“You don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head.”
— Jenny Diski
In Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, he writes, “Exhilaration comes from naming the unnamable and hearing it named.” I was exhilarated as a reader at the point of the book when he explains a phenomenon I’d thought about, but never had a name for: “reentry.” (Actually, I had used that word before, but only when talking about being on the road and then coming back home to family life — never for the making and consuming of art itself.)
[W]hat is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?
Percy points out that “the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers.” Percy then lists a bunch of reentry options, such as anesthesia (drugs), travel, sex, suicide, etc. (One needs to remember that the whole book is both brilliant and tongue-in-cheek, which can be hard, especially for American readers. “People in America are so binary,” said Ian Svenonius, whose books I love and also keep you wondering is-he-serious-or-joking? “They think that if something’s funny that it’s not serious. If you can manage to be funny, that doesn’t mean that things don’t mean anything.”)
One of the reasons I’m such a huge fan of a daily routine and the Groundhog Day approach to working is that it attempts to minimize these exact problems of re-entry that Percy outlines. By scheduling little doses of daily transcendence in which you work on your art, you can pop in and out of your everyday life without becoming a horrible parent or drug addict or total maniac. (Many argue that that’s just the price of Great Art, but I’ve never never bought it.)
It rarely happens, but everyone once in a while I make something that absolutely, positively, 100% sums up everything I’m feeling at the moment.
Then I post it on Instagram and take a nap.
Here is a beautiful passage about walking from Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway:
In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted….. Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.
Filed under: walking
“Your kids… They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
—Jim Henson
“Attitudes are caught, not taught.”
—Fred Rogers
Fiona Apple once admitted that she doesn’t want kids, but she spends a lot of time buying and reading parenting books. The interviewer said, “So you’re the parent and the child.” Apple replied, “Well, I mean, you always have to be.”
Every time I read a piece like Pamela Paul’s “Let Children Get Bored Again,” I want to cross out the word “children” and write “us.”
Let children us get bored again.
Let children us play.
Let children us go outside.
Etc.
The problem with parenting tips is that the best way to help your children become the kind of person you want them to be is by surrounding them with the kinds of people you want them to be. This includes you.
You can’t tell kids anything. Kids want to be like adults. They want to do what the adults are doing. You have to let them see adults behaving like the whole, human beings you’d like them to be.
If we want to raise whole human beings, we have to become whole human beings ourselves.
This is the really, really hard work.
Want your kids to read more? Let them see you reading every day.
Want your kids to practice an instrument? Let them see you practicing an instrument.
Want your kids to spend more time outside? Let them see you without your phone.
There’s no guarantee that your kids will copy your modeling, but they’ll get a glimpse of an engaged human. As my twitter pal, Lori Pickert, author of Project-Based Homeschooling, tweeted a few years ago:
parents keep trying to push their kids toward certain interests when it works so much better to just dig into those interests yourself
oh, wait .. those aren’t YOUR interests? so you don’t want to dig into them? they aren’t your child’s interests either; why would THEY?
joyfully dig into your own interests and share all the ensuing wins, frustrations, struggles, successes
let your kids love what they love
when you share your learning and doing, you don’t make them also love (whatever); you DO show them how great it is to do meaningful work
If you spend more time in your life doing the things that you love and that you feel are worthwhile, the kids in your life will get hip to what that looks like.
“If adults can show what they love in front of kids, there’ll be some child who says, ‘I’d like to be like that!’ or ‘I’d like to do that!’” said Fred Rogers. He told a story about a sculptor in a nursery school he was working in when he was getting his master’s degree in child development:
There was a man who would come every week to sculpt in front of the kids. The director said, “I don’t want you to teach sculpting, I want you to do what you do and love it in front of the children.” During that year, clay was never used more imaginatively, before or after…. A great gift of any adult to a child, it seems to me, is to love what you do in front of the child. I mean, if you love to bicycle, if you love to repair things, do that in front of the children. Let them catch the attitude that that’s fun. Because you know, attitudes are caught, not taught.”
It’s like a Show Your Work! lesson for parenting: Show the kids in your life the work that you love.
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