We got chickens. The chicks are adorable, terrifyingly vulnerable, curious fuzzballs. Elena named them Puffy Puff, Pinky Puff, Popcorn, and Delfina. These names had been on the books for months, long before the chickens actually arrived, but strangely, they fit: Puffy Puff was clearly the Silkie, her poofed white crest already visible, absurd and regal as the hats of British royals; Pinky Puff was easily the Buff Orpington, the most classic-looking of them all, a storybook chick; Popcorn was the Easter Egger, plucky and speckled and owlish and a good inch taller than the rest; and the elegant and distinct black Australorp became Delfina. Listening to a chicken podcast (not only is this a thing, but there are many to choose from) Jorge discovered the concept of “Chick TV.” This refers to the act of watching one’s chickens for extended periods of time, which is supposedly more riveting than television.
I believe this, because Elena and I already subscribe to Duck TV. Early in the pandemic, we left the house twice a day: once in the a.m. to go for a long run, with me running and Elena biking; and once in the evening for a walk. On the a.m. journey, we’d go to a small pond by Carnegie Mellon to feed the ducks. These Elena dubbed Fred and George, after the twin brothers in Harry Potter. Fred is the girl; George is the boy. Elena came to know them so well that Fred ate out of her hand.
We forgot about Fred and George for a long time, once we’d returned to a somewhat more normal – but still not really normal at all! – school and work life. We’d salute the pair whenever we drove or biked by, but in days filled once more with activities we didn’t have time to stop and observe their flat-footed waddles, their gulping of grubs.
This past weekend, though, we stopped. It was both surreal and reassuring to find them almost exactly the same. George is very strutty and opinionated, but he is a bit too scared to come close himself and instead observes, quacking loudly, while Fred eats the chips at Elena’s feet. I could not help myself from turning this into a teaching moment to explain to Elena the phenomenon of certain boys making a giant fuss of their importance, greatness, genius, courage, etc while a woman quietly and fearlessly steps in to actually do the thing. Still, we love George. Recently another male duck, whom we’ve dubbed Charly, has arrived at the pond and he has George all in a tither. George and Fred come over for their chips and then George spots Charly out of the corner of his eye, grunt-quacks his vexed disapproval, grudgingly tears himself away from free calories, and tries to waddle-chase Charly out of the pond. Charly calmly accedes and retreats a few dozen feet, but always pops back up and continues unperturbedly seeking grubs in the mud. George catches sight of him again, takes on a great woe-is-me air of noble suffering, and the cycle repeats, with George very satisfied with himself each time he returns from the chase. It is Duck TV, and Elena and I get a huge kick out of it.
The other morning, Elena woke up late – around 8:15 – and I gave up on any possibility of getting to school on time. I served her oatmeal and went to prepare her lunch and when I came back to the table, she was totally immersed in a Babysitters Club book. I was about to urge her to get ready, but I didn’t. Instead, I went into the living room and sat down. I watched. I watched my seven-year-old raptly and carefully absorbing each page, turning it and moving on to the next, taking bites of oatmeal with maple syrup. My daughter, age 7. Our living room. That table. That wall. Those plants. This was my life, I thought, as if I were looking back on it from a great distance.
It was a luxury just to watch her. How rarely we really see each other. Our lives. This is the house I live in. This is my husband, my child. The morning where we always do this, fuzzy purple hat, oatmeal. Life TV, I thought. This is Life TV.
Recently, I read an article on NPR about how Finland and Denmark are still ranked some of the happiest places on earth. The article posited that what contributed to this happiness might not necessarily be some sort of dreamy, romantic, exceptional quality of life (although hey, free childcare and health care and college don’t hurt!) but rather an acceptance of life as the imperfect grind it often can be.
The piece quotes the Finnish writer Jukka Savolainen: "Consistent with their Lutheran heritage,” he explains, “the Nordic countries are united in their embrace of curbed aspirations.”
