Simple, messy, fragrant, and brief
I used to want to make waves and now all I want is to look closely at ripples. I wanted to be “impactful,” which to me meant being part of big things. My mom worked in the White House growing up, so she was part of big things. I worked in tech for so long, which is obsessed with scale and impact (though the nature of that impact is sometimes left undiscussed). It’s not that I don’t understand that that stuff is important, since we live in a large-scale society and someone’s got to make the big decisions, but whereas before I hungered for that kind of importance, now I mostly feel tired by it.
This must’ve all started awhile ago, but the pandemic and quarantine probably exacerbated it. Big things were happening but they were entirely out of our control. What was under our control was our breath and taking care of our bodies. Our ability to improve one person’s day by calling a friend or leaving food for a neighbor. We couldn’t go anywhere but we could transform how interested we could make ourselves in the details of the same repetitive walk around a neighborhood. Now when I meet up with friends in increasingly wintery parks, I want to know how they’ve been feeling or what they’ve been cooking but I don’t want to discuss politics or what some tech company is doing.
Is this provincialism? Am I becoming domestic? Why is that considered pejorative? I’m feeling unmoored by these changes in my outlook on the world, while at the same time feeling more sure than ever that life is lived on a small scale, even if some of us do things that affect many others.
The biggest thing that I want to be part of, or maybe even create, is a community around food. “Community” is usually not a very useful word (Alicia Kennedy wrote a whole newsletter disparaging it) because of its vagueness or corporate co-option, but it’s also one of the things that you know when you see it. The restaurants I’m interested in working at seem to pull it off. They have a good feeling when you walk in the door. The people who visit seem to know the people who work there. They rarely have more than one location, or if they do, each of the locations feels very different. I’m not completely sure how they make money, because people seem to linger for a long time. It feels like somebody’s home, or rather that they took the concept of home and extended it to strangers.
I’m a little bit better at being the host than the guest at a party, which is maybe why this kind of work appeals to me so much. I find it hard to communicate in conversation sometimes. Conversations include a lot of opinions, which I seem to be losing as I get older. Is it rude to interrupt someone to point out a bird or a dog behind them? It’s right here, whereas what they’re talking about is abstract. But I know that conversation is a kind of communion, not just about the thing that’s being discussed, so I’m trying to get better at it.
My own thoughts are interrupted by glancing at a bright orange tree outside our window. This fall has been particularly beautiful.
What I’m reading
The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit
Cooking is likewise a mode of transformation and a pleasure to which I often repair, and it sometimes seems so pleasurable because it is the opposite of writing; it engages all the senses; it’s immediate and unreproduceable and then it’s complete and eaten and over. The tasks are simple, messy, fragrant, and brief.
I used to want to be a writer and now I want to be a cook, is another way of telling the same story above. Actually, I still want to write, as the existence of this newsletter indicates, but not the way I did before. I don’t do it to preserve myself or leave something behind, as I used to imagine as a kid terrified at the thought of death and nonexistence. I accept that life is simple, messy, fragrant, and brief, and my goals are therefore immediate and close to hand.