Of Storytelling and Escaping

“No good sittin’ worryin’ abou’ it,” [Hagrid] said. “What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does.” — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

The other night, my husband uploaded his father’s ghostwritten memoir to a self-publishing website and hit order.

This was the culmination of weeks and weeks of work. Some of the work was done by my husband, who learned how to use Adobe InDesign so he could format the memoir into a book, but most of the work was done by me. I’ve spent the last several months editing, fact-checking, and re-writing, trying to hone my father-in-law’s story so that his grandchildren might actually read it (as opposed to saying, Oh, cool, Grandpa’s written his memoir! and then simply shelving it). But although my work on my father-in-law’s story was mostly enjoyable, it also caused a roller coaster of emotions and a merry-go-round of philosophizing.

My father-in-law, now 82, was born on a farm in Poland in 1937 to Austrian parents. In 1945, at the tail end of World War II, the family was warned that the Russian army was heading their way, so they abandoned their farm and hit the road to find safety. Coincidentally, my own father was also born in 1937. He, too, was of Germanic heritage and living on a farm in a place that was going to be overrun by an army at the tail end of the war. But while my father-in-law’s family heeded the warnings to leave, my father’s family did not. The result was that one seven-year-old boy escaped and had—in his own words—an adventure, while another seven-year-old boy was trucked to an internment camp.

Although some of the thoughts that ran through my mind as I worked on my father-in-law’s memoir revolved around questions of chance, strength, perseverance, and consequences, most of my thoughts seemed to centre around storytelling: why we tell stories, who gets to tell stories, which stories help us, and which stories hurt us.

A few months ago, I would have tried to hammer all of these thoughts into something that had structure and purpose—some sort of hall of mirrors where reflections and perceptions were stretched—but let’s face it, these are strange days in which we’re living. They’re days of making do and getting by, days in which you’re scared to go to the grocery store for fear of what you might pick up, but you’re also scared not to go to the grocery store for fear of what you might not be able to pick up.

Because it seems wrong to engage in any type of hoarding—even if the only thing you’re hoarding is an insane number of drafts that could be turned into completely inconsequential posts, ones that may or may not help your fellow merry-go-rounders momentarily pause the ride—I’ve got a small list of things to share:

1. This two-part documentary from the CBC radio show Ideas on why humans are storytellers: Vestigial Tale Part 1 and Vestigial Tale Part 2. (I’m hoping CBC Radio is available regardless of location.)
2. This long article from Vox on hopepunk, a term that was coined a few years ago to describe storytelling that’s used to weaponize optimism.
3. The podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Harry Potter is my literary comfort food, and this podcast, which takes listeners chapter by chapter through each book, can be summed up as English class meets humanism meets therapy.
4. The podcast Ologies. My daughter routinely sends me episodes she thinks I’ll enjoy, such as fearology, volitional psychology (aka procrastination), and personality psychology. (The other day I listened to virology, which was very fitting, hugely instructive, and somewhat comforting.)
5. The limited series Maniac on Netflix, which is completely bizarre and  occasionally violent and tragic, but also (IMO) incredibly mind-bending.

If you’d like to return the favour, I’d love to hear about the things that are helping you to momentarily escape…

Small Things for Big Problems

Lina lived in Quillium Square, over the yarn shop run by her grandmother. . . . [The] shop had once been a tidy place, where each ball of yarn and spool of thread had its spot in the cubbyholes that lined the walls. All the yarn and thread came from old clothes that had gotten too shabby to be worn. Granny unraveled sweaters and picked apart dresses and jackets and pants; she wound the yarn into balls and the thread onto spools, and people bought them to use in making new clothes. — Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember

About 16 years ago, I stood in our kitchen in Minnesota, a set of thin knitting needles and a ball of sock yarn on the counter. At my feet—scattered everywhere on the linoleum and on the carpet behind me—were beads. My two children were extremely fond of making beaded snakes—of giving them names and homes, and constructing stories about their families and having them visit each other—but they were also extremely fond of dumping the beads everywhere and then using toy construction vehicles such as backhoes, bulldozers, and dump trucks to scoop them and push them and cart them around.

I can still remember how I felt as I stood there, a knitting needle in my right hand, the yarn looped around my left thumb and pinky, beads at my feet, children’s voices tugging at me. My husband was probably travelling yet again for work, and I was experiencing the quiet desperation that often came with having unrelieved days on end of just me and my children in the house. Those stitches that I was casting on to that thin needle felt like a lifeline—each stitch was purposeful and orderly, and it was a useful and creative thing I was attempting to do—and I remember thinking that if I could focus on those stitches, I might just be able to succeed at my one goal in life: being a decent mother who didn’t lose her shit and irrevocably damage her children.

This post has taken several sharp turns over the past week. It began as an ode to small things. Then, it morphed into yet-another treatise on handiwork as meditation. Four days ago, it became a rant about women’s work. Three days ago, I dumped everything but the quotation and wrote about reinvention. Two days ago, I yelled at the radio and then vented here about the need to retain a sense of perspective and to keep calm.

Clearly, I have been just as scattered as that box of beads.

I spent yesterday dusting, sweeping, darning, and knitting. While I knit, I watched our prime minister, who is in self-isolation because his wife has tested positive for COVID-19, give a press conference. And as the other news came in—closures and cancellations and directives on social distancing—I kept knitting, and as I did so, I felt my anxiety ebbing away.

