The end of the week is finally here. Hallelujah! I’m looking forward to a weekend with nowhere to go and no obligations. It feels like it’s been a couple of months since that’s happened. I have a ton of chores to do this weekend that I’m not looking forward to, mostly cleaning related: clean the fridge, clean the windows, clean the baseboards. But I’m happy I’ll be able to wake up when I want to wake up, lay on the couch and read in the middle of the day if I want to, maybe go for a longer run than my weekday runs if the weather’s nice. Watch the US/Netherlands World Cup match. I can put a time limit on the chores to make sure I save some time for rest and leisure.
Category: life
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I’m twisted sideways to type this because a cat crawled into my lap before I was able to get my computer out of my bag. I sat on the couch with my coffee on the end table next to me, pulled a fleece blanket over my legs, and she was on me within 3 seconds. Now she’s nestled in the basket of my crossed legs, purring and looking up at me.
I didn’t know what I was going to write about today, so I pulled a card for a prompt. It asked, what’s one thing that doesn’t cost anything, occurs naturally, and always makes you smile? I guess our cats cost us in food and vet bills (and sleep), but they do make me smile, especially when they purr or do funny stuff, which is often. Goats hopping make me smile. Llamas and alpacas make me smile. Bunnies, chipmunks, most baby mammals.
But probably the most common thing that truly doesn’t cost anything, occurs naturally, and almost always makes me smile is laughter. It doesn’t have to be my laughter, or even the laughter of people I know, but seeing people have fun and laugh brings me joy. Here’s a gift if the same is true for you:
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I remembered the other day that I used to want to be a meteorologist when I grew up. I have no recollection of why I wanted to be a meteorologist. I don’t remember particularly caring about the weather as a child. I only remember that there was a meteorologist on a local TV station who I wrote a letter to because I wanted to be a meteorologist like him, and he didn’t write me back, and my parents were salty about that on my behalf.
I’m baffled by this childhood affinity for meteorology, I don’t remember anything about my motivation there. Did I think the TV part was cool? I don’t remember ever aspiring to want to be on TV either, and there were plenty of other people on TV whose roles I could want if that was the case.
Meteorology was later replaced by marine biology (is there any child who didn’t want to be a marine biologist?), which I understand better because I loved the ocean and all its creatures and mystery and beauty, and if I liked something, I should get a job that puts me in proximity of that thing so I can be around it all the time.
It’s funny how we change throughout life, and get to know ourselves better. I love weather now in a way I don’t remember loving it as a small child who wanted to be a meteorologist. I love the raindrops beaded on the window as I type, and the sound of rain tapping against the roof. I love the way the sun and a blue sky bring me joy, wind makes me wistful, grey days allow me to rest and be cozy inside, snow brings quiet and peace and a sense of magic. I love experiencing the weather, and finding out what the weather’s like when I’m talking to someone who lives somewhere different from me, so that I can place them in their environment while we talk.
But despite loving all those things, I don’t want to study the weather. I just want to enjoy it. Same with marine biology. Just because I like something doesn’t mean I need to do a scientific investigation of it. I’d prefer to appreciate the beauty and feeling of it.
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I sometimes feel adrift. I’m 48, likely more than halfway through my life, and this drifting has become clearer to me as I look forward a decade or so and think about what life might look like in retirement. It used to be that our kids gave our lives structure. Now that one has moved out and the other drives, they provide structure on a macro scale — what days we all have off together — but not so much at the daily level. On a daily basis, work gives my life structure.
When I think about it at the surface level, retirement sounds phenomenal. No demands on my time, no obligations, my life is completely my own to direct however I want. But sometimes, when faced with time without demands or obligations, even just on weekends, I realize, I don’t know what direction to go.
If you’re a regular reader, it will come as no surprise that I found some great insights in a podcast episode. I tell you, I love the Hidden Brain podcast. On my post-Thankgsiving run, I listened to their Cultivating Your Purpose episode, where they open with a scene from The Graduate, where a young college graduate floats in a swimming pool, not looking for work, not looking towards graduate school, just adrift while his dad asks him what his plans are next, now that his parents have spent all this money to put him through college.
