The Week to Nowhere + New Year, New Links

Have you been meaning to subscribe and keep telling yourself you’ll do it the next time you’re at your computer or near your wallet or or or….I get it, I absolutely get it. But if you have the means, consider paying for the things that have become important to you. (If you don’t have the means, as always, you can just email me and I’ll comp you, no questions asked). Subscriptions make work like this possible.

I am, for better and often very much for worse, an oldest-daughter planner intent on solving problems. And I have not — at least in my adult life — been able to solve the problem of this past week. Zombie Week, In-Between Week, Nothing Week — the week in the United States when many people work and do not want to and many others do not work, or half-work, and feel little of the relief or rest of a week off of one’s choosing.

It is too expensive to vacation and overcrowded if you do; the weather, at least in most of the Northern Hemisphere, is hostile and unpredictable. Everyone’s sick. Everyone’s full. Do you want to be with other people or do you actually just crave complete solitude? The indoor temperature’s off; clothes chafes and smells too much like food you ate last week. The compass spins.

I used to work through the week, frantic in the absence of direction and norms. I’ve deliberately let that go, but what I’ve cobbled together instead isn’t much better: plans are cancelled, roads are closed, kids are sick, in-laws are stranded, pipes freeze, power’s out. All of those things happened last year and this year, and given the state of the climate and airline management strategies, there’s good reason to believe that the weather will only get more extreme and December travel more fraught in the future. The same principle applies to dealing with family: everyone I know is just going through it in a way that didn’t seem to be the case even ten years ago. It makes sense. We’re fragile, we’re aging; everyone’s fragile, everyone’s aging.

I am the person I am because I grew up where I did, but that hometown now feels hard-edged and belligerent. The signs for Christmas Gun Sales are funny but not, not at all. At my mom’s request, I sifted through bins and bins of clippings and art work and college notebooks and high school papers and stuffed animals and bad poetry and mix tapes and dance photos from my childhood and just piles upon piles of notes and letters. It was sublime: overwhelming, deeply touching, everything all at once, revisiting all those people I’ve been to others, at once intimate and uncanny. How do you throw the artifacts away yet retain the softness?

I started to feel sick the night before we were to drive from my hometown to a friend’s to ski — a thing that delights me! — and that sickness has flattened the week. Not sick enough to while the day away in bed, but not not-sick enough to do anything that gives texture to the week. The mealy bugs have come back to my succulents! Truly, how dare they! The uncharacteristic-but-now-characteristic deep freeze of last week burned my perennials. It’s nothing, it’s everything.

I’m writing to you from the past, and here’s what I’m trying, with intermittent success, in order to navigate this week: feel my feelings, go on a lot of walks, have in-person conversations, errand friend around, unsubscribe to noisy emails and allow others to accumulate, and write pieces like this one.

It’s okay for a week to go nowhere, whether you’re working or caretaking or on break from school or feeling ennui, and whether that week is this week or a wholly different season when those feelings arrive. I’m telling myself that as much as I’m telling you. I’m trying to heed how my response to this week emphasizes the parts of me that are still need of listening, in need of settling, in need of care. To remember just how much happens in fallow ground.

Here are the things that made me feel present, distracted, listened to, quiet, or cared for this week — and maybe one of them will do the same for you.