page 83

In a few hours, back to the City.

Until then, sitting at the airport, my head still in the clouds. In every way intentional. Every action, deliberate.

 
 

p.83 When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again. 

(Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot)- via Traci via Chris. 

 extra, scribbled on the same page:
“and if you don’t like these ironies, I have others.”

“The sky is a theater of possibilities. I’m not romanticising.”

finally, later, Chris adds:
“nothing exists except upon an assumed foundation of absence.” (Jacques Lacan)

the embracing of empty

Recently, Tim Ferriss posted Tim Kreider’s Lazy: A Manifesto. He gives some humorous insight on the “upscale” struggle to simultaneously “boast and complain” about being “so busy” all the time. Quotes below from Tim Kreider’s manifesto.

I wrote about how I am trying to spend more time by myself and not enslave myself to social obligation *all* the time like I did when I was younger. Recently, I’ve stopped treating vacation as time that I have to be running around always doing and scheduling things. It has helped me rediscover peace, rekindle old dreams, and, yes, in case you hadn’t noticed, wax poetic about everyday shit (are you sick of it yet?)

Here [in this cabin], I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email, I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone i know.

I remembered about buttercups, stink bugs, and the stars. and I read a lot.

Similarly, even while I am working, I strive to never be so “busy” that I can’t make time for people that really matter to me. Even if it’s on a whim.

…if you call me up and ask whether i won’t maybe, blow off work to check out the New American exhibit at the MET, or ogle girls at Central Park, or just drink chilled minty cocktails all day, I will say, “What time?”

I finally visited the Rothko Chapel. Meditation is still one of the hardest things I’ve ever attempted, even though I often attended Buddhist meditations as a child. I watched people struggle with the silence, the sitting still, the embracing of empty. And I remembered the buttercups. I remembered the stars.

***

Updated to add this:

 Our culture is such that a greater value even than freedom is productivity, utility. I was having a conversation with a friend about leisure, and she was saying how much she enjoys doing nothing, just wandering aimlessly around her house, thinking. “I find it so productive,” she decided. Even an activity we enjoy precisely because it is not about production we must ultimately justify by way of its productivity. This being the situation we find ourselves in, how can we ever justify to ourselves or to each other the value of those most fleeting relationships, lasting at most two seconds long, with a stream of people we will never see again? What is the utility of the quarter-of-a-second-long relationship?

Sheila Heti, “Stealing Glances”

letting go

You will never be able to escape from your heart.
So it is better to listen to what it has to say.

– Paolo Coelho

During my trip home to Houston, I spent a lot of time reconnecting with a childhood friend.

She’s making a lot of changes in her life- slowly, sometimes with a lot of hesitation, but always with enthusiasm. We talked about the difficulty of “letting go”- she is one of the smartest people I have ever met, and ever since I’ve known her she’s always liked for things to be “just so”. Smart people and needing control are a deadly combination, ha.

She gave us homemade canelés and we popped them into our mouths. We drank wine on her rooftop, I made a somewhat clumsy attempt to teach her how to two-step around her pool (I blame the wine), and we decided on a whim to bring a domino set up. We watched the yellow moon rise and the clouds slink around slowly above us. We let ourselves feel giddy from the wetness of the humid air and the feeling of winning at dominos. We drank Dr. Pepper out of glass bottles and red solo cups. Everything is an adventure.

I asked her later, what if she could just let it be? Stealing a first kiss doesn’t mean it will lead to marriage. Taking a new job doesn’t mean it will lead to waiting around for pension and retirement. While I do think about end goals often, I try to let the journey be the goal. What if we stop holding back?

Happiness as journey. Love as adventure.

“Fall in love,” I read recently. “With everything: with work, with the city, with people. Don’t hold back. The second you start making decisions out of fear, you miss out on the best feelings in the universe. Let yourself be in love.”

Today I drive to Austin under the cloudy skies. I’ll get out of the car despite the lack of sunlight, I’ll fall in love with the bluebonnets, the sticky air, the promise of rain, the pop songs on my Spotify playlist, the rolled-down windows, the bare feet on grass, the kolache pit stops, the wide open Texas sky.

I may have always been unlucky in certain types of love, but I realized that it’s a waste of life to feel cynical about it. I will not give up on it, even if it means I have to look at love differently. If not for the possibility of love, what truly would keep us here on this earth?