Sunday, December 26, 2021

Boxing Day Blah’g

Greetings from the champagne chalet. I’ve once again found myself tucked away in a “quiet” corner of my home, attempting to condense an approximately 837-day-year’s worth of disparate musings into a relatively cohesive email. Everything truly is relative these days.

It’s funny because just as you may be considering dropping off at this point, I similarly considered dropping off this year. Last year’s round 15 marked the Championship Distance, so I figured I could send Theo’s school photo, a video of Noa painting our Peloton with DryDex Spackle (#NotAnAd), a downloadable print of this classic, and call it good. Sure, rituals and traditions hold importance, blah. And okay, arguably even more so during times of historic uncertainty, blah, blah. But something about reflecting on this year, in particular, feels especially… blah. There’s a word for this. It’s ennui – a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction.* And though this did not top Merriam Webster’s Word Of The Year list, the top 5 (vaccine, insurrection, perseverance, woke, nomad) most definitely trigger my ennui on various dimensions. So for those who felt a chronic sense of blah in 2021, who embraced ennui, know that you weren’t alone. This one’s dedicated to you. (Us, really.)

Like many, I’ve found myself reminiscing on the last 22-months – a collective, traumatic chapter that has somehow simultaneously lasted both an instant and a lifetime – trying to recall the energy of the early foreboding days and perhaps still attempting to reconcile the dissonance. I always re-read my last few missives before starting anew, and woof, last year’s was a trip I was not prepared to revisit. The raw uncertainty, the delight of pandemic jokes before they went stale, the hope. And while no one could unequivocally declare 2021 better than 2020 (within its very first weeks, 2021 effectively told 2020 to hold. my. beer.), it was at least different. A variant, so to speak. And like any year, it had both highs and lows.

Unfortunately, in 2021, the uncertain times became certain: if you didn’t get vaccinated, you more likely got Covid, to varying degrees of severity. The unprecedented became precedented: the US lost more lives to Covid in 2021 than 2020. And the alarming became blasé: I just casually texted a friend “how’s your massive mental meltdown going?” which is so normal now, I’m surprised it wasn’t auto-populated. The world experienced record-breaking natural disasters, from an earthquake in Haiti killing 2248 to the worst forest fires in modern history in Russia. We lost pioneers and icons: bell hooks, Virgil Abloh, Joan Didion, Jessica Walter, Norm MacDonald, Daft Punk. We even (at times) lost our bones and when we didn’t, our afternoon walks became the last thing tethering us to reality, yet our only way of escaping it. We returned to the office, only to sit in comically empty rooms, cursing the hellish loop that is joining zoom from a dusty teleconference system. 

And yet, progress. Vaccines that protect against serious illness and death are taking ever greater hold in the U.S. and finally making their way to the world’s most vulnerable regions. We hugged loved ones and ever-so-cautiously reboarded airplanes. We explored more than ever from touching the sun to helicoptering around Mars to discovering ocean creatures straight out of sci-fi. Our love for the outdoors ignited. Cities did not die. Britney is free. And on the theme of freedom, Facebook and Instagram went down, giving us a brief, yet euphoric taste of how wonderful life might be if we could focus on true fulfillment, not fictional FOMO. Creative and compassionate humanity shined. We turned internet spats into songs and we confirmed that we are not cats, despite the compelling evidence otherwise. 

Overall, 2021 reinforced the importance of being nimble; to take advantage of unexpected opportunities arising from adversity. To capture the rare and fleeting moments of levity. And to enthusiastically discard antiquated relics, routines, and rituals (see: monuments, commutes, handshakes), all of which, even at peak-popularity, never served our collective best interests. See? Hope is not completely lost. Even the reemergence of the 17-year cicadas reminded us that the natural order of things can prevail in even the most turbulent of times. 

