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Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down

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Write before coffee. Morning pages. Catharsis.

Long pause.

I got those phrases out. Hard to keep going. The situation is so IMMENSE. How do I begin?

Finally, after a lifetime of living with people (not exaggerating), I have a room of my own or, at the least, an alcove and window of my own in my house. At work, where I have been going only rarely, I have an office of my own.  Solitude is ample, though of course there are dear people in my life and I see them.

While I have the ideal Woolfian conditions for thinking, writing, and creating, my mind holds a shifting sand dune to trudge up and over before I can proceed. How do I do things that are not necessary, not for survival, not prompted by the pandemic, pre-election, or work pressures?

Yesterday I voted. I filled out my mail-in ballot on my kitchen counter with a black pen. The stroke curved to fill the right edge of the Biden/Harris oval and went over the line, perhaps a millimeter. I stared at it. Did I ruin my ballot? Did I disqualify my own vote? Doesn’t every vote count, even in Massachusetts? Who should I call, the town clerk? What string of words should I google to find out if I messed this up and what I should do to fix it?

I called on my inner voice. Jane, it’s really okay. It’s all about filling the oval. Not X-ing or checking it. The human hand cannot operate with 100% accuracy. Not your hand, not any other voter’s hand. Have faith. Keep filling the ovals, front side and back.

I walked to my town hall to deposit my ballot.  Walking is better than sitting and driving. It felt ceremonial.

This is not about voting per se — it’s about the near-simmering panic that bubbles up. All these anxiety balls we are juggling are too many.

I read online some bit about the prefrontal cortex and its role in executive functioning and planning. (Did I get that right? If someone knows, please inform me because I am always happy to have the right answer gently provided to me.)

When this brain region is overwhelmed, as it is for all of us now, it can’t sort, prioritize, and plan.

I worked all day yesterday, feeling as though I kept circling the same To Do list over and over, picking off things to do and doing them with no sense of having picked the right thing to do. I ended up doing a lot and at the same time leaving a lot of gaps.

This is a duality: doing a lot and at the same time not getting much done.

I remember Jimmy, who loved quotable pithy wisdom, telling me more than once about some advice from guru screenwriter seminar-leader Robert McKee saying something like, “There is a difference between action and activities.”  You want your character, if you’re writing a novel, to be involved in action, not activities.  And–also according to Jimmy– someone else said, maybe a productivity guru, that this principle could be applied to work: be involved in action, not activities.

Activities are about all that’s happening for me and work and life right now. Do, do, do.

Yesterday after I got back from voting I took a break from my To Do list and I repotted a succulent garden that had lost a few of its babies in an over-watering episode this summer. I did this also on my kitchen counter — it’s an island at the center of the kitchen, and in this house the kitchen is at the center of the house — and one thing led to another so I emptied the dishwasher, reloaded it, sorted the mail, boiled water for tea, and gave the dog Winston some affection. He does his job so well, providing comfort and companionship, and I don’t always recognize him for his contributions to our life.

Late yesterday afternoon, in a Teams message my friend and colleague Ashley Armand asked me:

“Have you updated your blog? I haven’t seen a new post, but always looking forward to reading about all the feels that come with this life.”

What can I say? I wondered. By “say,” I mean “write.” My mind is holding all details in working memory as equally important and not doing its usual sorting, emphasizing, and minimizing in the way I rely on it to do. Promising ideas and images are not naturally floating to the top.

Monday I had THREE medical appointments, ones that replaced appointments that had been canceled back in April. I saw my endocrinologist, I had a routine mammogram, and later I went to Joslin to get a deep look into my eyes. In all cases, they had timed everything so there was really no waiting. You check in, and you get directed immediately to a room. I felt safe, and yet also as though I was walking on the moon with a few other astronauts.

