Thursday, February 15, 2007
Snow daze
Friends--I do not know if news of our mercurial weather has reached all parts of the country, but let me inform you that it is a regular Ice Storm 2007 here in Maryland. Schools have been closed for two days and I'm hoping for a third day just to make it a clean sweep. In my time off, I have been watching the Wire, reading, and baking. It all sounds so Amish, doesn't it? Except the part about the Wire of course. Owen and I have become quite adept at kneading and rising up delicious loaves of bread, many of which I have pictures of on my trusty digi cam. One day I will upload them and ye can marvel at the variety, from Victorian milk loaf to rye-walnut bread. Truly bread baking is a gift from the gods, a chance to reconnect with earlier times, and an inexpensive form of therapy. I love it, I love it, I love it.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Beginnings
We've just returned from church this afternoon. We have attended the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, on Charles in Mount Vernon, just south of the Walters Gallery, since sometime this fall. Although our attendance began rather spottily, we now go regularly and decided to enter the "Beginnings" class for those who want to learn about the church, what it means to be Unitarian, and what membership entails. In our first meeting today we shared our stories, explaining our religious history, our beliefs, and what brought us to the church. Sophie, as you might expect, was eloquent; I found it hard to speak, which surprised me. Bear with me as I attempt to explain how this all relates to the no-buy adventure.
Over the past year much has changed for Sophie and me. I feel like we've begun to slip truly into adulthood; college, with its turmoil and its sense of open vistas and possibilities, seems far away. We have both begun to succeed and thrive in our jobs; we are also facing the changes that Stage Two -- graduate and medical schools -- will bring. What has surprised me is how focused and self-enclosed I've become: for me there is only time and energy for Sophie and mathematics. For both I feel a passion and single-mindedness (perhaps double-mindedness?) that overwhelms me at times. After spending a long day dwelt in abstraction -- mathematics is a realm that I can't help but explore, and yet there is nothing visceral or easily rewarding about it, and it's a rather lonely place, of which there are few fellow explorers, and we each tend to follow our own paths through it, shouting our individual discoveries to our near neighbors across a distance -- after a day at work I return home to the warmth of home, time spent with Sophie. Too often this past year other aspects of myself have disappeared: we didn't cook, rarely exercised, and I only read math. The year of no-buy has reopened me. Over the weekend we bake bread, which has brought a lot of joy into my life, and cook. When we see friends (Sophie wrote about this last week), we don't spend half our time watching a movie or television. Instead we talk or work together. We are also reading more, because time has been liberated from the easy consumption of movies and cafes and restaurants. Somehow, although cooking takes more time, that time feels more open, is more easily shared with Sophie, and is more rewarding personally. In my soul I feel tectonic shifts; I feel the pressures of temperament and age reshaping me in ways I never expected or aimed for.
Church is part of this general trend. It is a clear sign that we are moving towards the rigors and rewards of adulthood that we want and savor a day spent ruminating beyond our own lives and joining a community built around the desire to contribute to our city and to share our struggles. When I was in my teens I pushed back against my parents' church, not finding it compatible with my aspirations; but this church, for all its seeming fluffiness and over-eager welcomingness, feels right. No-buy is giving me the time and shape to open myself to the possibilities of adult life, just when I need them most. At work, for instance, I feel like I have finally contributed something worthwhile and people want to understand my research. I feel obligations that were inconceivable even a year ago, and it's tiring to try to fulfill them. When I return home and share my time with Sophie, the year of no-buy has led us to renew ourselves in better ways, to spend time together in more fulfilling ways, than we had when we turned to the easy, quick solutions.
I'm rambling almost incoherently now, which isn't exactly unbloggish. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, although I battled against Sophie's idea for this year at first, no-buy has contributed to an unfolding of our lives that I think is necessary and is helping me to become the person I ought to be, even if it isn't the person I thought I wanted to be. My friend John told us yesterday that he seeks to simplify his life and to remove temptation not because he is put off by things like television or frozen foods, but because if he removes in a drastic manner the options that he finds easy and appealing, he opens space for the things he really wants -- like reading and thinking -- that get blocked out by the barrage of options and information that our society provides. Americans think they ought to face temptation directly and then berate themselves for failure; John's approach is wiser and ultimately easier and more rewarding, even if it seems less glorious to cut out temptation completely rather than face it squarely. Life as an adult seems to be a matter of finding effective coping strategies, strategies like no-buy or drastic simplification that are workable and that arise from admitting the bent of one's temperament and acting in response.
Over the past year much has changed for Sophie and me. I feel like we've begun to slip truly into adulthood; college, with its turmoil and its sense of open vistas and possibilities, seems far away. We have both begun to succeed and thrive in our jobs; we are also facing the changes that Stage Two -- graduate and medical schools -- will bring. What has surprised me is how focused and self-enclosed I've become: for me there is only time and energy for Sophie and mathematics. For both I feel a passion and single-mindedness (perhaps double-mindedness?) that overwhelms me at times. After spending a long day dwelt in abstraction -- mathematics is a realm that I can't help but explore, and yet there is nothing visceral or easily rewarding about it, and it's a rather lonely place, of which there are few fellow explorers, and we each tend to follow our own paths through it, shouting our individual discoveries to our near neighbors across a distance -- after a day at work I return home to the warmth of home, time spent with Sophie. Too often this past year other aspects of myself have disappeared: we didn't cook, rarely exercised, and I only read math. The year of no-buy has reopened me. Over the weekend we bake bread, which has brought a lot of joy into my life, and cook. When we see friends (Sophie wrote about this last week), we don't spend half our time watching a movie or television. Instead we talk or work together. We are also reading more, because time has been liberated from the easy consumption of movies and cafes and restaurants. Somehow, although cooking takes more time, that time feels more open, is more easily shared with Sophie, and is more rewarding personally. In my soul I feel tectonic shifts; I feel the pressures of temperament and age reshaping me in ways I never expected or aimed for.
Church is part of this general trend. It is a clear sign that we are moving towards the rigors and rewards of adulthood that we want and savor a day spent ruminating beyond our own lives and joining a community built around the desire to contribute to our city and to share our struggles. When I was in my teens I pushed back against my parents' church, not finding it compatible with my aspirations; but this church, for all its seeming fluffiness and over-eager welcomingness, feels right. No-buy is giving me the time and shape to open myself to the possibilities of adult life, just when I need them most. At work, for instance, I feel like I have finally contributed something worthwhile and people want to understand my research. I feel obligations that were inconceivable even a year ago, and it's tiring to try to fulfill them. When I return home and share my time with Sophie, the year of no-buy has led us to renew ourselves in better ways, to spend time together in more fulfilling ways, than we had when we turned to the easy, quick solutions.
I'm rambling almost incoherently now, which isn't exactly unbloggish. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, although I battled against Sophie's idea for this year at first, no-buy has contributed to an unfolding of our lives that I think is necessary and is helping me to become the person I ought to be, even if it isn't the person I thought I wanted to be. My friend John told us yesterday that he seeks to simplify his life and to remove temptation not because he is put off by things like television or frozen foods, but because if he removes in a drastic manner the options that he finds easy and appealing, he opens space for the things he really wants -- like reading and thinking -- that get blocked out by the barrage of options and information that our society provides. Americans think they ought to face temptation directly and then berate themselves for failure; John's approach is wiser and ultimately easier and more rewarding, even if it seems less glorious to cut out temptation completely rather than face it squarely. Life as an adult seems to be a matter of finding effective coping strategies, strategies like no-buy or drastic simplification that are workable and that arise from admitting the bent of one's temperament and acting in response.
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