What a depressing concept! we Americans think. They aren’t Living Their Best Life! YOLO! Why not optimize every spare moment of the day making your dream a reality? Why not realize every freaking inch of your potential, and then find more potential behind it, opening your own wellness gym and then product line and then YouTube Channel, or building your own travel brand and then podcast and then bestselling book as you cross the Americas by e-bike? Why not start your own dog breeding business or prairie homeschool? RIGHT NOW! LIFE IS SHORT! Why not buy and work and struggle your way towards complete perfection, complete freedom? (Which reminds me of the single greatest T-shirt I have ever seen, at a rodeo in southeastern Ohio: “I can’t hear you over the sound of my freedom.”)
But really, I think it’s a bit like money: you have to have enough to be happy. To be safe and content. But once you hit that threshold, having more actually doesn’t make you happier. Safer. More content. I wonder if it is the same with your dream life. You have to have a day-to-day that is satisfying enough. That carries deep personal meaning and connection. For some that might be more in career, others more in family or community, others more in location and lifestyle. But once you cross a certain threshold: does it have to be perfect? Do you have to live on a mountain in Hawaii growing all your own fruit and penning novels on your palm-fringed patio and running monthly women’s circles with your tribe? Maybe! But…I’m guessing…probably not.
This is the question: do you want to watch your own Life TV? What do you see when you watch it? A sunny-cloudy, warm-and-chilly early spring morning at the pond, orange duck feet going pad pad pad on the concrete, fat feathered hips a-waddling. A tiny chick peeping and skittering around and then suddenly bobbing its head and falling fast asleep on the spot. A little girl reading The Baby-Sitters Club at a kitchen table.
I downloaded a new Kings of Convenience album and was listening to it the other night as I cooked. From the fog of thinking and chopping a lyric drifted through: “she’s free from the chains of freedom.” Ohhhhhh, deep, I know, I know! (You get a feel here for what twenty-year-old me might have soliloquized about with great feeling in her dorm room at the University of Wisconsin over Keystone Lite.) Still. Bear with me. It was eerily fitting for what I’d been thinking about: that sometimes, the best thing to do instead of thinking big, thinking out, thinking at all, is just to watch some Life TV. To free yourself from imagining that you’re so free, or you want to be so free, or if you work harder you’ll somehow be freer, or you have to do something right now to free yourself.
Then, during a run, I listened to an On Being interview with Oliver Burkeman, about his work Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The podcast quotes this excerpt:
“No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance. It’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself all this time to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming, but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a life well spent, you’re free to consider the possibility that many more things than you’d previously imagined might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them on the grounds that they weren’t ‘significant’ enough. From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards, or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy, or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.”
For a few months now, I have been tracking the moon. I got myself a $3 moon calendar from Etsy and each morning I make note of the moon’s stage in a journal. Yesterday was a new moon: we’re moving towards a full on April 16th. It is surprisingly lovely to remember the moon. How easy it is to get caught up in the hubris of our small frenzied existences. To forget this presence that rocks the oceans, that shapes our own rhythms in ways we are simply too busy to recognize.
It feels good to see that cycling around: first, full, last, new. To look up in the sky and recognize waxing gibbous as if it were a familiar companion, your own life winking back at you – where are you on this one small day? Under this moonlight? What’s playing today on Life TV?
Recommendations:
Really enjoyed this Radiolab episode. On Being with Oliver Burkeman. Kate DiCamillo On Being, and this beautiful letter (I cried) about why children’s books should be a little sad. I taught this Robin Wall Kimmerer piece this week and loved reading and rereading it. So elegant. I’m thrilled to have an essay in this gorgeous anthology, Letter to a Stranger, which is composed entirely of just what it says – letters to strangers – and makes for absolutely perfect reading if you want to relax with a cup of coffee and be transported around the world and feel all the things.
“I'm 39 years old, divorced, and seven months pregnant with my first baby, who was conceived not in the throes of passion but through the painstaking — and painful — process of in vitro fertilization. Rather than blending genes with a husband, I used donor sperm that I bought online with a MasterCard.” My beloved friend Jenny wrote this gorgeous essay you should read right now!
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