I looked back at my camera roll for the last couple of days, then extended it to the last couple of months, to see if I had any photos that could illustrate this extraordinary time we’re living through. I saw

  • screenshots of catalog items I probably won’t buy
  • photos of trees downed in the recent crazy rain and wind storms
  • pictures of Winston
  • pictures of Lydia
  • banner and sign images from front yards
  • a haircut photo
  • hills and trees from recent walks and hikes
  • one masked selfie
  • gold leaves and crimson leaves
  • one of the John Hancock Building from a distance as I crossed a pedestrian bridge over train tracks
  • and finally my ballot getting dropped in the box yesterday.

One month ago my partner Chris and I were on Cape Cod for two weeks. We had rented a house there to “work from home,” yet in a better location.

There was an afternoon when he was working, on conference calls, and I did my own thing. Maybe a room of one’s own can also be the outdoors.

It was after a storm and the wind was wild. I walked to the town beach, near an inlet on the bay side of the narrow stretch of land that Wellfleet is on, part of the Cape Cod National Seashore that Kennedy set aside in his administration. The wind intensified, blowing my hair and making me shove my hands into my parka pockets. (Photos in this post are from that moment.)

The world is glorious, full of wonders, I thought. I turned in a circle and looked all around, taking a lot of mental photos and a handful of digital ones. It was an instance when I could believe that life itself is timeless–it existed before I was born and it will exist after me–and let go of that constant feeling of needing to do everything to save it.

And yet I don’t believe that our worries about the world are unfounded.

Your job as a writer is making sentences

/ jelizabeth / 2 Comments

I am reading a book, long ago recommended to me by teacher/artist/writer friend Jan Donley and recently brought to my attention by daughter/college student/writer Grace Guterman, that focuses on the building block of prose: sentences.

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From Several short sentences about writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg (Vintage Books, 2012).

Why are we talking about sentences?
Why not talk about the work as a whole, about shape, form, genre, the book, the feature story, the profile, even the paragraph?

The answer is simple.
Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Most of your time will be spent making sentences in
your head.
Did no one ever tell you this?
That is the writer’s life.
Never imagine you’ve left behind the level of the sentence
behind.

Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed.
The rest will need to be fixed.
This will be true for a long time.

I endorse this book. It is mesmerizing and full of wisdom. If you write, and if you struggle with shaping your sentences, it will also validate your labor and thoughtfulness.

Ghost Road

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Note: At the beginning of May, I joined a 30-day writing course designed by Megan Devine, founder of Refuge in Grief.  Every day we get a writing prompt, and there is a secret Facebook group to post to and share writing with other members. There are losses of all sorts, mostly deaths, and some losses are recent and some, like mine, more in the past. There is something special about the group — I joined for the writing, and I’ve gotten much more. Find more info about signing up for the next group here: link. My post for Day #19, unedited, is below.

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Image credit: Belmont Public Library

“You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Last night when I got home I asked Grace what she had done with her day. She is newly home from her first year of college. She told me that she and Elena (cousin) had gone to Ghost Road, off of Chickatawbut Road in Milton, to take Winston for a walk around a secret pond.

“I remember the day we later found out that Dad had died, Sally had taken us for a walk earlier that day around that secret pond in Chestnut Hill,” she told me.

“What? What?” I ask, confused. “You went on a walk the day Dad died? Who went?”

“Sally took me, Eli, Lydia, and Sara,” replied Grace. “Then later the police officer came and told us Dad died.”

It was one of those moments when I realized there was something I had forgotten, or never knew, from that confusing, consuming time that Jimmy died. In the days preceding July 25, 2016, when all we knew is that he had run away and no one could find or reach him, we swung between huddling together and trying to solve the mystery — Where is Jimmy? — to carrying on as usual with grocery shopping, dog walking, and (me) working. It was summer school time, and I was teaching a class.

So, I learned or was reminded, on the day we found out, in the afternoon, that Jimmy had been found dead in a hotel room, —

Wow, I had to pause there after I wrote that. I have a life, I had a life, in which the man I was married to, was estranged from, would run away and go to a hotel room and die of an overdose.

