Tag: love

Presenting my word for 2022

Julie Fanselow

I was at the Fred Meyer in Warrenton, Oregon, gathering picnic supplies yesterday morning when I realized I’d left my phone at the hostel in Astoria. Did I really want to backtrack to get it? Surely I could live a day without it. But of course, it wasn’t really the phone I wanted. It was the GPS, so I could keep my bearings on an unfamiliar trail I planned to hike. It was the pedometer, so I could record my mileage. It was the camera, so I could capture some images of my day on the coast. It was the music I had downloaded to play on my drive. I went back and got the phone.

For the past several years, in lieu of resolutions and inspired by a practice shared by Tim Atkins, a fellow writer for the Braver/Wiser website, I’ve chosen a word of the year. For 2020, it was learn. In 2021, it was a wonder. This year, I’ve settled on present. As wonder did for me, I hope present will have many lessons I can learn within its myriad meanings as 2022 unfolds.

My main attraction to the word is for its adjective sense, its “be here now” meaning. I want to be present in my life much more than I sometimes seem to be. So even though I went back for my phone, and even though I consulted my trail map and took some pictures en route, I left the gizmo in my pack most of the time because I was on a trail where I really needed and wanted to be present. Mud, roots, and wind made the going tough, but the reward for my focus — a sweeping view at the edge of our continent — was more than worth the effort.

I want to be present for family and friends, to hear and see them and help them feel heard and seen. I want to live and love deeply. I want to continue to prize experiences and people over things.

I want to stay in the present and avoid thinking too much about the past or the future. I want to multitask less — and worry a lot less. I want to be present to the pain that is omnipresent in my neighborhood, my country, and the world without being consumed by it.

And I also want to pay attention to the verb form of present, to tune into opportunities and experiences that present themselves as gifts (or presents, if you like. Isn’t language great?). Of course, some experiences will present themselves as obstacles, unwanted and difficult, but I will learn from them, too.

I would love to know if you have chosen a word for 2022 — what it is and why. Meanwhile, here is a little video from my morning walk today. I’m grateful I was present for this. (I can’t embed it here via my iPad, though I will do so when I get home.) Or to share a Maya Angelou quote a friend reminded me of the other day, “This is a wonderful day. I have never seen this one before.”

The editor steps back

Julie Fanselow

I really need to read some John Keats, specifically the piles of letters he wrote alongside his poems. 

For now, I’m reading Stephen Batchelor writing about Keats, describing his concept of “negative capability.” That sounds like something I’d rather avoid, especially in a season when I am simultaneously still sad over the end of a too-brief affair and feeling fresh sorrow over an angry snub from a dear relative. As Batchelor describes the trait in his new book The Art of Solitude, Keats said negative capability exists when a person “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, someone who dwells in equanimity. These are traits I prize and try to live by, but with my emotions running more ragged than usual this autumn, I’ve fallen short.

Why did my summer lover pursue another despite our transcendental times together? It’s a mystery I can’t solve. Why did my relative lash out at me? I may never fully know. Batchelor writes, “In letting go of — ‘negating’ — reactivity, one discovers a greater capacity — ‘capability’ — to respond to life.” In Buddhist terms, Batchelor adds, “to experience nirvana is to experience freedom from those attachments and opinions that prevent your own imaginative response to the situations you face in life.” 

Freedom from attachments. In retrospect, I wish I could have more readily acknowledged my friend’s fickle nature so I wouldn’t have spent two months bereft and berating myself over the loss of a liaison that barely lasted that long. 

Freedom from opinions. I wanted so badly to explain my passion for open-hearted travel to my relative, but he wanted none of it. Had I accepted that instead of trying to press my case, it may have saved us some serious heartbreak. 

Each of us has our own narrative. As a journalist, I’m naturally interested in helping people share and even craft their stories, and I usually do so skillfully and with great care. Yet as an essayist, I ought to know that my tale is the only one I can tell with any hope of authenticity — and that much as I may want to edit someone else’s experience, I simply can’t do that. I am grateful for the recent life lessons that illuminated this truth for me, painful as the instruction has been. 

Speaking of solitude and of travel, I am midway through a 10-day stay in Tijuana, happily ensconced in a cheap Airbnb near the ocean, easily forgetting what day it is. It is good to be here, good to have even more unstructured time than usual to read, write, think, sleep, and walk (but not sleepwalk). I’d hoped to have company for a few days and nights when I booked this spot in September, but it is fine, if sometimes lonely, to be alone. We live, we love, we learn, each of us ever-evolving, if we are lucky. 

