Extending, Grounding
Creative thoughts for spring.
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Hello friends,
“What do you do for fun?” was a question asked in a call with some writer friends the other day. My immediate response was, “anything not on the internet.”
It’s not entirely true. I’ve tried to maneuver my way around all the soul sucking bits of being online and kept the ones that do feel fun. Group texts for example. If I really need a dopamine hit, and I can’t resist the urge of the phone, the Pinterest app is going to do a much better job of serving it up with a side of actual inspiration than Instagram does. Public Domain Review is always reliable for procrastinating on things, and of course, I spend a fair amount of time reading newsletters which certainly require an internet connection.
But in general, I try to dip in only when I need to, largely so that I keep my attention from being divvied up across too many platforms, too many projects, too many snippets of information that I don’t have the capacity to take in.
Anything that doesn’t have to be summarized, projected, shared—this is what feels like fun to me these days. Maybe you feel the same?
My interior world, my close connections, the mundane stuff of everyday life that doesn’t have to be glossed up and sent outward—this is what feels the most energizing. The daily markings in a notebook that aren’t meant to be turned into anything, the cleaning out of blackberry vines that are already snaking through the yard, sitting outside for the first time to have coffee, flipping through an assortment of photos from my recent trip to see what color palettes and interesting shadows pop out at me.
In the current age, attention is our greatest resource, privacy is a luxury, and ultimate fun is found in doing things with our hands. It’s the tangible world, the mess, the one that can be savored, kept for ourselves or shared in person. I guess I’m also trying to avoid the “extinction of experience”1, and sticking my hands in the dirt, going in the water, looking up in the tree branches feels like radical use of my time.
Feeling this way was entirely predictable. The years of documenting finally caught up with me. The relentless churning out of not just work, but proof of existence. It feels like a decades-long digitally-induced hangover.
Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax. And so, we oblige—everyone does. We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.
There are responses induced by that habit that are hard to get rid of. I notice how difficult it is for me to allow a project to take time. To not wish that it would go faster or more smoothly.