Of Road Trips and Adulthood

From the passenger's side, I feed my handsome driver PB&J in bite-sized pieces as we sail along at 70 miles-per-hour from Atlanta to Baltimore. For my own part, I am a nervous and inexperienced highway driver. I am slightly more useful as a navigator and even more so as a DJ. We are on our way to the wedding of friends, and by the time you read this, we'll be on our way back from the whirlwind weekend. The excitement of these impending nuptials finally dawns on me when we get on the road, so I spend the first bit of the drive giving my companion a rundown of the schedule of festivities and the many people he will meet. He is a captive audience.

I run through the list of college classmates and friends from Boston and then brush off the rest with a wave of my hand. "Those are all the people our age. I can't tell you much about the grown-ups."

I am caught off-guard by the absurdity of my statement and add the caveat that perhaps we technically qualify as grown-ups too.

In one of Joy the Baker's recent posts, she lists off some of the commonly perceived barometers of adulthood: getting married, having kids, doing your own taxes. Of course, as she explains, none of these are particularly useful or accurate benchmarks of adulthood. They are significant milestones, certainly, if they happen to occur in one's life, but they don't have much to do with the definition of "grown-up."

I'm not sure there's a definition, really, or a destination we're trying to reach. As we count off the last few exits before our stop, I figure this whole marriage thing and the being-grown-up thing has a lot more to do with the journey than with the arrival. This may seem obvious, but it's not necessarily what I had expected. I used to imagine adulthood as a very serious state of being, in which you feel like you have some level of control over your life and then work really hard to maintain it.

Thankfully, this stage of life that I looked forward to for so long is a lot more fun, if also much more chaotic and unpredictable, than I ever let myself imagine. It is a series of small rituals and choreographies, punctuated occasionally by surprises, for better or worse. Some things are hard, but also funny. Some things are just hard, and the rest is just funny.

It helps to have a kind companion to cry and to laugh with as we sail along. I'm more grateful each day to be on this road together.

Making Home

Our place is unfinished in a lot of ways. There’s the bed, for one thing, which, while perfectly cozy, is mostly just a mattress on a bare frame. Headboard, footboard, dust ruffle, duvet—who knew a bed would require so many different components in order to look like a real bed? The “decor” is simply a miscellaneous collection of our most essential and favorite possessions. The only common thread among the artwork on our walls is that most of it belonged to someone else before us.

Still, it hit me the other day that it really feels like home. Before we moved here last summer and made our little nest, I couldn’t have pinned down much about what “home” means, exactly, but I was certain it was possible and that we’d figure out a definition for ourselves, together.

I can’t say I ever really felt at home in the tiny house in the tiny town where I grew up. I used to think it was about finding something bigger one day—a bigger house or a bigger city or that feeling of being a part of “something big.”

In college, I felt like I was getting warmer. I felt more at home living with an endless selection of books at my disposal and among the kind and curious friends I grew to love so much. There’s something about an extra-long twin bed, though, that screams “temporary,” and even the greatest cafeteria on earth would be a far cry from a simple home kitchen.

As a desperate graduate student, I filled up pinboards with dreamy photos of whitewashed interiors, perfectly rumpled sheets, and artfully arranged craspedia. I felt buried beneath an impossible workload, and I directed a significant proportion of my frustration toward my hand-me-down Ikea furniture, drafty windows, and the beat-up wood floor I rarely swept. My space looked exactly the way I felt—wrecked.

You could learn a lot about us by poking around this little apartment we now call home. Considering the onion peels on the counter and the selection of knives in various states of sharpness, you could tell that we cook here, often. From the worn tabletop, you could tell that we eat here, and from the number of placemats, you could figure we are two.

From the state of the carpet, you could assume that a furry black pup lives here, but she’d make up for that by greeting you at the door and inviting you to rub her belly. You could tell, from the percentage of square footage devoted to bookshelves, that we like books, and from the condition of those books, that we read them too.

I am learning that home has a little bit to do with the things you put in your space and the things you keep out. But I think it has a lot more to do with intention. We care for each other in this space, and by extension, we care for our space too. We live here on purpose, and we are very protective of the cozy factor. This is why we once turned down a very lovely television but could never have too many teapots.

The endless in-between

Dear world, I have a proposition for you. Could we maybe just skip all of the Februaries between now and eternity? Growing up in the Great Lakes region, I learned from a very young age that February meant still stuffing yourself into your puffy winter gear long after that winter gear has lost its luster. In fact, by February in northwest Pennsylvania, everything has lost its luster. The snow is no longer magical—it’s just cold and very persistent.

My sister and I had complementary snowsuits—one pink and one purple. As we got a little bigger each year, February meant packing ourselves and our snowsuits like bloated sardines into the back of our tiny red hatchback for the ride to school. When I started taking music lessons in fifth grade, it meant trudging through the snow with a saxophone case as big as myself and packing that into the hatchback too. Since some of my dad’s work was seasonal, February also brought with it a sense of scarcity. It was the time when we started to worry about our winter stores running out.

By the time I got to high school, February was less about the weather and more about the waiting. It was a month of auditions and applications for summer programs, of anxiously checking the mailbox for very important envelopes. And although the applications were different and the stakes felt higher, February remained that way for the rest of my long education—a worrying and waiting month, in which the fates review whatever you have offered up and confer about your next steps.

