Feelings

A little more than equal night.

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Last night at some point, depending on your local time, was the autumnal equinox: the moment at which the night and the day were of equal length. Now night is longer. This means that, even though it was over 90 degrees today and the trees are looking more parched from drought than ready to turn colors, it’s fall.

The symbolism is there: dark and light are staring each other down, and for a moment last night in their thumb war it appeared that they were at a stalemate, but dark now is leaning over light, whose brow is growing sweaty with fatigue. But there is something comical about the idea of this cosmic battle, because it’s one that plays out annually by precise mathematical rules. We’ve had the game fixed for millennia, ever since we started clocking the heavens on our megaliths. Darkness, now holding the upper hand, will win until December 21st, when light will get a second wind and come charging back until June 21st, and so on. Just like every year, give or take a day or two, on whatever calendar you reckon by.

You might say that we don’t need to attach meaning to it. There’s no surprise left in the game. But we do. The seasons are alternating change and stasis, and every year it shows us a mirror on ourselves.

Summer, light’s realm, is the stasis of life. The leaves are out, their hands outstretched, dark green and stable. The bugs, in this part of the world, howl all day and night long. The heat looms in and sets up camp.

Winter is the stasis of darkness, silence, and death. The trees outstretch their skeleton hands to hover under the slate sky. The warm-blooded courie in to stay safe from dark and storms and cold.

The shoulder seasons, by contrast, are all movement and change. You can’t fix them, even for a day. Each week is different, for however long they last. In spring, the buds come out on their own secret schedule, and you miss them if you take a different path a few days in a row. The trees get that fuzz of infant green, and you almost wonder if you’re imagining it. When the sun is glaring in your eyes for the first time in months, you may wonder if you’re just overthinking some moss—but no, it’s a leaf, you find out soon enough, and then there are leaves as far as the eye can see.

I’ve always loved fall the best, at least in theory. I find its colors, its smells, the feel of its air on my face, quiveringly beautiful. It’s temporary, too, like spring. One day you’re looking out at the top of the hill and it looks just a little less green, and then all at once it shrieks into full yellow or sighs through brown, and it’s not all at once, but suddenly its over.

I’m sadder in fall, too, and I crave to love it so badly. Those things are probably connected. Spring is all improvement, the slow glimmer of a rising smile. Watch the light grow longer. Watch the greening. It’s all abundance—the promise of future abundance, which is the best kind, sweetest of all in the imagination. And your imagination goes wild, waiting for warm summer nights on the patio, waiting to get your toes in the water.

And fall is the opposite of this, which is the paradox of abundance and scarcity all at once. There is only so much more time before the leaves are past their peak, and are gone. There is only so much time until the biting cold will stretch out its arms and stay for a while. But for now there is the harvest, the scenery, the delicious smell of wood smoke and leaf mold on the air. Pumpkin flavored everything; pumpkins on your paper towels. Time to get out the spooky socks and the right kind of crisp in the air to put them on. And crisps—yes, do you bake? Now you do: apple crisps, and pumpkin cheesecake bars, and lumpy-crusted pies.

The changing of the seasons is such a forced reflection on time. Seasonal time is inherently objective, and yet inherently subjective. There’s the objective amount of time the summer lasts—one looks at a calendar for that, June to September. There’s the objective, but unknowable, amount of time that summer weather lasts—check the forecast, make some predictions. But the way that I will feel about summer on a certain date? I often catch myself in the feeling that I didn’t quite do it up all the way—fewer weekly cookouts, trips to the beach, hot nights on a rooftop, than I anticipated from my perch in chilly winter. Scarcity, again. The feeling that I wasn’t there. And now the nights are coming sooner and it might finally begin cooling off, I can’t do it until next year.

What a strange way to live a life, I realize, fussing at the map rather than the territory.

But now the ticking experience clock is turning to fall. So I get the urge to gather, to binge on experience, to check things off like a squirrel gathering nuts, because it will soon be gone for so long. That kind of frantic demand for enjoyment, the harvest urge, is strongest in fall.

