blog

This piece in the New Yorker “How Dating During a Pandemic Is Like Being in a Jane Austen Novel” (by Amy Collier) is tongue-in-cheek but makes some really good points.

I know one lady who met the man of her dreams online during the pandemic, they corresponded/video chatted for months. Now they’re moving in together.

I’m a happy middle-aged single person who seems to have lost the urge to date. But if I still had that inclination, I would probably find the imposed “social distance” somewhat beneficial. It would keep me from rushing into things, as I tended to do when I was younger.

More thoughts later. For those of you who are not already in a committed relationship, and are interested in dating, how has “pandemic dating” been for you? Have you found any positive aspects?

“2020: The Year the Future Was Cancelled,” read the Economist headline. It showed up in my Facebook feed the other day. Along with a link to an article from a magazine called 1843 bearing the tagline, “What happens when you can no longer look forward to anything? We’re all finding out, and it’s not pretty.”

“Wow, what a load of nonsense,” I said to myself without even reading the article. (Even if I’d wanted to, it’s behind a paywall.”

I shared a screenshot and wrote the following:

This post screen-shotted below shows very limited, glass-half-full thinking (and dare I say CONSUMERIST-rooted). Actually there is plenty to look forward to, always. “Cancelled the future”? Pshaw!! The future is NOT cancelled; we have tons of work to do, and plenty of healthy beautiful ways to enjoy life still. Most of all we still have each other.

Other comments in response to the post I read, voicing similar sentiments:

“Amazing new opportunities to streamline what we do, in the new Zoom era. We always can (and must) look forward to making opportunity for work and acquisition of knowledge in the worst of times…”

“Lousy article. What about the joy of reading books? Watching films? Learning a language? Playing chess? Cooking? Eating home made food with family? Conversation?”

“It’s easy to stay present when there are no challenges. This is the kind of year mindfulness practice is for. All you ever have is now.”

Amen!

Whoops! I really thought I had made a post for you awhile back, about how to overcome lethargy, procrastination, and other forms of what I think of as garden-variety existential malaise. A malaise that befalls most of us from time to time. At least in the modern, industrialized, anomie-laden world; not sure about elsewhere.

It can feel like trying to move through the gravity of Jupiter with a bowling ball in each hand. It can feel like crawling through jello. You can’t even motivate yourself to pick up an envelope and put a stamp on it, let alone walk to the post office. So of course, your activism and small-business launches and calling your long-lost cousins and starting an exercise program and other great plans you have become rather-um-difficult.

I may have buried the topic in another post, instead of going with my original plan to create a post with the above title. Or, maybe I was overcome by the very inertia of which I intended to write! Ah well! Ç’est la vie. No crying over spilt milk.

Yesterday, I was going to add to that post (which it turns out does not exist) a link to this new, utterly superb post by one of my perennial go-to writers on the human condition, David at Raptitude. (See the link and quote at the bottom of this post.)

David pretty much says everything I was gonna tell you (and maybe did tell you, somewhere, buried in some past post that is resistant to being unearthed with the Search function). He says what I was going to say, and more.

My advice in a nutshell, when you are hit by the bogdown fog, the inertial lead blanket, the ungrateful dread, or whatever you call it, is, “Just … Start.” Start something; start anything. Even if it’s just washing a dish, sharpening a pencil, or cutting a tag off a new pair of socks you’ve had sitting around for months but haven’t worn because you have not yet worked up the momentum to pick up your scissors and cut the tag off.

(Is anyone else this existentially sluggish at times besides me?)