This February has been my very first post-school February. Having moved south and finally graduated out of the academic calendar, I had rather hoped that each of the months would take on a quieter character, that September would not be so amped up with anticipation and February would not be so filled with dread.

Despite whatever balmy visions I may have had about Atlanta, it’s still colder here in February than it usually is, and grown-up February still feels like a month of reckoning. It is a time for doing your taxes and for taking account of everything that has changed, for better or worse, since this time last year.

By now, you know how much I love beginnings. And sometimes I can deal with endings too, because they usually lead to new beginnings. In-betweens, however, are impossible to wrap my head around, and after watching twenty-six Februaries come and go, I am certain that February is nothing but an endless in-between.

There must be some important reason for February to exist—a rare flower, perhaps, that only blooms this time of year—and if you can think of one, I hope you’ll let me know. Otherwise, I will be eagerly ticking off its last few days in hopeful anticipation of spring.

A sustainable practice

The most effortless project I’ve completed was the writing of my senior thesis, a collection of poetry and translation relating to the book of Genesis. I suppose it’s no coincidence that I was fixating, even then, on beginnings. I spent some time in the summer doing a bit of research, and when I returned to school in the Fall, I had no idea what the actual writing process would look like over the course of the next six or seven months. I’d spent many sleepless nights wringing academic papers from my brain over the previous three years, and I knew I needed a more sustainable process if I was to make it to the finish line, sanity intact and thesis in hand.

In my first meeting with my advisor, he gave me a piece of advice that, at the time, I found funny. In retrospect, I think of it as earth-shattering. He told me to write first thing in the morning.

I must have asked what he really meant by “first thing,” because I remember his insistence: DO NOT brush your teeth, DO NOT eat breakfast, DO NOT get dressed, DO NOT do anything before you sit down to write. OK, you can have coffee. But everything else will get in your way. Just write, first thing.

This advice must have been personal, because, at the time, I didn’t drink coffee. He must have been sharing what worked in his own practice. In any case, I took his advice very seriously, and I’ve thought about it a lot since.

I arranged my course schedule so that I had a couple of mornings free during the week, and I did my other work at night. I took his coffee exception to mean that I could choose a couple of my own non-negotiables, as long as I could do them on autopilot.

So for a few mornings a week, before my anxiety or inhibitions could get the best of me—in other words, before I had a chance to get in my own way—I did what I needed to do to feel vaguely human, and then I wrote. Later on, I was editing or rewriting, but the process was the same.

I didn’t start by searching for inspiration or thinking particularly hard about what I needed to do. I just showed up at my table for a couple of hours, did what I knew how to do, and then, for the rest of the day, took care of the business of living. It was like starting the day with an offering to the muses. You can sleep in, I was telling them. I got this.

It reminds me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity, in which she emphasizes the importance of simply showing up and doing the work. I also think of the recent New York Times article on working less and accomplishing more when I consider the relatively limited number of hours I spent working in comparison to the amount of material I needed to produce. It was all about the quality of those hours, not the quantity.

Since I’m no longer a student, it’s been a process of trial and error trying to reestablish this sort of practice in my differently arranged life. The peculiar blessing/curse of the student is that she tends to have a great deal of control over her schedule. But even in my post-student life, I am comforted by a sense that the process of setting a goal and actually accomplishing it depends very little on talent or magic or circumstance and very much on creating rituals and habits that support simply showing up and doing the work over the long haul.

On learning new things

Of all the courses I took in college and graduate school, beginning language courses were my favorites. They were often scheduled first thing in the morning, and with a terrifying list of intimidating lectures and seminars stretching before me throughout the week, I loved starting each day with a heaping dose of humility. When you are struggling through your alphabet at 9am, all bets are off. The first days and weeks of a beginning language course are disorienting, frustrating, overwhelming. It is impossible not to make a mistake. In fact, you have to make mistakes in order to learn to converse. And it is impossible not to embarrass yourself. For the longest time, you sound completely ridiculous as you try to pronounce unfamiliar sounds and string them together, inching toward coherency. You write at a kindergarten level.

But the learning curve is steep, and there are moments of sheer delight as you discover new ways of seeing and describing your world. The results are measurable. You started out knowing three words, and eventually you know ten, then a hundred. Soon enough, you’re making up your own sentences with those words. And one day, perhaps months or years into your study, you realize that you’re finally saying what really you want to say, rather than only what you know how to say.

Last week, my friend Diana gave a Berkman Center talk on Coding as a Liberal Art. She’s been chronicling her experience learning how to code, and in her talk, she offers up reflections on being a beginner and ideas for how coding could be taught in a liberal arts setting.

In a world overflowing with experts and specialists and wannabe experts and specialists, what I love most about Diana’s effort is her open and honest embrace of beginner status. There are so many emotional barriers to learning new things—vulnerability, embarrassment, fear of failing, fear of making mistakes, fear of the unknown—it’s a wonder any of us ever takes on the challenge, especially in adulthood, of being a novice.

Some believe it’s futile to try to learn a new language in adulthood, since it’s nearly impossible to achieve fluency. And I’ll be the first to admit that after years of language study, my conversational ability is generally pathetic. I’ll also be the first to advocate for learning new things, including impossible things, like languages.