On the podcast, they talk about how a lot of us feel adrift like that, especially in transitions like graduating from college, mid-life, or as we begin thinking about retirement. We feel a sense of languishing. Those who have a sense of purpose feel less adrift. They have aspirations for the future, and those aspirations give them direction. On the podcast, they share two questions you can ask yourself to see if you have a sense of purpose:
- Do you feel like your life has a clear direction?
- Do you feel your daily activities are engaging? Important?
The first question I can answer easily: no. If my life had a clear direction, I don’t think I would have been so eager to listen to this podcast, and I don’t think I’d be wondering so much about what to do with myself when the kids are gone. The second question is more clear to me. I do feel like most of my daily activities are engaging: I exercise my body and mind, I learn, I laugh, I share joy and love with my family and friends, I help keep our home tidy and our bodies fed, I eat dinner with my people every night, I pet and feed and love the cats, I give my energy and brain power to a company I feel has integrity and whose mission I believe in, I appreciate beauty and excellence, both in human creativity and in the natural world.
Are these things important? I think so. They don’t save lives or the planet, they’re not activism, but they matter on a small scale.
I’m hung up on the direction thing, though. I don’t know what my direction is, and I feel like that’s pretty important to purpose. For example, if I had a year to do whatever I wanted, what would I do? My first instinct is to say I’d travel, slowly. By that, I mean that I’d spend significant time in each place I visited so that I could get a true taste of what life is like there. But even then, what would I do on a daily basis? I’m not saying I don’t want to travel or that this is a terrible idea, I’m trying to get at why — why do I want to travel? What’s my driver? Because that’s what will give me direction on what to do on a daily basis.
My husband and I went to see The Banshees of Inisherin Friday night. In the beginning of the movie, the main character, Pádraic, is abandoned by his best friend, Colm. We soon learn that Colm does this because he considers Pádraic to be dull. Dull, dim, and “a nice guy.” Pádraic, the good one of all of them on the tiny island off of Ireland. Not super sharp, pretty clueless, but honest to goodness nice.
Throughout the movie, Pádraic suffers loss after loss until I began to despair for him. Sometimes I am comforted by our smallness in the vastness of the universe. We are insignificant. Our smallness provides a sense of proportion when life’s problems seem overwhelming. Other times, our smallness, our insignificance, our meaninglessness in the grand scheme of the universe raises the question of “If we don’t matter, what’s the point? Why bother?” This is the feeling I began to get on behalf of Pádraic.
And I think this is where purpose comes in. Not meaning, which looks backwards to make sense of the life you’ve already lived, but purpose, which looks forward to the life you continue to live for. In the movie, when it seems Pádraic really has nothing left, and he may as well just give up on life, you realize, no, he does have a reason to live. His life has purpose, he has purpose: to care for the innocents, to stand up for himself, to be good and nice. In that sense, Pádraic the dullard has a strong identity and is less adrift than others in the movie.
So what’s my purpose? My first thought was that it’s to appreciate being alive. To enjoy and love the world around me. To acknowledge the gifts of life, to notice them, to receive them, and to celebrate them, like in The Color Purple when Shug says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
But is that enough, though? Is “appreciate being alive” direction? Loving my husband, my kids, my family, and my friends is a huge part of that appreciation, but I think they need a specific mention. The most important thing to me is to love my people, and to make them feel loved. It’s something I’m by no means perfect at, and will keep working towards for the rest of my life.
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One thing I’ve done a lot less of in the past 8 years of working from home is interact with strangers and acquaintances out in the physical world. In previous jobs, I’d pass people in parking lots or hallways, I’d run errands on the way to and from work, I’d talk, with my voice instead of text, to people in the office.
I haven’t consciously missed these small interactions. They’re not significant like being with my family and close friends. I hadn’t really thought of them at all until I listened to a Hidden Brain podcast episode called Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions. In the show, they talk about how the social isolation of the pandemic removed these little interactions from everyone’s lives, not just those of us who have worked from home for a while, and that maybe these interactions have significance after all. The wave to your neighbor walking their dog, the barista who smiles big and starts prepping your favorite coffee when you walk in the door, the chit chat about this weekend’s football game with your regular cashier at the supermarket — all of these interactions make us feel good. They make us feel connected, and less lonely.
