On doing the deed, invasive sunshine, and how the practice requires practice
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Dear Eva,
I have been hesitant to type the first sentence of this letter because this is a week where I have no idea where the letter might go. Now that I have done the deed and typed the first words onto the page, we are off! Let’s see where this activity of putting thoughts into words into sentences into a conversational epistolary form takes us on this Sunday morning. There will be very little time for editing, so today’s stream of consciousness is likely what we will get. Welcome to my unedited brain!
Today I woke up briefly about 90 minutes before my alarm was set to go off and it was already light in the room. Usually I relish the stretched out summer days around the solstice. But today the sunshine that streamed through the windows felt invasive, like an unwelcome visitor with an aggressively cheery demeanor insisting upon an early start for everyone in the house. When even the sun feels like another thing asking for something from me, it tells you something about where I am at the moment.
I am thinking about deadlines. I have one on Wednesday, and it has been directing the bulk of my time and attention over the past several weeks. A deadline can be so clarifying. Once it is set, anything that has been amorphous, undecided, uncertain, must be gathered up and put into a container. Choices must be made, plans set. A deadline provides a kind of certainty that we so often crave. By [x] date, I will have reached a particular milestone no matter what. This can be satisfying.
When you and I did the Midwives Artist Collective program, I remember hearing about someone in the program who used deadlines as part of her creative process in a fairly extreme way. Before even settling on a project, she would schedule a performance and invite people to it. Then, she would get to work. Maybe this is really just a kind of project planning? She sets an end point based on what she loosely knows is possible based on her form of creative work, her personal process. To pull it off, she necessarily must have a solid amount of shape in her mind’s eye about what the final product will be, and she must have the kind of confidence in her ability to pull it off that can only come from a history of repeated practice. This person – whoever she is! – has been on my mind lately as we work toward the imminent self-created project deadline at work.
I am thinking about how when I reach a certain stress level my brain curls into a kind of fetal position, clutching its knees, and rolling back and forth. Any room for creativity evaporates, and the best I can do is complete tasks. Anne Lamott says perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. I agree with this, and I think that stress can be another. The same forces are at play – less room for play and experimentation, more need to know. Just as with writing, this kind of constricted brain space is particularly problematic anytime you are making something new. Making is infinitely harder than analyzing. Making requires seeing all of those discrete analytical points and building a frame that balances atop all of them. This is never fully possible, so it is always imperfect. For me, making in this way is one of life’s most fulfilling experiences. I feel grateful to have found my way into a legal career that is rooted in a lot of making. This is rare, and I do not take it for granted. Right now, we are working to prototype a tool to help rebalance the relationship between human authors of knowledge and the machines that make use of it. This is an impossibly huge task with an impossibly complex array of factors at play, so of course what we are making will be flawed.
I recently stumbled upon an essay by the artist and design researcher Sara Hendren about the poetry of bringing a new solution into tangible form, rather than “endless talking about what the world should be like.” She wrote:
The poetry of prototyping is the vulnerable attempt, the tangible trying. The willingness to venture, knowing it might fail. The investment of commitment to even the most sloppy version of a possible newness. A thing being prototyped is trying to get born, unfolding right there in front of you. And all the conversations around that thing have the quality of willed belief: What if it was half as big? Twice as long? A different shape around its edges? Dozens of questions that are all really just versions of the best and only question in design, at the end of the day: Could it be otherwise?
These words feel like a balm in this stressful lead-up to unveiling our own messy prototype to the public. It is nice to be reminded that the root of what we are doing is an act of creating, done in service of an insistence that things could be otherwise if we try.
I loved reading your thoughts on artificial intelligence (notice I am not saying “AI!”). I am going to save a deeper dive into them for future letter or phone conversation, but I did want to say two things now. First, your mention of AI (sorry!) relationships being like communing with the universe reminded me of artist Holly Herndon’s reframe of artificial intelligence to “collective intelligence,” emphasizing the way in which it aggregates us all. Second, I am delighted by the thought that AI might learn empathy by its inevitable consumption of these letters. Are you listening, machines? This is what thoughtful human correspondence can look like!
I hope and assume that you are fully back to feeling good after Covid. It’s wild that this was your first known go of it! Congrats on making it so long. That feels like a remarkable feat!
I will end by saying plainly that I miss you, and I miss our long meandering phone conversations! Given the crunch I have been going through at work, that kind of spaciousness and connection feels distant right now. I will be delighted when Wednesday comes and goes, and I can return to a pace of life that better suits me. This pace is not sustainable!