Achieving perfection, or expertise, or fluency may be next to impossible, but perfection need not be the goal of a beginner. In fact, if perfection is the goal of a beginner, it’ll probably just get in her way.

One of the most important things I learned from being a beginner is how much I don’t know. A few words offered up in someone else’s native language or professional language doesn’t mean you totally understand a culture or field or perspective that’s different from your own. But it does mean you’re trying. It’s a step in the right direction. It means that perhaps you know enough to realize how much you don’t know.

All we need to know about dinner and divinity

Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal is one of those favorite books of mine that I haven’t finished yet. I’d like to make it to the end one day, but I’m certainly not in a hurry. I’m savoring it bit by bit, with full confidence that the author herself would approve of my slow read. It’s a book I know I’ll keep returning to even after I’ve finished it, much like the simple, beautiful thought at the heart of the book itself---that the end of every meal is the beginning of another. It’s a book that deserves, in my opinion, a genre of its own. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s not a cookbook or an instruction manual or a food memoir. I’d say it’s a sort of philosophy of food.

A browse through the table of contents is enough to make you cry: “How to Catch Your Tail,” “How to Paint Without Brushes,” “How to Light a Room,” “How to Make Peace,” “How to Build a Ship,” “How to Be Tender,” “How to Weather a Storm,” “How to End.”

You’d think it’s a book about food, and it is, but it is also a book about everything. Adler will start you off with an egg, then catapult you into the heavens, and finally bring you back down decidedly onto the earth. For example: “A gently but sincerely cooked egg tells us all we need to know about divinity. It hinges not on the question of how the egg began, but how the egg will end. A good egg, cooked deliberately, gives us a glimpse of the greater forces at play.”

I have a tendency to favor beginnings over middles and endings, but the opposite is true when it comes to food. I love the eating and drinking and savoring and lingering. I love a kitchen in action, with peels and cores strewn about the counters and several pots simmering on the stove. In the case of food, it is the beginning that catches me off guard. Why is it that dinner so often feels like a challenge to reinvent the wheel?

Some very wise friends sent us off with this book as an engagement gift, as we set out to establish a life---and a kitchen---together. From the very first pages, it has cut right through any anxieties I may have had about how we would feed ourselves. It’s the idea that eating well has nothing to do with extravagance, that cooking well has nothing to do with fancy tools, and that dinner has everything to do with where you left off in the last meal, or in all the meals that have come before.

I’ve never been much of a planner when it comes to meals, and as far as I can tell, thank goodness, An Everlasting Meal lets me off the hook. In practice, this means that the first inkling of dinner begins with the simple practice of getting a pot of water on the stove to boil and an onion in a skillet to soften. Then, and only then, is it time to start rummaging around considering what’s for dinner.

What comforts me most about this approach is that it begins with doing, rather than thinking. It’s one of those rituals buried in the everyday that, once you’ve realized it’s there, offers both a steady anchor and a comfortable stretch of rope for creative drifting.

You should sell that

I’ve been reading Etsy’s “Quit Your Day Job” series since my senior year of college. Although I didn’t have a full-time job, something about the mystery of the “alternative” career path held my attention. I graduated in 2009 with the inaugural class of recession babies, and like many in my cohort, I went to grad school with the hope of staying out of the tanking job market for just a few more years. I wasn’t exactly sure where my studies would take me, or how I’d make a living after another round of coursework, but I was fascinated, albeit terrified, by the upheaval that seemed to be taking place in the hierarchy of professions. While many were devastated by layoffs and cutbacks, it seemed that every corner of the internet was highlighting another creative entrepreneur who had left her “safe” day job to make a living through her art.

As jobs that had once been considered stable became obsolete, creative professions and other more “risky” pursuits were being thrust into the spotlight. What once seemed risky came to be viewed as self-sufficient, as less traditional paths began to redefine success and professional freedom.

Part of why I’m obsessed with reading all of those quit-your-day-job stories and interviews with full-time bloggers and creative professionals, is not that I want to do what they do, necessarily, but rather that their trailblazing inspires a bit of confidence in my own choices as I find my way in a new professional landscape.

One of the downsides of the greater visibility of creative professions, however, is the “You should sell that” mentality, otherwise known as the death of the hobby. It’s the idea that every handmade gift or creative passion is the seed for a money-making venture. It’s the sense that your art is not legitimate if you’re not selling it, or that you’re not a real writer if you don’t make a living through your writing.

For my own part, I admire those who make a living through their art, as well as those who are creating beyond business hours. There are as many ways to practice creativity as there are creators, and I think it’s so important to honor them all. As I juggle multiple roles, all under the umbrella of words-on-paper and words-on-screen, I am especially inspired by those whose creative integrity infuses all of their work, whether it takes place in an office or a studio, whether for love, leisure, or livelihood.

Whole worlds

Two volumes, four books, 2724 pages, hundreds of high-quality illustrations. These are the stats for The History of Cartography, an encyclopedic tome published by The University of Chicago Press between 1987 and 1998. The volumes are still available for purchase, but they are now also available for download as a series of PDFs, because, as the publisher’s site explains, much has changed since this work began:

“In 1987 the worldwide web did not exist, and since 1998 book publishing has gone through a revolution in the production and dissemination of work. Although the large format and high quality image reproduction of the printed books are still well-suited to the requirements for the publishing of maps, the online availability of material is a boon to scholars and map enthusiasts.”

