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On Monday, aside from the regular busy-ness of school drop-offs and pick-ups and prepping dinner and packing lunches, I spent the day crawling through my overflowing work email inbox, sat in some meetings where I picked up more work to do for the days ahead, and rushed to meet some deadlines I had put off before the holidays.

The rest of the week has been rushing by, with things to put away and things to finish and things to start. Everything has been moving with speed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about reentry, over the past few days, about giving myself space and time to re-enter the workplace, but also the routine of life, with grace and intention. Mandy Brown sums it up well:

Many times my first days back at work were a mess of grief, rage, busyness, frustration, and melancholy–this even when I was really content with my job, when I knew I was in the right place.

What really resonated with Mandy’s post was the idea that reentry could be some kind of messenger, a signal of what needs to and can change:

It’s so easy when caught up in the day-to-day to become complacent about your own needs; it’s nearly a necessity, in a lot of ways, because regularly coming face-to-face with how an environment or circumstance isn’t enough can be so dispiriting. And as coping mechanisms go, this isn’t a bad one: no workplace is or can be perfect. But part of what a lengthy break can do is rid you of the fog you summoned to blunt your peripheral vision, so you can now see clearly what’s missing or what’s broken.

Things are, for the most part, really good in both my work (more about that in a future post) and my life in general. Nothing is broken. But there are always things that can change to make things easier, to make the everyday more fulfilling. A period of reentry puts those things in perspective.

And so I will be carving out some space for reentry in the next few days and weeks, some time for reflection, for time to “ask myself which of my old habits and framings are still useful—which should be renewed and deepened, and which are ready to be left aside.”

I’m letting the speed turn into space, and to hold that space stay open for as long as I can.

We have an apple orchard not far from home that we visit every fall (sometimes more than once) and we relish in picking a variety of apples: fujis, mutsus, ambrosias, empires, and so much more. These apples all have their different uses—snacking and baking being chief among them—but the apple we covet most are the honeycrisps. We get as many as we can from the orchard, but often, we are left buying them at the grocery store to meet our needs through the year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the honeycrisps we get from the grocery store aren’t as good as the ones we get from the orchard, and seem to be getting progressively less-than-ideal every year. We’re not the only ones noticing this: Genevieve Yam at Serious Eats recently published an exposé on how honeycrisps went from marvel to mediocre. The reason, of course, is capitalism—as it seems to be for all things that get worse over time: trying to meet demand for the apple and attempting to maximize profits by growing it at scale in the wrong climate.

We’ll still keep buying honeycrisps where we can find them because they are still excellent apples despite their decline in quality, but we’ll also continue to be supporters of our local orchard when the apples are in season; there are many delights to be found in the things that are grown close to home.

A poem

Nonesuch
Rae Armantrout

This eucalyptus,
with its elliptical leaves

dangling, light and dry
as an abandoned chrysalis,

with its modest bunches
of pale pink flowers

and languid pose,
is my unattainable ideal.

Of a piece,
in pieces,

past it all
and in plain view —

nowhere
in the blasted web

of stars

is there any
such beauty.

Some links

I’m extremely thankful to Lucas for pointing me in the direction of Mundango by Dave Rupert, a small webpage that encourages you to do small, mundane actions to help you discover the small joys in life. I’ve been using a different bingo board every day this year and it has brought me unending delight.

I was proud to be a host of the City Symposium a few years ago. The team behind it just released a new study on how bringing together a “town square” to discuss complex problems could be more beneficial than solely academic discussion.

I’m constantly in awe of how DJ Earworm can take 25 different songs and turn them into one long banger that’s a joy to listen to in his United State of Pop series. This year’s edition, “Blame it on the Whiskey,” is especially good.

A fun exercise for the start of the year: write a letter to yourself to be delivered on New Year’s Eve.

Lucy Schiller has a great exposé on — or perhaps obituary for — the in-flight magazine. I used to read magazines regularly when I traveled extensively for work, but have noticed they have disappeared from all flights we’ve taken in the past few years.

From All the Little Data, by Nicholas Carr:

We talk a lot these days about Big Data, those heaping stores of digitized information that, fueling search and recommendation engines, social media feeds, and, now, artificial intelligence models, govern so much of our lives today. But we don’t give much notice to what might be called little data—all those fleeting, discrete bits of information that swarm around us like gnats on a humid summer evening. Measurements and readings. Forecasts and estimates. Facts and statistics. Yet it’s the little data, at least as much as the big stuff, that shapes our sense of ourselves and the world around us as we click and scroll through our days.

From Walking as Inactivity, by Thomas J Bevan:

Walking is one of the great forms of inactivity and in a world of striving and consumerism and grasping and impatience it is one of only very few potential forms of inactivity left. It is that makes it precious.

You see, when you walk slowly and with no real destination in mind you are not doing, you are just being. Such walking, such contemplation is the beginning of freedom, it is the necessary pre-condition for having your own thoughts and as such for truly living your own life.

Zoya loves my mother’s way of preparing an egg: a simple egg broken and whisked and fried flat with salt and pepper. It isn’t as fancy as a proper French omelet, and that’s the whole point; I loved this piece by Priyanka Mattoo that expounds on the idea that making eggs should be dynamic, resonant, and restorative.

“In most communities throughout the world, adults assume a modicum of public responsibility for the welfare of children, even if they have no ties to them.” From Frank Furedi’s 2001 book, Paranoid Parenting, as excerpted by Katherine Johnson Martinko’s excellent piece Yes, Please Talk to My Kid.

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