Hello lovies,
Well, somehow we have reached the part of August when everyone keeps saying “see you in September” like they are casting an ancient curse.
Summer is almost over.
Mine ended with a bit of a flourish: first, Ireland with my family, where we noodled around the west coast on bikes and boats and some white-knuckle driving on the wrong side of the road. Ireland is a middle-aged lady’s dream. Do you want to buy a series of cable knit sweaters? Yes! Do you want a lot of lingering breakfasts with Irish breakfast tea set to classical music? I sure do. My little family and I now have a tradition where we listen to a historical audiobook about the country’s history, then buy some books about myths, and then it devolves into watching action movies starring local heroes. I’ve now officially seen everything that ancient Irish heartthrob Liam Neeson can do while running.
Then I was off to Nashville for a wedding of a friend who wasn’t sure she would ever get married, and to see her joy. Well. It was a Masterclass in seeing someone say YES to life and let the love come pouring in. Plus, I will never get over how necessary it is to see an intergenerational dance floor. We did the Macarena. We did the Twist. We did some other things I can’t describe.
But now we’re facing the fall, and it’s time to look back on our summer selves with some grace. We had plans for the people we would become, didn’t we? We would read outside! Have friends over! Go swimming! Develop an easy relationship with linen! And then August arrives, and we are mostly the exact same people, except slightly sweatier.
I’ve been writing about what it costs to stay a person. About gratitude that cannot be manufactured on command. About Nick Cave and robots and Abraham Lincoln (I’m Canadian; I don’t know how this happened). About all the ways we keep trying to optimize ourselves into people who are somehow better at being alive. And then I went away and discovered that most of what I had been arguing can be proven in a field, or on a dance floor, if you stay long enough.
So perhaps our final Joyful, Anywhere assignment of the summer can be extremely simple:
Like what you like. No lesson required.
Here are some things I read, watched, laughed at, sent to friends, or found myself thinking about again later this month.
This month, I liked volcanoes and virtual pigeons and Mary Oliver and band camp videos. A perfectly reasonable August, in other words.
One more thing before we get to the link extravaganza: On October 12, I’ll be sitting down with Tim Shriver, Chairman of Special Olympics, and one of the most thoughtful people I know on the subject of dignity and belonging, for a live taping of Everything Happens at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, NC. Come be in the room with us. Tickets are right here. I would really love to see your faces.
I feel confident that the people in this beloved community are either already Mary Oliver people, or are about to become Mary Oliver people. This gorgeous documentary from American Masters is ideal for both groups. Oliver spent fifty years paying close attention to things most people walked past—a grasshopper, a pond, morning in the woods—and argued that this attention was an entire spiritual practice. I watched it wanting to go outside and stare at something for a very long time without my phone.
Katia and Maurice Krafft spent their careers driving toward erupting volcanoes (actual erupting volcanoes, on purpose, repeatedly) because they loved them. The documentary is a beautiful portrait of two people who found the thing that made them feel unreasonably alive and…just kept doing it. Personally, I would prefer my great passion to have a lower probability of incineration, but watching people love something this much? More of that, please.
Thirteen boys in a flooded cave in Thailand. An impossible rescue requiring divers, doctors, engineers, and volunteers willing to attempt something that should not have worked. If this documentary isn’t about hope, I genuinely do not know what is.
Buckle up, dear reader. We’re joining Rhys in leaving his rustic little hideaway behind and heading into the not-so-distant future—which, inconveniently, seems to have arrived already: self-driving cars, technological dependence, parasocial relationships, automation. Last month, we read about a family being pulled apart by what people believe; this time, we’re reading about a family being pulled apart by what people did—or maybe let a machine do for them—and who, exactly, gets the blame when it all goes terribly wrong. We’ll have much more to say next week, but in the meantime, grab a copy, put a hold on it through Libby, or listen wherever you get your audiobooks.
You may have just read what I wrote about Nick Cave and grief. Maria Popova has been sitting with a different Nick Cave essay (the one about joy, of course!) and puts it in conversation with Lisel Mueller’s poem “Joy.” The whole thing circles a question I love thinking about: what kind of joy is still possible when you are no longer naive about suffering?
Do you actually like the things you like? Or have you simply seen that shade of butter yellow 7,000 times? This piece is about what recommendation algorithms may be doing to personal taste, all the small preferences that accumulate into something resembling a self. It made me want to become opinionated about something inconsequential. Perhaps lamps. I’ll report back.
My friend Kelly Corrigan wrote this piece about dropping her daughter Claire off at college. She writes about realizing your child was never actually yours, that all that love, every unit of it, made leaving possible. There is something so tender here about loving people well enough to become less necessary to them (says this Enneagram 2 through gritted teeth).
Derek Thompson asks an extremely inconvenient question that I keep thinking about: at what point is it unhealthy to be this obsessed with health? Americans are exercising more than ever, tracking more, measuring more…and are lonelier than any generation on record. He isn’t anti-health; he’s pro-friendship, and his case that we have accidentally made the two compete is very difficult to argue with from behind a fitness tracker.
The internet contains roughly nine million essays about deleting Instagram and rediscovering the sensuous pleasure of being alive. This is not one of those. Blessedly.
The wonderful people at Oxford Pennant in Buffalo, New York, collaborated with me on a Joyful, Anyway camp flag, handmade in felt. In turn, I have discovered that I am susceptible to putting existential convictions on objects associated with summer camp (this is not new for me).
Someone has created an app that sends your texts via a virtual carrier pigeon that flies at 110 mph, meaning a message across the country takes about a day. You can watch your specific bird making its journey on a live map, and there is a 0.2% chance it gets lost or dies before it arrives. The creator describes the app as “pointless” with “genuinely no practical use.” FINALLY. An app that does not want to improve me.
A running app that hides all your numbers while you’re running and asks one question when you stop: How was it? The founder came up with it after his watch died mid-run. He went anyway, no numbers, and had his best run in years. So he built an app around a radical proposition: experience first, data later. Deeply correct.
We’re slowly but surely approaching sweatshirt season, and I am ready to be cozy. Catch me sporting this crewneck for the next six months, at least. Also available: caps, stickers, mugs, and a few other things for people who like to wear their feelings.
What did you actually like this summer, no justification required? A show, a snack, a song, a person’s work you fell in love with, a weird corner of the internet. I want to see yours!
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