Gather ye cider donuts while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same jack-o-lantern that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

Basically, I love fall, even if you could say it triggers me. But I’m celebrating the beginning of the season the best way I know how: with an inaugural apple cider, wearing some flannel quite by coincidence, with a candle burning, surrounded by my decorative gourds, welcoming it in.

A brief, loud noise.

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On Thursday night, I was having a very normal one: sitting on the couch with my boyfriend, (re)watching “The Crown.” Because the weather is in its glorious early-fall phase (the swampiness has dried out a bit), we had the windows wide open.

At some point, there came a very loud noise. It only lasted for a second or two, but it was a big rumble, or maybe a clatter, hard to characterize in hindsight. We looked at each other in confusion. “Probably an engine,” he said, and we heard nothing else.

The next morning, the news: a shooting, blocks away. Two “males armed with AK style rifle,” the police say, shot six people (killing one) in the courtyard of an apartment complex. They drove away.

Across town, three other people had been shot less than a half hour later. Likely unrelated.

These things barely even make the news. Body count far too low. Probably gang-related, and in that troubled housing project. It belongs to other people.

It was very loud, and very fast, and very common.

The restless middle.

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It’s been a strange bit of time, lately. (Isn’t it always, though, in a way?) I often get the feeling these days of being stuck in between one thing and another, or of waiting for something, or of an itchy feeling like I’m ready to run. As though there’s a soundtrack playing music quietly that makes you feel that something is around the corner, not having revealed itself just yet. And you get antsy waiting for it. A heavy restlessness.

The restlessness has some apparent causes that I won’t get into here and now. But it’s such a pervasive feeling, almost like a physical sensation, that it refuses to be broken up by logic or planning. (In any event, planning and I are on a break.)

Rob Bell did a podcast about something like this: “An Anatomy of Restlessness.” He touches on all of it, the whole feeling that has been lurking at my shoulder for a while: the guilty feeling at not being satisfied even in the midst of such a lucky life. A gut feeling that “the cloud has moved.” A stirring like in the first days of creation. The difference between the forms (the material facts of life that surround us) and the spirit that animates them: even if the forms haven’t changed, and they used to satisfy, they may no longer, once the spirit has moved.

Rob has some questions that I found helpful, and you might too, if this restlessness thing is following you as well:

  • Is the restlessness calling me to do more, or to do less?
  • Do I need to walk farther into the thing (whole-ass it, as Ron Swanson might say), or step away?
  • Is it about accepting that the situation is fine, or is it about recognizing that it really isn’t good enough?
  • Is there another challenge to take on, or is rest calling?
  • Is it about new birth, or about doubling down on what already is?
  • Is it about finding a break, or finding continuity?

For me, the answer to a lot of those questions is: yes; both; sometimes. Do more, yes, but of the right things. Let the others go. Walk further into the right things; step away from the things that no longer fit. Take on the challenges that get me excited; walk away from the challenges that only cause the joyless stomach ache.

It feels a great deal like a trip through the middle. If I take a stroll to look around at the smattering of pieces that make up my life, I can tell that the kinks are getting worked out of a few of them. Others are marinading, not ready for prime time. Others are hopping along in their juvenile way, learning to ride their bikes. Others are extremely good at the routine, doing it so automatically that they forget how they got home in the evening. And so on. It’s not glamorous, and it has a way of sagging, just as the heavy middles of so many novels do, sandwiched unceremoniously between sparkling beginnings and ends.

But in novels as in life, I might be better off to lean into it, to give the middle a bit of a sense of character. Give it a pizzazz all its own. Welcome it in. Because it’s a piece of the life, too. The restlessness, the middle, all of it, every day, forms the whole. Some day this, too, may be a joy to recall.

This morning, I took a moment to write down all the changes for the better that have happened in the last year: all the successes, learnings, adventures, small and large joys. Damn, what a year. It still feels like the middle. Just a little sparklier.

“But then time came for us too. We weren’t who we used to be but we also weren’t who we would be next, either. There was this awful in between. And we had to stay in it for so long.”

“Welcome to Night Vale,” episode 152

Book Two: the doubt speaks up

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Book Two is in the works.

However, the works are a little jammed up. 