We live in a world that uses big measures to quantify success, and because of that, anything small is easy to dismiss. And yet it’s often the small things that end up mattering the most—the small things that build until they collectively break us, or the small things that hold us together when we’re close to falling apart.

The photos, from the top: Darning my older son’s wool socks; knitting socks for my younger son; and—like Lina’s granny—unravelling a pair of hand-knit socks, ones that shrunk in the wash, so I can reuse the yarn. My youngest son needs a scarf, and I think it’s going to be a modification of this one, made from scrap yarn.

How about you? Are small things holding you together too?

Of Calendars and Clocks, Existential Dread, and Clarity

January 16th…it’s not too late to post about the new year, is it?

(And also: Trigger warning—this is yet another overly long and weighty post that deals with mental health and existentialism.)

---

About a month ago, Kate and Rita had a discussion about getting through the dark, cold depths of January and February, and this conversation got me thinking, not for the first time, about how I envision the months of a year.

Do you picture the year in your mind’s eye? Here’s what I see:

As you can see, I picture the year as a clock. Now, a clock has twelve hours and a year has twelve months, so you’d think the months would be evenly distributed, but no: January is at the 12 o’clock mark, but June is at 3, which means that the first six months of the year are squeezed into only three hours. July and August, lazy and hot, stretch out, taking their time and meandering from 3 to 6, while September, the ninth month, packed with paper and pencils and new prospects, runs from 6 until at least 8. October and November follow, shivers that are barely there at all, and December is a month that is so filled with expectation and pressure that it takes nearly a full quarter spin of the dial.

Sometimes—as I’ve pictured above—the gap between one year and the next is non-existent: December 31^st is stitched on to January 1^st and one year flows seamlessly into the next. Other years, however, it feels as though there’s a rip in time, as though there’s a well of blackness at the 11 o’clock mark and we’re being forced to take a leap across a chasm. The leap from 1999 to 2000 felt enormous, and—if I had been awake for it—I’m certain 2019 to 2020 would have felt the same. But the biggest gap for me was forty years ago, when we sailed from 1979 into 1980.

I was 12 years old on New Year’s Eve 1979, and I had been dragged along to my parents’ friends’ house. I was the only child in their house that evening: My parents’ friends’ much older children were out celebrating, and my brother, 14, had been allowed to stay home. For a while, I wandered the basement, half-heartedly playing a solo game of pool and throwing darts at the board that hung on the faux wood-panelled wall, but as the evening wore on, boredom was replaced by something else: It was almost as though my physical body—the liquid in my veins and the miles-long spools of DNA in my cells—had suddenly become dizzy with the knowledge that it, they, I was situated on a ginormous rock that was spinning in space and hurtling around a star. And as the clock ticked toward midnight, and I was called upstairs for the final countdown to 1980, a suffocating dread of the future hit me and it was all I could do to not—what? Scream? Cry? Take some unspeakable action to remain in 1979? I honestly don’t now know, and the incident didn’t repeat itself until many years later, but I still remember the pain of that moment as though it were yesterday.

I’ve often wondered what it’s like in other people’s heads. Do other people picture the year as a clock? Do other people think about being on a rock hurtling through space? Do other people have brains that spider web out and stick to everything, silently spinning language—beautiful and hideous, comforting and comfortless—providing an endless and exhausting running commentary and analysis of every. single. thing they encounter?

Of course, short of each of us scribbling down our every waking thought—or short of a new technology that turns our thoughts into live-stream videos (please let that never happen)—we can never truly know. That brings me to this:

The other day, my 14-year-old son and I were discussing solipsism, the philosophical framework that says you can’t ever truly know what reality is and that can almost make you believe you are the only real being on this planet.

This wasn’t the first time a conversation with my son has gone miles deep and philosophical. He was only nine when existential dread descended, making every nighttime tucking-in a torturous event filled with tortuous discussion, all answers fielded night after night, week after week, by me. I knew exactly what he was going though, after all, but it broke my heart that he hadn’t managed to at least make it out of childhood before having to deal with such weighty thoughts.

I remember being in first-year university and sitting in an introductory physics class in a dusty lecture hall, my body wedged into one of the small desks that were perched on a ratcheted slope, feeling hemmed in on all sides by the dreams of a few hundred others. Turning to my new friend, a kind boy who had grown up in small-town Alberta, I asked, “Do you ever wonder if all this is a joke?” He looked at me quizzically, not understanding. “You know,” I continued, trying to find words to convey an idea that would form the plot of a movie 13 years later, “Do you ever feel like one day some being will pop down and tell you all this is one big experiment?” The expression on his face slipped from quizzical to incredulous, and I thought, No, clearly, you don’t.

Rita once said (paraphrased because I can’t find the exact post) that we are all the narrators of our own stories, and while solipsism is the narcissistic height of all that, I almost find myself wishing that all this—the world in which we’re living—actually is an experiment.

Of course, harbouring a hope that none of this is real—that I don’t actually live in a province where the government tears down wind turbines and wastes millions on court battles to fight the carbon tax and to make beer more accessible, that the prime minister of another country didn’t actually fly off on holiday while his country was ablaze, and that the president of the most powerful nation on the planet isn’t actually rolling back environmental rules, denying climate change, and mocking schoolchildren—is not only insanity, it’s also sheer irresponsibility.

