Maybe instead of counting their blessings, people should count their problems.
a) Maybe counting your problems will get you used to the fact that ye problems, ye will always have with ye
b) Maybe counting your problems day after day and noticing how you nevertheless continue to exist and function would be therapeutic
Problems! I got ’em! Count ’em and weep!
Tonight I have a goat who is very sick indeed. Not even the one who broke her horn.
So I haven’t gone on about this yet, but this past weekend was shearing weekend. And we went out Saturday morning, a beautiful day, all gung ho and set to shear as many goats as we could… and Columbia’s face was COVERED in blood. In the barn we found a POOL of blood. She had suffered a grievous horn injury – and not the first time; in February 2020, her other horn had come off right in Xopher’s hand. And horns bleed a LOT.
Ouch!
I almost felt like I wanted to pass out, but Xopher was relatively nonchalant.
The next day he tells me he wants to saw off what’s left of the horn she just injured. It was really long and curly, and we don’t know exactly what happened to her Saturday morning, but having a really long curly horn is just going to be really prone to getting caught on things, knocked around, and injured.
He assures me that horns are only alive for a few inches, and most of the horn that we see on an adult goat is just like hair or fingernail. But I’m totally squeamish – sawing off an already injured horn. Ich! Ugh! But what can I do? I put the whole thing in his hands. I sat there and did my part to hold her down while he sawed away. First he was using an electric rotor saw but it fell and got busted early on, so he had to resort to a manual hacksaw.
I sat there trying to mentally check out as much as possible. And I thought about this passage:
“Most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we’re facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all.”
Really how many times do you tell yourself that? Usually it’s in the context of how much money we have, and how “first world” our problems are. We start ticking off all of our blessings, and literally say to ourselves, “Hell I shouldn’t have any problems at all.” But of course we have problems!
So I sat there thinking about how the problem-free life will never happen – certainly not the goat-owning problem-free life. And here holding a goat down while my husband saws off her injured horn – it’s just one more of those problems, those problems that always have been and always will be.
And reader, that helped.
“This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood… [until] it finally dawns on us, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.”
‘I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees… I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves…
We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another. And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.
And I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with….’
Richard Powers in an interview with Ezra Klein.
by Mark Boyle
He buys a smallholding in west Ireland, builds a cabin, and lives there with no technology more modern than a bicycle and a pencil and a monofilament fishing line (which he really beats himself up over). He tries not to be self-righteous, and fails. It wasn’t a very rewarding read.
“We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to.” Jay Jennifer Matthews quoted by, of course, Oliver Burkeman.
Playtime again. That on the left is not mohair – it’s Wensleydale. I actually paid money for someone else’s locks. I couldn’t resist the color.
“To describe attention as a ‘resource’ is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives… Attention… just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.” Burkeman
“Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?”
“Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful.” Oliver Burkeman quoting “environmentalist and spiritual writer Charles Eisenstein.”
Winter hay in the barn, ready to be hoisted into the loft this weekend.
by Oliver Burkeman
Can I say that this may be the best book I’ve ever read, and still be taken seriously? Burkeman just nails it. And can I say that by “it,” I mean “what it means to be human,” without totally losing you? What it means to have human neuroses – what if I put it that way? To always be looking toward the future. To always be failing when we deliberately try to be in the moment. To always feel too “busy.” To always be thinking that somehow, someday, we’ll get on top of everything, stop having problems, live in nirvana.
I’m not sure I can really do justice to this book in a review I write in one sitting; I have a feeling I’m going to be revisiting it many times, always finding more and more I feel compelled to share.
And an amazing thing about this book is that I feel it helps me understand my husband better. I feel that if I forced him to sit down and read this book, his reaction – after boiling with frustration that I was keeping him away from his internet memes – would be “Well, yeah.” The stuff that Burkeman “gets”, Xopher already “gets,” and somehow has managed to “get” for all these years I’ve known him. Now maybe I’m starting to “get” it too.
a) Xopher refuses to engage in plans for the future. I mean, yeah, he did call to try to order hay a few days (but only a few days) ahead of the weekend we hoped to put it up for the winter. When holidays are rolling around, yeah, he will make plane reservations to see his folks. But those are aberrations. In general he won’t plan a thing he doesn’t absolutely have to. More frustration for me, I cannot engage him in discussing any plan more than 24 hours away. He will simply sit there in a non-plussed attitude (even more than usual), and if he offers anything, it will be a reminder that “We don’t know what the weather might be” or something like that. What frustrates me is my resulting daydreams about “normal” couples – couples who, over dinner or washing the dishes, might idly chat about, oh, I don’t know, what they might do over the coming weekend, or places they might like to go on vacation next year. Nope, not happening.
I have pressed him about this, and he once offered this explanation: “Anything good that ever happened in my life happened without me planning it.” Yeah, I grumbled, probably because *I* planned it.
But seriously. Burkeman is on Team Xopher: “Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for.” Burkeman says that the planners are trying to exert control over the future, an impossible task. The future is just not something you can order around that way. It can’t be done, and only makes you anxious.
b) Xopher has always admired people who undertake big, grand, thoroughly pointless projects. Huge works of art or devices that serve no purpose. I thought he was just admiring people who had drive and ambition to do something big, when he can’t even get himself to put the finished trim around the bathroom window we installed back in 2004. But maybe it’s that he gets the value of pursuing “atelic” activities – those done for their own sake, with no goal. “Hobbies,” we used to call them, though a wonderful little sub-chapter expounds upon how we now find that word a little embarrassing. “In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs of productivity or profit.” And this also helps explain why so many people take to etsy – makes their hobbies seem less embarrassing if they can be reframed as a “side hustle,” pursued for profit. And I love the celebration of hobbies as being, by design, something we are often not particularly good at. If you pursue something while being utterly crappy at it, that really proves its uselessness and hence your true love for the pursuit. OK, I just like consolation that it’s OK that I suck at so many of the things I do.
c) Xopher exudes cynicism, depression, and downright being a downer. It’s true that Xopher does actually suffer from official depression; but sometimes he is such a cynic and downer it takes me aback. Well, apparently, there is a relief in giving up hope. “Seeing that things aren’t going to be okay. Indeed – they’re already not okay.” The result is apparently not despair. The words Burkeman uses are relief, motivation, possible, joyful. Maybe I’ll get there.
Or not! But there will be more and more quotes and concepts to share in the days ahead.
Tytania 