The process of writing book one had such a nice rhythm to it, or at least so it appears in rosy hindsight. I often felt like I knew what needed doing next to inch it closer to what I had in mind.

Now that I’ve paused working on that one for the moment, I’m trying to get moving on a very different idea to keep myself writing. But choosing which of my ideas to get started on was a little hairy, and now that I chose one and got partway down the path of planning it, the doubt gremlin (N.B.: a close cousin of the fear gremlin) is noisy.

“It’s a dumb idea,” says the gremlin. Thanks, I grimace.

“No one would be interested in that concept except you, and you’re only barely interested.” Yes, thank you for that contribution.

“Even if anyone likes your current draft, they would hate this one.” Let’s leave that up to them to decide, shall we?

“You’re not even spending any time working on it.” That’s an exaggeration. I’m just spending almost no time working on it, which is different. 

“Why don’t you get started on the better ideas?” Well, obviously because those ones will take a lot more research and work, and I’m tremendously impatient and a little sleepy, I admit.

“Those don’t seem like great reasons to commit to this idea,” says the gremlin, looking taken aback, and I have to agree.

But here’s the thing: the doubt only matters if I’m attaching some great weight to doing this. If I need my two-weeks-to-several-decades of work to be of maximum efficiency, resulting in the written product that will create the most good for the most people in the shortest amount of time, then I’m doing it very wrong. 

That’s okay, because that isn’t really what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to stretch the muscles and follow the curiosity. I’m trying to make myself laugh sometimes, and make myself feel stuff other times, and those stakes are a lot lower. The payoff is pretty high, too, because being able to make yourself laugh while you get better at something is pretty rewarding. 

Anyway, on with it–whatever it is. 

Maybe not “conflict:” or, further Enneagram thoughts.

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Conflict has been on my mind a lot recently, and not just because the world seems to be so full of constant knives-out energy (although that doesn’t help.) The very idea of conflict is central to my Enneagram type: 9s are among the more conflict-averse types, and my own conflict aversion was a huge wake-up call when I started learning about the Enneagram.

But lately, I’ve heard from a lot of people who are close to me that they don’t see me as particularly conflict-averse, or prone to merging with others to the point of disappearance, or unwilling to state an opinion, which are all ways that I have described myself. This might mean a few things:

First, I might be falling into the confirmation bias trap that lurks in all models, and certainly in the Enneagram. Especially when people talk about the Enneagram in a way that focuses on behavior rather than motivation, it can become simplistic to the point of pure falsehood. If you believe the memes, 9s are always buried under a blanket watching TV and tipping over into a fugue state when someone requires them to make a decision. So I may well be ascribing habits to myself that aren’t really as consistent as all that, falling into the gravitational pull of the stereotypes.

(I don’t think that’s the reason that I come across as less conflict-averse than I profess, though. I suspect the others:)

Second, I might have a more developed 8 wing than I realize. Like many 9s, I identify with nearly every type, often thinking I am all of them–except 8. Reading about 8s is, for me, like reading about aliens. That’s not me, at least, I can say defiantly. But don’t I have lots of rage, often internalized? Uh, yeah. And like to poke at people’s lazy thinking? Yes. And don’t I deeply resent being controlled (even if I am more prone to react passive-aggressively than proper aggressively?) Totally. But I’m only recently seeing these traits, because I think ordinarily I suppress noticing them. They don’t fit with the shallow version of myself I historically tried to inhabit: the unobtrusive, kind, peaceful, dreaming sort. (Some other time I might tell the story of intentionally throwing the Myers-Briggs test to empirically be as wood-nymph-like as possible.)

Third, and most important, at the end of the day the fear is not so much of conflict itself, but of disconnection. Conflict is a quick ticket to disconnection in a weak relationship, so avoiding it can be a shorthand for avoiding disconnection. I still get a little stomach ache thinking about the driver with whom I exchanged fingers a few weeks ago: I was walking; she nearly ran me over then flipped me off; I lost it at her quite impotently then fretted for a full day about how someone who doesn’t know me at all could have such malice toward me, and whether she’s out there thinking I’m the asshole, as though it really matters.

