Wait It Out

Deep into summer and at the beginning of a new year

Feb 16, 2025

Dear Reader

Whichever hemisphere you are in, you are right now deep into a heavy season. For me, it is summer in the subtropics. One must remember that.

Also, politics, right?

Take it easy, my friend.

Lower Your Cortisol Levels

If you’re trying to cope with what is happening right now in the United States and feeling defeated about anti-democracy disorder, then I recommend Ezra Klein on Bulwark in this episode of the podcast. This is a discussion of the current state of politics that neither shies away from the seriousness of it all nor gives up hope of corrective change.

Teach Your Child to Sit with Difficult Feelings

Here is another article echoing my argument that one of the best things to focus on as a parent is teaching your children to sit with difficult feelings. That is, not to numb or distract themselves from difficult feelings, not to give up in the face of difficult feelings, but rather, to wait until the difficult feeling passes.

Wait it out.

This time in The Atlantic from Russell Shaw with “Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids”.

One of the most important shifts that parents can make is learning to substitute our impulse to fix problems with the patience to listen. A fix-it mindset is focused on quick solutions, at quelling or containing emotions or discomfort; listening is about allowing emotions to exist without rushing to solve a problem. Listening teaches resilience; it communicates confidence in your child’s ability to cope with challenges, however messy they might be.

Teach Yourself to Sit with Difficult Feelings

You mention wanting to “be there” for your mom even though these conversations hurt you. Many adult children who struggle to say no to their parents grew up serving as their parents’ emotional support system, or absorbing their parents’ feelings, even at the expense of their own. When you told your mother how much her venting hurt you, she responded not by acknowledging your feelings, but by asserting her need to “air her frustrations.” Her response reveals something important: She sees you as a vessel for her emotional overflow rather than as someone with valid feelings of your own. And yet, despite your hurt, you’re still more concerned about her feelings than yours.

From Lori Gottlieb’s advice column in The New York Times. I have mentioned parentification before in an earlier newsletter if this topic is of interest to you.

Friends With Exes

This is a nicely observed story in The New Yorker from David Sedaris about being a gay man with a much-loved ex-girlfriend.

We saw Sedaris recently with my daughter - one of her Christmas presents from us. I have been reading Sedaris essays to my children since they were quite little. “Big Boy”, here in Esquire will forever be their favourite. For me, you cannot go past “Why Aren’t You Laughing” (here in The New Yorker) about his mother’s alcoholism. By old age she was both very loved and quite mean.

On Politics

I want more ease. I want more rest. I want more choices. I want choice for my body. My body that could become pregnant, my body that is covered in scars from gender affirming surgery, my body that is whole and holy and of this Earth.
Every time I drive down my street my nervous system feels scattered, the same last name plastered on the signs over and over again. My neighbors, the ones who I call if I’m in trouble. Who flatten the land so I can park the camper. Who let me walk along their trails. My neighbors, who can’t always remember my name but let me put my trash in their bin, who love June, who I know would have my back if I really needed them.
And yet, our politics are both wildly different and have these strange moments of crossover.

- “On voting in a swing state” by Cody Cook-Parrott.

I am enjoying a lot of Klein at the moment - we’re on the same wavelength and it just resonates with me, you know? - and so, I recommend this Klein podcast episode with historian, Gary Gerstle - Are We on the Cusp of a New Political Order? The whole thing is a very rewarding analysis of political economics over the last century, but I am highlighting the conclusion, particularly here, because it is both hopeful and fascinating:

