Commonplace : January 2020
"Happy new year 1 and all. Resolution? More unequivocal days, that is WORK days and PLAY days, not guilty play days and distracted work days." - Dave McKean
Time is a construct, but it still counts
The quote at the start of this newsletter is what I come back to year after year. I don't do resolutions, I set aspirational goals for my year. There are things I very much want to accomplish every year, though I know life will get in the way and I'll have a vast array of experiences I wouldn't have if I followed my plan to the letter.
Still, I do try and reach for the stars with my goals. They're rarely about reinventing myself, instead they are about the projects I want to build on and the bits of self-improvement that will enrich the life I already lead.
However, I didn't come in here to write about resolutions and process and all that. Instead I wanted to write about time and how flexible it is and our weird adherence to the Julian calendar.
I know it might sound a little odd, but I really felt like a door closed on December 31st and opened anew on January 1st. I have a huge wall calendar with my schedule for Luna Station all sketched out on it. (With lots of things in my life, I can be flexible. With LSQ, it's less of an option as we do have hard deadlines for things.) That big piece of paper with all it's bright and colorful flags on it has a definite start and end. It boxes off the year in a way that makes it feel self-contained as if no year exists before or after it.
At the same time, one day folds into the next with the only true personal deliminator being cycles of sleep and wakefulness. Though even that... if you take a long nap, when you wake have you started a new day?
Which is all a roundabout and rambling way of saying that I'm still transitioning myself from one year to the next. I think it's particularly potent this time around considering the big change in my life last year. Moving is disruptive under the best circumstances. In my case it was timed terribly, unexpected, and yet very much needed in order to recover a huge part of who I am.
This month I am working a little harder to make sure this new year and it's new possibilities take root. The potential is all there, I have only to open myself up to it. Time may be a construct, but I'm planning on leveraging its power and malleability in the months to come.
I hope you are finding your own way towards possibility and potential, too.
Wisdom & Websites
“Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all.” - Atul Gawande
What’s Your Moral Alignment? | HowStuffWorks - I'm Neutral Good, what are you?
“By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times / Into something better.” — Mary Oliver
Funny how hustle porn rears up so aggressively during the literal one week a year that the US actually reliably treats as a holiday? FUNNY! Anyway here are some favorite things about rest - A great thread on rest at a time when self care is easily forgotten.
Favorite Reads Of The Month
The Crane Wife
I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.
What made you become a vegetarian? - The Red Hand Files : The Red Hand Files
I felt that if I were to continue to live in this world I had to do what I could to reduce the existential suffering around me, or at the very least, not to add to it.
The Vegetarians Who Turned Into Butchers - The New York Times
“I grew up hiking the prairies of Colorado, and I developed a really deep love for those plains,” Ms. Kavanaugh said. “It’s like people say when they talk about loving the ocean, that you can see for miles under a big blue sky. When I decided to open a butcher shop, I knew I only wanted to source 100-percent-grass-fed animals from ranches that were helping regenerate the prairies.”
Status Update
Currently Reading: Critical Role – Vox Machina: Origins - Just finished this. Such a great, fun read. You don't have to have watched the show to enjoy it, a sign of good storytelling.
Currently Listening: Lots of stuff on Spotify. I'm still training that algorithm so I'm giving it lots of variety and not listening to one thing too much. Though Charly Bliss and Sylvan Esso and Titus Andronicus do get more than their fair share of air time.
Currently Working On: Still working on those print editions of Luna Station Quarterly's first couple of years. Also, lots of planning for the coming year. It won't all be fiction, but I'll be writing a LOT more.