The thing is, instinctively, I’d rather hang on to the hollow shell of a relationship than risk losing it. So that’s when the hiding, the aversion to difficulty, is helpful.

But in a strong relationship where connection is plentiful, where I feel secure that conflict won’t lead to disconnection, I can let myself show more. I can be a bit of a pain. I can needle people into refining their opinions. I can feel, and show, my frustration. This allows me to work through it, get past it, rather than simmering internally. The phoniness drops. And it’s simplistic to call all of this “conflict,” and to say that I hate it, because it’s a part of the big complex tapestry that any relationship is.

All that to say, your girl is still trying to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone has to like me, especially if it comes at the cost of having been myself. And this is the kind of stuff that the almighty models can do well, at their best: show us the ways we might be hiding from the truth about why we do the things we do. This is when we have a chance to change those things, if they’re not working out for us.

Three Greek words for a fresh start.

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As my pastor recently observed, it’s the new year. Sort of. At least it is the sense that kids are going back to school and the blazing hot summer is starting to break. There’s an opportunity for a fresh start–which is to say, even though a fresh start is always available, right now it might feel a little more possible than it often does in the middle of things.

A few days ago, I was introduced to Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies, which is a program to help with procrastination and follow-through depending on one’s type of accountability. Are you accountable to your own expectations, or other people’s expectations of you, or both, or neither? You can take her quiz here if you’re curious.

But the quiz didn’t really illuminate anything for me, because I’m so inconsistent and ambivalent. I’m accountable to others–and I’m not. I’m accountable to myself–and I’m not. I’m often saying yes to invitations and requests when I’d rather say no. This builds resentment on my part. It also may cause resentment on the part of those who kindly asked me to participate but who wouldn’t have asked if they’d known I would be sullen and difficult, or half-present.

And when it comes to commitments to myself, I’m the same way: I over-commit, always making ten plans when one would do, and then when I only end up completing one, I irritate myself. Or I burn the candle at both ends striving to get all ten done just to say I did. Plus, the weight of the ten expectations I set makes me want to rebel by procrastinating like a toddler striking from naptime, with more or less the same predictable results.

Still, for an optimistic committer such as myself, the lure of the new plan is often irresistible. I use Google Keep to store my dozens of to-do lists, containing everything from the grocery list to the daily to-do list to the weekly to-do list to the prioritized list of movies I want to watch soon (I know) and, of course, the long-term to-do list that is the only barrier between me and fatal inertia. A lot of this in Enneagram terms is down to my type’s tendency to struggle with priorities: all priorities seem equally urgent, so I put them all off equally, which causes total chaos. My two most productive times are the panicked hour before I must leave work, and the panicked hour that straddles my planned bedtime.

As an experiment, I’m taking a break from the to-do lists. We’re going to see what happens. May need to schedule a wellness check just in case this experiment results in me starving to death because the list didn’t tell me to shop for groceries.

But contrast this list-making, task-obsessed, rebellion-inducing behavior with the following:

Right around the new calendar year, I printed out a page with three Greek words on it, that I hoped would set the tone for my year. It hangs on my fridge thusly:

Eudaimonia

Eucharistia

Metanoia

Eudaimonia: literally, “well-daemoned,” “well-spirited.” Happy, virtuous, excellent, living well. For me, this meant to aim for the things that create that sense of joyful ease, creative flow, peaceful purpose.

Eucharistia: gratitude.

Metanoia: transformation.

These words are a guidepost, not a to-do list. This means they don’t provide the tremendous satisfaction I associate with the conquered to-do item (seriously, nothing like hitting that check box on Google Keep; how I miss it…) But I see them every day, and every day I’m a little more likely to think about what I have to be grateful for, or how to lean further into the things that give me joy, away from the things that don’t. Or to reflect on the ways transformation is always possible.

I think it’s helping, even if it’s hard to know without being able to cross it off as complete. I still have a long way to go with the transformation part. But for today, I’m sitting outside with the birds and the breeze, and that is hard to beat.

Swamp lessons.

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Something else I’m always talking about in meatspace (perhaps “complaining about” is more apt) which is especially relevant in August in DC:

The dew point.

Bear with me.