I am very struck — on the right at the moment, if you look at the kinds of people that young right-wingers read — hilariously, the Bronze Age Pervert, the Claremont Review people — the things that I think would have once been framed in terms of Christianity are now framed in terms of classical virtue. There’s a sort of rediscovery of the Stoics, not the early Christians.
And so there’s something here where — obviously, efforts to remoralize America are not new — but this idea that we have gone wrong in modernity by becoming so individualistic seems to be gathering a fair amount of force.
My read of it is that the Christian right is just too weak and not sufficiently appealing to be the vehicle for it. And so these other aesthetic and ancient containers are being searched for, but there is some kind of pushback happening. I think there’s an argument that that is reaching throughout society, and so I think you see a lot of interest among people in both parties around some of these tech regulations. But I think of that as sort of fundamentally moralistic.
One version of it might be to bring in somebody like Jon Haidt and to say that there is a sense that leaving kids to find their way with smartphones has been just a tremendous moral failure on the part of adults and on the part of government, that we have just sort of abandoned too many young people to the wilds of the internet and the wilds of technology without taking responsibility, a certain paternalism that certainly parents, at the very least, are supposed to have. But the backlash to a world that seems that we’ve just let anybody decide anything — if you’re taking the right-wing critique of this, you bring in gender ideology. You bring in quite a bit.
And I think on the left-wing critique, it has much more to do with the role of corporations in public life. But there’s some sense we’ve really gone wrong.
Well, interesting that we talked about Christianity and Trump. Part of what I’ve been trying to understand is how sincere Christians have been able to give such incredible support to the man who I regard as the most pagan man ever to inhabit the White House… the Christian right has become somewhat contaminated by its blind adherence to Trump and by its too great a willingness to plunge into politics with any messenger, no matter what moral qualities they’re exhibiting.
That there is a movement among conservatives to step back from that and to ground their morality in something deeper, more widespread, something that can appeal to a greater cross-section of Americans, regardless of whether they go to church or not. If there is a moral awakening underway that is not tied to instrumentalizing churches for strictly partisan purposes, which is one way of describing evangelicalism in the last 20, 25 years, then that would be new.
And if that’s what you’re sensing, a kind of search for a different kind of moral foundation, less contaminated by politics, then that would be an interesting development, and it might create a new basis for conversation between the Democratic and Republican Parties, especially if it can transcend the religious-nonreligious divide, which doesn’t get talked about much in America — because anyone wanting to be elected president has to declare their belief in God — but is nevertheless profound.

Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.

- Leo Tolstoy

Comedian, Elliot Steel responding to a Trump voter in the audience. It doesn’t go where you think.

That an open society places an enormous intellectual responsibility on ordinary people. That is to say, in an open society we govern ourselves by means of our opinions. We count them in elections… this means that the quality of our opinions will determine the quality of our politics. And, this means what will really determine the quality of our politics is the quality of our opinion formation, and education and media in an open society.. those are the machinery of opinion formation. And one of the things you are seeing, and certainly in the United States right now, is a complete breakdown and degeneration of opinion formation. And, that is a problem that frankly, it’s not a political problem, it’s a cultural problem. Culture is much harder to deal with than politics, for that reason it’s going to take a while. This is not a question of an election cycle. It’s a much larger problem. And, frankly, I’m not sure what we’re going to do about it. But I think the crisis is that deep.

- Leon Wieseltier

Some people if there’s unhappiness cause absolute chaos and people know this from relationships they’ve had. If somebody is causing chaos, it’s not because there is chaos, it’s because you can hide in chaos. If you are having a row with someone who’s causing chaos, then you’re not having a row… they’re avoiding every bit of it. If they’re just ramping up, ramping up, ramping up causing drama, drama, drama.. it’s because they don’t want to play on the real playing field, you know? So, some people hide. I definitely hide and some people, and once you work it out you see it everywhere, hide in chaos. And you look at some of the people running the world at the moment - they constantly need chaos. They constantly need argument. They constantly need things to be shifting because it means they can’t sit still. And, if they can’t sit still, they can’t ever be caught. And, if they can’t ever be caught, they …don’t have to look at themselves. Because, culturally as well, it’s applauded these days.
People like these people. ‘I’m a disrupter, I don’t play by the rules’, and you think yeah, there’s a reason you don’t play by the rules, because if you play by the rules you’re fucked.

- Richard Osman.

Pain Processed

The finest souls are those who gulped pain and avoided making others taste it.

- Nizariat

What Will Survive Of Us

Why would a girl with such a wonderful father ever need a second one? Because someone must have dropped Tom on his head as a baby. A streak of cruelty ran through him that could be channeled into incredibly destructive behavior, sometimes directed at himself, more often at the three people he loved most: my mother, my sister, and me.
If you had caught up with me 20 years ago, or even 10, I would have showered you with shocking tales. But something happens when you turn 60. You just let go. You finally realize there isn’t ever going to be a reward for thinking about something and talking about it. And you realize (terrible truth though it may be) that, as Philip Larkin—of all people!—reports, “what will survive of us is love.”

From “Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgement - What Seamus Heaney gave me” by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic.

Strange Days

I am a fan of Kanye West’s music and have been vocal about that in previous newsletters. But for the record I am, of course, incredibly repulsed by his antisemitism, which has grown now monstrous1. Ugh.

I am very tired of these hate-filled, nonsensical rants of his. I am even more tired of the way contemporary media allows people with absolutely nothing useful2 (or moral) to say to me to completely dominate my attention.

Ye is a brilliant musician. But when he goes on these rants it is pretty clear to me that what I am seeing is an episode of mania. It’s bitter, it’s uninhibited, it’s hateful, it’s fixated (but rambling), it’s deliberately provocative… it’s one half of an argument with an invisible foe3. I am increasingly struck by how odd it is that we are all engaging with this. I mean, he has a lot of money, that’s why we are seeing it reported on, and why we are reading about it, but really, how odd.