I don’t always think of that. The facts of that day. All I can picture is the moment the police detective, Matthew Something, drove up and got out of his car in a Red Sox shirt thrown over his uniform. I can never forget that and I never want to: the vivid Red Sox shirt, all white with the red trim and lettering, over the dark uniform and against the darkness of his car. He walked over to me standing there outside. He had called ahead. After days of searching for Jimmy, I knew what he would say before he said it. Sally was standing outside with me, on the driveway. He walked over. He told us, “Mrs. Kokernak” (no one calls me that), “I am sorry to tell you that your husband’s body has been found.” And then, the details of the finding. The questions about the name of his doctor, and his psychiatrist. They would investigate. There was likely no crime. He could not tell me the cause of death. Then the kids come outside, Eli, Lydia, Grace. One of them ask from the front porch — Sally and I still in the driveway — “Mom?” as if my name and the question mark ask everything.

“Dad has died,” I say. “He is found.” Continue reading →

Open the door, and let them in

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July 2, 2017 in the neighborhood, for Canada Day

Quickly:

With my daughter Grace, a senior in high school, I’ve been coaching the writing of the college essay. Last night we finished the final proofreading. Grace said we don’t need a title. “Not required,” she said. “Optional?” I wondered.  “Yes,” she admitted. Okay, then, we’re writing one.

Titles are so important: they are the invitation, and the doorway into the book, movie, and college essay.

It was 10 o’clock on a Friday night, and Grace and I were spent.  Remembering a nifty list of exercises for generating title possibilities, I dug it up out of the Google dirt.  Here it is:  link.

We focused on the first three of the four functions of a title. (The fourth one seems more important for publications.)

First, it predicts content.

Second, it catches the reader’s interest.

Third, it reflects the tone or slant of the piece of writing.

Fourth, it contains keywords that will make it easy to access by a computer search.

And then, from the list of title prompts on page two of the guidelines, we used numbers 1, 6, 7, 13, and 14 and generated about 15 good and bad title ideas for Grace’s essay. It took only 10 minutes with two focused people working together.

What we learned: your first idea is NOT your best idea, and bits from your bad title ideas will provide you with a key word or two that together may be the foundation of a good title.

Also, people, tone is really important! If it’s a humorous essay, avoid an academicky, serious title.  If it’s a hopeful essay, give that title a lift (e.g., Grace’s title uses the word “spirit” instead of “motivation.”)

Titles are important! Always use them!  For essays, make them informative and inviting.

Sugar in her tea

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IMG_2632-1 (1)I am rusty at non-required writing. Every day I get it done for work but when it comes to the optional kind, I am tentative and wary of beginning again.

That phrase in the title – sugar in her tea – I transcribed it today from interview notes for something I’m writing. A freelance gig at an agricultural nonprofit, it has to do with farmers in the developing world and how their lives improve when their income grows. To have sugar in one’s tea after years of drinking it black? That’s a small sign that farmer livelihood is improving. (There are more significant measures too, like nutritious food and peace of mind.)

It’s just Grace and I here tonight. We are talking a little but we’re quiet. Oh, Winston’s here too. Are we lonely? I’ll ask Grace. We are sitting in her room together.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I think that maybe if it was like some Saturdays in the past when it’s just been the two of us all weekend, and we only leave the house to do errands, that can be lonely.”

She adds, “Sometimes when I’m lonely it doesn’t have to do with us. It might be because of being upset with a friend.” Knowingly, she looks at me and continues: “It’s not the household dynamic.”

In my own moments of loneliness, I try to tell myself it’s just a feeling and it may have no immediate origin. You just have to abide with it. It may not need to be fixed.

Meanwhile, I’m reading a book, Scary Close by Donald Miller. It’s about intimacy in general – being real and being close to friends, family, a partner. Its subtitle contains the phrase “dropping the act.” This is the kind of thing a person reads when she wonders if she knows anything, after years of adulthood, about what it means to connect, and how to do it well. Though there is something about the writer’s voice that is a little too proud of all the insights, there are some illuminating bits, and I am enjoying them, like this one:

One night they are sitting around a fire in the yard. His future father-in-law, who is reportedly good at relationships, “said if we took the logs from the fire and separated them out in the field, they’d go out within an hour. They’d just lie there cold. He said for some reason the logs needed each other to burn, to stay warm” (203).