Things like this rarely happen these days, as we have generally given up on trying to contain the whole world between two covers. And this is certainly for the best, since a conversation about the history of anything can only benefit from more voices than one book, or one series of books, can contain.

But what struck me most when I came upon this work, which was published between the time I was born and the time I went to middle school, is the sort of sustained attention it must have required. Although it includes the work of multiple contributors and editors, it’s hard for me to imagine the kind of commitment and hard work that brings such a project to life over the course of more than a decade.

Since offering up my New Year’s resolution to finish what I’ve started, several friends have asked me why and wondered what I really meant. Does it mean I have to finish every book I start, even if it turns out I really don’t like it? Does it mean I have to finish a faltering project, even if it seems doomed? Of course not.

What I really meant is that I’d like to move beyond the wonder of beginnings. I love beginnings. I love the excitement of brainstorming ideas and the hope and optimism that comes with getting started. But after the thrill of beginning wears off, the middle is much less glamorous. It requires simply showing up and doing the work, or “being boring,” as Austin Kleon says in Steal Like an Artist.

Endings, too, can be a challenge. Whether it’s finishing Moby Dick or sending a long-term project out into the world, endings require a sort of reckoning between what you’d hoped for and what really came to be. Sometimes things turn out better than expected, sometimes worse, but an ending is almost always different from what you imagined when you began.

As I set out to finish what I’ve started, in small and perhaps increasingly bigger ways, my intention is simply to embrace all of the middles and ends that are required, just like beginnings, to make things happen.

Non-negotiables

We watched a couple of documentaries last weekend that are still tugging away at me as the week floats by. The first was Happy, and the second was Bill Cunningham New York. In the first, intimate portraits of happy people in surprising situations—from a rickshaw driver in India to an American woman who has recovered from a severe accident—were interspersed with researchers discussing what they had found to be the building blocks of happiness: novelty, close relationships, and acts of kindness.

In the second, shots of the revered street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham biking all over Manhattan with his camera contrasted with glimpses of his tiny apartment, where he sleeps on a board among file cabinets. For him, sleeping and eating seem to be afterthoughts. And the idea of a work/life balance? Well, he’d probably just laugh and say that work is life.

In a surprising moment, he responds to the invisible interviewer that, yes, of course, he goes to church on Sunday. It seemed that while everything else came second to his work behind the camera, church was a given. The otherwise opinionated and articulate subject paused for a long stretch and struggled to explain why.

More than anything else, these two films challenged my assumptions about non-negotiables. Each of us is constantly making tiny choices, arranging and rearranging priorities, which eventually add up to the more public aspects of our lives. Sometimes it’s impossible to really explain the whys and hows of our own lives and the lives of others. We can only grasp at threads among the complex bundle of will, experience, nature, and circumstances. I suppose all of this is obvious, but perhaps I needed a reminder.

On finishing what you've started

I started thinking about resolutions early in December, and I finally settled on something specific just in time for the New Year. I knew I wanted to dig deeper and put down roots. I wanted to focus on paying attention and following things through. I had a sense of what my intentions would be for 2013, but I knew I needed something a little more tangible to measure my progress and keep myself on track. Our little dining area is crammed with shelves and shelves of books, a combination of the two libraries and reading histories we brought into our relationship. Over the course of a meal, it’s not unlikely that we’ll pull out one or two, a bilingual dictionary or a novel or a theoretical tome, and mull over its past or flip to a familiar passage. I love our little library, but I’m always aware that it’s laced with a funny little secret.

The truth is, there aren’t so many books on those shelves that I’ve actually finished. Sure, I’ve read zillions and zillions of pages, if you consider them all together, but finishing one whole book is another thing entirely. If you pull out any of the books that are my own, you’re likely to find a bookmark stuck halfway through, or a worn first few chapters followed by crisp, untouched pages through the end. In some cases, I even stopped just a few pages before the end.

It’s not that didn’t love those unfinished books—in fact, I’ve claimed many of them as my favorites. Mostly I’ve just been drowning in reading assignments for the past few years and never felt like I could give my full attention to one whole book before sailing into the next. And maybe, in some cases, I liked those books so much that I didn’t want them to end.

Whatever the reasons may be, those unfinished pages are calling to me, especially now that I’ve got a little more time to attend to them lovingly, rather than whizzing through their pages in a race to some imaginary finish line. I think I set each book aside with a pang of guilt, but also with a glimmer of hope that I’d come back to it sometime in the future and finally do it justice.

A change in my reading habits is just one small example of the attention and depth I hope to cultivate this year, but I think it’s a good place to start. I’ve left plenty of loose ends dangling over the past few years, and I think it’ll feel just right to return to those characters and stories and ideas, one by one, and find out how things turned out.

Would you like that book in print or pixels?