Most of us are accustomed to talking about the humidity percentage. But as I laze here indoors on this mid-August mid-Atlantic free sample of purgatory with a lingering migraine, it’s 93 degrees out and just 50% humidity. So why does it “feel like” 100 degrees? Why, when one steps outside, does the sweet release of death suddenly seem so appealing, whereas 93 degrees in my arid hometown would be patio weather for the semi-hardy? 50% humidity doesn’t sound terrible.

And how can Olympia, Washington be one of the most humid cities in the country, and no one there sweats profusely while cursing existence?

As this article from the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang explains, humidity percentage is an expression of relative humidity—how much water vapor is in the air relative to the air temperature. You could have 90% humidity at 32 degrees, or 90% humidity at 90 degrees, and there is a very different amount of water vapor in those two air situations. Hot air can hold far more water vapor than cold air, so higher relative humidity in warmer air is bad news for people who don’t like their air drinkable.

The relative humidity percentage, then, doesn’t tell you what you want to know, which is how miserable you’ll feel if you dare to venture out. Weather nerds prefer using the dew point, which is the temperature at which water vapor will form dew. Think of a cold drink brought outside on a hot day: how long will it take for water droplets to form on the outside of the bottle? A higher dew point means that the droplets will form quickly, because the air touching the bottle won’t have to cool very far to form dew. The higher dew point means there is more water vapor in the air generally, as the air becomes closer to saturated with water. And more water in the air means more discomfort.

For those new to dew points, the number will mean almost nothing to you at first. But if you memorize a quick set of reference points about the dew point (perhaps from this handy chart) you can quickly get a sense of the system. For example: during my walk earlier today, the dew point was 74, which is abominable. At the time, the temperature was 81 or so, which gives us a relative humidity of about 80%. I was…not thriving. And I knew it, because the dew point was 74, and I looked like this:

Now, the dew point is supposed to tell us how our delicate human bodies will feel when we are exposed to a certain amount of water vapor. The Capital Weather Gang helped us out with this handy graphic:

But, it seems, even though no one ever says they get used to this humidity, we are somewhat accustomed to it. I mean, look at how much more delicate people are in Idaho:

“West is best,” I scream into the swamp as I melt into a puddle of sweat and tears and the whisper of a dream of autumn.

Indecision fatigue.

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It’s a time of plenty, friends, by just about any measure (which isn’t to say that this plenty is properly distributed, or that there is no room for improvement, but that’s another matter). And yet I notice quite often that my mind has a habit of seeing scarcity everywhere. See, for example, my almost perilous aversion to wasting food, culminating in narrowly avoided tragedy in the glass-shard soup incident of 2015. My grandparents lived through the Depression, yes, but why is its hold so strong on me still, when I grew up wanting nothing?

Scarcity looms everywhere, though, probably as a form of the common human negativity bias. It tries to keep me alive by telling me to make hay while the sun shines, (seriously, get out there, it’s sunny, what are you doing, the sun will go away and you won’t have enough hay, dummy!) It keeps me alert to potential danger by reminding me that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush (and, hey, you’ve only got one bird in that hand; what are you going to do when you’re next in need of a bird? You think birds grow on trees?)

Pretty obnoxious, really. And one place it comes up in this kind of meta way is when I am working on an idea: some little voice in the back of my head is piping up: “Hey, what about the next idea? Is this the only one you’ve got? You might never have another. Just thought you should know!”

It is, to say the least, hardly helpful. There’s nothing less creativity-inspiring than worrying about the potential future scarcity of creativity, just as there’s nothing less satisfying to the stomach than fretting about where one’s next meal will come from. Yet even as I’m working on picking what I like and seeing how it grows, the little scarcity gremlin looks over my shoulder and warns me that I’m probably going to run out of ideas soon, and probably half of the ones I’ve got are going to fizzle out before I can finish…just trying to be helpful!