I am drawn to that image — poetic and romantic — even though the objective part of my mind is wondering what are the thermodynamics that make this so.

There’s also a long part in the book about having a meaningful life, and Miller summarizes principles from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. There are three recommendations if you want to have what Frankl claimed humans wanted even more than Freudian pleasure: “a sense of gratitude for the experience they were having, a sense of purpose and mission and belonging” (182):

Have a project to work on, some reason to get out of bed in the morning and preferably something that serves other people.

Have a redemptive perspective on life’s challenges.

Share your life with a person or people who love you unconditionally. (183)

I have a good portion of all of these — project, perspective, people — though the winds have buffeted us and feelings of purpose, resilience, and love are still on the mend. That’s an up arrow, for sure, though sometimes the tender spots ache when we palpate them.

I’ve been thinking about having a project to work on, one that is mine all mine. Not for income. Not for housekeeping. Not for athleticism.

Rising in me again, in part because of my summer freelance writing project, is a belief in writing itself as worthy and desirable. Even though I’m a writing / speaking teacher, most of the writing I do in education is feedback on the work of others. Oh, and emails, but that’s every job. I had lost heart with my own writing in the last year or so, and the activity of writing, in addition to the conversations about writing, has done a lot to boost my writing ego.

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Nature section, Brookline Booksmith

I live near a bookstore now, and they invite patrons to bring their dogs along. Winston and I sometimes stop in to look at a shelf or two on our evening walk. Yesterday a book on mushrooms caught my attention, and then we scanned the Nature shelves. I fantasized about resuscitating my project on Elizabeth White, amateur botanist, and the cultivated blueberry.

A friend of Jimmy’s called me tonight, before sundown. He half jokingly said he was atoning for not having been in touch for a long time. I said I didn’t think that way at all. In fact, people live inside my head, not in a crazy way, but in a populated way. I think of them; they think of me. I know that.

Somehow all the parts of this meandering post fit together, though there is no beginning, no end. Having a good life, a meaningful one. Loneliness. Writing desire. People, near and far.

  No click, no write

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Perhaps one can write about absences as much as presences.

This is Winston at 8:59am today, no spring in his step, no appeal to play or go outside. Yesterday he had his distemper shot. Today he lacks inspiration, his usual zest.

Winston_poky

I’m about to put the timer on for 15 minutes, to see what kind of summing-up I can generate. Then I have to get ready for the day. The first item is to meet with a lawyer at 10:30am to sign a trust document, and associated paperwork. This is a thing you do when you are the only parent left. Personal administrative organization is important.

Fifteen minutes, go.

In my capsule bio over there on the side, it claims that I write when I feel a “click.” (You have a muse, I a click.)  Not much click in the past several months that lead to writing, though certainly there have been other sparks or even ah ha! moments.

I have packed and unpacked a lot of boxes, and with the great help of my family and friends we have moved from one address to another. The new one is better. For one thing, more sun streams into the windows. That’s both a metaphor and physically true.

I have taught classes, gone to meetings, ‘graded’ papers (shorthand for commenting on them), shopped for and eaten food, socialized, laughed, slept (but not nearly enough), listened, cried (though less and less), paid, spoken to groups of people whether students or colleagues, sewed buttons back on, gritted my teeth, sighed, touched.

Every minute of every day is filled.

Ugh, I hate that, like a topic sentence that can only announce a litany of Poor Me, I’m So Busy.

And yet it feels like  race sometimes. I eat on the way from thing to thing, like a vehicle constantly refueling while in operation. Do military planes do that, or race cars?

I’m not fast, though. I wish I were. Still methodical, still a uni-tasker or, at most, a bi-tasker.  Not multi.