(Oh, and if by chance you do remember my posting about this topic, and have any idea when it was or when I titled it, do me a favor and drop me a line, OK? 😉 )

Anyway! Without further ado, I give you …

Further Exploration:

How To Handle The Beast (David at Raptitude.com): “You might know the Beast too. It has many forms. … Whatever the form, the Beast has certain characteristics. It saps your sense of agency and forward motion. It robs you of what might feel like your birthright: the basic ability to function to society’s standards. You lose the sense that you can steer the boat. The Beast may stay away for weeks or months or years. Then one Thursday afternoon, when one too many things goes wrong, it darkens your doorway again and you know that life might be different for a while. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s a good thing. Many of you do though. For what it’s worth, I’ll share what I’ve learned about tangling with the Beast. …”

“Human activities are at the root of our descent toward chaos. But that means human action can help solve it.

“Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century. It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere.”

— U.N. Secretary-General of the United Nations, speaking last night at Columbia University.

A colleague inboxed me this talk in the wee hours, and I happened to be awake, so I stayed up til 5 watching it. Fifty minutes very well spent, and that is saying a lot from a person who doesn’t like watching much video. (Includes worthwhile introductory remarks before; and worthwhile Q&A from students after.)

Please, please take time to watch this today, or as soon as you possibly can. Thank you. And share with everyone you can. Thank you again. Remember we are all in this together.

A friend who I phone-texted this to just now just commented, “We just seem hell bent on overindulging and fouling our own nest. There’s a desperation in the over consumption that is sad beyond words. How disconnected are we from each other and the daily tasks that could be done with attention and focus, making us less desperate and unhappy. I guess it comes down to a redefinition of happiness. Its not found in status and things but rather found in mindfulness. My two cents worth.”

And I wrote back, “YES. Your two cents is gold. And this is why I get up in the morning, this is my life mission. Every gig I do feeds into this.”

Making peace with nature, working with nature, radically reducing the footprint of human activities. This essential speech outlines our grave situation, but also offers great hope; outlines initiatives in progress; gives actionable suggestions for individuals as well as institutions.

Further Reading:

CDC: Don’t Travel for Winter Holidays Either (USA Today article in Daytona Beach News-Journal): CDC caution against Thanksgiving travel (which many people disregarded) is repeated for Christmas/winter holidays. The public-health recommendation can help take the emotional angst out of choosing to stay put. (Sometimes making the choice for purely environmental reasons can feel harsh, especially for those of us who would otherwise be very seriously tempted to travel to the ends of the earth to be with our families, carbon footprint be darned.)

The Climate Debt the U.S. Owes the World (Bill McKibben; The New Yorker): “… we can’t meet our moral and practical burdens simply by reducing our own emissions; we’ve already put so much carbon into the air (and hence reduced the space that should rightly go to others) that we need to make amends.”

A mere 1% of the population causes half of global aviation emissions, The Guardian reported recently.

My friend/colleague Chris Searles has a nonprofit called BioIntegrity that’s putting the word out about nature-based climate solutions. Chris polled a climate-action Facebook group the other day, “Should this 1% pay — out of their own pockets — to offset their aviation admissions?”

My response:

Yes! They should. At one point in my working life, I was part of this 1%, flying up to 11 times a year for a total of over 40k miles a year.

After I stopped the work-related flights, I purchased carbon offsets for them, and for every other flight I could remember taking in my adult life. I chose Gold Standard credits at the recommendation of a colleague I trust as a “low-footprint expert.”

The price was peanuts, maybe a couple hundred dollars or so if memory serves.

I have quit flying. And, I feel I should not fly again except possibly in extreme emergency (if such a scenario even exists), and if I do, I should purchase triple carbon offsets.

Just because I have made this choice doesn’t give me any right to tell anyone else they should. (More about that later.) But I do hope a lot of people, particularly those of you who agree with this blog’s message, will quit flying entirely, or radically curtail your flights, and when you do fly, purchase carbon offsets. They’re cheap. If you can afford to fly, you can afford to buy carbon offsets. (I made a post about carbon offsets awhile back; will dig it up for you. –> OK, here you go! Mitigating Your Footprint with Carbon Offsets.)

