Our morning walks have been particularly good this past week. The Texas spring is still going strong, and it’s not too hot, not yet. I thought I’d make a “joiner” (from my Instagram stories) in the style of Hockney to celebrate.
Search Results for: walking
So shall distance sing!
“Maps are of two kinds. Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kid — the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time — or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time… But these days I have begun to feel that stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes?”
—Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville
Twelve years ago, when my wife and I bought our first house, I wrote this:
In the five years that we’ve known each other, we’ve never lived in anything bigger than a one-bedroom apartment. Now we both have offices, a washer/dryer, a two-car garage…it’s very surreal.
When you live with someone in a tiny apartment, you’re always in close proximity. You never see that person more than 10 or 20 feet away, because there isn’t 10 or 20 feet to gain between you. You get used to seeing them from a particular distance.
Meg and I often meet each other for lunch on campus. When I see her from far away, walking towards me, she looks like a different person—she looks like a stranger, or someone I just met. It’s like a visual refresh. (I wonder if this visual element isn’t part of the hidden magic of what self-help couples books tell you to do: meet for dinner, but take separate cars…)
Twelve years later, present day, my wife and I have been home with our kids for almost four weeks now, in a townhouse not too much bigger than that first house we shared, and I see them all now, only in close-up. There’s very little stepping back, getting perspective.
Before this, I would stand outside my first grader’s school, waiting, and when he would walk outside when the bell rang, for a minute, I got to see him in his own world, for a brief few steps, until he saw me and entered our shared world again. My wife and I would pull up to my pre-schooler’s school early, and see him waiting with the other kids, and it was the same thing: eavesdropping on him in his own world, before he was back to ours.
I’m keeping everyone else in the world at a distance, but the people in my house have never been closer. It’s hard to get any kind of perspective. (This is the only time in my life I’ve envied people I know with ranches and lots of property — a “spread,” as in, “Why don’t we spread out?”)
Here is my friend Alan Jacobs on why he’s reading ghost stories right now:
“Tell the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson counseled writers; and fifty years later W.H. Auden spoke of readers like me: “When have we not preferred some going round / To going straight to where we are?” People often cry out for writing that, as we say, “speaks to our condition,” but more often than we might wish to acknowledge we are not prepared to have our condition spoken to directly. Another poet, T.S. Eliot this time: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”
When you’re looking at a painting in a gallery, you sometimes find that you need to step back a bit in order to see it whole, to grasp its structure and proportions. You don’t get too far away; just far enough. Perhaps that’s what these stories have been for me: A step or two back from the details of our current predicament gives me the critical distance to process what’s happening with less stress, less mind-warping anxiety.
We were at the kitchen table the other night and my first grader picked up his little binoculars, turned them the wrong way around, and looked at me. “You’re so far away!” he said.
I wish, sometimes, that I had a similar way of zooming out, and getting some more perspective on him. It’s like how one of my camera apps alerts me, when I’m trying to take a picture, “You’re too close!” I need to step back to really see.
I’m typing this now in my front office. The boys are outside with my wife, looking for the slugs and caterpillars eating her plants.
Amazingly, I can’t hear them, but I can see them in my mind.
And I miss them!
A few fragments of my grief
-
“The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.” -
“Such homeschooling! No homeschooler I know would voluntarily sign up for a homeschool devoid of libraries, parks, friend meetups, rousing trips to the coffee shop and long days at the museum.
Not to mention we’re all walking around like pale atlases, trying to hold up under the relentlessly grim news.
This isn’t homeschooling, this is HARD.”
-
“We’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different…. Understanding the stages of grief is a start. But whenever I talk about the stages of grief, I have to remind people that the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order. It’s not a map but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world. There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us. There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities. There’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right? There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end. And finally there’s acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed. Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies.”
A working from home manual in disguise
I laughed out loud yesterday when I read this tweet:
I tweeted this a few days ago as a joke and people took it way more seriously than I thought they would:
Yesterday, @hhavrilesky posted a legitimately helpful thread about working from home, and while reading her tips (“stick to a schedule,” “[take] advantage of early morning hours,” “turn off your wi-fi,” exercise, “create a clear end to your work day”) it occurred to me that my book, Keep Going, because it is partly about overcoming the endlessness and occasional monotony of creative work, doubles as a manual overcoming some of the obstacles of working from home.
Here are 10 tips taken straight from the book, along with excerpts and quotes:
1. Take one day at a time.
“None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it.”
—Laurie Anderson
2. Establish a daily routine.
A daily routine will get you through the day and help you make the most of it. “A schedule defends from chaos and whim,” writes Annie Dillard. “It is a net for catching days.” When you don’t know what to do next, your routine tells you.
3. Make lists.
“I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down fifteen things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten.”
—Mary Roach
4. You can be woke without waking to the news.
There’s almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour of the day. When you reach for your phone or your laptop upon waking, you’re immediately inviting anxiety and chaos into your life. You’re also bidding adieu to some of the most potentially fertile moments in the life of a creative person.
5. Airplane mode can be a way of life.
You don’t need to be on a plane to practice airplane mode: Pop in some cheap earplugs and switch your phone or tablet to airplane mode, and you can transform any mundane commute or stretch of captive time into an opportunity to reconnect with yourself and your work.
6. Stay light. Play.
“You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO . . . Try to do some BAD work—the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell—you are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT.”
—Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse
7. When in doubt, tidy up.
The best thing about tidying is that it busies my hands and loosens up my mind so that I either a) get unstuck or solve a new problem in my head, or b) come across something in the mess that leads to new work.
8. Naps are a secret weapon.
Me, I like the “caffeine nap”: Drink a cup of coffee or tea, lie down for fifteen minutes, and get back to work when the caffeine has kicked in.
9. Demons hate fresh air.
Walking is good for physical, spiritual, and mental health. “No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk,” said director Ingmar Berman to his daughter, Linn Ullmann. “The demons hate it when you get out of bed. Demons hate fresh air.”
10. Finish each day and be done with it.
“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read more in the book. Hang in there, y’all!
On reading more than one book at a time
There are many different ways to read, and many different ways of reading that generate new writing. (For example, reading with a pencil.) One of my favorite ways is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.
Here’s Octavia Butler:
I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.
Here’s Richard Powers:
I like to keep one work of fiction and one of nonfiction going at once, and I’ll use them to triangulate against each other to conjure up some third space.
Reading this way is a form of input as collage.
Like walking through the city all day, you’re bombing your brain with lots of different inputs, recognizing patterns, and pulling a thread of meaning out of it all.
My kids do this naturally, by the way. They’re very promiscuous with their books, flitting from one to the next and sometimes back again. (I heard from one reader who said she was admonished in elementary school for reading this way. Her teacher told her parents she should have no more than two…)
This method is easily transferred to listening, watching, etc.
More: “Storing up images”
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