I daydream about reading, yet feel incapable of sitting down for a long, luxurious amount of time which is what reading needs.

And about writing I long for it yet wonder if I am permanently impaired. Perhaps, you know, I should just have some image stand in for thoughts or even a video.

I just pictured video-ing myself, and the anticipatory stress of getting the hair and background and sweater and facial expressions just right for the medium.

Like a child, I want to call in sick because, you know, sometimes I just don’t feel like it. Then my internal dialog convinces me I should go and I can go and this is how I will do it.

Maybe we have pets, like Winston, to project not just our love onto, but our other animal wishes and desires, like curling up with our nose to our knees — I think I’m still flexible enough for the fetal position — and taking a break from our usual selves. Winston has signaled that today he is not even going to walk though I will prod him to take a bathroom break.

Me though? I’ll walk.

Alarm! Sound: piano riff. Fifteen minutes, done. In a moment I’ll stand.

Everyone wants to be in the lab

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high school chemistry lab in Penang, Malaysia (2009)

The other night at dinner, I had the impulse to tell someone, when we were talking about undergraduate engineering students and my great pleasure in working with them, “My work satisfies the part of me that could have done that — could have majored in one of the STEM fields.”

I didn’t, though, because I hate that: when people in the middle of very good careers (like me) say something like, “If things had been different, I could have been an opera singer, or travel writer, or doctor.” I worked with someone 20 years ago who was the director of major gifts at an Ivy League university — a very good job by any measure — who would often say that if his life had been different he would be first violin in a major orchestra.  Honestly, I doubted it. How could he know?

So, I try to never say, “I could have been X if not for Y.”

Ha! But here I’m going to do something like that.

I have always loved reading and writing, so it’s really a great fit for me that I have become a communication lecturer who reads and writes and teaches writing and speaking and some ways of reading. When I was in high school I liked English, but maybe my favorite classes and teachers were in chemistry, physics, geometry, calculus, and even shop and music.

Jump ahead to college: I registered for biology, chemistry, and calculus. I loved Calc I, didn’t do so great in Calc II, yet I found biology especially to be tedious and chemistry only mildly satisfying.

Why did I love chemistry in high school and not as much in college?

Here’s the “if not for Y” part.

Chemistry in high school, as well as physics and biology, was taught AND practiced in a lab classroom. Everything happened there: the lesson or lecture, the experiment, the teacher’s office hours, the teacher’s grading of exams, the socializing with peers in class. We sat at the bench in groups of four, learned there, and did experiments.  If you remember this experience, too, and want to be reminded of it, see the photographs in the Flickr album, ECHS Has New Chemistry Lab: link.

My memories of the teacher, Mr. Victor Khoury, and classmates and furnishings and bits of experiments (carbon, and the crucible!) are vivid.

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high school chemistry lab in St. Louis, MO (2006)

In college, the lesson happened in a lecture hall, and the lab in the lab. The labs were taught by people different than the actual professor/lecturer, and the professor could be found in his office. The lab instructors we could talk to in lab, and I remember mine in the one college chemistry class I took. I also remember my lab partner and her name and my impression that she would go on to be a star in science, she was so obviously good. Continue reading →

First grief, then work

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One could also rewrite that with verbs: First grieve, then work.

I woke up at 5:45am, my body still not adjusted after the daylight savings time change. I went to sleep late, only intellectually grasping what was happening in the election. I woke up and, even before consciousness, I could feel my heart broken.

It’s noteworthy, isn’t it?, that the feeling called ‘broken’ is heavy like cement, or like I swallowed six hard-boiled eggs without chewing. A broken heart does not feel like shards of glass. It’s a fullness that jams your esophagus.

Next, crying. I had to do that, and a few texts to my friend Lisa. I called for a Day of Mourning. I was still in bed, and I lay there.

“First grief, then work.” I read that right before I made plans to give up on social media (that betrayer) and the New York Times and the radio. The phrase was tweeted by Ada Límon, a writer I don’t know, yet.

