Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it.
- Barbara Kingsolver
I started a new full-time work role at the start of the month and I immediately lost my ability to read books. I thought it was because I was tired or stressed, and it was the sum of those things, and also something more. It was the fear of meeting big, difficult ideas in big, difficult books and being unable to spend time circling around them. I’m needing to move in straight lines at the moment: people are needing things; deadlines are in place. I don’t really get what all the urgency is about, I really don’t. If the thing didn’t happen exactly when the person wanted it to happen then nothing really bad would happen - it is not that kind of work. No one is going to bleed out on the floor. Straight lines don’t make much room for greeting difficulty.
Some days the world of work feels like looking at point A and point B and being expected to get there immediately, as the crow flies, when, in truth, we are perambulating land creatures that must navigate hills and valleys and trolls under bridges. Right now it feels as though difficulty has to be project-managed out, rather than met eye-to-eye. “I wonder about this” or “I don’t know yet” are not humilities but weaknesses.
The internet is awash with relatively comfortable people sharing how aghast they are that their work demands soldier on while literal soldiers soldier through people’s literal lives in a literal war. Other comfortable people make fun of the uncomfortable comfortable people for centring themselves. I don’t know what to make of it except this feeling of wrongness about the crow’s flight. All power to the crow, but it’s not for us. Straight lines should be reserved for those rare brave acts that alchemise wisdom into action. For everything else there is circling. Can you do something brave right now? Yes? Great. No? Then take the circuitous route and see what you learn - that’s your brave thing right now. No one needs aggressive urgency. That’s war logic.
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The best moment of the month was seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza at the Waiheke Cinema, sinking down into the old leather couch at the back, watching all the endearing handheld community features before the main event, then getting that rare near-perfect proper-movie feeling, charmed by both the reluctant love story and the strange innocence of pre-80s neighbourhood entrepreneurialism. Being a charismatic crank along the lines of Cooper Hoffman’s character looked positively cute on such a small scale. And Alana Haim’s character made the switch from telemarketing water beds to phonebanking for a politician, using nearly the same script. We are all selling something.
There was more viewing than reading in February, that’s for sure, and it wasn’t all feel-good. The new documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, and the dramatised-true-story series Dopesick represented the teleological endpoint of all that free hope of the free market. Any ethical handbrakes possessed by the dorky aspirants and earnest innovators of yore have no purchase against the tailspin gravity of the profit-drive - whether providing dividends for aviation shareholders, or market domination for a pharmaceutical dynasty. Hundreds of lives smashed into a burning crater of rushed engineering and witheld pilot training; thousands of lives ground into a powder of corporate-greed-induced addiction.
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I think what I want is for everyone to be able to waste time - to be inefficient, and for that to be cool and enjoyable, not morbid and blue. And right now it is only morbid and blue because we can’t afford to be inefficient. We have to keep going otherwise we’re out on our arses. And when I say cool and enjoyable I don’t mean a perpetual kind of holiday mode - though you’re more than welcome to that - but cool and enjoyable as in inefficiency-as-desirable-methodology; inefficiency as the way to good things. Efficiency is doing something aggressive to ourselves and others, bit by bit, until it turns into tailspins and crashes and blue, blue morbidities, writ small and large.
I can be a real Eeyore, can’t I. Work will turn out not to be as inflexible as it currently feels. Or it will turn out to be every bit as inflexible and I will be the one to flex. To be fair, my reserves are low right now. Once again I do not currently have a home to call my own (not to own own, but to depend upon). I started the month of February as a host and now I am a guest once more. And, to be fair, life needs both: we need to offer and to accept hospitality. It might sound silly but I do feel like a host when I write this newsletter to you. Welcome, settle in, let me tell you a story. And at the same time I am your guest, enjoying the hospitality of your inbox. Thank you for having me. I love both parts of our dynamic. Words are funny, aren’t they. They really do make things happen.
Keep circling, brave friends.
Until next month,
H x