Letter to the Reader – July

July 2021: The Art of Little Things

Dear lovely readers,

I’ve been thinking a lot about new beginnings.

The pandemic has taken so much of our lives from us – and it has become a tantalizing dream to think about new beginnings. It’s also scary and strange and nerve-wracking. Like so many other people re-entering a changed world, I have the strongest urge to make a big leap. I want to do something, anything, that feels and looks different from what I’ve experienced during the last eighteen months.

And yet, that hope is mixed with crushing anxiety.

I’ve tried to sit down and write and think and make stories, but my brain refuses to cooperate. It starts thinking about everything I’ve lost this year. It starts thinking about all the failures and rejections and prolonged struggles that I’ve fought, over and over again, for so long.

And it makes me tired.

Half of me is bursting with a wild, newfound energy. The other half wants to sleep for a thousand years.

When I’m stuck, when the words won’t come, I usually turn to stories made by other people. I watch lots of movies and I read lots of books and I fall in love with new characters. It helps to step out of my own mind. It helps to see other people do the hard things and still make it, even if their success is as simple as sending out that job application or setting a kettle on the stove for a hot cup of tea.

Big moments are flashy and bright in our memories. But they’re like fireworks. They burst into our lives, an overwhelming light, and then they dissolve in seconds. We build them up, but it’s not the big moments that keep us going. It’s never the big moments. It’s the small ones.

When I stayed with my friend for a few days in April, she made me breakfast every morning. I stood next to her and watched as she boiled oats and chopped strawberries and added milk and cinnamon and almonds to the bowl. That oatmeal was the best oatmeal I ever had because she made it for me, so carefully, with so much love.

Every few weeks, a close friend from college will send me a funny snapchat about her life as a medical student. Sometimes, she’s drinking wine, sitting by her laptop, and trying to wade through hundreds of pages of material about the respiratory system. Other times, she’s wearing a blue surgical cap, eyebrows raised, sharing her terror about sutures. These pictures are always unexpected and they always make me smile.

During Fourth of July weekend, my sister and I paddle-boarded in the ocean and it was the perfect kind of hot day, one where the white-blue sky melted into the water and it felt like we were headed toward the ends of the earth. We drank orange slushies mixed with coconut ice cream and we jumped around in the water. At night, we ate beef cabbage soup, so tired and warm with sun that we didn’t even bother seeing the fireworks. We didn’t really feel like we needed to.

I still want to do something big. Something unexpected. But maybe it’s not the thing that will make me better. Maybe, instead, it’s just another plan. Something that I can do, but something that I don’t necessarily need to do to feel like a whole new person.

Because even when I don’t do things, I am still whole. We are not half-people who need to prove that our lives have value. We just do.

Mary Oliver once wrote, “Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a little.”

Maybe that’s the key. To save ourselves little by little. Day by day.

Love,

Meesh