The psychologist on the show, Gillian Sandstrom, talked about being a deeply introverted person, and how her dream as a child was to live on an island with her books so she could just be by herself and not have to interact with people. But at some point in her career, maybe when she was in graduate school, I can’t remember, there was a hot dog stand she walked by every day on her way to her office. At that hot dog stand was the hot dog lady. Sandstrom formed what’s called a weak tie with the hot dog lady: they’d smile and wave every day, and sometimes they’d chat. They weren’t best friends — they didn’t have a strong-tie relationship like we have with our partners, family, and friends — but they had a mutual, friendly familiarity.
On days when the hot dog lady wasn’t there, Sandstrom noticed in herself a small disappointment, a letdown, because of that absence. Though the hot dog lady isn’t someone she would have called up during the isolation of Covid lockdown, because we really only stayed connected with our strong ties during that time, the small smiles and chats were an important part of her human connections. She was surprised by this letdown, and it led her to wonder, are these weak ties more significant than we thought?
It turns out, yes. Small interactions with people we don’t know well, or at all, do contribute to our well-being. A smile and a quick chat with the person checking you in at the hotel, striking up a conversation with someone at the park, in a cafe, on a bus, while you wait somewhere — all of these provide little boosts in our connections with humanity. They are relationships, albeit small ones, and they make us and those we interact with feel good.
Something that really jumped out at me in the episode, especially now that I’m in my late 40s and many of my close relationships have spanned decades, is that these tiny social interactions inject novelty into your life that may otherwise be lacking in your day to day. As a person whose worked from home for several years, I can confirm that my days are pretty much all the same. What goes on at work is different each day, but my daily routine doesn’t change a lot, I interact with mostly the same people every day, and Zoom is no substitute for the ambiance and change in physical space of being with one another in real life.
Tiny interactions with strangers, not through a laptop screen or through words in a book, have the potential to bring a freshness that I otherwise might not find.
I wrote yesterday about feeling good about my mind and body connections, but wondered how to hook my spirit in as well. I think connecting with people in the physical world is one way for me to do this. This will require me to put myself in situations where I can do that.
On Tuesday, I worked from a cafe, which I never do, to get myself out of the house and around people. While I was there, working and sipping my mocha, I helped a man at the table next to me connect to the wifi. It felt nice. I want more of that.
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Last week I travelled to Denver for a company meetup. I work for Automattic, a completely distributed company, where the last time I saw most of my colleagues was pre-pandemic. These gatherings are invigorating, deep, and meaningful, and I got to see friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in five years. My coworker Steve captured the meetup beautifully in words and photographs in his recent blog post. As he mentions in that post, lots of conversations happen at these meetups — conversations not just about work, but about ourselves, about life, about the cosmos.
In one of the conversations I had, a friend told me that during the isolation of the pandemic, he realized he wasn’t where he wanted to be with himself. Something was off. He had no doubt that he was connected to his mind and spirit, but he’d never paid much attention to the vessel that carried them: he was disconnected from his body. To correct for that, he began running, and he loved it. Now, he’s got all three connected — mind, body, and spirit — and he’s happy and fulfilled and feels like he knows himself better than he ever has before.
I was, of course, inspired. I want to be happy and fulfilled and know myself better than I ever have before! But my missing piece is different. I feel connected to my body and mind, but I’m not sure about my spirit. And I’m not sure how to connect. I listen to and take care of my body: I exercise and eat well and drink lots of water, I get enough sleep, I track my menstrual cycles. My mind, I am intimately connected with. I’m always with it and in it and stimulating it and using it.
But spirit? I want to be connected to my spirit, but I’m not sure what that looks like in practice. How does one connect with their spirit? I can’t just go for a run like I did (in the cold! in the wet!) for my body yesterday. I can’t meditate like I did for my mind this morning. Is spirit something to even actively connect with, or do you just have to be?
I think I know what kinds of things feed my spirit: beauty, wonder, awe. Love, connection, laughter. Maybe? Do those sound like spirit things? Maybe I just have to be open to receiving these things. Or actively put myself in situations where I’ll experience them.