Further Exploration:

• The Systemic Climate Action Facebook Group

• BioIntegrity Facebook page

• BioIntegrity website

• (Update Jan 5, 2022): I just found out there’s a “Flight-Free Community,” with branches in the USA, UK, and Australia. I just visited the Flight Free USA website and took the flight-free pledge for life; was going in that direction anyway but this helped me make it official. I love the personal stories from people on the Flight Free USA page. My favorite observation is from a guy named Joshua Spodek in New York City: “People think of planes bringing them to distant loved ones, forgetting that flying in general makes them far away in the first place, relying on planes to fix the problem that planes created.” And the story from a guy in Cali who looks my age or older and has pedaled 100,000 miles on his electric bicycle!!! Wow!! (I heard about the FF community when a friend in the Socially Conscious FIRE Facebook group shared about it. I’m so happy to be constantly finding more deep-green-supportive communities to add to my resource files, for you and for me too!)

Over the years, without my really paying much active attention, my attitudes about tourism have shifted. I mean, I’ve never been super keen on conventional tourism, as in going on “getaway vacations,” cruises, or package tours (though I have done some of that). And I imagine many of you probably have similar feelings.

I’ve tended to prefer long stays and immersion. Like when I spent five weeks roaming around England, Scotland, and Wales back in the 80s. (My first time going overseas by myself.) Or when I took a month-long rail trip around Japan (I was living and working in Tokyo at the time). On those trips, the streets and everyday shops were always more of an attraction to me than the comme il faut visits to ruins or museums (though I could see the value in visiting ruins and museums, and did a good bit of that too). Really though, I would almost always rather just sit around chatting with some local in a pub or café. Or walk into a grocery store or convenience mart and see what’s on the shelves.

So it’s not as if I was ever a very tourist-y tourist. But, in recent years, I’ve started to feel more cautious about even the “educational” type of travel. Some of it is concern for carbon footprint. (But to address that concern, a traveler can purchase carbon offsets, something I have written about on this blog.)

But even beyond the environmental concerns of long-distance (especially international) travel, I have noticed within myself a more humanitarian, social, economic concern that until recently I might have had a hard time articulating. In the past few months I’ve stumbled on some readings that not only expressed a lot of what I’d been feeling, but also brought me to a deeper level of awareness around travel. A few months ago I started building an electronic “scrap file” of links on this topic. I added and added to it, but then turned to other topics and forgot where I stashed the “tourism” scrap file(s?). But as I find it/them, I will be sharing the links with you here. Watch this space! (Update: Yay! I just found one of my link-stashes! See below.)

Further Exploration:

• “Are We Doing Vacations Wrong?” (Yes Magazine): “From the economic instability that tourist cultures bring to their overuse of natural resources that exacerbate climate disasters, to glaring labor exploitation and gendered oppression that keep poor women of color living under the boot of White supremacist patriarchy, participating in the mass tourism industry is more likely to spread social inequality than staying home would.”

• “Lovely Hula Hands” (Haunani Kay-Trask, Revolutionary Frontlines blog): “I would imagine that most Americans could not place Hawai’i or any other Pacific island on a map of the Pacific. But despite all this appalling ignorance, five million Americans will vacation in my homeland this year and the next, and so on into the foreseeable capitalist future. Such are the intended privileges of the so-called American standard of living: ignorance of, and yet power over, one’s relations to Native peoples.”

• “Pandemic Returns Hawaii To Locals” (AP article in Daytona Beach News-Journal): “Locals, many of whom depend on tourism jobs, have long felt ambivalence about living in an island paradise that relies heavily on visitor spending, but many saw an upshot to a health crisis that threatened their livelihoods – reclaiming favorite areas long overrun by crowds. … ‘What the pandemic did was give us all a moment to pause, a number of months, to rethink everything,’ said state Sen. J. Kalani English. ‘What it proves for us is that old model of tourism, which is, you know, mass bring 11 million visitors a year, didn’t work and people were tired of it.'”

