I can think of three dependable moments when I feel quasi-reborn: the rush of optimism of New Year’s, the first ‘normal’ day after an illness, and then the quiet back-to-normal period after a long trip away. Well, I’ve had all three simultaneously. It’s 2024, I just got back from the Yucatán, and the stomach bug and perennial cough that I caught over three weeks have finally gone away. Everything feels possible, if a little tired and achy. I know that this will eventually exhaust itself. But for now, I’m enjoying the alienness that I feel towards myself. We sometimes have to pull far away from things to get close to them again.
One of the things that I’ve missed most is the cold. When I left for Mexico City in December, people in New York were still wearing sweatshirts, autumn wear, the occasional beanie. Now the winter coats are fully out. People’s necks are wrapped in long scarves that they tuck into their collars. Boots everywhere, of all different kinds now: low boots, high boots, dark boots, tan leather boots. Heads are cloaked by an assortment of hats and hoods. New York is a fashionable place — I do not fit in. But the winter changes the calculus, slightly. People start to dress exclusively for warmth. People are all bulky shapes from excessive layering, with beanies that are mismatched but warm, and hair that is abandoned to the cold air or the sleet. You step inside somewhere and see masses of coats, gloves, scarves, hats, and ear muffs stacked on the back of some tiny fashionable wood chair that no longer fits a person. It is the modern, sleek world of designer aesthetics groaning under the weight of winter bodies.
I usually say that winter is my favorite season. What I mean is that these are the days that justify most of my hobbies and activities. Lazy Sunday mornings in a cafe, curled up in the reading chair with a book at home, putzing around the kitchen, finicking with the houseplants, meticulously looking over every corner of a shoebox apartment with a close eye. These are activities that I think are best enjoyed in winter. In winter, I feel entirely comfortable just sitting around, hibernating, doing nothing.
Speaking of winter. A Nor’easter came through the region a few days back. It dumped feet of snow in the hills, the Appalachians, and the white-picket fence towns all around. Briefly, the city had a thin coat of fluff in the grass, and on the windshields of parked cars. For a moment it felt like winter, especially here in my neighborhood where every third house still has lights on the roofs. But then the white disappeared from the crowns of the bushes, and the sidewalks turned into a transparent mush of sleet puddles. I took a picture from behind a window of Central Park at the height of the flurries. It was something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting. But when I stepped outside, the sky had already transitioned to rain, and despite the chill, it could have looked like any month; April, October, or May.
This is a time of year that is easy to dread. Many people move thousands of miles to escape days like this; grey, flat, quiet, short. When I woke up this morning, just a few minutes before work began, the skies were already gravel-colored and shapeless. I made my carafe of strong coffee, pouring the boiling water over the filter of grounds in the bottleneck, and when I came back to my desk to work it was already somehow darker than when I had woken up. By 11 am I’d already had four cups of coffee. And then I continued on in the afternoon, with mug after mug of tea bags dipped in boiling water, with little drizzles of honey meant to infuse sustenance, I guess. Or sunny-ness. And when the darkness became too much, at about 4 pm, I plugged in the multi-colored Christmas lights that I’d stranded around the perimeter of my ceiling. Even though the proverbial wise men have already visited the manger, I don’t think I can take down the lights quite yet. Everyone else is beginning to wrap the bundles of lights from the yards and toss the browning Christmas trees to the street. But mine are staying up for the winter, I think. These are dark times. It’s worth letting the light in.
But on the topic of the New Year and new beginnings. Many resolutions work off of the logic of ‘reinvention’, I suspect. We’re supposed to fundamentally alter parts of ourselves that we don’t like, using the first day of the Gregorian calendar as a license to make that happen. In the modern world, that’s a quantifiable thing. If you’re trying to be healthy, you lose a certain amount of weight, eat a specific number of acai berries in the morning, or you walk a certain amount of steps each evening, or you trim the amount of time you scroll on TikTok by a few minutes using a little app. You essentially turn your life into a ledger, and tally up the numbers and move around the little elements of your life as if they were beads on an abucus.
At the end of last year, I’d fallen into my version of that trap. After a long time without writing seriously, I sat myself down and determined that the only way to force myself to write would be through measurement. Each day, I would estimate how much I had written, using a spreadsheet I’d built for the purpose. I made graphs with pretty colors, and formulas to minutely calculate the words-per-handwritten page. It seemed to work. I began to write more. I resurrected my blogging habit, and brought it into the modern world (because nothing screams ‘cool’ quite like an email newsletter!). I journaled more often, filling reams of pages with words. It felt great, to sit down at the computer after a long day and see some digital proof of all the work that I had done. The modern world intricately ties worth, and meaning, to numerical values.
But I felt myself squeezing all joy out of the process. I’d write words, near-gibberish, just to meet word quotas. I left flab in essays and newsletters because it fattened up word counts. The same process trickled into my reading. I had set ambitious reading goals for myself, with spreadsheets and tables and different levers to micromanage the habit. I began to read more, or so it seemed. But I’d pick up a book or an essay and skim it for the main point, or read through to the end just to say that I had done so. Barely any of the words and the stories were sticking in my brain. All of the joy of reading as an ‘act’ and an art form was gone. It was just consumption, gussied up with the vocabulary of optimizing oneself.
In Walden, Thoreau famously wrote, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” What he meant is that the technology that we think of as liberating can quickly become its own sort of chains. We ride trains, or planes, because it gets us from Point A to Point B quicker. But suddenly we’re tied to timetables, and spend hours in security lines, and more hours cramped in seating that makes our bodies ache, and then we are achy and exhausted and grumpy during our whole trip anyways. At a point, we wonder: was all that travel worth it? Modern life’s technologies feel similarly self-defeating. We get phones to make life simpler but then spend hours, days, weeks of our lives glued to them. We then download phone apps to help us spend less time on our phones. We use satellite maps, but forget how to get places, and are always lost without them. I watch YouTube videos about how to waste less time online. Think about that. So on, and so on.
Yet still I’m online, and so are you. After all, you’re reading this on a screen somewhere. It’s impossible to conceive of living in this world without this technology, without this dizzying pace of movement. It seems impossible to not ride the train when the whole world is covered with rails. But the world isn’t digital, or covered with rails. It’s a real, breathing thing, of soil, water, mud, grass, sunshine, rain, and snow. I could put together a whole digital plan for how I was going to spend more time outside this year, and tie a digital watch around my wrist that tells me how good the movement is for my arches and my cardiovascular system. Or: I could step outside and walk, and trust my body, and save myself lots of time and effort.
That’s what this year is about for me: taking steps, ‘touching grass’, following the natural rhythms of things, including myself. The same will go for my writing on here. I’ll write about things when they interest me, but I have no grand plans (2023 was the year of abandoning grand plans). Some things will work. Others won’t. Maybe nothing will stick and that’s… okay. I could try and plan out everything I’d want to write about, like an author pre-plotting an easily marketable airport paperback. But that would be writing a lie, a fairytale. “Be it life or death, we crave only reality,” Thoreau said. That’s all I want to get closer to this year; reality, however it looks, even when it doesn’t market well or sell a sexy story. Reality, and life, is all we got. Thanks for sticking with me as I try to scavenge around for it in the dark. I’ll try my best to let the light in.