the slow work of being alive
and also of making things
Some days it is hard to not feel like a little glass bauble whipping around on the end of a string that is woven from GENERATIONS of opportunism and cruelty and anger, being like “HOW DO I DESTROY STRING WHEN I TOO FORM A PART OF THE STRING” only to look up and see that it’s still summer, but now there’s a nip in the air, and every day at 10am, hordes of children still descend upon the playground across the street, and they invent entire worlds with full dramatic arcs, in the span of 20 minutes.
Anyway, I often return to this quote, from a New Yorker interview of Samin Nosrat, which I pasted in the “QUOTES” folder of my Scrivener all the way back in 2020.
I just turned forty. I’ve never had a lot of age-related anxiety or any sense that there’s some timeline I’m behind on. But I’ve been thinking, How do I want to be for the rest of my time in this place, where it’s just going to continue to get much more difficult for a lot of humans? And I’ve realized that I can’t think about this in terms of the whole world, or all the people following me on the Internet, or all the people who are going to read my book, because that has been paralyzing for me. I think what I need to do is think about it in terms of: Who lives on my street? Who am I near? How do we take care of each other? How do I make the small places and times feel good? And then the real question is: What can I learn from that, which I can then share with a larger group of people?
(related: i loved this recent interview of Samin Nosrat on Talk Easy)
I coped with isolation and hardship in 2020-2021 by drawing a lot of reactionary political cartoons online — it was immediate and validating, and it helped me, and i like to think it helped others, too. Lately, but especially since November, and now that we’re not stuck in our houses anymore, I’m trying very hard to be in the world as much as I can, much in the way that Samin enunciates so wonderfully, and trying to cultivate things over time.
Example: organizing huge New Yorker cartoonist party in February.
read about it here:
Example: applying for a city grant to help throw the annual neighbourhood block party, and then designing this sheet cake that was a hit with the children.
Other slow work I’m doing: I finally figured out how to keep my houseplants alive and I am propogating like a madwoman.
Other slow work: I started imperfectly meditating in June.
I finally realized that my brain is sort of the final frontier of “getting a handle on things” and I cannot possibly hope to handle the world if i can’t even handle my relationship to myself.
I alternate between this ten minute Daily Calm meditation and this (wonderful) twenty minute meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh. I try to do it every day, but I miss some days. I cannot articulate exactly has changed but i am now firmly in the camp of “SOMEHOW, MEDITATION HELPS” and i am determined to keep it going.
I loved this substack post that Elif Batuman wrote about meditation and writing (this is one substack i highly recommend paying for if you have the means. I feel like it has rescued me innumerable times)
I LOVE this George Saunders piece from 2006, The Incredible Buddha Boy, that is a lot about meditation, and so much about miracles and faith and mystery. It is currently one of my favourite things to re-read.
Other slow work: the actual work I am doing right now, which is less “gag cartoon with 8 hour turnaround time” and more “longform thing that I can’t really post about for months to years, even though I’m working on it the whole time.”
I am finding that the process of working on a long creative project, and managing the constant anxiety I have about it, is like a microcosm of learning to live in the world: you have an idea of the big thing you want to see at the end, but it is the result of countless tiny decisions you have to make in that direction; you make these decisions by learning to listen to and trust yourself; and it is essential to pay attention to and take care of each successive small thing before the big thing can rise into view.
I ADORED this lecture by Celine Sciamma, where she talks about how good writing comes from a radical application of your desires!! (i was again alerted to this video through Elif Batuman’s substack):
What struck me the most was her saying that, in writing, desire is not self-indulgent — it isn’t about taking the easy way out. It’s about resisting easy pleasures and resisting the temptation of belonging, to get to the point of impact.
The other place I first read about writing and revision as an application of desire/delight/self-trust is, of course, A Swim In The Pond In The Rain (i first wrote about how this book changed my life 2 years ago almost to the day, here:)
NOTE: I didn’t go into this intending to make a statement about “creative work as a metaphor for living” because I am very wary of people who write big treatises on “the correct way to live.” But I HAVE found that a lot of the wisdom i’ve collected about “how to write/create better,” from so many different brilliant people, is in line with how I think about living, in general, right now. Boiled down, creative work is the hope that you will extricate something amazing and transformative by working steadily and indefinitely on one small thing after another, in conditions of uncertainty. So.
To close, here is something I wrote down when I was trying to get through my third year undergraduate exams:
TGIF, thank you for reading,
xo Zoe
Longtime listener, first time caller, and big fan. I can relate to so much of this post, from discovering that meditation does in fact work to finally learning how to keep our plants alive. Thank you for sharing! 💛
that cake is AMAZING!!!!