It’s a bit like Elon Musk. The more you see of people like this, the more insecure and vacuous they reveal themselves to be and the stranger it seems that they hold sway over us.

Wasn’t it something to watch the billionaire mastermind opposed to diversity and inclusion giving such a haphazard speech in the White House office? Because he was oddly disorganised and because he was also being interrupted by his four-year swearing and scuttling about, and there, Musk was, like he was just hanging with us in the lunchroom and giving us a pep talk promoting family-friendly work measures, rather than justifying how an unelected person gets unfettered access to a democracy’s treasury?

We live in such a time of contradictions4.

Get More Joy

In this difficult season, Casey Joy reminds us you can chuck out your crappy plants. I mean, come on let’s liberate ourselves.

“A whole human life of struggle, bravery, defeat, triumph, hope, and despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade”

Recently, I recommended So Long Marianne and I mentioned that I was looking forward to the bits of the Leonard Cohen (and Marianne Ihlen) story where he was around the Australian writers, Charmian Clift and George Johnston. Now that I’ve watched it, I can attest to how much fun the Australian couple is and how great the actors playing them are - Anna Torv as Clift and Noah Taylor as Johnston.

Torv and Taylor steal many scenes, but there is a particularly wonderful scene with Taylor in Episode 6, where Johnston soothes Cohen while he is experiencing drug-induced psychosis in the midst of a writing frenzy. And it inadvertently says a lot about a certain part of Australian culture that I recognise.

Jonston captures this ability some Australians have, to be completely present for another’s vulnerability, because they are capable of seeing their own faults so clearly. It’s the bit of Australian culture that is self-loathing, that is given to dark humour, that is completely calm in the face of chaos because it is utterly devoid of judgement. It is truth-telling, but in a gently challenging and patient way. It has seen it all, it has been humbled. It is both rugged and tender.

Interestingly, you can see it occasionally in clips on the Instagram account, Brown Cardigan, when young men are equally amused by and soothing of volatile, old alcoholics.

Speaking of Johnston and Clift, I came across this terrific little analysis of their own writing frenzy by Nadia Wheatley:

In her own account of a summer on Hydra, Peel Me a Lotus (published in 1959), the writer mocks the film stars and their hangers-on who have overtaken the island that in winter was a refuge for Charmian and George and the small colony of expatriate writers and artists who were their friends. The book’s title alluded to the famous Mae West line— ‘Peel me a grape!’— which Clift ironically combined with the notion of the mythical lotus-eaters, whom the Homeric hero Odysseus discovered lolling about on an island covered with narcotic plants. The deep irony now is that Clift and Johnston are themselves depicted as exactly the kind of idle parasite whom she abhorred.
Thus there are many accounts of the couple going to their local grocery-shopcum- taverna for a drink at midday, but few acknowledgements of the fact that they regularly started work at dawn. In their ten years in Greece, Johnston and Clift between them produced fourteen novels and two travel books.
Distance from their markets, together with a tax system that hit them simultaneously in three countries, meant that proceeds of this work were patchy. The 3 reason why these writers headed for the port at midday was the hope that the post-bag aboard the daily steamer arriving from Athens might include a cheque. No one who has a regular income can grasp how nerve-wracking it is to live from one royalty period to another, never knowing how book sales are going. On one occasion in Greece, when the payment from a novel had failed to live up to expectations, Charmian sat weeping in the stair well of her house. ‘It is not being poor that matters,’ she explained, ‘but knowing that one is going to go on being poor.’

Patriarchy

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

If You Force Me to be Your Property I Will Become a Woodchipper

I've been many things in my life-
a scholar, a mother, a laborer, a love,

a singer of songs that are mostly puns,
a dancer with my dogs in the living room,

but if you force me to be an object
I will become very sharp-
A blender. A garbage disposal.

Arsenic serviced our ancestors well
but have you considered
that we are being threatened
with the room where the knives live?

Someone once told me
the best poems are threats.
Well,
So am I.

- Leslie J. Anderson.

People Who Can Walk a Dog Off-Leash

You know it.

Something Nice

Want more relaxing music to listen to during your subtropical summer? Try Modest by Default’s انهم لا يستطيعون or The Curse of Colonialism series.

Sacred Minute

Wash every bowl, every dish as if you are bathing a baby - breathing in, feeling joy, breathing out, smiling. Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute5. Where do you seek the spiritual? You seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do every day. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes become holy and sacred if mindfulness is there. With mindfulness and concentration, everything becomes spiritual.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

blue milk

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