Recipe for the current moment:
Read something old and shrink time
“The days are long, but the years are short.” – Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the strangeness of time. Consider these facts put together by the BBC, starting with how much our language matters. Take a moment to describe time in your own words: Do you describe it like a horizontal line (behind or in front)? Or like sand in an hourglass (a lot or a little)?
My dear friend in LA described the fires surrounding her home on three sides as apocalyptic. And the stakes of what is happening in the world have been feeling this way. Entropy seems to be catching up to us. At maximum entropy, the physicists say, there will be no future or past. Imagine that.
Time has been feeling to me lately not like a line or an hourglass, but like an accordion. I am living in 2025, and I am living in 1992—the year of my grandma’s journal I’m reading. Perching in this accordion fold has given me some quiet ways of coping with the soul-battering news.
Reading something old shrinks time. Being with my grandma’s hopes and struggles four decades later has been shrinking time in a comforting way. Each of her days has so much to it. And yet, reading her words on the page, the years between us feel like nothing. “The days are long, but the years are short,” as Gretchen Rubin says. I have this quote on a mug, which can make it feel cliché. But when I actually stop to think about the words while sipping, I inevitably tear up. Noa’s three years of childhood have already felt this way—long in the nights and shorter every birthday.
When time shrinks, feelings linger. In this journal, my grandma is recently retired and has just decided to move away from her adult kids and grandkids in Colorado back to her hometown in Iowa. The push-pull of her decision is here on every page. One week, moving is just the thing, and by the next, she has lost her “zest” for it.
She feels for my mom, who is the most upset by her decision to go. But she quotes Mary O’Hara in Thunderhead, “If you go away from . . . the place you spent your childhood in, you can find a better place, perhaps, a way of life you like better, but the home is gone out of your heart.”
My mom is exactly my age in this journal—40 and about to turn 41. When I send her journal snippets, she cries the same tears now that she cried then, missing her mom. Our feelings for our people never go away.
“Baking cookies is the recipe for loneliness.” This is my great-grandma’s saying, memorialized by my grandma on a hard day. She quoted this line in her journal, baked some cookies, and called my mom for a long chat. I read it now, eat some cookies, and call my mom for a long chat.
Reading these words, my heart lifts and hurts. My grandma felt lonely. When she did, she looked back into the past—to her own mother’s wisdom—for comfort.
I’m experimenting with cadence for this newsletter over the coming months. I’ll be back next Friday, January 31.
You have no idea how much I needed to read this. 😭😭😭 Thank you.
Lovely post!