From the 2021 Archives: January Musings
The other day, I looked up the number of sunny hours in Berlin in January and compared it to 2020 (53.5 hours). Berlin only got about 5.1 hours of sun in January 2021. Of course, this has changed now, since a few days have passed, but I think it gives a pretty good idea of what the past few weeks have been like. Grey. And I don’t mean a stylish Pantone kind of grey. I mean the type of grey that absorbs light and leaves you disoriented and uninspired for weeks on end. A thick blanket of clouds hangs in the streets day and night — as if the current state of the world has manifested in the weather. That is to so say, the world feels less airy these days as if there’s not enough space to be. Maybe I have fallen out of love with the city? Perhaps that’s why it has felt so hard to commit to a string of words recently? Maybe indefinite home office and an increasingly severe lockdown are getting to me? And maybe that’s all because I can’t seem to get enough space?
Thinking needs space
In Thin Places, Jordan Kisner notes the relationship between space and thought: “Saying I can’t get enough space is just another way of saying that I am not thinking very well and that this problem of thinking feels at least partially spatial.“ I read Thin Places during the late spring of 2020, and this link between space and our ability to think that Kisner identifies has stayed with me throughout summer, fall and winter. The past year has been marked by a perceived collapse of space. Of personal space, because work has virtually moved into my home and of public space because libraries, museums, and other public places have been increasingly inaccessible for various reasons, all of them related to the pandemic.
Even though I love my new apartment, into which I was lucky enough to move over the summer, it feels increasingly jarring to spend my days in limbo between work and sleep and doing the most essential things. Here’s where books come into play: they create the space in my life that I need at the moment.
Finding solace in books
This might not come as a surprise, but reading has given me solace. I started putting my phone away at 9pm, so I get at least an hour of reading in. Though I don’t manage that every day because I fall asleep so fast, I still finished five books in January. My favorite by far was Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, which had been on my list for quite some time. It’s a meditation on what it means to be a writer. In typical Dillard fashion, it ventures into seemingly unrelated subject matters to connect them to writing aspects that explain this profession more aptly than many of the texts on the subject I have read before.
Another book that gave me food for thought was How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. She writes about the attention economy and how we can resist being drained of our emotional and psychological resources. It’s a text that is less self-helpy than I expected. It made me reflect on my tendency to react to events immediately on social media and what effects this has on me and other people. Considering that social media apps are built to profit from our emotional reactions, it seems like giving in to that becomes a way of exploiting ourselves. I don’t want to downplay the profound ways in which social media has helped to fuel social justice movements and helped to bring forth discussions that had previously been silenced by more traditional news and media outlets for way too long. Yet, I can’t ignore at what cost this happens, and I thought Odell’s suggestions to refuse the logic of moral panics was something I needed to hear.
Other books I’ve read and I liked: Eternity by Tracy K. Smith a wonderful poetry collection that explores what it means to struggle, grieve, live and love. Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry, an essay that deep dives into the question of why people hate poetry. It includes discussions of poems such as Citizen by Claudia Rankine, which showed me aspects I hadn’t considered before. Finally, I also finished The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, a hypnotic novel that I would categorize as gothic fiction. It reminded me a lot of Kafka for some reason.
Keep exploring what feels good.
And now a quick note, before I end this post. I think it is vital that we take care of ourselves, especially during these times, to truly show up for other people. It doesn’t make sense to stretch ourselves thin and wear ourselves out. We all need our little pockets of joy that allow us to recharge and really nurture ourselves. I haven’t really figured out what works for me yet, but I am exploring. Maybe that’s a lifelong process? But what I know is that it has helped me to genuinely show up for my friends and family when they ask for help.
