003: January 3rd, 2024
Sweating out sins + observing the world around you.
One of the most delightful things I’ve done semi-regularly since the move from Austin to Nashville is frequent a bathhouse.Â
This spa houses a hot tub, a dry sauna, and a steam room. There's also a cold plunge meant to be used in between all the warmer activities, as well. Before the pandemic it may have been open to the public, but now it's available by appointment and you can go for a private dip with a couple of friends in intervals of an hour or two. It's delightful in every sense of the word.Â
Every time I walk through the doors, despite usually having never met the beautiful receptionist with her perfectly dyed hair (the bathhouse is also a salon), I feel welcomed and as if they've been waiting for me for quite a while.Â
And every time the pool offers me something good, something different.Â
On my most recent dip, I was joined by two women I consider my blood sisters. While becoming warmed bone broth, one of the sisters, Jess, posed a beautiful question.Â
She'd recently watched a TV show (I don't remember which one), and at some point, a character asks another character to describe the color gold to a person who is blind.Â
We discussed how we'd describe it and went through each of the senses, tossing our answers around. I said it smelled like freshly baked bread or sugar carmelizing, and it felt like the warmth of a sunset. The other sister, Stephanie, said that the color gold feels like sunshine on bare skin.Â
This exercise in observation also happens to be one of my favorite parts of writing.
Have you ever read a book and listened to someone describe something in such specific detail that you felt like you were experiencing that thing yourself?Â
Once, while reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I found a paragraph that described the process of immense grief in a way that felt familiar to me despite never having experienced it myself.Â
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
When I read Magical Thinking the first time, I hadn't been through something as consuming as the grief of losing someone you love to the unknowable next. I hadn't breathed through a single day living on the other side of loss. I hadn't walked through that particular minefield, but I understood through her beautifully shattering words and her care to explain what that might be like.
When I read Magical Thinking the second time, after the loss of my grandfather-in-law, I found every word to ring true. In the time since losing him, almost a year and a quarter now, the tussle for me has been in what she describes at the end of this pull quote: "the relentless succession of moments during which we confront the experience of meaningless itself." Though it is hard to walk through grief, I have found an immense amount of solace in knowing that others have walked through it too, and have lived to write about it.
This is one of the most important and meaningful things about taking the time and care to look at the world around you and alchemize it into words or art that someone else can interpret and experience. It was a balm to know what I might be heading into because one of the greatest writers to ever live took time to explain it carefully, and I had picked up the book.
I return to places like the bathhouse and to writing things down each day because I find these things particularly grounding. This grounding comes by directing my attention towards observation. It feels like a superpower. What you notice and where you direct your attention forms and shapes your day-to-day experience. There's a great power in that. I hope to continue noticing. I hope to continue wielding my attention in a way that bends my reality towards better.Â
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