• U.N.: Skiing May Not Spread Coronavirus But Slopes Still Risky (AP article in Daytona Beach News-Journal; article focused on European countries known for ski tourism): “… the danger of coronavirus spread from skiing is from many of the other activities linked to the sport. The real issues are going to come at airports, tour buses taking people to and from ski resorts, ski lifts … and places where people come together,” Ryan said. “We would advise that all countries look at the their ski season and other reasons for mass gathering,” he said, warning that indoor socializing after skiing might be particularly risky.” (I’m including this article because it made me wonder if a few Euro ski-resort town locals are — like some Hawaiian locals mentioned in the above-linked article — breathing secret sighs of relief because maybe the lack of tourist crowds will give them leeway and time to enjoy the natural attractions of their own places.)

“Bad blogger! Bad blogger!” is what I’m saying to myself right now. Not in too stern a voice, because overall in my world I am feeling kissed by grace and have much to be thankful for. So I can’t manage to get as annoyed with myself as I usually do over my electronic “scrap habit.” Still, I am a bit irked with myself.

Back in the 80s, I was one of legions of young women who carried a giant purse. (It went well with my tall, puffy, DIY-frosted hairdo and my hot-pink leopard-print headbands and such.) The mega-purse would get filled up with a tangle of various papers and receipts and jewelry and junk, and periodically I’d have to disgorge the purse’s contents onto a table or something to sort things out. Well, friends, I haven’t changed all that much; I just do it with smaller purses (or mini hip packs) now. Therefore nowadays there are natural physical limitations on how far-gone I can let myself get!

Unfortunately, though, I also do an electronic version of that dysfunctional scrap-tangle habit. And the electronic version is a lot less self-correcting, let me tell you! Not only do I have multiple places to store stuff (my favorites are the iphone Note Pad app, Drafts section of this blog, and texts I send myself), but there is pretty much infinite space to store it! Unlike my purse, which (even those gargantuan purses from the 80s) has limitations on space, forcing me to clean them out eventually!

Well, in the spirit of one of my favorite permaculture design principles, I’m going to turn a problem into an asset. Make lemonade from the lemon of my organizational foibles, as it were.

Lemonade part 1: First, I’m sharing this foible openly with you, which I hope will help you feel comfortable with any glitches you have in your own organizational style and creative process. Thus (I hope) helping you in your work.

And lemonade part 2: I’m going to be giving you an unvarnished glimpse of my post-building process itself. This post, expressing my thoughts on tourism, may take awhile, as I try to either find the links from memory, or locate the electronic “scrap box” where I have been saving up all the links for you. You know, the links for the “Further Exploration” section, which I provide with posts on big topics when I feel compelled to share with you more voices than just mine. This sharing of my post-in-progress is also in hopes of helping you feel more comfortable with your own organizational quirks (if you have them), so you can get your creative activities flowing.

Right now, I’m starting from zero-ish. The file “scrap box” for my post “Thoughts On Tourism” is not in the Drafts area of this blog where I thought I had left it. If it’s not in either of my other two favored locations, I will attempt to cobble together the links from memory.

Human memory is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it works better than we expect.

Because, for various reasons, travel and tourism are a very emotional subject for me (a big part of why I let my “blog post gestation period” drag on for so long!), I may start the post by building the Further Exploration section first, and letting that lead me into writing my actual thoughts.

I’ve been “pregnant” with this post now for weeks-turning-into-months! Yikes! It feels great to make this “confessional” post though, and to get started (re)creating the actual post.

I hope you have found this preamble post helpful. We all (well, most of us) procrastinate from time to time, and we all (most of us anyway) misplace our “file folders” from time to time. And probably most of us feel blocked in our self-expression from time to time. I’m happy to be expanding my “bag of tricks” for navigating through those self-created rocky shoals. And I wish you the best in your own navigation, and am here to help you in any way I can.

And I thank you for blessing me with your presence, Dear Reader!