Checking In
Something we do at hotels, something we do with ourselves.
In a hotel, I could be a different person.
The effect is strong for me. I feel it as soon as I step into the lobby. Great hotels work hard to cultivate this powerful pull, to create a world you can enter while the rest dissolves magically behind you — but even a crappy budget hotel offers a watered down version of the same tantalizing promise of possibility. I give my name at the desk. I present my credit card. And for a tiny moment, I am untethered from whatever reality brought to me this hotel, open to whatever may happen next.
Here in the back half of January, I’ve been thinking about beginnings. Adulthood doesn’t come with many. Once you reach cruising altitude in grown-up life — whatever that looks like for you — the work is more maintenance than navigation. I’m for this. Committing to the people, places, and work that anchor us to a course in life is meaningful. It can also be boring. Settling down demands discipline and faithfulness and focus. It means doing a lot of mundane things a million times over. It becomes easy to zone out of your own life.
There are plenty of ways to discover you’re doing this, but with enough time, marriage is one ~fun~ way to find out. You might find yourself traveling together in the same vehicle toward two different destinations. You might find you’ve drifted way off course. Or you could realize you’re years down the path you wanted, but you’ve somehow missed most of the sights along the way. What is that Talking Heads song again….this is not my beautiful house?
Jivan and I have been married just long enough for our changing selves to bump into one another. My solution to feeling lost is to go backward. His solution is to stop moving. Last year, these natural tendencies left us somewhat distanced even when we were close together. Thankfully, 2021 rolled under like a wave and the freshness of a new year has broken over both of us. Things already feel better, clearer, closer, even just a few weeks in. But I’m doing the work now of trying to understand the year behind us and the speedbumps we dragged our weary selves over. I’m reading one of Madeleine L’Engle’s memoirs right now, and she says this about marriage:
“Our love has been anything but perfect and anything but static. Inevitably there have been times when one of us has outrun the other and has had to wait patiently for the other to catch up. There have been times when we have misunderstood each other, demanded too much of each other, been insensitive to the other’s needs. I do not believe there is any marriage where this does not happen. The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys. I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, Two-Part Invention
I find this comforting. And really, I wonder if last year’s heaviness was less about us as partners and more about two individuals squirmily trying to adjust to the ways our season of life and global moment in time have changed us. The thing is, we’re always changing, even if it’s so slight we don’t realize. The trick is to change in the direction you want to end up. I say trick because it’s not easy. Life is hard, and so often we’re getting through the moment rather than living in it. Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” which has always been a cold, welcome slap of water yanking me out of my dream world and firmly into the present reality.
Oddly, hotels are so delightful to me because they do the exact opposite: they offer a taste of a different life, of the different person I could be. That ideal hangs in the air like perfume, and I come home wearing it. Leaving loveliness behind is hard, so I don’t. I return remembering I can be that person, or at least a person leading a life that matches the beauty of whatever other world I imagined.
Of course, the chance to start again isn’t limited to hotel stays. It arrives in a rush of endorphins after exercise you didn’t initially want to do. In that rare eye-of-the-bath-dinner-bedtime storm of little kids when for one half-second, you have the presence to think of the parent you want your kids to remember. In the dark of early, early morning, with your alarm’s first ring. These are the tiny, quiet chances for circling back to that person you dream of being, and they are very, very easy to miss.
My patience for irony and sarcasm is pretty much exhausted at this point, meaning I can’t tolerate any cynical jokes about failed new year’s resolutions or even any nihilistic refusals to make resolutions. I have nothing but admiration that any of us would want to resolve anything at all. Once we click past most of the standard adult milestones, we are granted so few natural opportunities to reflect and initiate change, to start over. It seems arrogant to waste the ones we are given, including, most prominently, the start of a new year.
We’re weeks, if not days, away from the point when new year’s resolutions falter. The bracing blue clarity of January lessens; life crowds in. It is big and intense, beautiful and overwhelming. You will forget what you intended, or let yourself off the hook just this once. You will mess up. Your priorities will get knocked askew and your good intentions will pile up like books on a nightstand. And that’s okay.