So there I am, clinging white-knuckled to the little list of ideas I’ve got, squeezing the life out of the poor things. But in Big Magic, which I read recently (and you should too, if you want to live a more creative life and could use a little boost), Elizabeth Gilbert has an interesting idea that turns my scarcity gremlin on his head: she pictures inspiration as a sentient force, a personified entity, that goes where it likes, and stays if you entertain it generously. With a straight face, she tells the story of the time that the idea for a novel visited her for a while, then once she’d demonstrated that she didn’t have the space in her life to tend to it fully, entered the body of Ann Patchett the day that they met. Ann Patchett ended up writing this book that so badly wanted to be written. Which is not to say “cling harder and panic when you have an idea, lest it enter the body of a more talented nearby artist.” (That would be our neighborhood scarcity gremlin talking again). I suppose it’s just to say: be grateful when it’s there. Welcome it. Don’t squeeze the life out of it.

Now I’m doing better, taking some deep cleansing breaths and welcoming the friendly inspiration spirit in. I’m living in abundance mode, not scarcity mode. I’m countering that negativity bias. Noticing the plenty, not the lack.

But then–oh no–such plenty. Ideas coming so hot and heavy that I have several different digital to-do lists, like so many crumpled purse-bottom post-it notes, cluttering up the joint. Ideas coming so fast and incomplete that they talk over each other and my mind starts to feel all jerky and fuzzy like it does when I’ve been visiting the portal too much. Each one is a welcomed guest but, “well,” I begin to say to the throng of them in my living room, “I do visit the portal a fair amount, and I have my day job to consider, and my social life, and I’ve got to stay showered and need to shop for groceries now and then, and as it is I’m already halfway through two of you, so I might not get to you” (pointing to one of them in the back, a new arrival staring at me slackjawed) “until halfway through next year, at the earliest, I’m sorry to say.”

How do I pick what I like and see how it grows when I struggle to follow a thread long enough to plant it, and when I like quite a lot of things?

Don’t be fooled. This is scarcity talking. Scarcity of time. Like any other scarcity fear, there’s a grain of truth within it, but it’s hardly helpful to let it run the show.

So you have to conquer the first scarcity, the fear that ideas will come at all; perhaps you do this by trusting that the idea has its own will, and will find you if and when it pleases, no matter how tightly you squeeze or how much you suffer in the meantime, so you may as well relax. Then, when you’ve caught one, you have to conquer the second scarcity fear: the fear of scarcity of ability, the fear that you won’t do the idea justice and shouldn’t even try. You do this by learning to entertain it gently, and just follow it where it leads.

But how do you conquer the third scarcity, of time to follow the many possible leads you’ve got? You’re indecisive. You don’t know which one is top priority. (After all, if everything is top priority, nothing is, and there we are in the bowels of the couch playing Flash games until long after our bedtime). Okay, so just do something. Do literally anything. Print out a list and throw a dart at it, see which one it lands nearest. Use a random number generator. Just start. Just for ten minutes. Just mess around with it on your phone while you wait in line at the pharmacy.

But the fear is still there. The gremlin hasn’t left. It says: “okay, you’ve got a lot for now, that’s great. But what will you do in five years? You haven’t really got five years’ worth on that list, do you? Aren’t you worried that you’re going to to flame out in a while, even if you do find the time to do any of them?”

That’s when I look that gremlin in the eye and go, “listen, buddy, I know this game.” I know all about trying to pin my future down and buy it an insurance policy. It’s a fool’s errand. I look back to what I was dead certain I wanted my long-term future to look like when I was 15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 28…every single time, if I could have locked it in, of course I would have. But every single time, I either didn’t get it, or I got some very different version of it, and thank God for that, because I can’t imagine much worse than being trapped in a life younger-me chose. She doesn’t know anything about me.

So ideas will come. And I’ll entertain them as best I’m able. And I’ll get new ones, or I won’t, because maybe me in several years won’t even want them, and that’s totally fine. And I’ll find the time, here and there, or maybe future me will. She can figure it out.

Pick what you like, see how it grows.

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Recently, at the recommendation of a dear friend with whom I go way back (way back), I read Emily P. Freeman’s The Next Right Thing.

My friend recommended this book a few months ago, after I’d been making a little quiet fuss for a while about not being sure about my long-term plans. The book sat on my total chaos bookshelf (the one where new arrivals languish horizontally, their spines not even showing, no doubt shortening my librarian boyfriend’s lifespan every time he glances at the horror) for a month or two.