It’s true: I did flirt with the idea of not going to work, or of going to work and refusing to work, or of going to work and telling someone else whose fault it is. Because it’s not mine.

I sat up and wept some more, my back against the pillows I put there to prop myself up. I thought of my children, one at a time.

Then I thought of cleaning out the fridge. Really. And I thought of emailing someone I teach with and promising, “Tonight I will download all those papers and put them in our dropbox.”I imagined the downloading, the renaming of the poorly named files.

The list started to form after that.

Once, at least 25 years ago, when I worked at Harvard University in fund raising where the theme was always leadership — “We are training the future leaders of America, and the world” (I got so tired of that) — I said to my friend Joe that I regretted I was no visionary. He reassured me that there would be no movement without people like us to schedule the troops, order the supplies in advance, and make enough coffee to keep everyone energized. Everyone would also need a tshirt or uniform in a size to fit their width and height. I am good at logistics, and so was he, and there would be no progress without us.

I don’t know why that anecdote popped into my mind. I have no plans today to join a movement. But, you know, logistics. Continue reading →

Pillow on the sidewalk

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Tonight after work I went looking for the pillow I had seen on the sidewalk during my morning commute.

Earlier in the day at the office, I saw my colleague, Sue Spilecki, and mentioned the misfit pillow to her. When I first saw it on Monday morning, plump and expectant on the sidewalk near Allandale Farm and across from the Exxon station, I immediately thought of Sue and her poetry and imagined the pillow catching her poetic attention. My own thoughts — more scenic than poetic — pictured a person, very tired, walking along and accepting the pillow’s invitation to lie down. I pictured that person, a woman, stretching herself out and giving herself over to sleep with cars and school buses streaming by. This imagined woman was very tired; the journey had been long.

But in my mind it was not a poem; it was a person, a character.

I promised Sue I would go back and get a photo for her. After all, the pillow had been there a few days in the same place – why wouldn’t it remain there? I veered off my running route tonight to track it down. It was gone. There was a sign for an event at Allandale Farm – “Craft” – and I wondered if a caterer or event organizer had tidied up the sidewalk in advance of guests. There is a fancy element to Allandale, even though it is a farm, and in fact the property is owned in trust by a wealthy family though they have deeded it (and therefore protected it from taxes) to some land trust for protected use.

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what i saw after i didn’t see the pillow

I wandered down the dirt road and even breached the No Trespassing sign. I had done this once before and been asked to leave by a woman who drove up to me in a blue Audi. Later, the encounter made me write a short story about it, something to do with wealth hidden behind bucolic agriculture and what rural land may mean to different people (characters) in a community: migrant farm workers, a young mother/photographer, the landowners themselves. At the time I wrote that story, I had not imagined a pillow on the sidewalk or a woman reposing on it.

Another colleague, Tracy, asked me today about my blog and my writing. “I miss it,” I said, even though I also admitted I had set my writing aside last summer in a very deliberate, practical way and only now am I rejuvenating it, feeling both tentative and awkward.

Also today I read a student essay in which the writer used a lot of interesting words that were almost but not quite right. The misfit words could have been misfires in the student’s working vocabulary or they could have been errors created by autocorrect. Only one of the ‘off’ words charmed me: the writer referred to a “collusion” of automobiles, and in the context I believe the writer meant “collision.” How more interesting to imagine two cartoon-like cars, with their noses together, whispering, secretly planning, conspiring. In a dystopic future, imagine all our smart, sensor-filled cars, controlling us and not just doing our bidding, whether driven by us or some network of data.

I do not, though, have a mind for dystopia. I would really have to commit to it and imagine more than two cars, a whole community of them, with leadership and planning and resources and, more than anything, motivation. Why would they want to take us over? I cannot picture what cars would get from us that they would actually want or need.  See, this is not my genre.

Next to me on the couch right now is a plate with cracker crumbs on it. I wet my finger, dab them up, and eat them.