But remember that these are the days and this is your life and you don’t need a hotel to check in.
current status
reading :: The Fading of Forgiveness, Comment // This essay is excellent. Tim Keller explores the rapid and significant changes in popular thinking about forgiveness and reconciliation (where does forgiveness fit in cancel culture, for example?) quoting Hannah Arendt, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King, Jr. before shifting into a brief but dense overview of the countercultural Biblical teachings on forgiveness. I keep thinking about this line: “Forgiveness is always a form of voluntary suffering that brings about a greater good.”
cooking :: Oven-Baked Polenta // It’s rare for a recipe to change my life, but this oven method for making polenta just did. Thank youuuuuu, Carla Lalli Music. You bring water to a simmer (normal), you whisk a stream of polenta into it vigorously (normal), and then you slide the whole covered pot into the oven and don’t give it another thought until it’s time to finish it with parm—essentially, skipping right over the part where you have to babysit a burbling, spattering, needing-to-be-stirred pot of hot polenta on the stove.
loving :: Obelisk Square Tapers // A friend gave me a pair of similar square tapers that I hoarded for far too long before finally deciding that ordinary life deserves drama too. When you burn them, the candles melt inward, creating a delightful castle turret effect on the four corners. Their height and saturated color add a visual punch anywhere you need one.
watching :: Station Eleven // Based on Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel of the same name, this show exploring life after a devastating global pandemic is exquisite. To be honest, the appeal of watching a “pandemic show” in the midst of a pandemic was extremely low for me, but I’m glad I gave it a try anyway as the show is masterful with lovely writing and character development. The pandemic is really not the story here, but merely a powerful frame for exploring bigger questions about civilization, connection, art, and grief. What holds us together when the world as we know it falls apart?
cooking :: Steak Au Poivre // Looking ahead here — but we always stay in for Valentine’s Day and cook something special. Some years it’s uber low-key and comforting like date night rigatoni, but if you want to pull out all the stops, I suggest going old school with steak au poivre. It’s delicious, it’s passionate (I mean, you light the pan sauce on fire!), and it’s just old-fashioned enough to feel fun. Splurge on wine and eat a bracing salad to go with your fancy steak.
reading :: The Case Against the Trauma Plot (The New Yorker) // I hadn’t really thought about the ubiquity of the traumatic backstory in basically every cultural artifact we consume these days, but now I’ll see it everywhere. “‘If Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet,’ Elie Wiesel wrote, ‘our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.’ The enshrinement of testimony in all its guises—in memoirs, confessional poetry, survivor narratives, talk shows—elevated trauma from a sign of moral defect to a source of moral authority, even a kind of expertise,” argues Parul Seghal. If you can commit the time, this essay is a well-researched, insightful read.
listening :: Dance for Me Wallis — I was staring at this painting in a museum gallery when this song came on the museum’s speakers and I almost cried it was all so overwhelmingly beautiful for a single intense moment. / Similarly, a choral version of Fleet Foxes’ “Wading in Waist-High Water” recorded in a church early in the pandemic is heavy with lump-in-your-throat beauty. / Amber Mark “Softly”— This EP is a hard turn away from either of the previous recs, but I dare you to listen to this very sexy female-led R&B without dancing.
the real feel
In its current state, the world could use a little more cringe. Cynicism is the prevailing attitude of our age, rendering an earnest celebration of Valentine’s Day absolutely out of the question. The critiques of the holiday ring true—it’s grossly commercialized, it’s shallow and narrow in scope, it misses the point—but honestly, you could aim those same critiques at any American holiday. Isn’t turning everything inside out in constant pursuit of irony exhausting? Sure, candy hearts and red roses by the dozen ain’t it, but love is. And I think we should seize the opportunity—no matter how it comes to us—to celebrate the many ways love shows up in our life. So don’t be too cool for Valentine’s Day this year. Smooch your partner a lot. Stop to remember specifically why you adore them and tell them. Plan now to give them a V-day present, why not! But not just your partner. Fling your love around generously, splashily: friends, parents, childcare workers, clergy, etc. Now more than ever, people just need to be reminded that they are loved.
last words from someone else
I know this is where I usually drop in a tweet that made me laugh, but this time, I’m going to lean into sincerity. In a thread of 40th birthday life advice, food writer Helen Rosner tweeted a tidbit that has already proven profound for me in practice:
Until February — do something that leaves you sweaty and exhausted, have friends over for dinner last minute on a weeknight, take yourself on a ramen lunch date.