Tag: work

So long, Surely Joy

Julie Fanselow

It’s been six months since I last posted here. I’ve known for nearly that long that I’d be putting this blog to bed. It’s time to write a few words about why.

“Putting this to bed” is a term I probably learned in my first weeks of journalism school when I worked on the copy desk at The Post, Ohio University’s student newspaper. Every night Sunday through Thursday, we’d write the last headlines, give everything one more look after the layout guys completed their work, pile into a car, and take the pages — safe in a big flat box — to the printing plant. After that, we’d often pile into a booth at a late-night diner. We’d do it again the next day, yet in the news cycles of the 1980s, each day had an ending: a chance to say, OK, that’s done.

Endings are a lot blurrier these days. It’s been months since I’ve felt compelled to write here. But how do I know when I am done? How does anyone know when anything is finished?

The easiest answer is that I am practicing something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life, and especially my professional life: letting go. For a very long time, work was a big source of meaning for me. Now it’s not. For decades, I have processed things by “writing out loud” about them. Now I’m more likely to do so while walking alone or talking with friends, and often while traveling — my greatest source of meaning and revelation.

As I wrote last summer when I turned 60, I likely have a third of my life ahead of me. I want to spend a steadily decreasing amount of it looking at a screen of any kind. I also know that the media landscape I grew up in no longer exists and I have little taste for the frenetic new one; I have no desire to build a platform, launch a podcast, or even spend much time on social media.

With my good health and modest means, it will be wise and necessary for me to keep working most of this decade. But I have already arrived at a place where being content is more precious to me than producing content. My part-time job in guest services is the work I love the most, yet I’ll have no trouble completely giving up a paycheck of any kind when I know the time is right. Meanwhile, I will keep doing good work, but steadily less of it, as I continue on the glide path toward that time.

And so it is — and it has been — time to put this blog to bed. In this complicated world, may we all embrace and enjoy closure when we find it, without regrets and in the spirit of curiosity. That goes for love, for work, and ultimately for life itself.

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. 

Pandemic postcard #50: Help along the way

Julie Fanselow

There are plenty of reasons to cheer as the Senate seems poised to pass the latest — and let’s hope final — pandemic stimulus package, from ramping up the vaccination campaign to cutting child poverty in half to offering help with daycare costs so parents can get back to work. Personally, I am glad because I’ve already spent my next stimulus check.

I didn’t wake up the other day planning to buy a new laptop. But after a few weeks of increasingly sluggish performance, a Microsoft warning that I could no longer update my cloud-based Word software was the nudge I needed to replace Tom’s late-2011 model MacBook (which itself had come out of the closet to replace the 2013 Mac desktop that had hemorrhaged on me last year). With luck, I will get nearly a decade of use from this nimble new machine. Meanwhile, I’m marveling at the speed with which I’m opening and saving files.

It definitely feels like we’re accelerating out in the world, too. And much as it helped to have spring arrive just as we were locking down last March, the longer days and warming temperatures are welcome harbingers of better times ahead. But we’re not out of the dark winter yet, despite what certain governors would like to think. Ask the essential workers who haven’t yet been vaccinated as variants of the virus continue to spread, or grocery store staff working hazardous jobs for $10 an hour, or the kids who are eager to return to school before fall. Ask the folks in Jackson, Mississippi, who haven’t had water to drink or even flush their toilets for three weeks.

We’ve learned a lot of lessons this past year. One is that official inaction kills people, as it did with weeks of insistence that the virus would magically disappear. Another is that government can do a lot of good, as it did with the first round of stimulus relief, passed last March like the emergency bill that it was. Yes, the national debt is piling up, but with near-zero interest. Economic activity will replenish the coffers as we spend money and pay taxes. It’s smart to go big, especially to help the littlest and the least among us.

Self-sufficiency is a myth that deserves to die, and it sometimes feels like a more humane form of capitalism may be within sight, if only we can learn the lessons of 2020. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a country where people didn’t need to choose between food and medicine? Where people have help — via a reasonable minimum wage, for example — affording rent and child care, not just when emergencies happen, but to prevent them?

The government rescued me and millions of others last year with the first-ever unemployment assistance for freelancers, and now it has helped me replace the main tool of my wordsmithing trade. I am happy to have my first new computer in nearly a decade. Thank you, Uncle Sam. I’ll pay you back soon, I promise.


Thank you for reading Surely Joy. You can find the first Pandemic Postcards and my earlier writings here. If you’d like to get future posts via email, look for the link on the right side of this page (or maybe below this post, if you’re on a mobile device). I write for a living, so if you’d like to support my work, please hit the tip jar. Thank you.

Pandemic postcard #49: Reel life and real life

Julie Fanselow

Like most of you, I’m sure, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve been in a movie theater. Of all the activities I’ve missed most this past year, sitting in a big dark room with strangers ranks near the top. Here’s how I described the experience in a column I wrote many years ago:

Everyone knows why we go to the movies. To escape, right? And sometimes, there’s nothing like a few hours away from reality, bathed in darkness, completely consumed by a story that sweeps us far from our daily routines.

The last movie I watched in a theater was exactly like that. Portrait of a Lady on Fire took viewers to France in the late 18th century, immersing us in a forbidden romance. My act of seeing it in a theater on March 14, 2020, had a hint of danger, too, even with only a handful of people at the Saturday afternoon showing. Two days later, all theaters in Washington state shut down. Some are reopening now, but I’m not especially eager to go—except, perhaps, to a no-concession matinee where people need to stay masked the whole time, and that doesn’t sound like much fun.

Still, there’s a part of me that aches to see a film in a theater. That feeling was reawakened last weekend by Nomadland, a film currently in theaters and on Hulu that is about solitude and self-discovery amid community and hardship. I was captivated by its indelible characters, by its understated music and lovingly photographed scenes of the American West, and by its portrayal of resilience—so much so that I watched it again the next day.

From rom-coms to action epics, films sometimes serve as Rorschach tests, giving us a chance to see aspects of ourselves through the characters on the screen. We needn’t identify with a character to love a film: The weekend before last, I re-watched an old favorite, Harold & Maude. I thoroughly enjoyed it, yet I don’t see myself in either of its main characters. But I see much of myself in Fern, the central character in Nomadland, an uprooted woman in the residual stages of grief, a person near my age who enjoys the company of others yet is prone to wandering away from the pack. For that matter, I see myself in Dave, the other lead role, someone who is more of a people person than Fern.

Nomadland reminds us of what we are missing in 2021, as many of us who live alone mark the first anniversary of our last hugs. The film is a feast of human connection, from haircuts to campfires to stargazing parties, from breakroom conversations to Thanksgiving dinners. It made me deeply miss seeing people in person, but it was comforting to watch the people onscreen casually go about their lives, especially because—with the exception of lead actors Frances McDormand and David Straithairn—people in the film are playing themselves.

That’s yet another remarkable aspect of the film, how it blends real life with reel life. It shows that there is dignity in hard work, that 99 percent of people are essentially decent, and that everyone has a story. You only need to ask—and to listen. Nomadland also serves as a 108-minute meditation on why we decide to keep the things we hang onto, from homes to vehicles and jobs and relationships and stuff, and why we choose to let things go. It’s also about how people and things come back to us.

I could go on and on; Nomadland is a cinematic onion, revealing many layers and asking many questions without resorting to political debate or judgment. In the end, its central question seems to be: What makes a good life? If one version of the good life goes away, do we have the inner fortitude to make another one? Do we greet these changes as obstacles or opportunities? Can a restless and often difficult but ultimately free life be as satisfying as a settled one in a comfortable, well-furnished home? Is there a middle way?

We’re all living with versions of these questions in 2021, no matter what the past year—or decade—has thrown at us. I expect I’ll watch Nomadland many times over the coming years as I live into the answers.

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Pandemic postcard #47: True love

Julie Fanselow

“Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are.”—Forrest Church

It was a Sunday morning in September 2018. I had just met a fellow traveler to the Port Townsend Film Festival; I don’t remember her name, but the short conversation I had with her lingers to this day. We had both just been to a screening of a movie in which a man with a terminal illness had decided he wasn’t going to fight it any longer.

Having lost my husband to multiple myeloma less than three months earlier, I was seeing everything through the lens of grief. The woman I’d just met was a cancer survivor who had become a patient advocate in Seattle, a job that was giving her a lot of meaning after what she’d been through. I told her I’d come to believe that I was put on Earth, at least in part, to help Tom through his final journey–but having done that, and done it well, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do next.

For much of my life, I thought my highest fulfillment might come through work, and to an extent, it has. I’ve done a lot of good work, and some of it made a real difference. After losing most of my paid work in early 2020 and falling short last summer in the pursuit of new work that might feel truly meaningful, I’m now trying to find satisfaction in simply doing the work I have.

As for romantic love, I have experienced it in its fullest, once-in-a-lifetime-if-you’re-lucky expression. Although Tom and I had just five years together, we “got” each other completely. I don’t expect to find that intense level of connection again, and I’m not sure I’d want to; I quite enjoy living alone. So if I am not eager to experience new levels of fulfillment through work or life partnership, what’s left?

As I near 60, I think service may be my true love for the next decade of my life, and perhaps beyond. I am here to serve, but to do so selectively. When I am selective, when I try to intuit the next right thing, I can serve with all my heart.

Volunteering at the food bank these past 10 months, I’ve often worked beside two people who are role models for this ethic of service. David, who has a ton of vacation time after many years with the same company, spends many of those free hours volunteering, both at the food bank and with victims of domestic abuse. Patti is retired and lives out of two suitcases, a level of minimalism I’ve considered before and may mull again a few years from now. She has been waiting this pandemic year for clearance to travel to Mongolia, where she plans to volunteer with children.

A week ago Wednesday, the co-chair of my church’s leadership committee emailed to say that my name has been coming up as a possible board member. Would I be interested in a conversation about the opportunity? The request came a bit out of the blue and felt a little flattering. I love my church and I love to serve it, but it only took me a few hours to intuit that a three-year term on the board wasn’t part of my plan.

Two days later, I was able to quickly turn down a tight-turnaround, detail-heavy project from a work client. Once again, I simply know at this point in my life what I enjoy and what I’m good at, and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time–least of all mine–in trying to be who I am not. Just a few days later, a friend approached me with a project that would take about the same amount of time and pay the same as the work I turned down, but it is a project that I will find much more fulfilling. Things happen for a reason.

What is my grand plan? I no longer think I have one, but I know I want to be free to serve in a big way if (not necessarily when) the right opportunity arises. In the meantime, I have found small but not insubstantial ways to be of use, including the food bank and assisting in an English conversation class two mornings each week. Because I have committed to these activities, I take care to allow room in my schedule for them, even as paid work picks up.

At some point, I may get an offer I can’t refuse: for a paid job that makes my heart sing or a major volunteer opportunity that feels exactly right or even, though less likely, the chance to be a grandparent and meaningfully and helpfully meet another life at its start in the same way I was blessed to help Tom in his final years.

So I leave my options open, much as someone who is looking for true love might. But just as I did when I was young and hungry for a partner and purpose, I always seek to live life fully as it is right now—only now, I know the power of saying no, and of occasionally and wholeheartedly saying yes, and in getting on with things one way or the other.

Thank you for reading Surely Joy. If you’d like to get my posts via email, you can sign up elsewhere on this page. The quote at the top of this week’s essay comes from Forrest Church’s book Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow. I’ve long thought it to be a good mantra for life.