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to a call-in program on CBC Radio about the generational divide over climate change, and while many people were supportive of the children who had protested in 2019 and even said that the divide was not generational, but political and ideological, there were also one or two callers who said that the children who were protesting climate change were naïve.

This charge of naïveté makes my blood boil.

What is Greta Thunberg’s main message? She’s asking adults to do the Right Thing. She’s asking adults to listen to the scientists. She’s asking adults to be responsible. This is not naïveté; this is a child who has absorbed the lessons that she’s been taught in school: I’m not a teacher, but I did spend about a decade shelving books in school libraries, and I know for a fact there are no books with titles such as This Is Too hard, Let’s Just Give Up! or Someone Else Will Clean Up the Mess! or Pollution: A Noble History or One Person Can’t Possibly Make a Difference! 

I suppose I’m now coming off as naïve. Perhaps you’re saying—while bristling—Of course we don’t teach children to pillage the Earth! That’s just the way the world works, that’s just collateral damage from the system we live in. What do you actually expect us, as individuals, to be able to do about the mess we find ourselves in?

Maybe I am being naïve, but I think the most important thing we can do is staring us in the face. It’s right there in the arbitrary number we use to mark the passage of our rock around our star: 2020.

20/20

(Yup, it’s so painfully obvious I didn’t want to write it.)

We can open our eyes. We can seek clarity. And once we do—once we recognize that this mess is an existential crisis—we can focus on what’s important: Community, conversations, connections, and caring—for our planet and all the life on it as well as for each other. After all, this is the only rock we have.

Visible Mending and Visibly Mending

Recently Months ago, I fixed my favourite jeans. They’re 18-ish years old and were getting so threadbare that for a while I was one of those fashionable women who sport jeans with rips in all the right places. When the rips began migrating north, however, fashionable began to verge on risqué, and I knew I had no choice but to toss the jeans or fix them.

So, I took a long length of denim I had previously harvested from a child’s pair of jeans—ones that were too worn to send to Goodwill—consulted a tutorial (and my 20-year-old son’s girlfriend who was visiting for the weekend), inserted the fabric into the leg of my jeans, and pinned it in place. Then I hunted down a box of craft supplies and chose a matching colour of cotton embroidery thread, so the stitches that would need to run the entire length of my thighs would be fittingly quiet.

I cut a long length of floss from the skein, and as I separated it into two 3-strand lengths, the action whisked me back thirty-five years to when I sat on the burnt-orange living room carpet of my parents’ house, my back against the red chair, my teenage self attempting to disappear in the small, meditative Xs of cross stitch.

It’s safe to say my Dutch mother—who sat her four-year-old daughter down with a square of aida and a needle threaded with embroidery floss—would be horrified by my pants. She would be horrified by the fact that I wore them for months a year or two as they progressively became more and more fashionable slovenly, but she would be equally horrified by their current post-mended state.

You see, my mother—now 88 years old—grew up in a time when you did not advertise your mending. If your clothing had rips, rents, holes, or frayed bits, you quietly went about the business of fixing things. Mending was necessary and industrious work, and there was pride in doing the job well, so well, in fact, that the broken parts would be invisible.

So, here, dear reader, is where this post goes sideways. It’s where instead of doing the normal and expected thing—presenting a tutorial for visible mending—I follow a completely different thread:

On the morning of the summer day that I finally mended my pants, I spent hours sitting at the kitchen table with my son’s English-major girlfriend, discussing a letter I was writing to the editor of my local newspaper. My son’s girlfriend had recently completed a course titled Writing for Social Change and I was unashamedly picking her brain.

How do we effect change? I asked her. I was burning with the need to respond to a letter in the newspaper that argued Canadians needn’t bother even trying to address climate change because the collective carbon footprint of our small population is too low to matter.

Do facts work? I asked her. What about shame and blame? How about appealing to self-esteem? What about—and here I peered once again at the letter I was composing on my computer—sarcasm and satire?

After hours of agonizing over every word and comma, I hit send.

And then, dear reader, I was blindsided by a wave of anxiety, sickened by panic that was compounded with a side-serving of shame: my son’s completely normal and well-adjusted girlfriend saw my distress.

Take a walk, she instructed.

And I did: I left the house, walked along the lake, tried to breathe, tried to tell myself that everything—the letter to the editor, the outing of my apparent mental illness to my son’s girlfriend, the upcoming federal election*, the impending loss of civilization due to catastrophic climate change, the not-knowing what to cook for supper—would be okay. But it wasn’t until later in the day, when I threaded my needle with embroidery floss and ran those stitches up and down, up and down, up and down that the anxiety finally eased up.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that things have been quiet around here. I have lots of good excuses, but it all boils down to the fact that I have been allowing anxiety to win.

Two days after sending my letter to the editor, I got a response: Yes, this is interesting and we’d like to publish it, but it’s too long. Can you get rid of 100 words?

So, I shaved 100 words and made the piece tight and focused, but instead of sending it back, I sent an apology. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, I said. But I would like to withdraw this piece. I wrote in anger and frustration, and this will only make things worse.

The editor wrote back with unexpected kindness: He said he understood, said I was a good writer, said if I ever wanted to write another letter, he’d gladly publish it, said—if it made me feel better—that another person had stepped up and written a strong rebuttal to the original writer.

