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After I fill out my line-a-day journal before bed, I peek at the lines I recorded last year:

• It snowed again.

• Kris made chicken soup.

• Friday got a new squeaky toy and she loves it.

Sometimes I flip ahead to divine my future by checking what I wrote before:

• On that day in March it was 50 degrees.

• On that day in April we opened the windows for a little bit.

• On that day in May I went for a walk in a t-shirt.

I’m reminded of when Kris proposed to me in January 2020, after a hike to the top of a hill looking over the Boston skyline. It was 70 degrees, unseasonably warm and a perfect day to get engaged. Six weeks later we’d be in a global pandemic.

Six weeks from now it will be April 1st, officially Spring in New England. The sun will set after 7pm and the piles of snow in our backyard will have seeped into the dirt. I got so excited thinking about everything I’ll be doing in April and realize I’ve forgotten about the end of February, the whole of March.

I restarted Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Morals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. Burkeman is best known for his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a book that simultaneously freaked me out and freed me up to think about how I want to spend my 4,000 weeks in this life. In his chapter-a-day Meditation for Mortals, Burkeman reminds us that our time on earth is finite, and we’d do well to accept our limitations. He quotes writer Sasha Chapin, who asks, “what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day?”

I’ve been curious about Stoicism, a philosophy from 300 BCE that I discovered on an Instagram account that teaches philosophy “for the girlies.” My first thought was this feels like the serenity prayer (accepting the things we can’t change, changing what we can, being wise enough to know the difference) and my second thought was this is fun, like a logic problem. I liked reading Aristotle and Plato in grad school, so why not: let’s give this oldass philosophy a spin.

I took a few Stoicism books out of the library and gleaned a key lesson in the first couple chapters: I cannot control many things (like being stuck in traffic on our way to a friend’s house for dinner), but I can attempt to control how I respond to my lack of control (we will get there when we get there and self-shaming will not change that). I was delighted at how easy that clicked and how I was able to relax about being late.

Stoicism! How fun! It’ll be my new thing! But I’m too busy during the day to read, and I fall asleep when I read the books before bed. I return them to the library unfinished.

I wish I felt like studying Stoicism (or exercising, or meditating, or journaling) was my job in the way I felt in about literature in college. I was a detective when I charted how Virginia Woolf used semicolons. I wrote poem after poem after poem and won the Undergraduate Poetry Award for one I wrote about a grackle. I was dutiful, obsessed, and delighted to do the work…which of course feels easier to do when you’re already good at something because you’ve spent your life learning how to do it well.

I want to already be six weeks into diligent study of Stocism. I imagine that on the other side of just six weeks I’d feel like a whole new woman: calmer, certainly wiser, even kinder to the people and animals in my life, unbothered and in my lane, as they say. But I’m here now and over there in my daydream, on the other side of the hard work, it’s just so far away. Can’t I just download it straight into my brain like Neo in The Matrix? Sleep with a book under my pillow and hope for osmosis?

I can’t blame it on my phone, either. At least not entirely. As much as I want to be a little intellectual witch who lives in the woods and toils over stews and nonfiction, throwing my phone in the garbage disposal won’t suddenly make me good at practicing new things. I choose to direct my ears and eyes and hands in one direction at a time.

Burkeman reminds us that the only way to become the kind of person who does something is to do a little bit imperfectly. Just a tiny action? Okay. I can do that. I might need reminders to pop up on my phone and post-it notes pasted around the apartment, but I can do a little baby bit of it.

I’ll let you know how I’ve progressed in six weeks, and in the meantime, I wish you a nice balance of daydreams and tiny steps forward.

Curiosities

• The talented Melissa Kaitlyn Carter (recent guest on Honing In and the creator of my podcast theme song!) is running Demo Club, a six-week container where you’ll share songs-in-progress and finish one demo recording within a supportive community! Learn more and sign up here—it starts next week! Melissa will also be offering Song Craft in March, so be sure to sign up for her newsletter to get more information.

• Another talented Honing In guest, Catherine La Sota, is hosting the free online viewing and writing event she mentioned in our episode! My So-Called Literary Life will take place on Zoom next Tuesday the 24th. Learn more and sign up here.

• Luca J. Davis’s recent newsletter “Some People Don’t Even Have to Write” totally hit the spot! Davis talks about being a writer and also struggling to write. I felt so validated in reading their newsletter, because I’m a big fan of their writing and it helps to remember that even skilled writers who love to write sometimes struggle to get the words on the page.

• We finally started watching the show Severance after many people recommended it. We’re 4 episodes in and it’s a little stressful, but uncanny and visually weird in a way that I find intriguing.

Take care and talk soon,

Dr. Kate

Email: kate@katehenry.com

Website: katehenry.com

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