four things for summer

what I'm learning and loving lately

Look! The kids are back to school, and I’m actually sitting down to write, albeit something short and sweet. Here’s what I’ve been learning and loving lately:

Petit Lac Sainte-Marie from our summer Canadian road trip

❤️Living seasonally¹. At the end of June, I was feeling a little sad about summer going too quickly. We had a trip planned for the end of June, and while we were there, I told Grant that I needed more fun and less schedules until school started back up in a few short weeks. So when we got back, we did just that: invited friends over during the week instead of waiting for the weekend, bought up concert tickets to every show we wanted to see, and sneaked down to WNC for nearly a week of outdoor fun.

Also over the summer, I listened to Cal Newport’s newest book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. In it, he recommends what he calls seasonality alot. By that, he means, varying your productivity in a seasonal way, giving yourself breaks from more intensly productive times. In the book, he gives examples of prolific artists and writers who credit this more seasonal approach to their success, pointing out how a factory mindset that dictates more hours worked equates to more productivity works in a factory, but doesn’t correlate to knowledge work, which is what most of us do these days².

I realized that this is what we inadvertently did for 4-6 weeks this summer. We pulled back from our normal schedules and responsibilities, did the bare minimum around the house, and said no to things that we didn’t really want or need to do. It wasn’t an actual sabbatical, but it felt a bit like one. Now we’re going into the fall a little more “topped off” after having had a more restful, more fun several weeks. Obviously, we have jobs with schedules that enable us that privilege, but like Newport says in the book: “you have more control over your workload than you might at first imagine.”

📚Women are better endurance athletes than men. We often talk about how men are naturally stronger than women, but we’re only talking about one kind of strength. Recent studies³ show that women are consistently better at really grueling endurance events than men. I learned this from The Resilience Myth by Soraya Chemaly.

But maybe more importantly, with Chemaly’s help, I learned that there are many different kinds of ways to measure - and to be - resilient, just as they are many ways to be strong. We tend to think of resiliency only in terms of perseverance, optimism despite challenges, and grit - that resilience is a personality trait we need to individually develop. But that idea of resilience is short-sited at best and often just plain wrong.

When we only define positive attributes along such narrow perimeters - like thinking that men are categorically stronger than women even though women consistently beat men in the toughest endurance challenges - we harm ourselves by holding ourselves to unrealistic expectations, but we also miss out on the bigger picture of how best to leverage positive attributes for ourselves and our communities.

Now go read The Resilience Myth.

❤️President Biden. I have many words to say about the last eight-ish weeks in politics, but none of the hope I’m feeling now would have been possible without President Biden willingly giving up his power for the good of the country.

This summer, we took the kids to Canada for the first time. On our way home, we asked the kids what they liked best about Quebec, where we spent most of our time, and our fourteen year-old said that he liked how no one had political signs or flags in their yards, that everyone seemed “more chill.” We told him that, up until 2016 and the rise of Trump, no one had political signs in the yard until 45ish days before the election. No one put flags on their cars or boats or their houses with a candidates’ name on them, let alone flags cussing out the other guy flying in front of their house - all of which we see plenty of on our drive to their school every morning. I’m sad that my kids have had to come of age during a time when they think MAGA behavior is normal, but I’m hopeful the fever is breaking in time for them to see a better alternative before they become adults.

📚As we get older, gauging your own energy becomes more of a non-negotiable. I have a good friend, Laura, who is an Enneagram 5. A distinguishing feature of Enneagram 5s is that they are very skilled at managing their energy. When I first met Laura, this was not something that I did really at all, let alone well. I would just say yes to stuff without thinking ahead to what the rest of that week or day might require of me. I would see her considering the state of her calendar, her spirit, and her priorities before saying yes to anything. Maybe this seems like an obvious skill to you, but I didn’t really begin to learn it until my mid 30s. I’m an Enneagram 7, oldest daughter, recovering people pleaser—the idea of considering my own energy before committing to things was practically a foreign language to me.

As our kids’ commitments have required more time, scheduling, and energy, I’m been noticing even more how careful I have to be with my energy reserves. But it’s also as our kids get older, their problems get more complex, requiring new levels of discernment from us about if and how best to help. Grant and I will have what feels like a relaxing weekend only to get to Monday and keep asking ourselves why we’re so tired despite getting plenty of rest over the weekend. When you add in the state of the world for those of us paying attention to it, it becomes increasingly more of a non-negotiable to be wise about what energy I have to give and who I most want to spend it on.

Honorable mentions. The Olympics were so fun! I might still be watching parts that I missed weeks after they’re over. And then the DNC was so great. We should watch things together more often. I miss that in the age of streaming. Between the Olympics and the DNC (especially that roll call), I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more wholesomely patriotic in my life.

This Garden Study interview about how gardening is a beautiful way to get to know your place (which I would like to write an entire book on if some publisher is reading this). In it Jess, the interviewee says, “Nowhere is boring! Some things are lost forever, I don’t want to pretend otherwise, or minimize habitat destruction, but I hate that destruction can be used to write off whole regions (like abandoned urban sprawl, or post-fracking towns, or the entire midwest.)  There’s no landscape that’s so damaged it’s unworthy of repair.” Amen!

Since it’s an election year, the Republicans are again calling the Democractic candidate “a radical Marxist” because that is their go-to line no matter the candidate. Our neighbor put a note in our mailbox begging me not to vote for “the leftist communist Marxist Joe Biden” in 2020. Because we obviously collectively failed at civic education in this country, this simple and helpful glossary of terms might prove useful in the weeks ahead.

It was a great summer of reading. Check here for my list so far, but my favorites were: The Madonna Secret is my favorite book of the year (maybe past few years), and I want you to read it so we can talk about it please. Go As A River was gorgeous, and I loved every bit of it. Ambition Monster and The Age of Magical Overthinking were great on audio. Funny Story and Part of Your World were my favorite beach reads even though I didn’t make it to an actual beach this summer.

Now it’s your turn: what are you loving and learning lately?!

Happy Labor Day Weekend!⁴

Sara

1. Cracking myself up with this one. Living seasonally belongs on every what I’m leaning and loving list obvi!

2. He also importantly points out that humans have been living and working seasonally for most of human history. In this NYT op-ed that closely echoes his book, Newport writes: “Extracting value from the human brain is not something that can be regularized like installing a steering wheel on a Model T. Introducing more variation into the pacing of our work is not a concession made to labor but a smart recognition of how to produce the best results over time. This type of variation is aligned with the long history of humans engaging in productive activity. It’s the grinding regularity of manufacturing that’s the outlier, not our instinctual attraction to a more natural pace of work.”

3. Recent because we’ve just - in the last 35ish years at most - started studying anybody but white men.

4. Here’s some Labor Day reading for you.