life

Socially distanced

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But when she at last put on gray shawl over the gray dress and went out into the street, Sophie did not feel excited. She felt overwhelmed. There were too many people rushing past, laughing and shouting, far too much noise and jostling. Sophie felt as if the past months of sitting and sewing had turned her into an old woman or a semi-invalid. She gathered her shawl around her and crept along close to the houses, trying to avoid being trodden on by people’s best shoes or being jabbed by elbows in trailing silk sleeves.

#Me, at Costco yesterday morning.

(From Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones)

A personal paracosm

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A twelve-year-old boy in Queens, NY, and I have something in common: we’re both making a map of places we can’t go.

Brendan Koerner describes his son’s painstakingly created paracosm, constructed with Google Maps and a stack of handwritten notes, as an exercise in escapism and control. Cartographers, Koerner notes, are often drawn to maps as a way to escape reality, the same way bibliophiles are drawn to books. For someone trapped inside an apartment during a pandemic, the baseball stadiums of New England are no less fantastical—or inviting—than the soft green hills of the Shire.

I’ve been less trapped than most, thanks to my fieldwork. But while getting out of the city (heck, even getting out of my house!) and into the forest has been an incredible relief after weeks spent within a few blocks, it has also brought with it a large amount of stress and uncertainty. Far from being new, this is just another layer of stress on top of the existing pile of worry, anxiety, and desperation called graduate school. In reality, I’ve felt trapped since long before the pandemic began.

For someone who has moved every six months for the past seven years, staying in one city for three years has been a difficult adjustment. It’s been made even more difficult by a student’s budget and time commitments that render even short trips somewhere between implausible and impossible. So, like Koerner’s son, I started making a map.

The map is still in it’s early stages, and I’m in no hurry to finish it—after all, once it’s done what will I do for escapism??—but as it grows I hope to share it with you so that maybe you, too, can be inspired to find joy in places you can’t be.

Practicing spontaneity

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Last weekend I took a break from practicing spontaneity to spontaneously stop at a park off a highway in Burnaby. Spontaneity is something I’m bad at, so I was deliberately practicing it by blowing off my work and going for a drive. I kept catching these tantalizing glimpses of the strait through the trees and I told myself if I saw a sign for a park or a pulloff or something I would take it. Which is how I found myself not ten minutes later crossing a narrow footbridge over a set of  railroad tracks.

It turns out the tracks were important, because the park is one of the last places to bear the name of the town that grew up around them. The railroad, the water, and the plentiful trees created the perfect habitat for a sawmill, called Barnet after the owner’s wife’s family. The community took it’s name from the mill and grew into a sizable company town, with economic ups and downs, fires and rebuildings, and even a dramatic labor strike. But today nothing remains except the park and Highway 7A, still signed in some places as the Barnet Highway.

The experience helped me put things in perspective, though I wasn’t quite sure what that perspective was. Striking for fair pay must have seemed all-important to those long-ago mill workers, yet now it was barely a footnote in history. How would my looming, all-important, panic-inducing deadlines look in five years, yet alone a hundred and fifty? That kind of thinking certainly made all my fears and dreams seem fleeting and insignificant. But perhaps history is not an appropriate scale by which to measure a single person’s life. Humanity may experience centuries, but humans experience moments. And the moment I was experiencing was of a mild winter morning by the water with the snowy hills heaped up like clouds and someone’s dog running by on the path. It was altogether a much nicer moment than any I might have been experiencing at home behind my desk. So I decided my deadlines weren’t, in the grand scheme of things, all that important, and I should go on practicing spontaneity a little while longer.