And, dear reader, it felt like such a reprieve—until, you know, it didn’t.

This kind of fear is hard.

Speaking—sending words out into a world that has become unbearably ugly and polarized—has gotten me into trouble over these last few years. It got me thrown under the bus by the PTO. It isolated me. It sent me to therapy.

And yet, if you’re the type of person who sees all the threads of where the world has been and where it is headed—if you’re the type of person who doesn’t see mending as mere stitches in fabric, but instead sees mending as unpaid labour, mending as rebellion, mending as art, mending as care-taking, mending as privilege, mending as resilience, mending as environmental stewardship, mending as lowering GDP, and mending (or the lack of mending) as the perfect metaphor for the unravelling of our world—then keeping silent also takes a toll.

Several months ago, I explained this conundrum to my 23-year-old daughter. I told her that not speaking left me feeling sick with anxiety, but that when I drummed up the courage to speak, worry over the fallout that might arise from speaking left me feeling sick with anxiety.

She said, Better to speak, then.

My mother—if she were aware of this blog—would tell me not to speak. Or at least, she would tell me not to speak about weakness; she would advise me to keep all my rips, rents, holes, and frayed bits invisible.

But I can’t help but think that part of the reason the world is in the state it’s in is precisely because we have fooled ourselves into thinking invisibility means non-existence. We have pushed all the broken bits out of sight, shifted the consequences, and taken advantage of those who don’t have the power—or the ability—to speak. I think if we are to have any hope of fixing this world, we have to make all of our brokenness—and our mending—visible.

---

*On October 21st, Canada elected a minority Liberal government. This means Justin Trudeau is still the prime minister, but he will have to work with other parties to get things done.

#TenYears of Reusable Produce Bags

About ten years ago, I sewed a bunch of really ugly produce bags:

Look at the upper right side: the photo comes with its own verdict…EEK!

I wrote a painfully long-winded post about these bags shortly after I started this blog, in which I explained that one day I didn’t see plastic produce bags, and the next day I did.

So: I searched my fabric box and chose the most lightweight material I could find—a length of hideous curtain lace that my mother-in-law had probably bought on clearance and kept for a dozen years, before de-stashing and re-homing with her too-kind-to-say-no daughter-in-law, who—probably five years later—did the merciful thing (because fabric wants to be useful) and whipped up some reusable produce bags.

My children—especially my daughter—were horrified.

Why—WHY?!—do you have to be so weird, and NO, I am NOT going to take one of these bags and put apples into it, thankyouverymuch, because we are in PUBLIC (!) and who knows WHO might see us here, and . . .

(Ah, such happy memories . . .)

Ten-ish years later—ten-ish years during which I wore my children down and they willingly participated in my madness and I saved approximately 2000 plastic produce bags and my daughter got her own set of reusable produce bags (non-hideous ones which I bought for her stocking two Christmases ago)—my daughter goes shopping in a new zero-waste bulk store in the city in which she lives, and she texts me this photo:

EEEEKKKKK!!!!

Oh my. I think I will. (And I think I have to email the woman behind allthingspreserved.ca, so I can learn the story behind her produce bags.)

This post is a positive offering for the Ten Year challenges that are swirling around on Facebook and Instagram. So many of the pictures are so disheartening, but there are also so many positive things happening, especially in the zero-waste movement.

Zero-waste stores seem to be popping up everywhere—we even now have a tiny store, in the very small and not especially forward-thinking city in which we’re currently planted, a place where I can get bulk dish soap, laundry detergent, shampoo, and toothpaste. And while I know (I know!) that 2000 plastic produce bags saved—or two shampoo bottles, or three dish soap containers—won’t save the world, I can’t help but see all these little things as gateways: little things that can lead to other little things that can lead to bigger things, that can lead us from simple addition all the way to multiplication. Ripples to waves, in other words.

In other ten-year news, it’s ten-ish years since my daughter pushed her pork chop away and declared herself a vegetarian.

My children—especially my daughter—were horrified. Her parents—especially her mother—were horrified.

Why—WHY?!—do you have to be so weird, and NO, I am NOT going to take one of these bags and put apples into it, thankyouverymuch, because we are in PUBLIC (!) and who knows WHO might see us here, and . . . Why—WHY?!—do you have to be so difficult, and NO, I am NOT going to be cooking separate meals for you, thankyouverymuch, because that is doubling my work in the kitchen, and . . .

Ten-ish years later—ten-ish years during which she stuck to her guns and her little brother joined her and I learned even more about cooking and I gave up processed food and we all fully joined her and Oh She Glows became my Bible and her father went down two pant sizes—Health Canada ignored industry pressure and released a new food guide, which recommends a mostly plant-based diet.

Just to be clear: There’s is no connection whatsoever between my daughter becoming vegetarian and Health Canada releasing its new food guide.

There’s only this: Ten years will pass no matter what. And when we come upon new ideas or are faced with new realities, we have two choices: We can flat-out refuse to go or be pulled along protestingly, or, we can open our hearts and minds to new ways of doing and seeing. And if we open our hearts and minds, we might just be very surprised—and grateful—to see where we end up ten years later.

