Dear Kate,
The heat is out at my house. The furnace, installed during the Eisenhower administration, died in November. Presumably from exhaustion. With a rattle and a wheeze, the pilot light blew out for the last time. I understood. I gave it a pat and shut off the gas. My house is very old. It’s entitled to be tired.
Now, the wind is sharper than in November. The sun sets earlier and rises later. The darkness is near enough to touch. If I fall asleep with wet hair, I wake with it plastered to my neck, damp and cold.
This house, built on hardwood pier and beam, holds its climate. The night’s chill sticks around. I pile electric blankets, warm my hands under my laptop, turn the oven to 450 to reheat lunch and crack the door for a bit. I move as little as possible. A small space heater tries its hardest, whirring, whirring, whirring.
By 5:00 PM, the sun starts to set. It will be cold again soon.
This, of course, is lunacy.
(First let me say my landlord has been working diligently on the furnace. It may, however, take an appearance on Pawn Stars to replace a pilot light manufactured two decades before man walked on the moon.)
Landlord aside, I have other options. I don’t have to sit alone, shivering. I can make things better.
Here’s an idea: I can get up. I can go outside.
I can pull on pants and a sweatshirt, shove an apple in my pocket, tie up my sneakers, and throw open the door. Walk half a mile. Shake off the chill. Get a little sweaty. Watch the morning dew dissipate. Start to feel the sun heat my neck, my wrists, the tips of my ears. Move my arms. Marvel at the freedom of my own two feet. Nod at a neighbor, coo at the chickens. Come home, and see that the sun has now started to warm the little house, the slightest incremental increase imperceptible from within, but relished when left and returned.
When things feel too dark, too cold, too lonely, I remind myself: Get up. Go outside.
What may feel productive—to keep the doors shut, the curtains drawn, the blankets piled high—is only to keep the cold in. To remain in the dark. It’s an example of ridged thinking, a type of behavior well surmised by Warren Buffett: “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.”
The danger of ridged thinking is in its invisibility. We might not know our own patterns, might not recognize the ruts we’re creating until we’ve tread too deep. We might not feel the chains.
And yet, to deeply contend with our days, to think them over, to challenge our ever-inflexible thinking, to decide what dignities we believe are afforded to whom, and in what contexts, is an active pursuit, not a passive one. It requires a creative sort of thinking, the freedom to turn things upside down and backward.
How do we respond when things go awry? Trapped in a rut, the options are limited. Our reactions become hamstrung by habit: The familiar Instagram posts, outrage texts, rapid fire tweets.
In the 72 hours since I first listened to The Daily’s Thursday episode, one piece of reporting by Nick Fandos has rattled around in my ears.
Fandos, rushed into lockdown with all 99 present members of the U.S. Senate, found himself in a hallway with both Sen. Chuck Schumer, the presumptive Senate Majority Leader, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate Majority Leader.
Fandos describes how both men struggled to keep pace with the crowd. McConnell, 78, who had polio as a child, must be dragged by the armpits. Schumer, 70, is hauled by the neck. Two of the most powerful men in the world, reduced to the limits of flesh and bone: An image that just barely cracked my ridged thinking.
It’s easy to make these people less than human. It’s easy to let our pulse race and our hairs stand on end at the mere mentions of their names. In fact, human is exactly all they are—no more, no less. Elderly men, with arthritic knees and sun-spotted skin. Turn their power upside down and backwards, realize it is no more and no less than your own.
How do we dismantle our ridged thinking? We can start by thinking of those graphics on the news as exactly what they are: human beings. People who licked the cookie dough spoon as a child, ran through sprinklers, delighted in the warmth of towels right from the drier.
And what if we did a few of those things ourselves? What if we tried to feel just a bit more human? Ventured outside the ruts?
This week, I climbed a tree. In public. In a park. (I fell.) I swung on a swing set (considerably harder as an adult with cellulite.) I skipped down the street. (It would have been easy for my neighbors to imagine I was having a stroke.) I took time to remember that I am not that important. I took time to remember that you can always open the windows. You can always let the light in.
XOXO,
Ali
My Book Rec: Gilead
There’s never been a better time to read Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s perfect novel. It grapples with the morality of the Civil War, Christianity, and the truth of relationships between neighbors.
Here’s a passage I find exceptionally useful.
“When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, ‘What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?’ If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person.”
The book: Gilead
My rating: 🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠
Read more: “Marilynne Robinson’s Essential American Stories”