So why the collective blah? Why the ever ennui’ng* ennui? Well, chugging along on a track designed by MC Escher himself, we’ve been riding a roller coaster of emotional ups and downs at breakneck speed, trapped in what feels like an everlasting loop, one day indistinguishable from the next. Some experts labeled it languishing, or the sense of stagnation, aimlessness, and emptiness. Others believe it’s due to a deprivation of freedom and control, and point out the lengths we’re going to reclaim it (insert revenge bedtime procrastination). And while I relate to both of those as symptoms, I sense that our pandemic-blahs are caused by the tension of living in perpetual “unresolve.” Because let’s be honest, as humans, we are terrible at embracing paradoxes. We crave the binary. We desperately desire denouement, even if it’s not the dream outcome. It’s why we clap on 2 and 4, not 1 and 3. It’s why we feel physical satisfaction and relaxation when the tension of a diminished chord progression resolves, bringing the journey to an end. 

Humans have an almost unstoppable propensity for closure and there’s something intoxicating about the act of resolution in itself. But fundamentally, avoiding dissonance may be more of a compulsion than a strategy. In my line of work, it’s disheartening to recognize that Community, a powerful force for solving our most intractable problems, can be a powerful incubator and problem-accelerant, too. When a system appears to be malfunctioning, indifferent, reckless, or corrupt, people are likely to come together and respond, for better or worse (see January 6th). Spoiler: our COVID-19 journey is not going to resolve anytime soon. Surges will happen, variants will rise, mitigation strategies will be in a constant state of evolution, dissonance will dwell. Because no one, literally no one, has the answers (to anything, really). Rather than remain paralyzed with doubt and fear over each new uncertainty, anxious over the unknown, tense at every bit of news, and contemptuous of fellow humans who hold a dramatically different sense of acceptable risk, what if we set boundaries so that we don’t have to exhaust ourselves with stress over every curve ball?

In reality, humans are dual and contradictory by nature – beautiful and broken; confident and humble; happy and hurting, sweet and sour, lost and found. These clichés feel familiar because they’re how we’re built. So perhaps if we reflect on the world in our own opposites and learn to master the art of paradox, we’ll begin to find balance in dissonance. Answers in opposites. Focus in fragmentation. Pick one, DryDex Spackle over a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign (#StillNotAnAd), and slap it up as the 2022 mantra, because what we’re self-treating as a temporary detour is our real life. And finally, just like any other version of burnout, the solution is not more self-care; the solution is boundaries. We must reclaim our time, clear the constant distractions, and grant ourselves the freedom to focus. We will find solace in experiences that capture our full attention. Paradoxically, we can be generous toward others while staying true to ourselves and setting standards. Small circle, private life, happy heart, focused mind.

So with all of this said, and deeply inspired by the brilliant Jamie Varon, I’ll close with this. Coming out of this blah-bound season, I really don’t care if you live your “best” life. I hope you live your freest life. Your most unburdened life. Your lightest life. I hope your life is a patchwork of lessons and trials and joys and mistakes and growth and evolution and expansion. I hope you truly know that rejection, failure, disappointment means you care, you’re trying, you’re out there in life, alive to it. I hope your life feels beautiful to you more than it looks beautiful to everyone else. I hope your life is an ongoing evolution, a constant becoming. Mostly, I hope you take the path that is meant for you, not the one expected of you from yourself, from others, from weighty ambition or dogma. And I hope that in 2022, you leave empty space in your life for the unknown, the magic, the adventures, the surprises, the unexpected, the unresolved. Because as ennui’ng as it is, the ambiguity is where the life is. 
xo, Laura

*You won’t be surprised to find out that the French loanword ennui comes from the very same Late Latin word that gave us annoy — inodiare (to make loathsome) – especially considering that you can remember how to pronounce ennui by saying annoy while plugging your nose. 



Writing, Podcasts & Other 2021 Inspiration

Podcast Episode/Series 
Octomom (episode)
The Unlikely Pioneer Behind mRNA Vaccines (episode)
A Mother And Daughter At The End (episode)
The Dropout (series) 
The Happiness Lab (series) 
One Year: 1977 (series) 
9/12 (series) 

Art 
Celeste Barber
Yung Pueblo 
Rupi Kaur (watch her Amazon Prime special) 
i do not want to have you 
to fill the empty parts of me 
i want to be full on my own
i want to be so complete
i could light a whole city 
and then 
i want to have you
cause the two of us 
could set it on fire
    -rupi kaur 
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