Primum Non Nocere — First, Do No Harm: A Resolution for 2019

This past summer, my husband and 13-year-old son and I went to the Montreal Science Centre and spent quite a lot of time in the Human exhibit, playing God with an interactive evolutionary tree.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take a picture, but I found this in an old textbook:

A phylogenetic (evolutionary) tree from Helena Curtis’ Biology, Fourth Edition, p.378 (Worth Publishers, New York 1983).

The virtual tree at the Science Centre was incredibly complex, with branches upon branches upon branches. We could zoom down through millennia in order to see the relationships, but we could also—mwah-ha-ha—wreak havoc: at a touch, we could chop off limbs, sever branches, prune twigs…we could cause entire species to be wiped off the screen.

It was shortly after our trip that I recalled this bit of family history:

My great-grandmother’s first husband was a fisherman who was lost at sea. After the requisite time frame of not-knowing had passed (7 years? 13 years? my mother cannot recall) my great-grandmother got married again, this time to my great-grandfather.

My great-grandparents had several children, many of whom died in infancy or early childhood. The youngest—my grandfather—lived, grew up, and got married. He and my grandmother had five children. Their middle child—my mother—contracted polio at age two. The branch that I was to be on nearly withered at that point, but no, my mother lived. She emigrated from The Netherlands and met a man who had survived a gunshot wound to the leg and a WWII work camp. They had a son, and then a daughter, and because one of each was enough for my father, no one else was born.

At 18, I somehow found myself in a university chemistry lecture. I met a girl who had met a boy who had (years before) met a boy, and because I met that second boy, the tree grew: a daughter was born.

A son was born.

A life was miscarried.

But the loss of that branch meant another got a chance to live—a child who played God with me this summer on the interactive evolutionary tree at the Science Centre in Montreal.

There’s something both humbling and fantastical about the evolutionary tree.

Each and every one of us is the culmination of a line that stretches—completely unbroken—to the beginning of time, billions of years ago. All of us have ancestors who found shelter, foraged edible food, and avoided becoming prey—at least until the time they bore offspring.

It would be easy to imagine that those unbroken lines make us special. It would be easy to believe we’re the ones who are *supposed* to be here.

But of course, the fact that we’re here is merely the luck of the draw.

It’s one man—but not another—lost at sea.

It’s a bit of wind that caught at an arrow. It’s a lost scent, a left turn, a—

(It was a literary stringing-together that my anxiety told me was tempting fate; you get the idea, I’m sure.)

To an over-thinker with anxiety, this trail of thoughts can quickly become debilitating. Not only can you almost start to convince yourself that you can make paths happen, you can also quite easily get pulled under by the weight of responsibility. After all, the last thing an anxious, highly sensitive person wants is to be another creature’s arrow or poison or storm-tossed sea.

Or straw…

Have you seen this video, the one that went viral, the one of the sea turtle that had a straw stuck up its nose, the one that sparked the Ban the Straw movement? I confess I couldn’t bear to watch more than ten seconds of it, but even that small glimpse gave me a visceral two-fold response:

First, wrenching heartache for the suffering of the turtle.

And then, sickening guilt.

Was that MY straw?

(Ah, guilt. My constant companion. And I’m not even Catholic.)

I have, in the past (not often—perhaps only less than a handful of times—but yes, I have done this) precariously placed cups-and-straws on the tops of almost-overflowing bins and told myself that this was ok. After all, the garbage truck would be along momentarily, wouldn’t it? How was I to know the wind would blow and scatter things? How was I to know all streets lead to waterways and all waterways lead to oceans and all oceans lead to turtleswhalesdolphinssharksfish?

We used to have the luxury of being blissfully unaware of our actions.

But that blissful unawareness is no longer possible. It now either takes work—a determined looking-away—or it takes a hard-headed heartlessness that’s born from— well, to be honest, I don’t know what it’s born from. Privilege? Exhaustion? Hopelessness? Complete asshole-ness?

Years ago, when I belonged to the classics book club at my local Barnes and Noble bookstore, the employee who was the book club leader said (referring to something I can no longer remember), “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

So many of the problems we face seem insurmountable and systemic and way-too-big for individual action. And we can argue about whose fault it is and whose responsibility it is—corporations or individuals—until the cows come home. We can also talk about convenience, and time, and work, and wants versus needs. But all of that clouds the fact that we all possess some power.

And in thinking about all of this—in my constant wondering why it is that some people see everything and some people bag bananas (because those two things are opposites, right?)—I was reminded of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take after graduating from medical school.

I was going to tie all my thoughts together and find some way to say, Hey, how about for 2019 we all make like we’re doctors? Unfortunately for this blog post, Wikipedia tells us that “do no harm” is actually not part of the Hippocratic Oath.

And I had just reconciled myself to adding yet-another post to my growing file of drafts that never get published, when this CBC Sunday Edition episode on Samuel Beckett handed me a ribbon with which I could tie together my thoughts.

Samuel Beckett, playwright and novelist and author of the famous quote Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better (a quote that’s been taken out of context and spun in an entirely different direction than he intended), also said this:

It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt.

Yes. There it is: I would rather be hurt—be inconvenienced, be small, be limited, be simple, be quiet—than to hurt.

And maybe that sounds bad.

Maybe it sounds like I’m advocating for martyrdom.

But here’s the thing: Despite the fact that society tells us otherwise, inconvenience and smallness and limits and simplicity and quiet are not actually hurtful things. They’re the things that can expand us—they can breed creativity and thoughtfulness and meaning and purpose and health.