Armed with a shiny new gift card, I set about fulfilling my reading wish list this week. There was only one problem. For each title, I hovered over the “add to cart” button, wavering unsteadily between two options: print or ebook. In the past, the print vs. digital decision has always been an obvious one. I wanted to feel the weight of a book in my hands, inhale that new (or used) book smell, and wander my way through the geography of its pages. My Kindle library, on the other hand, is made up largely of books I couldn’t find at the university library two hours before a class. The sensory aspect of print always won out; ebooks were second-string.

Lately, though, the gravitational pull of digital has dragged me right into the center of the debate. It used to seem as if digital libraries were isolated ones. When all of our recent reads drift into the abyss of the cloud, we lose that particular intimacy of hovering over a friend’s bookshelves, running a finger over the titles, and uncovering the stories behind the stories.

That’s the thing about personal libraries. They bear witness to the places we’ve been and the people we’ve loved. The collective provenance of our books is like a time capsule. Where were you when you read this one, and who were you with, and where did you get it, and who had it before you? The used books and those with personal inscriptions are of particular interest. They remind us of our connections to friends and strangers.

And anyways, have you ever had an author sign your ebook?

But despite the compelling arguments for print (and I can think of many more), I am beginning to glimpse the possibilities for reading in community with ebooks. You can read together long-distance and share impressions in real time with 24-Hour Bookclub. You can share favorite passages with Readmill, and you can even browse your friends’ digital libraries with Goodreads. I’m just touching the surface of these and so many other possibilities, but I’m excited about reading as a communal sport. I hope it lands comfortably somewhere on the spectrum between very quiet alone-time reading and social media overwhelm.

In the end, I bought one ebook and one print. I’m devouring the former while I wait a whole forty-eight hours for the latter to arrive, in all of its weighty, book-scented glory. As for the rest of my list, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Slowing down (with Emma and Erin)

“She appears to write much of her poetry, as Americans eat their dinners, in hot haste,” said one critic of Emma Lazarus’s early work, according to Esther Schor’s biography of the poet. I had to laugh at how the 1871 comparison still applies today. We still eat quickly, and we write quickly too, jotting off breathless blog posts and status updates without looking back. Lazarus would have thrived in today’s digital world, I think. In sharp contrast to her contemporary, the reclusive Emily Dickinson, she was a determined extrovert, eager for her writing to make it into the hands of the literary giants of her time. She wrote letters to Emerson demanding feedback on her poems. She milked her “network” in search of literary success. Her persistence and tenacity were astonishing.

But even the talented, energetic Emma Lazarus eventually hit a wall of anxiety as the speed and the pressure to produce caught up with her. As she wrote to a friend, “I have come home to hard work—finding three books to read & review by Tuesday . . . as soon as I feel that a certain thing is expected of me by a certain time, I get a panic & don’t know how to do anything. How anyone lives by writing I cannot imagine.” I was nodding emphatically as I read along. Preach it, sister.

Beyond the usual deadlines and expectations many of us receive from others or set for ourselves, I think there’s a sort of insidious pressure these days to exist online, to be always on and constantly, consistently producing. It’s the marketing advice about “personal branding” and blogging every day and building your audience. It’s that feeling of needing to “keep up” with the internet, as Erin Loechner describes it in her post, “The Rebirth of Slow Blogging.”

Forgive me if I sound like a broken record. I’ve written about slowing down here and here and here and here. It’s been at the heart of my work with Uncommon, a growing slow web community. I’ve been writing and thinking so much about slow food, slow tech, slow everything, coming at it from different angles as a way of figuring out what slow really means, as an intention and a practice.

Something clicked when I landed on Erin’s post, because I think she helps explain something important about the idea of “slowness.” It’s not about doing things in slow motion, but rather taking time for depth and storytelling. It’s about aiming for quality over quantity. It’s about taking time for reflection and creative restoration.

As I head into the new year, I’ve got Emma and Erin in the back of my mind, and I’ll be wondering about the delicate balance between creative impulse and depth, busy production and quiet reflection.

An optimist's perspective on resolutions

December is always a bit of a surprise, and then it rushes by (at least for me) faster than any other month. For many, it’s a month that hurtles toward Christmas and is propelled by shopping and parties and decking the halls. For me, that target date, bright and imminent, is New Year’s Eve. Despite the floundering public perception of New Year’s resolutions (Empty promises! So cliché! You’ll never keep them!), I can’t help myself. Somehow, January 1st always feels like a fresh start, and I can’t miss the opportunity to reflect on the past and set new goals and intentions for the future. In high school, I was almost always babysitting on New Year’s Eve, and I would bask in the quiet moments edging toward midnight after I put the kids to bed. I’d take the opportunity to record important themes from the year, gathering up the threads and carefully noting significant challenges and turning points. I would set goals for the future, and yes, some of them would fall by the wayside within the week. The first to disintegrate were the daily life goals, habits I wanted to create, like getting a certain amount of exercise each day or writing for a certain amount of time. It’s so hard to wrestle your day or your week into a new shape when the rest of your environment stays the same.

And then there are the goals that seem to work themselves out on their own, without my having to try so hard, or the goals that are completely displaced by new ones. What’s most important is not necessarily whether I accomplish each goal within its allotted time frame, but rather what I can learn from the changes and consistencies between my intentions from year to year.

In the past few years, I’ve recorded my intentions for each year in a wiki. I don’t look at it often, but when I need a time capsule or a snapshot of my priorities and intentions, I know where to find it. I’ve also started a habit, which I’m sure I culled from somewhere in the blogosphere, to give each year a theme, so that even if the specific goals change, I can easily keep the intentions behind them in mind. One year, it was mindfulness, the next was wellbeing.

I think the coming year may be the year for depth. It’s the first time I can look out onto the year and know that it will not be shaped by semesters. It feels less temporary, and I am so very thankful for it. I am comforted by the fact that my routines won’t be overturned at the end of each semester, and I don’t have to live in constant tug-of-war with the breakneck pace of the school year. It will be interesting to see how time unfolds on the other side of all that. I am excited about putting down some roots in my new life. I hope to spend less time worrying about what I should be doing and more time just doing things well.

Stillness is a state of mind

“And eeeeeven when you are reaching for your toothbrush, you are dancing.” I remember my ballet teacher stretching out, cat-like, her limbs taut and lean, torso erect, one arm gesturing dramatically toward the corner of the studio. In her own masterful way, she instilled in us what Silas House describes in “The Art of Being Still,” a way of embodying your craft wherever you are, whatever you may appear to be doing. When I look back on the period of time when I was dancing, I think of it as a time when I was always dancing, just as my teacher had insisted. That meant stretching my calves at the bus stop or going over choreography in my head, but it was also something more subtle and persistent. It meant that I saw the world in relation to dance, and even the simplest aspects of daily life were metaphors for something I was learning in the studio. The flow of traffic in the halls of my high school was a chaotic, pulsing choreography. Every moment, from the sacred to the mundane, was set, in my mind, to a soundtrack of classical music.

Conversely, I also brought the studio with me into the world. The constant tension between strength and flexibility in my practice also found its way into social interactions. The discipline and intensity of my ballet training manifested itself in my studies as well.

When House explains that he gathers material for his writing while standing in line at the grocery store or biking to work, I get it. I’ve never felt exactly that way about writing, but I’ve experienced it through dance. There’s a certain state of mind that persists when your body is your tool. From the top of your shellacked bunhead to the tip of your aching toes, every part of your body seems to exist to remind you that there is work yet to be done and that whatever your other roles in life may be, you are ultimately a dancer.

It might seem odd to compare dancing with the stillness House describes, but I think it is simply a particular state of mind. It is a way of allowing the foreground of your mind to attend to the business of living, while in the background, your creative mind remains agile and supple, perhaps idling, but never turned off completely. This is not the same as multitasking or absentmindedness. If anything, it is a way of being present.

As dancers, we cultivated this state of mind through many, many hours of practice. Since we spent so many of our waking hours in the studio, it was impossible to ever really leave it behind completely. As for writing, I’ve never been quite sure how to cultivate the same sort of presence. Writing a lot helps, of course, and reading does too, I think. Not the sort of online reading, which darts rapidly from one link to another, wandering among disparate bits of information. Rather, it’s the deep reading that comes only by curling up with a paper-and-ink book and settling in for the long haul. Perhaps one’s mind is simply freer, while suspending disbelief in order to be enveloped by someone else’s world, to tinker in the background with other worlds-in-progress.

The other side of slow

I am a strong advocate of slow, simple living. Of taking time for quiet, stillness, and reflection. Of being present in the moment. I insist that it is possible to incorporate these qualities into one’s life as an ongoing process and practice and that it is not necessary to flee to the ends of the earth or conjure up extreme conditions for such purposes, as others have suggested. I did not always feel this way. I spent the first eighteen years of my life striving for constant activity and intensity. If I was not studying, I was dancing. If I was not dancing, I was working. And if I was not studying or dancing or working, I was joining a new activity. Rest and quiet time did not even make it onto my very long to-do list.

I hit a speed bump of exhaustion in my senior year of high school, which slowed me down a bit but not completely. I remember coming up for air momentarily before spending the next five years ramping up again until, by the end of my first year of graduate school, I had once again worked myself into a high-pitched frenzy of activity. Looking back, I see my grad school self as a sort of academic Road Runner, zipping all over Cambridge with stacks of books before finally running right off the busy cliff. In my case, the bottom of that cliff took the shape of many months of illness, exhaustion, and recovery. From that experience, I finally learned my lesson.

Since then, I have been careful to seek balance and to prioritize quiet time and cozy time and even time for nothing in particular. It is sometimes very lovely to curl up into the cave of quiet I have built for myself over these last couple of years, but it is always a tug-of-war. I am constantly brushing up against my inner overachiever, who confuses “quiet” with “lazy” and “restoration” with “lack of productivity.”

Lately, though, I am discovering the other side of slow: too slow. Since graduating in May, I have been cobbling together fragments of part-time and freelance work, arranging and rearranging them until I have to admit that the pieces do not make up a whole. My quiet self assures me that this is an excellent opportunity for contemplation. My overachiever self keeps measuring the gap between how much I am capable of and how much I am actually doing.

I know from experience how hard it is to let go of things, to admit that you have taken on more than you can handle and that your life is out of balance. I know now that it can be just as hard to admit that your life is perhaps a little too quiet and rather short on busy.

