Happy Hour Hack: Chaos and kindness
The Molly Surno edition
Welcome to the Happy Hour Hack, a weekly Friday post of tips and inspiration to take you into the weekend. I always share one thing from my interviewee of the week, along with any ideas I receive from readers, plus some things that are piquing my own interest.
The Forum
Just a reminder that Mother’s Day is in a little over a week. And mothers are kind of our thing around here. So if you know a mother who would enjoy reading what brilliant, creative women have to say about work, family, life, and art, then consider a gift subscription:
My first post after Mother’s Day will be a special two-part interview with the one and only Patti Smith. The full interview will be available to paid subscribers only.
Hack
Our tip this week comes from the curator and cultural programmer Molly Surno. (I highly recommend signing up for excellent newsletter, Push Picks.) As I sit here typing, the floor behind me COVERED in laundry in various stages and all surfaces confettied with scraps of paper from some kind of project by my kids, her words bring me great comfort:
My only motto is embrace the chaos. I think that’s how you can really enjoy parenthood. I tell myself that every day. I’m like, if I feel like I can control this, then I’m not gonna have fun.
This reminds me of the cover art for Sharon van Etten’s album Remind Me Tomorrow, which I should probably make The Creators Forum’s official soundtrack. (Yes, I am trying to get her for an interview!)
The image is a photograph that filmmaker Katherine Dieckmann took of her own kids. When Sharon told her she was pregnant and unsure how she would balance everything, Katherine showed her the photo and said, “You’ll figure it out.”
Kenzie Bryant wrote a lovely piece about it for Vanity Fair. And here’s a quick snapshot of the piece’s wisdom:
Thanks to the minimalist impulse that’s fed Marie Kondo’s come-up and so, so many Instagram accounts, our eyes have grown used to the clean, orderly images we see online. In that way, Remind Me Tomorrow’s art is a visual salve. It’s difficult to look away from the wreckage: the girl, freely denuded except for a tiara and necklace; the boy, diapered and Buddha-like, frozen in a meditative repose. It grabs you, and says that you don’t have to wait until after you’ve decluttered your life by deciding whether every box and bauble sparks joy or what have you. You don’t have to wait until after the world settles around you. You can have that calm right now, randomly and without expectation, amid it all.
Book
I recently went to a memorial for an especially good human being, someone who approached life with a sense of humor and who was kindness incarnate. The whole thing lit a fire under me, as death tends to do, to live better, to be better. So in search of ways to remind myself to try to keep my priorities in the proper hierarchy and to always choose to be nice, I revisited the ever-brilliant George Saunders and his book Congratulations, By the Way. (It’s a slim volume that can be read in less than ten minutes.) It’s a slightly expanded version of a commencement speech that he gave at Syracuse University in 2013 in which he lays out, in his usual humble, hilarious way, what really matters in life: kindness. It should be mandatory reading for every human being. I look forward to gifting it to my children when they’re old enough, but for now, I’m vowing to read it yearly because I’m getting too old to be stressed about the things I stress about. Check out these two snippets:
So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
And so:
My heartfelt wish for you: As you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit.
This sentiment was echoed in my conversation with Molly. She talked about how caring for her children reduced her anxiety about her own life. I relate to that. I remember distinctly when my first child was born feeling palpably relieved, relieved that I finally don’t matter so much, too much. Perhaps it could even mean that we’re a bit kinder for it.
Two Poems
On the same theme of being inspired by loss, here are two poems that I’m finding comforting. The first is a carpe diem–type poem by the great Mary Oliver. And the second, for when there are no more diems to carpe, is an old classic by Walt Whitman. I recently read Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, and it references the last line of section six of “Song of Myself” as a way to help cope with mortality. May we all approach the end with such openness and acceptance.
Moments
By Mary Oliver
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
*From Felicity, Penguin Press, 2015
Song of Myself, 6 [A child said, What is the grass?]
By Walt Whitman
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
*From Leaves of Grass, David McKay, Publisher, 1891
Music Video
I was recently introduced to the video for Weyes Blood’s “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody.” And it’s so surreal and disturbing and pretty, and I wanted to share it with you all: