november 2021: what I’m learning and loving

Did you see those memes going around in August about how we’re still processing 2020 and there were only four months left in 2021? I got a little panicky seeing those at the time, but now that we’re in December, I’m feeling a little more accepting. So here’s what I’ve been learning and loving lately:

What I’m loving

Colder weather. Our November here was gorgeous. The leaves fell the latest that I can remember, and they really just seemed to be showing off almost all November long. My camera roll at the moment contains approximately 78 percent pictures of trees, twelve percent Wendell, and nine percent the kids.

Hard, but good screen stories. We watched a lot of heavy TV in November: Dopesick, Mare of Easttown, and Four Hours at the Capitol. Dopesick is about the opioid crisis, Mare was about trauma and families and redemption, and Four Hours was about the insurrection. All heavy topics, but all very well done and very worth watching. Some of our responsibility these days is witnessing what is going on, and all of these helped me do that.

I wonder journaling prompt. I wrote about a new journaling prompt I’ve been using lately in the newsletter. 

What I’m learning

A giant pet peeve aha. I had a realization that one of my biggest pet peeves is when someone (especially a someone with authority or power) acts as if there is only one “right” way of doing something or being in the world – and, by the way, this “right way” always coincides with the way they do it. This has helped me to see a few sticky situations that I keep getting mired in in a new light. Naming it as something that bothers me freed me up to see when and where it’s happening, and helped me get a little helpful distance from the situation. Name it to tame it, as they say. 

We’ve strayed too far from responsibility. In most indigenous cultures, there is an emphasis on responsibility – to oneself, to creation and creator(s), to community. I’ve been thinking about how so many of our cultural issues today boil down to the fact that we don’t take our responsibilities seriously. It’s as if there is a seesaw with responsibility on one end and rights/individual freedom on the other end, and it seems like most of the population has so firmly flown to the side of their rights and individual freedoms that they have no room to think about their responsibility to the collective. Once I started noticing this, I see it everywhere: the entire pandemic obviously, vaccination, gun control, the insurrection and aftermath, anti-racism backlash, the narrative around American history, to name a few off the top of my head.

Initiations. I wrote about the pandemic as an opportunity for initiation in this newsletter, but I’ve been reading, listening, and thinking a lot about what other initiation opportunities I’ve had in my life – which ones I’ve leaned into and which ones I’ve missed. Because we don’t talk about initiation much anymore, let alone actually do it, what depths are we missing out on? Both individually and collectively. 

Be careful how we talk about obesity and other “underlying conditions.” Every time I’ve heard of someone dying of Covid (at least pre-vaccine days), I’ve been guilty of asking, “did they have any underlying conditions?” What I was inadvertently doing was 1) seeing if there was some information about this dead person that could make me feel better about how “healthy” and not likely to die of Covid I am and 2) quasi-blaming this poor person for dying of Covid. 

Grant and I joke often that we’d give up social media if it didn’t help educate us/change our minds about something/help us see things in a new light every week or so. Virginia Sole-Smith has been one of my favorite follows as of late on this whole obesity topic, and she has helped me to see the error of my ways when it comes to how I was talking about Covid, but also more broadly about how we talk about body size, diet culture, and fatphobia.

Her article in Scientific American about how even the science can’t agree on how weight impacts health completely blew my mind and has truly changed how I talk about these things. We assume that the science is clear on this stuff, but it just isn’t. For one thing, how we measure and classify “obesity” to begin with – body mass index – is complete bullshit, so if your measuring tool is broken, the findings or assumptions you reach with it will be broken too. There are tons of layers of privilege and bias in these conversations, and Sole-Smith helps me see the water we’re all swimming in a little clearer. Her newsletter is a constant education – subscribe pronto. 

Sharing is caring. I’ve been sending out a ton of book proposals the last month and have been getting tons of rejections back. Our kids keep reminding me that J.K. Rowling and Madeleine L’Engle were rejected hundreds of times before getting published, which is sweet if a bit demoralizing because I certainly don’t consider myself in those women’s writing company. The rejections have largely been around my too-small platform, not my writing or really the big idea of the book itself. This is frustrating because playing to the social media gods’ algorithms makes me squirmy, to put it mildly. But lately, I’ve been thinking about this thing I wrote last spring:

 We all have this magic that we’re capable of probably every hour of our days if we’re only on the lookout for it.

One magic thing we can all do for the people whose writing, thinking, ideas, recommendations make a difference for us is to tell another person or group of people about them. We can share their stuff, post comments on their stuff, encourage others to follow them. It seems small, but I can tell you that it is big magic for those of us on the receiving end of it.

John Dewey says, “we do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience,” and that is what this monthly reflection practice is for me: an attempt to actually learn from what I’m experiencing. I encourage you to try it too! I’d love to hear what you’re learning and loving lately in the comments below. Happy Decembering!