The title of this post, and the promise of a resolution for 2019, is perhaps a bit of a red herring. I have no resolutions for 2019. I only have continuations:

• I will continue to keep my eyes open
• I will continue to try to live as responsibly as I can
• I will continue to seek ways to do less harm

If you’ve been here awhile you know that this blog is where you’ll find plenty of why-to but not a heckuva lot of how-to. So many people do the whole how-to thing so well—and the last thing I want is to contribute yet-more noise to the internet—but maybe my next post should be a list of all the ways I try to do less harm…or maybe it would be nice to talk books for a change. I just finished An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim. Next up will be The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan, and then Samuel Beckett’s Molloy.

Any resolutions for you?

Scrawling Versus Scrolling: Can Journaling Break a Mindless Phone Habit?

Welcome! I’m glad to see you here. Are you here for PSA? Yes, Phone-Scrollers Anonymous, that’s right. Take a seat, please. Don’t be shy. (That’s my department.)

Well, I suppose since I’m the one who’s organized this meeting, I’d better start:

Hello. My name is Marian, and I’m a mindless phone-scrolling-aholic. It’s been 34 days since my last early morning, sitting up in bed, sipping coffee in the dark, I-hate-that-this-is-how-I-start-my-day-but-I’m-seemingly-powerless-to-stop mindless phone-scrolling session.

Can you relate?

Here’s my tale: I wake at 5:15. I pour myself a cup of coffee. (Courtesy my husband, who is up at 4:45.) And then I sit up in bed, the room dark except for the glow of my small screen. And I begin to scroll.

I bop from blog to blog. I hop onto CBC and read the news. And then — maybe — pop over to The Guardian. I tell myself not to look at the comments section, but I rarely take my own advice. When that gets to be too much — when my chest is tight with the conflict I’m absorbing — I look through Facebook to see what my eight “friends” are up to. Instagram is next. I drool over knitted items I will never make, vegan dishes I’m too lazy to prepare, zero-waste sites that make me want to do more more more with less less less.

Two cups of coffee and 45 minutes later I put the phone down. I pull on work-out clothes and head down to the basement treadmill.

But I’m feeling icky:

1. I’ve just wasted a whole lotta time (and daughters of Dutch mothers must not waste time!).
2. I’ve bathed in a myriad of emotions: fear, envy, inadequacy, hopelessness, rage and disgust. To be fair to the Internet, there’s also been a laugh or two and a feeling of connectivity. But the residue of the negative is the thing that seems to stick.

Thoughts:

1. This is a terrible way to start the day.
2. How did this happen? How did I get here? What did my mornings look like before I had this damn phone? Did I used to just, you know, get up? Why don’t I have any willpower?
3. Hmm. Addictions. Habits. Nature abhors a vacuum. Maybe I need something to replace the phone scrolling as I sit here in the dark and drink my coffee. Gum is to cigarettes what FILL IN THE BLANK is to phone scrolling…
4. What’s that, Internet? NaNoWriMo?
5. Yes, well, erm…
6. How about NaNoWriMo-lite?
7. Hmm. I already have a journal. It’s right here, in my bedside table.
8. But it’s dark.
9. *Actually?*
10. /Turns on the light/

More thoughts (and some questions):

1. Filling a page is a glorious accomplishment.
2. Journaling can be anything you want it to be. It can be a to-do list or a to-blog list. It can be a poetry-under-construction site, an active volcanic eruption, or a flowers-and-sunshine tra-la-la walk in a meadow: look at all the things I have to be grateful for!
3. There’s a lovely soothing tactile rhythm in keeping the pen flowing, even if the words are — literally — keep the pen flowing keep the pen flowing.
4. In 34 days I’ve used three pens. They weren’t new to begin with, but this is ridiculous.
5. Sometimes words come out and I have no idea where they came from. They fall out of the pen and I look at them and say WTF is that how I really feel?
6. Words are evidence.
7. Uncensored journaling requires one of two things: a) absolute security and trust in the knowledge that a double-underlined PRIVATE will be respected, or b) absolute fearlessness for any possible repercussions that may occur if that double-underlined PRIVATE is not respected.
8. A cross-shredder would also work. Or a fire.
9. There’s ritual in daily writing. I need more ritual in my life.
10. Journaling is a cheap thrill. ANOTHER page done! Go me!
11. Journaling is writing exercise.
12. Thinking is not writing exercise. Some people I need to stop fooling myself that it is.
13. Journaling penmanship can be different than regular penmanship. (Or is this just me?) My grocery list is an upright mix that falls between printing and cursive. My journaling cursive leans so far to the right it’s almost falling over. It’s as though the words are running a race and are leaning into the wind. Sometimes it’s so messy it’s indecipherable the next day.
14. I’m curious: is anyone else a cursive chameleon? My cursive has changed over the years. In high school it was upright, rounded, painfully neat. In university it shrank: minuscule writing, crammed on the page, a shrinking violet, just like its creator.
15. Is journaling in cursive a different experience than journaling on a keyboard? Is the physicality of filling a line, a page, a book necessary to the experience?
16. If so, has the Ontario school curriculum robbed a generation of journaling?
17. The Ontario school curriculum has — for sure — robbed a generation of a third-grade right-of-passage.
18. A certain mean mother who shall not be named forced her youngest child to learn cursive after school.
19. This was not actually torture, as the child claimed.
20. Journaling is self-reflection. Contrary to what your mother told you, self-reflection is a good thing.
21. Journaling is trying words on, taking them down from the shelf, pulling them over your head, turning from side to side. Do my thoughts look too FILL IN THE BLANK in this? Words can lie. Just sayin’.
22. Journaling is a privileged activity. I’m sitting in a safe place. I’m drinking coffee that’s been shipped halfway around the world. It’s been trucked on asphalt roads to my fully-stocked grocery store. My husband made it without having to chop wood and build a fire. I didn’t have to walk hours to fetch the water. I have a pen and a book, both (likely) made in China, shipped and trucked using cheap fossil fuels. If these run out — the pens and the book, I mean — I can buy replacements.
23. Journaling is the thing I could have done twenty years ago if I hadn’t done other things, like cross-stitching pictures I no longer own and watching Mad About You and Friends.
24. If I hadn’t spent time watching Friends I wouldn’t be able to laugh with my coffee-bringing husband as he exits the bedroom dressed in running tights, demonstrating how he’ll try not to run like Phoebe.
25. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. That’s technically true, but for all intents and purposes it’s actually a lie. (See Kate’s eloquent comment below.) So I’ll rephrase: We can all spend whatever truly free time we have in the manner of our choosing. Some of us don’t have the privilege of having any truly free time. Some of us have free time but don’t have the privilege of freedom to use it as we might want.
26. I want my time on this earth to matter, even if it’s only in a way that matters to me or to the people I love.
27. I no longer want to lose hours to mindless and useless activities. I want to be fully awake.
28. It’s now Day 35: Yes, scrawling can beat scrolling.

