years, I have never been an evangelist for the place. I came here by chance, and now I live here by choice. (Mostly because a woman I love loves it, and I’d rather live in her world…) But the place has been good to me, and in my own way, I have come to love it. (You know how Texan you are based on how mad you get when people badmouth Texas.)
Here is what I love most about Texas: It has taught me how to find beauty. How beautiful things grow out of shit.
An orange extension cord run to the end of a driveway, offering power to anyone who needs it.
How, without traffic, you can really hear your neighbor’s windchimes ringing in the frozen, silent air.
The icicles on Coconut’s house.
Even now, iced over and on our knees, I can still find beauty, because Texas has trained me to look for it.
It ain’t Grand.
It’s my home.
This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.