For now, I have mustered my optimism, reassuring myself that this is a temporary lull, an in-between time that I will look back on and be thankful for. In the meantime, I am mesmerized by the stories of other women’s lives and careers, tales of balancing acts and masterful feats of juggling. I scour these stories in search of clues for tipping the balance in the other direction, knowing all the while that the answer is probably not to be found on the outside but within.

Coming and going

Last Thursday, I landed in Chicago and hit the ground running. I had just a couple of hours to catch a glimpse of the city before my work there began in earnest. And although I knew I’d be exhausted by the end of the trip, I wanted more than just bland seminar rooms and conference center halls to make up my first impressions of the city. It was the first time in a long time that I’ve simply showed up someplace new and set out to wander. As I hopped out of the cab on Michigan Avenue, I felt myself slow from my usual hurried pace to a leisurely stroll. I had no particular destination in mind, and in fact, had little sense of where I was to begin with.

It felt strange at first, to plop down in the middle of a purposeful crowd without much direction of my own, and then, all of a sudden, it felt so good. I wandered in and out of shops, just to browse, in a way I wouldn’t in my own city. I ran my fingertips over silky dresses and sequined tops. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and snapped photos. I smiled at strangers and held the door behind me.

Over the course of the next five days, I worked long hours and ate enough deep dish pizza to last me a decade. I took in all the twinkling lights and laughed at how Christmas seems to have blossomed rather early in Chicago. It’s funny how some places seem imbued with such magic when you meet them for the first time.

It felt just as delightful to go as it did to come back home to Atlanta, just as luxurious to sleep in a new bed as it did to return to my own. Our little place felt even more cozy than when I’d left, and I couldn’t help wondering at how sometimes slipping away and returning again is the perfect reminder of delight in newness and comfort in familiar.

Knitting for Writers

No, this is not the name of a ridiculous fundraiser. And it’s not a title for one of those “How to . . . for Dummies” books either. I took up knitting during my last year of graduate school. I had received a starter knitting kit, complete with gigantic needles, two balls of very chunky yarn, and instructions for basic projects, during the previous year. After a couple of false starts, I left it propped against the wall in the corner for many months. Since I couldn’t knit my first row perfectly, I was determined to give up altogether.

But as I launched into my last year of studies, I felt smothered by the weight of so many books that needed to be read and so many papers that needed to be written. I felt like I was climbing a mountain whose summit I couldn’t see. As part of me began to hunker down and plow through the work, another part of me came up for air, grasping for something tactile to hold onto.

I was searching desperately for something that was not a four-syllable word or an idea about a theory about a concept. I wanted a real thing, with measurable weight and texture and vivid color. Hence, the knitting.

I remember the false starts, when I tossed the needles aside in frustration, but I don’t remember beginning in earnest. Before long, I had transformed a ball of thick, scratchy yarn into a very ugly, very square-shaped hat, which I gifted to my sister, who wore it with pride on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the hat, I gave up on interesting shapes and focused simply on flat rectangles—potholders, scarves, and lately, a blanket. I realized that my delight had nothing to do with the complexity or practicality of the project, but simply with the joy of transforming one thing into another.

For a while, I had a thing for fancy yarns and would scour the aisles of yarn shops for the softest possible yarns (alpaca, cashmere) and the warmest colors I could find (brick red, mustard yellow). Eventually, though, I settled on an armful of the simplest undyed yarn I could find, along with a pair of circular needles. I wasn’t sure what I would make, exactly. I only knew that it would be very big and very flat. I just wanted to knit and knit and keep on knitting without stopping for a very long time.

In the midst of all of that knitting, I wrote my papers. I wrote them without all of the hair pulling and teeth grinding I had done in my first year of the program. I wrote them without that terrible sense of sprinting and crashing I’d had before, and without the all-nighters. I chugged along steadily, picking up with each new paper just as soon as I’d tied off the ends of the one before. I knitted, I wrote, and at long last, I graduated.

Of course, this is not to say that it was only knitting that saved me, or that it wasn’t still a very hard year. It’s just to say that sometimes it helps to come at a thing indirectly, that sometimes it takes a bit of creativity to generate momentum, and that discipline grows with steady practice over time.

Curating the internet

Recently, I came across a brief news article offering up a study as evidence of what I’ve already known for a while: Facebook is depressing. The Utah Valley University study showed that of the 425 students who were interviewed, those who spent more time on Facebook were more likely to feel that life was unfair and that others’ lives were better than their own. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that we tend to curate the best pieces of ourselves on the internet. We tend to share the sweetest, most photogenic aspects of our lives, polishing them up before sending them out into the world. You’re more likely to share a photo of your puppy in the brief, glowing moment when she’s sleeping than when she’s simultaneously tearing up your socks and pooping on the floor.

And if you’ve ever drowned your sorrows in your Facebook news feed while you’re in a funk, you’ll know what I mean. As soon as you’ve broken up with your boyfriend, everyone in your feed seems to be blissfully in love. Circumstances or biology are preventing you from procreating as you’d like to, and suddenly it seems as if everyone else in your feed is popping out babies by the dozen.