Making

Making small changes. Although I’ve been as green as I can possibly be for a number of years, I’m not yet zero-waste (like this inspiring woman). This year I’ve been focusing on finding alternatives to some of the remaining personal care products that I haven’t yet completely greened-up.

I’ve used a “natural” brand of deodorant for many years, but the plastic containers—destined for an eternity in a landfill—were really starting to get to me. Some of the DIY deodorant recipes I looked up seemed far too complicated, but this one seemed more my speed. After reading the commentary about sensitive skin, this is the modification of that recipe that I ended up trying:

baking soda (1 part) + arrowroot powder (4 parts) + a few drops of tea tree oil

I mixed it up in a bowl and then cobbled together a non-Pinterest-worthy applicator. (I took a square of scrap fabric, stuffed it with some small bits and pieces of fabric, gathered it up, and tied it with thread.)

Success: Even in this blasted heat, I’m happy to report I’m not smelly at the end of the day.

Making time. I’ve been doing what I did so well when my kiddos were little: capitalizing on small bits of time in order to sew and knit and read. I sewed several tops this summer (two were up-cycled from textiles I already owned: a too-small scarf became the front half of a blouse, and a former skirt yielded just enough fabric to eke out a sleeveless blouse); I knit socks on the beach and between flips of pancakes; I dipped into and out of books, taking breaths of air from other worlds—literary oxygen masks—and found that by the end of the summer I had read an astonishing (well, astonishing for me . . . ) number of books.

Making an exit. This spring, in the midst of the drama with the PTO, I quit volunteering at the school library. I had worked in the library for seven years, and although it had been a love-hate relationship for quite some time, with me being fully aware that I was hanging on long past my Best Before date, the loss of this work still stung. I’m an introverted homebody. There are days when the only adult I speak to is my husband. And most days, I’m quite all right with that. But my library work took me out of my home and out of my shell. At the very least, I had a twice-weekly, one-minute conversation with the school secretary. And now, well . . . ?

Making connections. This summer, I read a book my 19-year-old son recommended: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, by Charles Montgomery. It’s a fascinating read—illuminating in a sometimes angry-making way—and enormously readable, even if you aren’t totally obsessed with urban design the way my son is. This passage, coming on the heels of my exit from the library, hit me hard:

 . . . the tight web connecting trust and life satisfaction also extends to the misty realm of our sense of belonging . . . and casual encounters are just as important to belonging and trust as contact with family and close friends. —Charles Montgomery

Making banter. Banter . . . what an old-fashioned term. I recently happened across the word in a book on copy editing. It was used in reference to the email and texting exchanges that can sometimes occur between an editor and a writer when they’re on good terms with each other and are allies working together towards a common goal. That passage reminded me of this: Several months ago, I had a short, mostly one-sided, nerdy emailed exchange about apostrophes with an acquaintance. (Sigh. Yes, I am that painfully weird.)

Months on, I can still recollect the feeling that came over me as I was occupied with crafting those words about words. I felt happy. And light. Those weren’t words that were simply going to be filed away, unsaid, piled on top of all my other unsaid words; those were words that I planned to send along to a fellow human being. There was a palpable shifting of weight from my shoulders, a momentary displacement of the anxious thoughts that cycle constantly through my brain. Living in this world at this point in time—when so much of what’s going on feels like is an existentialistic crisis—is really hard, especially for those of us who are sensitive or who struggle with anxiety. Bring back the banter, I say; bring back laughing about inconsequential things; bring back correspondence. (Oh my: listen to this song, which seems to encapsulate all that and more.)

