Hello and Happy New Year, friends!
We’ve had a couple of birthdays, traveled to New York City, finished the first half of the school year, and survived Winter Break. I am more than delighted that we’re back to our structure and routine again.
I’ve been trying to work with WordPress’s new platform and having some trouble… but hopefully this will look right on your screens. Thanks for reading.
Am I There Yet? The Loop-de-Loop, Zigzagging Journey to Adulthood by Mari Andrew
SUCH a sweet and refreshing look at growing into adulthood. This seems like the kind of book you might buy as a gift for someone graduating college and then, just before you wrap it, open it and glance through it. You’d get so immersed in Mari’s stories and illustrations that you would simply have to read the entire thing.
This was the first time it occurred to me that I was not immortal, and the first time I realize just how much I enjoyed living. Not because of triumphs and trophies, but because of things like pressing elevator buttons, wearing a sweatshirt and making pancakes on Christmas morning, finding a seat on a crowded subway, reading on trains, whispering when there was no need to, and watching a cat clean his ears with his paw.
In a section toward the end of the book called “Show Up,” Mari writes:
“Show up for friends. Show up for yourself… Show up with stories to tell. Your whole life prepares you for the big moments, so go in confidently knowing you have years of experience to your name. This goes for interviews, dates, or any important conversations. It’s ultimately about whether they’re a fit for you than you a fit for them, so be funny and self-assured and wear hot pink if you feel like it. Don’t hide the fact that your favorite sport is bocce ball and you’re currently binge-watching Golden Girls.”
One of the many spot-on illustrations in the book
And in another part where she describes feeling distant from where she’d like to be, she writes:
“It occurred to me that I could build a bridge to that reality. I could actually make myself into a person who plays guitar on a warm evening in a park… I decided I wanted to be a person who painted with watercolors for fun because it seemed like a really soothing activity, so I decided to make one illustration a day and color it in with a cheap paint set… I made myself an artist simply by making art.
“The great gift of heartbreak, rejection, loss – of any challenge – is that it’s the impetus to stop hoping you’ll be happy someday and start making yourself happy now. Making yourself into an adult is this ongoing process of transforming your life experience into the person you’ve chosen to be.”
Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig
Depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet with suicide accounting for over one in a hundred fatalities. “It kills more people than most other forms of violence—warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, gun crime—put together.”
Writing about the combination of anxiety and depression, Haig captures what it is about depression that makes it so hard for other people to understand.
“You are on guard to the point of collapse every single moment, while desperately trying to keep afloat, to breathe the air that the people on the bank all around you are breathing as easily as anything. You don’t have a second. You don’t have a single waking second outside of the fear. That is not an exaggeration. You crave a moment, a single second of not being terrified, but the moment never comes. The illness that you have isn’t the illness of a single body part, something you can think outside of. If you have a bad back you can say “my back is killing me,” and there will be a kind of separation between the pain and the self. The pain is something other. It attacks and annoys and even eats away at the self but it is still not the self. But with depression and anxiety the pain isn’t something you think about because it is thought. You are not your back but you are your thoughts. If your back hurts it might hurt more by sitting down. If your mind hurts it hurts by thinking. And you feel there is no real, easy equivalent of standing back up. Though often this feeling itself is a lie.”
Thirteen Ways of Looking: A Novella and Three Stories by Colum McCann
The writing in this collection could stop a train. It’s stunning, words juxtaposed with others you would never expect to describe aging, parenthood, marriage, and perspective. Each chapter in the title story opens with part of a Wallace Stevens poem and leads into a stream-of-consciousness reflection on a piece of his life. Highly recommend.
And how is it that the deep past is littered with the characters, while the present is so housebroken and flat? Wasn’t it Faulkner who said that the past is not dead, it’s not even past? Funny thing, the present tense. Technically it cannot exist at all. Once we’re aware of it, it’s gone, no longer present. We dwell, then, in the constant past, even when we’re dreaming of the future.
A probe of pain. Like fatherhood. Trying to ease those little aches that spring up each and every day. The promise of consolation outlasting the punishment of living.
Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind by Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Our species is just one among 8.7 million others. How many of these can we name? How many do we know or understand?
Did you know that rats love to snuggle or that they laugh when happy? This is a collection of Boston Globe columns written by best friends and animal writers, Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. They explore the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals as diverse as snails, house cats, hawks, sharks, dogs, lions, and even octopuses.
After knowing our fellow animals for 200,000 years, we humans lost touch with them. This collection of essays is a great way to learn more about a few of them.
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama has written a memoir that is thoroughly enjoyable. She speaks for so many of us when she writes, “So many of us go through life with our stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our whole truth doesn’t live up to some established ideal. We grow up with messages that tell us that there’s only one way to be American – that if our skin is dark or our hops are wide, if we don’t experience love in a particular way, if we speak another language or come from another country, then we don’t belong. That is, until someone dares to start telling that story differently.”
She describes perfectly the feeling of “not-enoughness” she had when her high school guidance counselor tried to dissuade her from applying to Princeton, saying “I’m not sure that you’re Princeton material” with such judgement that it only fueled Michelle to prove her wrong.
“‘On this day,’ he said, ‘we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.’ I saw that truth mirrored again and again in the faces of the people who stood shivering in the cold to witness it. There were people in every direction, as far back as I could see. They filled every inch of the National Mall and the parade route. I felt as if our family were almost falling into their arms now. We were making a pact, all of us. You’ve got us; we’ve got you.”
Michelle touches on her search for a fulfilling career, how important it was for both her and Barack to meet Valerie Jarrett, the significance of their wedding ceremony, and how she negotiated working with communicating and daily life with an unconventional thinker. She describes how her identity changed as a newlywed and how they had vastly different upbringings and ideas of what marriage is. We learn about their efforts to help adolescent girls around the world, among many initiatives. And of course, they feel that they are always pushing against many stereotypes.
“It’s all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.”
I’m one of those controlling parents who are trying very hard not to be. I watch my daughter wait until the last minute to complete a school project and I try very hard not to say a thing (after my first 5 offers to help). I know it’s just hanging out there and that the day before it’s due will be miserable for both of us.
And yet, relinquishing control is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. The stakes will only get higher the older she gets.
“Failure – from small mistakes to huge miscalculations – is a necessary and critical part of our children’s development… All sorts of disappointments, rejections, corrections, and criticisms are small failures, all opportunities in disguise, valuable gifts misidentified as tragedy. Sadly, when we avoid or dismiss these opportunities, in order to preserve children’s sense of ease and short-term happiness, we deprive them of the experiences they need to have in order to become capable, competent adults.”
Children whose parents don’t allow them to fail are less engaged, less enthusiastic about their education, less motivated, and ultimately less successful than children whose parents support their autonomy.
What an interesting collection of books! My favorite read recently was “New York 2140”, which is both thought provoking and entertaining. It makes me want to see New York today, and the future Kim Stanley Robinson paints for it feels so real, he really had me believing. It was some of the best science fiction I have ever read, and increasingly topical. Your website looks fine to me, I don’t see any formatting errors. Let’s see if the commenting feature works too.
Thanks for your comment, Susanna! New York 2140 sounds good, but I probably should stay away from streets that become canals! I DO have an inflatable raft in our garage now though, just in case. 🙂
NYC was super fun, just showing my daughter all the touristy sites. I hope to return in the springtime to show her outdoor attractions.