The problem with the feed—which is not very nourishing, by the way, but often rather draining—is that it’s missing a holistic view of other people’s lives. When you bond with your real-life friends, you share in their triumphs and their sorrows. Most of our hundreds of Facebook friends are actually acquaintances or strangers, and although it may seem that they are sharing aspects of their private lives online, these glimpses have been selected from among many others for public consumption.

Of course, there are a number of ways to respond to a study like this: ignore it, cut back on Facebook usage, stop using Facebook altogether. My own experience of Facebook has been very conflicted. On the one hand, I find it to be so very useful as a directory and as a sort of social memory. I use it to look up contact information or to find a friend’s friend’s spouse’s name that I’ve forgotten. On the other hand, I arrive to look up a bit of information, and then find I’ve lost a couple of precious hours after having fallen down the rabbit hole of the news feed.

This problem certainly extends beyond Facebook to other social networking sites, Twitter, blogs, etc., and there have been many interesting responses to it across these platforms. Some have chosen to regularly prune their feeds by cutting back on people they follow. Others have taken a cue from Jess Lively’s “Things I’m afraid to tell you” post, sharing some of their own flaws and challenges as a balance to their otherwise optimistic and upbeat content.

For my own part, I’ve taken the “regular maintenance” approach to managing my feeds and overall internet experience. My Twitter bookmark is set to a list of people I actually know. I’ve trimmed my Facebook feed by taking some time to block updates from people I’ve lost touch with beyond Facebook. I’ve used Feedly to craft a reader of content that’s consistently thoughtful and inspiring. It makes sense that we curate our public personalities online, and in response, I’ve tried to curate my own window onto what I encounter when I first open up a browser. It takes time, but it feels like a method for encouraging healthy content consumption, without having to feel like I’m fasting or binging on internet “junk.”

On making (and breaking) tradition

As a brand new family unit, my husband and I now face the strange and interesting task of managing tradition—embracing some of the traditions that have been passed down to us from our families and communities, casting others aside, and creating new ones. I’ve always been interested in tradition. I’ve loved learning about ritual practices and mythologies and uncovering the origins of our often deeply-held beliefs about why we do things the way we do them.

But engagement and wedding planning were a bit like being tossed into the deep end on the tradition front. I can’t count the number of times I received advice in the past several months—often from perfect strangers—that began with the loaded word “traditionally.” Let’s try out a few basic examples to get the “tradition” juices flowing.

“Traditionally, a bride wears a white dress.”

“Traditionally, a bride is escorted down the aisle by her father.”

“Traditionally, Americans eat turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.”

Why do brides “traditionally” wear white dresses? In which cultures is this true? Who started this trend? What if a bride hates white? What if a bride does not have a father? What if there is no bride, but rather two grooms? What if an American is also a vegetarian?

Ouf. As (I hope) you can see, even the simplest statements about tradition require a bit of unpacking and may be more useful in statistical reports than as practical advice for individuals.

This is not to say that all traditions are bad or wrong. Traditions can offer guidelines for interpersonal conduct that help us connect with and show respect for others. Traditions can help us make meaning of important life cycle events. But many traditions also have the frustrating characteristic of seeming natural and obvious to insiders, while appearing completely foreign and unnatural to outsiders. Many traditions do not account for difference.

So as we continue in the process of “tradition management” together, I hope that we will be able to practice a bit of what we’ve learned thus far—that tradition is best handled with equal parts critical thinking and creativity, research and respect, humor and sensitivity.

Seasons of creativity

There are a few distinct stages in the creative process, and they come in cycles, at least for me. Sometimes they align with the seasons, and sometimes they are seasons of their own. Each may last a day or a few weeks, months or even a year, but each has its own delights and challenges. The first is the beginning of an idea, a project, or a concept, and it often looks a lot like spring. New directions and possibilities are blossoming all over the place, and inspiration pops up around every corner. This is my favorite creative season, because in it, everything seems possible. The challenge is choosing which path will be yours and letting others fall away, gathering enough momentum to sustain you for the journey ahead.

What follows (one hopes) is a long, hot summer of productivity. If spring seemed bright, summer feels too bright, lit by the harsh florescent glow of long hours at the office or studio or in whatever sort of incubator your work requires to take shape. Here the challenge is showing up each day with new energy, even though you’re a bit dehydrated from the day before, and brushing off the negative spirits (both internal and external) who insist you’d be much better off spending the summer at the beach.

The afterglow of completion is something like autumn. There is a chance to harvest the fruits of your labor, which have inevitably turned out quite differently, for better or worse, than what you intended when you first imagined them back in the spring. There is a moment of exhaustion, then relief, then joy. Take time for celebration here. This season is the most fleeting.

I think you know where we’re headed at this point. The winter of creativity is strange and disorienting. It is the season I most wish I could pass right over—and sometimes I do—skipping right from an end to a new beginning. But this is a sort of fallow period for the creative body and soul, and though it’s uncomfortable, it offers the potential for restoration.

When I began writing this column a few months ago, I was just settling into life in a new city and increasingly swept up in planning a wedding. Now that my world is awash in brightly colored leaves and the glow of autumn, it feels like I can safely call this place home, and the wedding has passed into the category of a shared memory. I am wondering where I’ll redirect all of that creative energy next and hoping I won’t have to endure too much of a winter to figure it out.

How about you? Does your creative process come in cycles? Where are you at on your creative journey?