Dear friends,

I got interviewed for a children’s magazine last week, and asked what advice I would give little girls. I said the appropriate things (you’ll have to wait for the issue to come out, I don’t want to scoop them) but afterwards I was trying to remember what, if any, advice from adults I listened to when I was ten or eleven. It was difficult to even remember any individual unrelated adults from that year. There was Sister Donna, who I remember somehow always red-faced and huffing at me, frustrated by my continual pestering her about why I couldn’t be an altar server like my friends Chris and Tom; a nameless, beleaguered math teacher who seemed to take my resistance to learning long division as another sign that we were in the end times; and a few hazy parental figures, as indistinct and voiceless as the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons. I know I had other teachers, scout leaders, friends of my parents, and magazine subscriptions of my own, but those adults might as well have been alien species, for all the attention I paid to them.

I don’t actually remember any honest-to-goodness advice from adults until I was maybe in junior high school (and most of it was of the “one word, Ben” variety). What I do remember was noticing which adults looked happy. Which adults seemed to enjoy their days (even when surrounded by noisy adolescents). Which adults showed enthusiasm, rather than resignation. (Perhaps that “I learned it by watching you, dad!” PSA had something to it, after all.)

My sister likes to claim there are three reset points in the year. There’s New Year’s Day; there’s back-to-school, and there’s your birthday. My birthday is this week, but I’m doing less of a reset and more of a doubling-down. More enthusiasm!

The trick, I think, is not waiting for enthusiasm. When you’re a kid, you have vast reservoirs of naturally-occurring enthusiasm (and many adults seem to believe it’s their role to bleed it from you). As an adult yourself, you might think you’ve closed the door on whole fields of things to be enthusiastic about. You’re not a sports person, not an art person, not a bird-watching person. You’ve conflated enthusiasm with personality.

The trick is to have the enthusiasm version of “strong opinions, loosely held”: you want “intense interest, briefly experienced”. You don’t have to commit to learning ALL THE BIRDS to let yourself wonder “hey, what was that bird?” You don’t have become an actual sports fan to enjoy learning about baseball players rushing the mound. And even though I’m pretty sure I’m turning into an “art person” I can’t stop telling people about the performance artist Chris Burden (CW: guns).

Anything is interesting if you look at it from the right angle. Sort of the inversion of Horace’s “nothing is beautiful from every point of view”: nothing is boring from every point of view, either.

This newsletter started because I wanted to share the joy I get from, basically, microdosing enthusiasm. From giving myself permission to go off-task to answer the “huh, I wonder …” question, and then maybe go one or two steps beyond that. Lately, I feel like I’ve been too focused on “doing what’s in front of me” to look up, figuratively or literally, and I miss it. So I’m resetting. I’m doubling-down. I’m looking up more things. Thanks for coming along.

Stay well!

Your friend,

Erin