Trains of thought

Julie Fanselow

“I’m taking the train to take time for my thoughts …”

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Gabriel Kahane, toward the end of 2018. I was standing in the kitchen of the house I’d shared with Tom, and Kahane was a guest on the late great radio show Live From Here. The songwriter explained how, the day after the presidential election two years earlier, he’d climbed aboard a train to ride 8,980 miles around America. The idea was to see people face to face, talk with them, turn their stories into songs, and see whether music could maybe bridge some of what divides us as a country. Transfixed by that introduction, this rail devotee eagerly sought out Kahane’s work, especially Book of Travelers, the album based on his post-election trip.

In January 2019, Kahane came to the Triple Door, my favorite Seattle club. I sat by myself at a table for two, off to the side of the room, but still feeling awkward and adrift in the small venue where I’d seen many shows with Tom. It didn’t matter; I needed to hear these songs live, and Kahane — onstage alone, with no backup band and minimal patter for the audience — seemed a bit lost at sea, too. He let the music do the talking for him, as he did later in the year on a rainy fall night at the University of Washington’s Meany Center, one of the last concerts I’d see before the pandemic.

Kahane was back at the Meany Center last Saturday, so of course I was there, seeing him for the third time on another rainy November night. He opened with a song that posed the question, and I am paraphrasing: What if this were the last show I ever get to play? More personable now, married and the father of a three-year-old, full of songs and stories of a year spent away from the Internet (the basis for his next album, due in 2022), Kahane played for 75 minutes, all of us except him masked for the duration, all of us grateful to be there hearing live music. He ended his set with the same song with which he’d begun, prefaced this time with its backstory.

It was early March 2020 and he had to take two planes to get to a small-town show. After the concert, a nice woman named Lisa drove him to his motel — nothing special, she said, except for the cows. Make sure you see the cows. The next morning, after making a waffle at the breakfast bar, Kahane looked out the window, saw 25 cows, and turned the scene into a bedtime story for his daughter: Let’s count the cows. His little girl couldn’t get enough of the story, and neither could her papa, who told it countless times during the pandemic. It put his kid to sleep, and it gave him a chance to relive that last pre-COVID show one more time.

It’s human nature to hope we haven’t experienced our last time doing something. I recently wrote a magazine story about how many of us have lacked physical contact during the pandemic, starting it with a line I penned in my journal in March 2020: What if I never get to hug anyone ever again? Twenty months ago, for someone living alone as the world shut down, that was not a rhetorical question.

Amid his new work, Kahane sang three songs from Book of Travelers. I know every note and nuance of these songs; they sustained me as no other music could in the second half of the first year after Tom died. He started with “Baedeker,” a hymn to travel and to maps, then he segued into “Baltimore,” a song about loss and reckoning. As soon as he sang the line with which I started this post, I found myself weeping softly into my mask, ambushed by the first sneaker wave of grief I’d felt in a long while, my emotions swirling past me into a present in which I’m missing both Tom and my summer companion amid a new season of overly complicated romantic geometry.

Four times during the first two years after Tom died, I took long-distance trains as a means of connecting with my memories of our life together: how we’d squeeze into a tiny Amtrak roomette, make a list of all the train songs we could think of, watch movies on his laptop, and just watch the world roll by. How we’d talk with strangers during communal meals in the dining car, holding hands beneath the table as we waited for our food. My memories and tears continued as Kahane played “Little Love,” a song about two people who hope to simply fade away together, the kind of life I wish I’d been able to experience with Tom, except he prematurely disappeared into the long gray silence.

I’m still here, vaguely restive with a reawakened desire that has left me feeling lonelier than ever for a specific set of arms. I could use some time on a train.

Fortunately, I’ll soon be climbing aboard the southbound Coast Starlight for a 23-hour ride to California and my family’s Thanksgiving gathering. I could make the same journey in a few hours by air, but I’d rather take the train to take time with my thoughts, to be in motion while sitting still, to be rocked to sleep, and to be grateful for all the experiences that I may or may not have again.

This week’s videos are of “Baltimore” and “Baedeker.” You can learn more about Gabriel Kahane and his music here. (There’s a lot to know.) Enjoy, and in case I don’t get back here before November 25, happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reading Surely Joy.

Be/wilder

Julie Fanselow

“Which do you think is bigger? Outer space or inner?” — Robbie Byrne to his father, Theo, in Bewilderment

Have you ever finished a book and wanted to immediately read it all again? I’ve just had that experience with Bewilderment, the new novel from Richard Powers. But because I have so many other books waiting, I settled for re-reading its first few pages and its last few pages, savoring those passages for now. I had the same impulse with Powers’ previous book, The Overstory; as soon as I finished it in 2018, I wanted to read it again, preferably over a few days in the woods. But it was a much bigger book that originally took me weeks to read, and it’ll be a while (maybe next summer?) before I get back to it.

Bewilderment is, at its heart, a love story about a father and son and the woman whom they both loved, a woman who loved them both but not quite as much as she loved the world and all the things in it. I read it quickly over a few days mostly spent outdoors, taking in its final 50 pages or so sitting by a lake yesterday afternoon, leaves falling all around me. It was the perfect book to read on the cusp of a summer I was sorry to see come to an end and an autumn that I tentatively welcome, as if I had any choice in the matter.

That’s not to say it is an easy book to digest. Powers finished this book mid-pandemic, shortly before the election last fall. The uncertainty its characters feel is palpable, because it is what we are all living through: environmental devastation, authoritarianism’s creep, and the way our market economy seeks to define and solve every malady with a diagnosis and a pill.

The beauty of Bewilderment is how it resists despair and ameliorates anxiety. It insists that each of us is perfect in our imperfection; that although we can never fully know another person, empathy is possible; that our interior lives are full universes unto themselves; and that a rich inner life can help us survive the pain we’re inflicting on the world. Bewilderment is a book to read in the spirit I think it was written, a mix of hope, resolve, and wild abandon — which seems like a good way to live right now, too.

I finished Bewilderment on the shores of Deep Lake in Nolte State Park, southeast King County, WA.
Bewilderment is a book to read outside, if you can.

Baseball = life

Julie Fanselow

In my adult life as a baseball fan, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as excited as I do now. As I write this on the last night of September, my team — that is, my home team these past eight seasons, the Seattle Mariners — is tied for the second wild card slot in the American League. (For those of you less than familiar with baseball’s playoffs, it works like this: Each league has three divisions, which means there needs to be a one-and-done wild card game between two non-division-winning teams to have four teams ready to compete in the rest of October’s post-season games: first the league divisional series, then the league championship, and finally the World Series.)

There’s been big buzz in baseball land this week over how tight the American League wild card race has become. As of tonight, the New York Yankees are 91-68, with a two-game lead on the top wild card spot, so they’re likely in the game. The next three teams have nearly identical records: the Mariners and the Boston Red Sox are tied at 89-70 and the Toronto Blue Jays are one game back at 88-71. Between now and Sunday afternoon, a variety of scenarios might unspool to determine who will get to play in the AL wild card game next week and quite possibly a tie-breaker “play-in” game (or two) beforehand, depending on how many teams finish with the same record.

As a fan of baseball and good writing, I enjoy reading Lookout Landing, a Mariners fan site. The site’s logo shows a lone dejected man sitting slumped, head down. I’ve only been here for eight seasons, but that’s long enough to know the perennial pain that Mariners fans feel. Ours is the only team in Major League Baseball that’s never been in a World Series. We famously have the longest post-season drought in major professional sports, nearly two decades without a playoff appearance. Why should that change now?

It should change because change is inevitable, as is chaos, which is what the Mariners have been riding all year. Last April, no one gave this team a chance to make the postseason this year. As of tonight, the Mariners have scored 48 fewer runs than their opponents, and yet here they are, poised to make the playoffs anyway — or not, and in many ways, it hardly matters. Whatever happens these next three days won’t diminish the fact that this has been a magical year of shattered preconceptions and us-against-the-world camaraderie: of rookies toughing it out to learn what it takes to be in the big league … of a widely derided trade at the end of July turning out to be a brilliant move … of 33 games won by just one run … of an 11-2 record since mid-September … of 17,366 people at last night’s game sounding like twice that number.

Yesterday morning, I took a walk with the person I’ve mentioned a few times in my infrequent recent posts, someone with whom I shared some stellar days and nights over the past few months. Alas, we mutually and a little sadly agreed that our summer fling apparently wasn’t meant to last. I went home and got ready to go to my job at the ballpark, where the contrast couldn’t be more apparent, where those 17,366 fans were showing what it means to be all in, to be vulnerable, to accept risk, to risk failure and foolishness in the pursuit of something worth remembering.

I was already scheduled to work Friday and Sunday. This morning, I asked to work Saturday, too. Baseball has a habit of breaking hearts, and by Sunday night, mine might be shattered. Or not. Either way, the ride has been worth it.

Tradeoffs

Julie Fanselow

Hello, world. This is me, poking my head up for what now seems to be a monthly dispatch. It’s hard to believe I was writing weekly pandemic postcards until a few months ago. It’s difficult to fathom I’ve just begun volume #5 of my “pandemic journal,” the notebook I write in almost daily (though that, too, has become a less-regular practice this summer).

So here we are. I want to talk a little about tradeoffs.

Tradeoff number 1: My new upstairs neighbor threw in a load of laundry at 11:30 last night. I’d been sleeping a while, but the thumping woke me up. The neighbor seems to be up all night, so I guess they work a swing shift and probably get to bed around the time I wake up–but I still hear the floors creaking at 6:30 a.m. as I write this, so who knows? Then there’s my improbably loud refrigerator, which runs about 30 minutes every hour. I hoped I’d be used to it after four months, but it’s still annoying, especially in 499 square feet.

Ah, but I like this apartment, especially its east-facing windows and sliding glass door out onto the tiny fire-escape-sized balcony, where I sit and read or listen to music, and where the hummingbirds have been gathering all summer. I’ve enjoyed its evening cool during our heatwaves, and the low-angled light will warm my apartment this winter. I value the fact I’m a quick stroll to the bus stop and the grocery store, yet within a few blocks, I can access miles of more ambitious walking terrain where the city blends into the suburbs and fat blackberries are now ripe for the picking. It’s a tradeoff: the realities of urban living.

Tradeoff number 2: The pandemic is still very much with us, and like most people who chose to be vaccinated, I’ve lost patience with the arguments of those who’ve opted to keep the virus spreading. At the same time, I know that no good comes of castigating people for their doubts and fears, so I’m opting, as usual, to give them grace. I do know that I will live my life as the delta variant runs rampant. I’m masking up again indoors, but I never saw the need for outdoor masking a year ago and I don’t now, unless you’ve chosen not to get the jabs. I’ve been traveling and will continue to do so, and for sure I’ll take that booster shot just as soon as I can get it, thank you.

It sounds like we may all be destined to get the delta variant, vaccinated or not, though it is much worse if you’re not. I’ve finally heard of the first breakthrough case among two people I know personally; they’ve had flu-like symptoms for a week, but as vaccinated people, they’re pulling through. I mostly fight despair over my relatives whose faith-based fear causes them to doubt science, and over the plight of children who have little protection as they go back to school. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is what it is. I’m grateful we had a few months of relative freedom from COVID earlier this summer. It’s been nice to go maskless at the ballpark, where I love to give fans a welcoming smile. It’s been delightful to get to know my new companion, to hold hands and hug and kiss without worrying too much about making each other sick. Yet it seems likely we’ll all need to be vigilant over this thing for a lot longer than any of us had hoped.

Tradeoff number 3: I don’t know what I want to write about Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban. My country has been involved in Afghanistan for decades, but never with a clear, cogent mission. People — in this case, the Afghani people, working toward a shared destiny and the quest for human rights — need to hold each other to account. Just as we can’t beat a virus if people don’t accept shared moral responsibility, there are limits to what one country can do for another.

Thanks for reading Surely Joy. By the way, if you get these dispatches via email, my previous post from about three weeks ago seemingly never went out that way, so you can read it here. And if you’d like to get future dispatches via email (since I post so rarely these days), you’ll find a link to sign up elsewhere on this page.

Be well and don’t despair. There is much good to celebrate, even amid this unsettled, uncertain season.

60

Julie Fanselow

I know I’ve been scarce here on my blog. Rest assured: It’s not for a lack of joy. But since it’s been a month since my last post — and, hey! I turn 60 this week — I am here to share a few thoughts on attaining this milestone. 

First and foremost, I’m feeling nothing but joy at the prospect of being 60. My 50s were my favorite decade of life so far, and I have reasons to believe my 60s will be as good. Or better!

Regular readers know that while I named this blog for a phrase from Henry David Thoreau — “surely joy is the condition of life” — I have come to associate my mission more with the words of Brother David Steindl-Rast of Gratefulness.org, who has said that joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. The corollary to this is that fear is sometimes — usually? — what keeps us from feeling joy. Fear of aging. Fear of death. Fear of disability or decline or the loss of love. Fear of the other. Fear of the unknown. It’s not that I never feel fear. I know I do. But somehow, my optimistic, hopeful orientation usually overrides whatever fear I have. I believe some of this is innate — a product, perhaps, of being surrendered and subsequently adopted in the first three weeks of life — and some of it is learned. 

Like most people, I was a bundle of anxieties in adolescence and well into adulthood. It takes time to overcome that early uncertainty about worth and purpose. (Dear young reader: Know that you are awesome just as you are, and it gets better.) Giving birth was probably the first indication I had that I could do anything, but that was nearly half a lifetime ago. So I continue to whittle away at my residual anxiety, and I feel less fearful at 60 than I was at 50, for life has shown me again and again that the hardest experiences are among the most rewarding and revelatory. 

As I greet this new decade, I’m ever aware that two of the most important people in my life, my mother and my husband, were gone at 62. As painful as these premature deaths were, they’ve helped me know all too well that our time here is finite. Rather than live fearfully, I really do try to live as though each day could be my last.

At the same time, I know it’s possible (perhaps probable) that as a healthy 60 year old, I have somewhere around a third of my lifespan still ahead of me. What fresh wonders and knowledge are still on my horizon? How will my expectations be upended? Will I feel even more joy when I turn 70? 

I am especially joyful that, after a year of anxiety in 2020 over losing most of my work in the pandemic, work is now the least of my worries. I have just enough, and best of all, it’s flexible work that allows me plenty of time for adventures, for community service, and for living a creative life. 

Over the past month, after three years of flying solo, I’ve had the utterly unexpected and delightful joy of new companionship. The day after tomorrow, I leave for a trip to Alaska — on my own. The day before I return, my friend will be off on a multi-week trek he planned long ago. I’ll be away for nearly two weeks in September. Indeed, it is likely that we’ll be apart for much of the next two months, and so a tiny bit of anxiety bubbles to the surface: Will this sweet, summer-kindled romance wind up a fleeting memory by fall? Will we be able to create time together in two lives that are already full of dear ones, commitments, and plans? 

I don’t know the answer. But I do know that although lifespans are finite, love is not. I am learning anew that although I’ve prized and often prioritized walking my own path, our time here is made richer by connections and relationships. I think he and I will find a way to keep the flame lit, and I feel ever more grateful for all my family and friends, including the ones I haven’t met yet.

Happy birthday, Julie. May the next how-many-ever-years we may have be full of joy and service and surprise and peace and love. All the good stuff. 

Happiness as a choice

Julie Fanselow

“You always seem so happy,” my ballpark colleague says to me. “Are you always so happy?”

I’m a bit thrown by such an existential question, this change-up amid the usual between-innings banter. I agree that this is true, and I mumble something about having a hopeful orientation. Orientation is one way to put it, though perhaps not the most elegant. I wish I’d replied with my favorite quote, “Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.” (Thanks as always, Br. David Steindl-Rast.) Yet there’s little reason to overthink my reply, in the moment or in hindsight.

Am I happy? Why yes, I am. It beats the alternative.

Mixed emotions are human, and June 19 is a day that will forever bring mixed emotions for me. I mostly feel joy for the birth 65 years ago today of a man whom I had the great luck to love over the last five years of his life—though of course that joy remains tinged with regret that he is no longer here. I may have a longer essay (or two) to write someday about Tom’s last few months and the anguish I felt after he was gone.

I can’t say I was happy during those hard months. But looking back three years, I guess I was joyful even amid the depths of that anguish. Scratch that: I know I was joyful, because that’s how we survive the worst things that life and death throw our way. Joy is also how we recognize the glimmers of goodness that are always glinting in our peripheral vision—for example, people who recognize our happiness because they themselves have chosen the gift of seeing life through an optimistic lens.

(As an aside, today is the first official Juneteenth, and that brings more mixed emotions: We should celebrate how far we’ve come as a country that we can now recognize the end of slavery with a federal holiday. No, this doesn’t right all the wrongs that centuries of human bondage have wrought in our country. The work for representation and reparations will continue. But can we make it joyful, generous, perhaps even playful work? Can we curb the tribalism and bickering, escape the confines of our identity silos, and give each other some room to breathe and grow?)

(Putting my soapbox away …)

I’m uncharacteristically rambling here, so I’ll stop, but after two months without a post, I wanted to check in. Life is good: I have just the right amount of work, I’m grateful for my family and friends, I’m enjoying my new-again neighborhood, and I’m plotting all kinds of adventures for this summer and beyond. It’s a beautiful life—and yes, a happy one. I’m joyfully greeting this season of sun and light and a return to the world, and I wish that for you, too. Thanks for reading Surely Joy.

A few words about the music for this post: Last night, I went to my first live music show in about 18 months, at my fave music club. Here’s a 10-year-old radio listener lounge version of a song LeRoy Bell and His Only Friends played last night, “Everything About You.” And a few days ago, I saw the glorious, raucous, sexy “In the Heights” at my favorite movie theater. The first eight minutes are below. Enjoy!