I am hopeful you have been floating in a pool sipping citrus-infused beverages, if not literally then at least in spirit. I plan to be in that mode very soon myself, and I cannot wait!
Sending love,
Sarah
Saturday June 21 and Sunday June 22 2025
Dear Sarah,
Our 2018 selves might be delighted to know that we’ve relaxed a bit! I’m glad we were rigorous with our schedule then — the contrast and the relaxed pace now feels all the sweeter.
Lately I find myself tired, scattered, occasionally agitated and distractable. Some of this is post-covid brain — which I think is reactivated by exercise as I’ve started to get back into light running — but I know it is also tied to the bits of work I must do and do not want to do. My brain wants out and is ready for any random distraction, or will try to create distraction. I find myself reaching to touch my phone again and again, hoping someone has messaged me so that I will have a reason to be peeled away from my work. Even the reach-and-touch draws my eyes away from my computer screen, if only momentarily. I shall endeavor to follow through on my professional commitments, but my capacity to delay gratification work-wise — i.e. to keep working hard and long in the now so that at some distant future time I can relax — has dwindled in the past few years. I’m taking my pretirement now and I’ll navigate the future as it comes. If older people who thought they were able to retire are finding that they must return to work in some form — if that’s the eventuality anyway — why not pretire now and then keep working as needed, until I die. I’ll work in our local apocalypse-era Trader Joe’s. Work won’t be fun then but it’s also not fun now, and the road ahead at least includes some unexpected twists if I turn my time now to my own devices.
1. It is Saturday, which was a day fully booked on my calendar, and which in the last 12-24 hours has converted to a day only 25 percent booked. Weekend time reclaimed! I’ve been writing and lounging.
Sometimes I plan without planning: I’ll put something on the calendar as a hold or an intention. Intentions and ideas look essentially the same on the gcal as firm commitments, deadlines, meetings. Today I’d put an activity on the cal for early evening but didn’t really plan around it — as in, I didn’t use my remaining time effectively to accomplish what I was hoping to accomplish. But I am allowed to change my mind. I can redirect — I can overrule my self-created sense of FOMO — I did this to myself — I can quiet my brain and re-focus on what matters to me, and-or what I “need” to do (personal goals, deadlines, some measure of monetary gain) with the time available to me. I’ve made that a practice this year and the practice requires practice.
2. Now it’s Sunday morning. I went to bed late last night and woke up early with the sun in my skylight. I had some aspirational plans on the calendar for today but I am going to need to recalibrate. As I showered this morning I acknowledged a word and a mood for this recent period of time: miscalculation. I acknowledged it calmly, I do not feel stress about it, it is not a punishment to use this word. I am simply looking at the things I’ve done, the things I thought I would do, the things I need to do, and the things I want to do, and am realizing I’ve done some of the math wrong. I am reviewing my calculations. All the things won’t fit and I’m not willing to rush and squeeze to make them fit. I won’t accommodate the rushing anymore, revolving around the idea that I had an idea for a plan and so I must execute the plan no matter how I feel when the time for the plan actually rolls around. And so there are things that I am taking off the calendar in order to free up space, things that were possibilities and now I am making other choices.
I’m sending my condolences for the passing of your childhood friend. I am fascinated by the sense of certainty you described in your letter, the people at the service sharing a “certainty about why he died, certainty about what happens next, certainty about the fate of everyone in that room.” I am exactly on your page about the only certainty being uncertainty. I find it to be grounding to acknowledge the uncertainty, to accept it, and to continue living in an unresolved state of being. I think our brains like to label and “know” things so that we can stop thinking about them; we seek resolution. This feels to me like a brain science topic; I think I’m thinking of the way we can drive familiar routes and find ourselves at home without really having noticed the drive all along the way. Once we are used to seeing something we stop seeing it. I have more to say about this but I can feel my brain flapping in the wind.
I can relate to the extended search for a single jigsaw puzzle piece! The piece that seems like it should be easy to spot — the way that what is obvious, or seems like it should be obvious, can evade us —.
Smallest life update: I bought a new scent of dish soap and I’m regretting it. The next three to six months will be lemon verbena scented instead of basil. I might just spend the money again to get the superior scent (basil). I hope you are enjoying only your favorite scents in your home! Looking forward to reading your words moments from now!
Until soon, yours,
Eva