Making a new start. In April, after the email about apostrophes shone a spotlight on the small things that make me happy, I took a leap and signed up for an online course. I’m now on course number five, and I’m hoping this will one day lead to some sort of a career with words. It’s been accompanied by much anxiety, but on the days I can silence my inner critic it feels like I am finally on the right path.

How about you? What are you making these days?

Of Trains and Small Coincidences

I snapped this picture a couple of weeks ago, while sitting in a VIA train, stopped at a station en route to Montreal. It’s my 13-year-old son’s reflection you see in the window. (Don’t tell him I’m posting it here.) Even if you look closely, you won’t be able to make out the book he’s reading (Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, if you’re curious), but I’m hoping you’ll be able to read the words that are printed on the side of the neighbouring train, the ones which hover beside his reflection. The image — the future plus my son’s reflection — is one that snagged my breath and made me think, “Yes, well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? The sum of it all.”

As many of you know, it’s been a hard year for me. I feel the need to qualify that statement, though, to make it clear that it’s not been hard in any solid kind of way — there’s been sufficient food, shelter, and clothing, and — knock on wood — we’ve all been healthy in body. No, the hardness that I’m talking about has only existed in my head, and this — the future, and the prospects my children will face in that looming future — has largely been the reason.

A week after I took this photo we were on another train. And sitting beside us was a group of five young nuns, robed in blue. Why blue? I wanted to know. Where are you going? I wanted to know. Why did you become nuns? I wanted to know. How (these days) does one become a nun? I wanted to know.

I love stories. And I desperately wanted to hear theirs. But I didn’t ask.

The nuns were more boisterous than I would have expected nuns to be. While four of them played cards, the fifth — seated by herself in the row behind them, facing me — embroidered. This seemed a pastime that was more  stereotypically fitting for a nun, and while she embroidered, I knit. What are you making? I wanted to ask. Who is it for? I wanted to ask. She and I caught each other’s eyes a few times. Socks, I told her, silently. For my daughter.

When my hands grew tired, I put my knitting away and pulled out my book: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. I nudged my son, whispered, “Look at the title of my book.” He laughed, immediately appreciative of the coincidence. I wanted to snap a photo of the book against the backdrop of the blue hem of a nun’s frock and the dangling loop of her rosary beads. I wanted to stretch my arm out and hold my book out vertically across the aisle, so this group of nuns, my fellow passengers — on the train, in this life — could see the title. I wanted them to laugh at the small coincidence, to share that moment with me, an atheist. I wanted to tell them that in the absence of a god, and in the presence of never-ceasing worries, the only thing that works to momentarily nudge the weight aside is laughter. Laughter about little ironies and small coincidences, and the small bits of human connection that come along with it.

But I didn’t.

Like a Dog With a Bone…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about courage, about what it takes to keep going even when things get difficult.

As many of you know, I’m like a dog with a bone when it comes to environmental issues. And because I believe in the maxim, Think globally, but act locally, I’ve been trying my best to effect change at my community level.

I’ve been:

• plalking — picking up plastic garbage while walking (similar to plogging, but slower-paced)
• pleaking — speaking up (politely, despite my inner seething) about egregious plastic use (bottles, bags, utensils, straws…)
• pliting — writing far-too-earnest emails to principals and PTO parents who simply do.not.get.it.

The first (plalking) is easy: just remember to bring a bag, because otherwise your hands will become too full and you’ll have to leave stuff behind.

The pleaking and pliting are much harder.

I’m not trying to ruin a cashier’s day (I swear I’m not), but why (WHY?!) does a customer need her spool of thread bagged (in a minuscule this-bag-will-never-be-useful-for-anything-else-and-will-be-immediately-garbaged type of bag) when she has a GINORMOUS purse slung about her body? Why can people just not see these things?!

And the pliting…good god, the pliting…

The pliting is the (main) reason for the radio silence on this blog.

It seems I spoke too soon when I talked about the success I had had when I advocated for change during PTO meetings this past fall. Indeed, my efforts to raise awareness of environmental issues at my 13-year-old son’s school have gone south in a stellar, shit-hitting-the-fan, okay-that’s-it-I’M-DONE kind of way.

Except…

After calming down…

I’ve decided I’m not.

Done, that is.

I refuse to be done.

Because sometimes things are just too fucking important.

So I’m going back. I will keep trying. I will speak, even though I will be sick with anxiety, even though I feel abandoned by an ally who has seemingly given up, even though I feel intimidated and unwelcome, even though I have little hope of succeeding, even though it seems no one else cares.

I’m telling myself this dog-with-a-bone refusal-to-give-up is what courage looks like. And I’m telling myself I have no choice but to keep at it. My children are watching, after all. My 13-year-old son, who painted the Keep Calm and Carry On sign that sits in my kitchen. My 19-year-old-son, who when he heard the saga, told me I should take it to the board. My 21-year-old daughter, who wants to make it her life’s work to look after the environment, who told me she now looks at pregnant women and wonders, How? How can you possibly think to bring a baby into a world like this? (The hope of a deep-thinking/all-seeing child/adult is a fragile and heart-wrenching thing.) And I’m telling myself I have to do this for other people’s children as well. For the many children in my son’s school who plastered the halls with hand-drawn and coloured posters prior to Earth Day. Because even if their parents don’t seem to care, they should know that other adults do, and that despite the odds, these other adults will keep trying.