I hear the buzzer from the washer in the basement, the load done. I told Lydia I’d hang up her sweater.

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sidewalk where i expected to see a pillow

Tomorrow, another day at MIT, reading more essays, a summer project for a bunch of us. It’s optional (paid) work. It seems my most cheerful colleagues sign up for it. We get a free lunch (Middle Eastern food), and we sit together and don’t talk about work, kind of like indoor recess. We do talk about our children, our writing, New York vs. Boston/Cambridge, Uber, and – for a moment – a pillow on a sidewalk that no longer exists.

And yet it does: Sue wrote a poem about it.

 

The self as a boat, always under repair, still the same boat

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IMG_0220 (1)In the photograph is a book I just finished reading that I loved. That’s not to say you should read it. You have to like theory mixed with memoir, and a whole book fashioned from paragraphs and no chapters. I underlined a lot of it. I won’t type out the underlines having to do with motherhood, sex, queerness, or gender; you can find those yourself.

Here is the book’s author, Maggie Nelson, who is new to me, incorporating Eve Sedgwick, and thinking in a sidelong way about her own work:

“Many people doing all kinds of work are able to take pleasure in aspects of their work,” Sedgwick once wrote, “but something different happens when the pleasure is not only taken but openly displayed. I like to make that different thing happen.” [Note: Sedgwick was also a teacher, Nelson’s.]

One happy thing that can happen, according to Sedgwick, is that pleasure becomes accretive as well as auotelic: the more it’s felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual, it becomes.

I don’t know what these words are, and I have to look them up. Autotelic, an adjective, is “(of an activity or a creative work) having an end or purpose in itself.” And accretive, also an adjective, is “the process of accretion, or the growth or increase by a gradual addition.” Well, this blog-writing is accretive, that is for sure. I am having more trouble with autotelic. I don’t always know if what I do has an end or purpose. I am in the middle of it, always, and wonder where it’s going.

Today I went with three friends, all women, on a hike in the Blue Hill Reservation in Milton and Quincy. (Five hours, nine miles, 20,000 steps, according to Sue at the end.) It’s good to feel strong and able. I stopped about every 30 minutes to check my blood sugar. Because my diabetes is often on my mind I feel on the edge of vulnerability, as though health could fall apart at any moment. Weird, to hold these two qualities in the mind at once: that I am strong, that I am (at the edge of) vulnerable. I looked at my body in the mirror after I returned home and took a shower because I was freezing, my clothes all damp from sweating but the air outside pretty cold. My body looked good, not decrepit. I have no mechanical complaints. Just metabolic ones, and those are inside and the only person who notices them intimately is me.

My friends did ask a few times, “Do you need to check your blood sugar?,” though very matter-of-factly. I liked being cared for with a light, not lavish, touch.

Also today I prepped a pot roast and put it in an enamel cooker in the oven, and I continued my endless tidying, closet cleaning, trash-taking-out. At one point I stood at the sink and looked out the window, and I wondered if my emphasis on neatness has prevented me from any experiences in life or from being in the moment. Making order is all about dealing with the past in service of the future. Did I not play with the children, for example, when children, because I was arranging their toys on a shelf or tidying the pajama drawer?

Maggie Nelson writes about motherhood, and draws on theorists like Donald Winnicut (dead) a pediatrician and psychoanalyst and Kaja Silverman (living) a theorist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Nelson, paraphrasing Silverman, writes: “As the human mother proves herself a separate, finite entity, she disappoints, and gravely.” I underlined this too, and I realize I am including something from the book about motherhood, although I said above I would not.

A former student emailed me today that she stumbled across my blog, and found “cool stuff.” I am alternately buoyed by the compliments that come my way, and pulled down by the internal sense that what I do is never enough, or not quite the right thing at the right time. Is this womanhood, motherhood, Jane-hood?

About the title The Argonauts, Nelson writes, referring to Barthes, that “the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo.” It is somehow continuously the same boat, yet it “will be forever new.”

20 minutes, up.