First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Living with Intentionality

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It’s pretty much become the American norm to blare television screens at every opportunity. The convenience store, the doctor’s office. The elevator (I mean, really?). Sometimes it’s standard items, like the weather forecast or the news. Sometimes it’s convenient items, like the news broadcasting a local shooting the laundromat you were just about to go to. And sometimes its boring dribble and marketing routines aimed to fill our every idle moment (can we talk to people, please?) with background noise and advertisements.

We’re a consumer culture, but we let it get too far, I think. We let the billboards line our streets, we welcome the sales pitches into our homes each night and we’ve come to look forward to the personalized ads on our computer screens. They are everywhere with their toxic message: “What you have is not enough,” day upon each day. We don’t just let them, we have come to rely on them, expect them, a perfect constant. Stalking to a whole new level. Don’t buy in.

So anyway. I was out with my roommate, awaiting our turn in a mundane line and glimpsing those annoying presentations on left-screen. It was a long line, and I’d become quite adept at half-listening to which brand of flee medicine was best-suited to cure my dog (Canine Advantix seems to be the running favorite), which brand of toothpaste kills all those pesky germs while simultaneously whitening (no one’s teeth look like that model’s but right now they favor Colgate) and how Pepto-Bismol could best cure my…well, you get it. So somewhere along the string of far-too-cheesy (oops, cheery) people pepping too-personal remedies (I mean, that poor dog, right?) the station settled on one of those trivia game shows I have a tragic habit of guessing all the answers too, whether out loud in public or otherwise.

I do believe I mentioned it was a long line. Our turn came in time with the $10,000 question: “How many hours does the average American spend at work throughout the course of their whole life?”

Math is a thing I try (less than successfully) to avoid most of the time. I was just working through the concept of the standard forty-hour week on a fifty-workweek year when the contestant gave his answer: Approximately 90,000.

Alright, there are more zeros than I thought in that.

If you set the timer now, that would be, like, ten straight years nonstop, round-the-clock, no bathroom breaks.

Now mix that in with the fact that the average human spends about a third of their whole life asleep. (Which is, approximately, thirty years for a ninety-year-old person.)

Now, mix that in with the fact that life is full of little annoying practicalities that take up a lot of time. Getting stuck in traffic. Trying to get through that auto-recorded voice and talk to a real person (translation: paying bills). Sending text-messages (seriously, look back at your past conversations. Some of these span hours). Listening to those annoying market-ads and game shows in line at the grocery. So between the work and sleep and annoying nuisances, there doesn’t seem to be that much time in life for actually…living.

(But if we quit our jobs, we can’t afford the coffee needed to cut back on the sleeping.)

So we adapt in other ways. We work hard, we drink the coffee like its water (or in my case like it’s coffee). But we drink it out of Styrofoam to-go cups on our way to work, instead of sitting down to tables. (Translation: Visit Europe. There are lovely little shops along cobbled streets in Budapest where coffee houses span two stories, tea is served as a three-tray process and shops feature well-used couches. Yup, no annoying hard wood benches or awkward swivel chairs that just beg you to hop off and make room for the next nameless person.) We place our orders all online to cut back on commute times. We call friends instead of visiting. We text instead of calling.

(But, at the end of the day, we all turn on our televisions and welcome in the salesmen.)

We adapt, in ways that feed into the toxicity of the original problem. We’ve become so numbed-out, so drained and stressed and soul-dead that we barely even notice.

 Half-alive (and sleep-deprived) has become our new normal.

And I don’t just mean for those 90,000 hours.

I mean, most of the freaking time.

When was the last time something really lit you up? Like that carefree, childlike happiness at the thought of summer fireflies? Like fireworks and chocolate milkshakes and all the first-crush-flutters?
Those precious little moments shouldn’t be the rare exception. They should be the standard, and there should be thousands of them. Tens upon tens of thousands.

Here’s the thing. Staring down the billboards and the throats of all those talk-show hosts, staring at the loading symbol on your computer screen and staring at the clock at work, We Have To Carve Out Those Moments. Deliberately, soulfully, and with every intention. We have to make the effort. We have to make that our habit.

We our comfortable with the mundane. We are safe in our routines, we are content to have our souls numb.

(Dare I even say, we don’t know any better? Have we all forgotten the purity of those halcyon summertime moments?)

We as humans spend a third of our lives asleep, so please, when you’re awake, wake up. Go for a run before work. Meet up with that friend at lunch, and actually sit down at those annoying wooden benches. Join a yoga class. Make smoothies. Dare yourself to do these tiny little things that punch shards through your routine and leave room for adventure. Perhaps we can’t fix that forty-hour workweek, because we like affording coffee. What we can do is take all the moments that comprise it, and give them a purpose. Paperwork? Own it. Conferences? A chance to inspire someone with your artistic mess of an authentic self, because they’re all wearing suits and watching the clock, too. Traffic jam? I dare you to start composing music.

Some thoughts:
  1. No meaningful conversation should happen in a text. Just. Don’t.
  2. Relationships are everything. You are not wasting time by calling a friend/going out to lunch/visiting your parents. (You might be wasting time scrolling social media and thinking that you're socializing.)
  3. Really enjoy nature. I mean, really. Weather, seasons, sunsets. Our climate-controlled living is a bit monotonous.
  4. Write someone a letter, in your own handwriting. There’s something really quaint about opening the mailbox to a real letter that a friend took the time to write (on stationary, no less!) instead of just bills and preordered packages.
  5. Take more walks.
  6. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (The rest have been deliberately left wide-open for you. If you need more lines, then use them.)
A little more life-giving, a little less soul-killing.

 I promise it’s worth the effort.

Coming next week: "What the Hell is Shock for, Anyway?"

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