Happy New Year!
We closed out 2021 with two peaceful weeks at home. A proper winter storm blanketed Seattle with snow that stuck around for several days. We got to spend time with my brother and sister-in-law who live out of town and met my three-month-old niece E for the very first time.
My husband and I traded off walking with her in the Baby Bjorn. There’s nothing like that feeling of a tiny being asleep on your chest and it is one of the things I especially miss from when my son was a baby. It was the most enjoyable stretch of days I’ve had in a long time, just being together with nothing to do, nowhere to go, relishing in each other’s company.
One of my favorite January rituals is the purchase of a fresh, new paper planner. For years I’ve used the classic Moleskine daily planner but I changed it up this year and got the Appointed 2022 Year Task Planner…
We have a new duvet cover from Rough Linen that I’d been wanting for two years. It was well worth the wait and it fits perfectly with our Wool Room comforter…
Every January we send out a New Year’s card. I really enjoy the hand-addressing part so I often don’t have the envelopes pre-printed. However writing our return address over and over feels tedious. This year I ordered this custom return address embosser. Problem solved.
My husband and I aren’t drinking but he just celebrated a birthday and I wanted something to pop open to mark the occasion. I found this incredible non-alcoholic Copenhagen Sparkling Tea at my favorite neighborhood coffee shop, Sound & Fog. (They also have a fantastic selection of natural wines.) Grab a bottle if you ever see it, it really is remarkable…
The Metropolitan Opera has a wonderful podcast Aria Code and this week I revisited my favorite episode - Puccini's final opera, Turandot (season 3, episode 1). In each episode the guests explain what the aria is about (so it’s great if you’re like me and know nothing about opera) and then finishes with a live performance of the aria. This one features legendary Italian tenor Franco Corelli singing “Nessun Dorma” in a Metropolitan Opera performance from 1966. Crank it up…
And because it feels so good to watch someone who’s at the top of their game work at their craft, watch Jonas Kaufmann sing the same here…
Just before Thanksgiving, I checked out Jenny Odell’s excellent book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy from the library. In fact, I still have it at home because I’ve renewed it three times.
The book is slim but vast in scope. There are so many important things she writes about, making connections to a number of ideas that might not seem related upon first glance.
“…the need to periodically step away is more obvious than ever…we absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to. More than that, as I’ve argued this far, we need distance and time to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all…By spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle…you are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”
So often the conversation about how to avoid digital distraction or how to better manage our relationship with our devices and content/media consumption focuses on some tool or “hack” that helps us create boundaries - like instilling tech sabbaticals, keeping our devices on do not disturb, not sleeping with our phones on the bedside table. But Odell explores “the relationship between discipline, will, and attention” and how “if we’re to truly encounter anything outside of ourselves, we have to want it.” And we have to do the work of it.
“Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention…A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all“ type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. ..I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.”
“If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in its living ongoing events. To choose the world is…an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present.”