reader. writer.

My weekly check-in on my favorite topics

What’s been helpful: 

I’m always a little embarrassed that this goal is so important for me, especially because I have to remind myself of it so often. It’s this: Make it achievable. If I want to get started on any goal, I have to give myself tasks that feel achievable. That is, I can have goals that are ambitious and unwieldy, even some I may never fully attain, but if I want to make any progress, I have to give myself smaller, doable tasks that will get me one step closer to the larger goal. And, if possible, I should give myself a pat on the back each time I get that small task done, even if the huge ambitious goal is still floating somewhere in the distance ahead of me.

What I’m reading:

I just finished Robert Macfarlane’s Is a river alive. Section two placed me in a landscape scarred by “pollutocrats” in Chennai, India and section three on a wild river ride along the Mutehekau Shipu river in Canada. The insights of his book I will leave to you to discover if you choose to read it. Instead, I will just note the joy and wonder I felt as I experienced the world in this book, to get to know people who work so hard to mend the harm we’ve done, sometimes intentionally, to our land and waterways. And most of all, to get to be there without leaving home, without contributing to more pollution or waste by traveling in person, and instead to be transported through his words, and to feel as if this journey matters.

What I’m writing:

The goal I set for myself remains the same—search and analyze what I say about specific characters across the series to make them consistent. I am done with major characters, but still have many minor ones to check. The work helps with just editing in general, catching small glitches along the way, though I have to watch that I don’t get bogged down in that. In some ways, this reminds me of my goal to “Make it achievable.” If I try to tackle the revision of fixing everything all at once, I am less likely to succeed (and more likely to procrastinate). Instead, I have to manage my attention to focus on one or two concerns at a time. And keep moving.

Democracy, yes, please: 

I often stumble upon online drama among those who could be allies, and this is what I now tell myself: Each of us can be imperfect and still help defend democracy, free speech, and human rights. 

After I wrote that, I worried it sounds as if I didn’t think it mattered if a politician or public figure has done or said something harmful: um, yes, we should care, and we should support the best advocates for democracy we can find. Suggesting that perfect is the enemy of the good isn’t the same as shrugging off the bad. 

This is my main thought— just that it doesn’t make sense to act as if nothing can change unless everyone is on the same page on every issue. We all just have to start wherever we are, address blind spots whenever possible, and find common ground as often as we can.  At least, that’s my goal —tune out the drama and focus on what I can do to help. 

Notable words: 

“Not, it seems there at the Gorge, that language could come anywhere close to representing this river. The history of literature is littered with the debris of attempts to utter water: a vast Oort cloud of fragments shrouding a presence which declines articulation and resists correspondence. Faced with a river, as with a god, apprehension splinters into apophasis; deixis is dismantled. The alien will not be articulated. Alive, yes, but not in any way we might speak it. Perhaps the body knows what the mind cannot. Days on the water have produced in me the intensifying feeling of somehow growing together with the river: not thinking with it, but being thought by it.”  Robert Macfarlane