“The secret to life is clean underpants.”
So said Ms. A, a wise woman I interviewed recently for the book, and I swear to you, in context, it made a lot of sense. She’s in her mid-60s, and has been there, done a lot of that. A LOT of that. We were, as you might have guessed, talking about how overwhelming life’s big decisions can be, especially when there are so many options. Here’s a little more of what she said:
Just keep going forward. One of my theories of life has always been do sweat the small stuff. When life is overwhelming you, wash your underpants. Make sure you have clean undies in the drawer, clean dishes to eat off of. Start paying attention to those tiny things that are within your control. And before you know it, something will happen, and it will become easy for you to resolve.
True? Who knows. Counterintuitive? Sho ’nuff. I bring it up because, today, I’m preoccupied with big things: A dear friend’s mom is terribly ill, and there’s nothing I can do about it, except offer words from afar. Additionally, I was just in New Orleans, a city I love passionately and have in many ways made my home away from home, which I’ve watched (and done a little to help) recover, slowly, in the years since Katrina. But the oil spill (ahem, FU, BP) may well devastate the entire region far more than Katrina ever did. It’s heartbreaking. Overwhelming. Infuriating. There’s a sense of impending disaster–and all anyone can do is wait. But I have faith in ‘my city.’ It’s come through a lot of darkness, with shining colors.
Because I was gone, I just got around to watching the latest episode of “Treme” last night, and one (of the many) scene that stuck with me involved John Goodman’s character (as is par for the course: his is one of the best characters on ANY show, EVER). If you don’t watch, the show takes place in New Orleans, the first year after Katrina, and in that particular scene, he is reacting to the news that city officials are considering canceling Mardi Gras. He’s an extremely intelligent man–a professor–and yet, over this bit of news, he loses his shit. Why? After all, in the face of such chaos and devastation, what are a couple of parades and some beads going to solve?
I think it’s a bit like what Ms. A was saying: there’s comfort in the small stuff. For a New Orleanian dealing with post-Katrina life, small stuff might well be one of the world’s biggest parties. For me, when I’m freaked out, I cook. The more chopping and stirring involved, the better. (Hello, risotto.)
We’ve all been told not to sweat the small stuff. But sometimes, it’s all we’re capable of sweating. Sometimes, the shit hits the fan, through no fault of our own, and we’re left–if you’ll pardon the metaphor–in a shit-filled room, with nothing to do but adapt. Sometimes we’re in a place where something big has to change–and we’re the only one who can change it. Sometimes having undies to wash or a meal to cook or a parade to plan–something, anything to focus on–is distraction enough to soothe. And, after a little soothing, we’re generally in a better place when it comes to tackling the big, nasty stuff.
And so, today, in between reading the horrific predictions about what might become of the habitat and industry that are reliant on a healthy Gulf and shooting rapid-fire words of love and support to my friend, I went for a run. I went to the grocery store. And I’m about to cook an epic meal that involves one hell of a lot of chopping.
(I did the laundry yesterday.)
Barbara Kelley
Shannon Kelley
In response to: The Case for Sweating the Small Stuff
I am trying to write. I am not trying to be “a writer”, a term so nebulous and fraught with anxiety (where will I publish, how do I get an agent, will my future children ever eat, who’s paying for health care?) that I don’t dare ever utter the word in reference to myself. I use the verb to describe how I waste most of my time (usually with a modifying verb, as in “I try to write”, “I attempt to write”, “I can’t write anything today”), but “write” and its iterations remain only vaguely descriptive of something I sometimes do – never nominative.
It’s the small stuff that is of paramount importance to the writer, be s/he professional or not. We all know this is true for the actual words on paper, the product of writing: particular details of color, descriptions of things, names of people and fruits and streets. But what I mean is even more essential than this: I mean the small act of sitting down. The difficulty to a writer isn’t writing a novel, I daresay; it’s writing an opening sentence. Let’s be more honest than that: it’s sitting down and opening a notebook/blank document on which to write that opening sentence.
If you’ve ever freaked out about feeding the twelve people you just invited for dinner, and are standing in the kitchen with food everywhere and pots strewn about and absolutely no idea how you’re going to pull this one off, you have no choice but to start intimately with the small stuff: chopping the first onion. And then the second. After the sixth onion, you’ll probably realize that everything is going to be fine if you keep attending to the one small task before you.
Or if you’ve ever decided to paint the living room by yourself, you’ve probably come back from the paint store with two gallons of paint, a drop cloth, a few rollers, a paint tray, painter’s tape – and promptly freaked out at what a giant task you have before you and briefly considered returning everything and hitting happy hour early today. But then you just do what you have to do: you move the furniture, you start taping off the ceiling and the floor. Pretty soon there’s paint on the wall and you’re humming.
Maybe you lived with someone once, and this someone unexpectedly broke up with you and asked you to move out. Overwhelmed with the enormity of building life anew and finding an apartment and divvying up your books and finding a better job so you can afford yourself, you might find yourself, night after night, sobbing into a double Johnnie Walker or the expensive Malbec that he bought when you were in Argentina. But when you’re ready to get on with things, you’ll find that the most important thing is the small step forward: checking Craigslist for apartments for rent. Visiting the apartment. Checking Craigslist the next day for more apartments. You start to realize that you don’t have to solve the whole problem of being poor and heartbroken and displaced all at once: you just have to take one single step in the direction you know you have to go, and do it again and again until it works. Until you are in a fantastic and cheap one-bedroom in the middle of the village, and you’ve just been offered a job, and you’re falling in love with your new next-door neighbor.
Our great fallacy is that we expect big answers to big problems, when it happens that answers are rarely as grandiose as problems suggest. Answers are usually available to us if we willing to start small: chop an onion, move the bookshelf, ask Jonas if that place next door is still available.
For me and my writing, I’ll just find a chair to park my booty in every work day and open my computer. I figure my task is just to sit down and show up. That’s the smallest step I can possibly take while heading in the right direction. And the smallest step is the only step we have to take.