I picked it up just in time for reading it to coincide with a Big Freakout. Isn’t it funny how that often happens? The universe senses a freakout coming and throws a tiny life preserver out into it. Or maybe I was providing for myself, sensing the brewing eruption. Either way, I was tearing through it on the metro on my way to and from work, waiting for inspiration to strike, waiting for Emily to tell me what to do with my life.

Spoiler: the book doesn’t do that. If you ever find one that does, please send it to me immediately.

And don’t we all think we want that book? A recent poll I saw on Amy Young’s Instagram story had 95% of responders feeling stuck. So there’s nearly all of us in our own private occasional freakouts, wanting someone to come give us a little pull or shove, get us un-stuck.

In parachutes Emily, like a firefighter into the wildfire of my panic, bearing short chapters, each of which is a little inspiration, a little way in to the unknown. She dropped a few buckets of calm water onto me with each chapter.

One, in particular, has stuck with me. Remembering a time she was trying to zhuzh up her garden, Emily tells us her strategy: “Pick what you like, and see how it grows.” You don’t have to have the whole vision for the garden. You don’t have to have all the research done about how each plant will fare in each corner. You don’t have to know how it will work over the winter. You just have to pick what you like, and see how it grows.

Reader, that little line is part of why I’m writing this now. I’d been unsure of how to go forward in my life, how to find my vocation, as though it were some kind of prize hidden under some disguise in some unknown spot, and if I only knew how to find it it would be waiting for me. But it’s not like that. It’s all right in front of me, right in my hands and my head and my heart, because in every moment I can pick what I like and see how it grows. So in this blog, I’m picking what I like and writing about it, and we’ll see where we get.

Even at risk of beating this poor metaphor to death, I’m starting to think of everything in my life as a little seed being scattered. Every conversation, email, interaction with a stranger, passing thought, scrolled-by post, is a seed being scattered across my mind. Some seeds grow. These I chase down, researching further or noting down for future reference, or I get them stuck in my mind and can’t stop thinking or talking about them. Some don’t. These I immediately forget, even if I’d rather not, and I might require reminding. When I notice that something didn’t stick, maybe instead of worrying I’ve done something wrong, or telling myself I should buckle down and force myself to be more interested–maybe I can shift this. Maybe the seed fell on the wrong soil, or it was the wrong seed for the soil, or something. Maybe I can let it go.

And maybe I should save my attention for the seeds that did take root. Sr. Joan Chittister, who has literally written the book on vocation (well, a book on vocation), reminds us of Honoré de Balzac’s words: “Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.” Not to light a fire under planting that garden, but it’s worth considering. You may as well do the things you like. Not doing so can have disastrous results.

I’m also going to be gentle with myself about what doesn’t grow, and about what I don’t pick in the first place. For example, here I am writing about The Next Right Thing, rather than Autumn. I liked Autumn, perhaps a little less than I liked another of Ali Smith’s books, How to be Both, but I did like it. Yet as I was reading it, and especially as I thought about writing about it, there was this nagging suspicion that I was being dense, not understanding it on some level that would be obvious to most. So how do I pick what I like and see how it grows? For one thing, by not forcing myself to write about Autumn if I don’t want to. (As it happens, I’ve read more about it now and I think I do “get” it; I just don’t have anything in particular to say about it, and that’s fine.) (Another side note: is this not a terribly Enneagram-9 problem to have, worried that my very thoughts and preferences are wrong?)

Now, when you find what you like, is it guaranteed to grow? Absolutely not. Nor are my tastes guaranteed to stay the same. But just as Emily parachuted into my life with little morsels of wisdom, I’m realizing that there’s no mega-parachuter coming with All The Answers. Or, at least, it’s highly unlikely. So instead I’ll just be down here in my garden, picking what I like each day, and watering it, and seeing how it grows.

A note on the book: Emily comes from what I would call an evangelical Christian background, and the book is pretty religious in its orientation. It might not be for everyone (especially those who don’t particularly want to hear about Jesus or read gospel quotations.)