Can I Handle the Seasons of My Life

“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.”

Hello, Beautiful World

‘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.

Book Corner 2021.49

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.

Get Neither Less Nor More out of Life

“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.

Pay Attention Now

“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

More 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?”

Hay

“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.

Book Corner 2021.48

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.

More Produce

The long ones are called Napoli; the fat ones are called Red-Cored Chantenay, but they didn’t seem to me to have red cores.

Long Pie Pumpkins a Long Shot

At top is a “Long Pie Pumpkin.” The other is a Delicata. I only got a few Delicata this year, and that’s fine – they were really terrible. I don’t know why. They were so starchy. Meanwhile, first time trying this Long-Pie oddball, and baked the thing, and it was delicious. I always plant pumpkins in the manure pile in the goat pen, knowing I’m going to lose some to hungry goats, and this year was no exception. But there are a few that seem to be safely out of their reach. I picked a huge one today. They don’t seem eager to turn fully orange but that doesn’t seem to adversely affect the yumminess inside.