First time here? Here’s what this newsletter is.
Would you like to buy this print? Every week, there will be ten prints (and that’s it, forever) available for $8 each (including shipping). Each 5x5” print is numbered and signed. Be sure to choose “WEEKLY PRINTS ONLY” for your shipping option at checkout. Last week’s sold out, so hop on while you can! Here’s that link again.
A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Hey There Friend,
The elusive concept of balance seems like it might be the universe’s greatest puzzle. Eat what you want, but not too much. Choose happiness when you can, but know when to greet and embrace less comfortable emotions. Stand on one leg because this is yoga class and that’s part of it. The list goes on. This newsletter errs on the side of “cut yourself some slack,” with the assumption that you might be a person who often puts too much weight on the other side of the balance: the beat-yourself-up side, the work work work side, the no-pain-no-gain side. In a broad sense, you need both. But moments where the balance is exactly right are rare (if not fictional).
I am writing this on my phone at the doctors’ office. I know you’re not supposed to listen in to anyone else’s anything when you’re at the doctor, but my ears have minds of their own. I just overheard a well-meaning (and probably scared of lawsuits!) person behind the desk say kind of loudly in the phone, “You’ve been feeling this way since last night? You SHOULD have called the doctor on-call last night, then. You shouldn’t have waited til now.” I totally understand why people say to each other (and to themselves) “should have” or “shouldn’t have.” I also know that in the grand universal enigma of balance, those words have no place. It’s like trying to plug the letter “A” into a numerical Sudoku. You’ll have to get that out of there completely before you can even begin to solve anything.
You might have made a choice, or a mistake, that screwed up your balance. You can look back and see that clearly: “Wow, I ate half that pizza last night all by myself and now I feel horrible. I shouldn’t have done that. And who are we kidding? I ate the whole pizza.” Sometimes the shoulds and shouldn’ts carry more weight, because your choices affected someone else negatively. You yelled at a stranger on the train; you talked about someone behind their back and they found out; you lied about something to benefit yourself because that was easier in the moment. And for all of these actions, there are consequences. There do not, however, need to be punishments.
No matter what choice you made in the past, there’s no version of reality in which you can go back in time and unmake it. You are here, now. There is only forward. The danger is that in re-seeking balance, you might end up over-adjusting. These giant swings are recognizable when you see them or hear them: “For the next six months, I won’t eat any dairy or gluten or sugar” or “I’m going to buy Sarah a lavish bracelet to make up for the ways in which I may have hurt her." Extremes like these set us up to fail. In truth, moving towards balance happens in slow motion.
What if instead you could acknowledge that balance is a never-ending puzzle, and no matter how aggressively you try, you will probably never solve it? If you stuck all your jelly beans on the “impulse” side of the scale, begin moving one jelly bean at a time over to the “intentional” side. However long you think it will take to re-calibrate, double that expected time in your mind.
I can’t stop thinking about how scary it would be to hear a medical professional say, “You should have called last night.” Or, moreover, how quickly I would move to, “This is all my fault, I have already failed, it’s already too late, I shouldn’t have bothered calling at all.” It’s terrifying to call in the first place. If it was you who was on the other line with my doctor’s office today, I want to say this to you: You called this morning, and that was enough. You are moving in a different direction. With all you have inside you, I hope you can focus moment-to-moment on the immediate next step, rather than swinging to a field way out in the blurry future, or looking behind you at what you might deem a mistake.
Love Always,
Sophie
Add this to your to-do list.
Learn the name of one plant that is currently alive in the place where you live.
Close your eyes for three whole minutes and see how many different sounds you can identify.
A drawing.
Sammi and I had two New Yorker wins this week! We had our first-ever Daily Cartoon published on Friday, and then another one in the print magazine that just came out. Here they all!
Audience participation.
Last week’s prompt was: Write one sentence that includes as many pleasing words as possible. One person submitted a sentence, and it is lovely. Here it is!
Caroline Wold (@norwegian_wold) submitted this:
Sustained by ego, and not much else, the suggestible scholar nevertheless ascended the ranks of excellence in his class.
(I don’t know why, but every sentence I wrote with my favorite words made me sound like a snobby Brit with a pipe in a library.)
This week’s prompt is a scavenger hunt: find something in your house that makes you feel happy when you hold it. Take a picture of it and feel free to include a few sentences about it, if you’d like. Email your picture to me by hitting “Reply” on this email, or emailing me at sophielucidojohnson@gmail.com . I’ll put them in next week’s issue!
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about pregnancy. Skip it if you don’t want to read about pregnancy.)
Luke’s boss went out of town this week, and I don’t normally work in a school building on Wednesdays, so we decided to have a “Babymoon.” We never did have a honeymoon, and we’ve both been so busy lately, it seemed like a fun idea that we couldn’t really afford but oh well. We live in Chicago, so we decided to stay in Chicago (cheap transportation!), and go places we don’t normally go. We stayed in a suite in a fancy hotel. Since it is the middle of the week, this was about a sixth of its normal cost. The fancy suite had a few things going for it: it had a big couch (that we didn’t sit on, but it was there), and a throne (ditto the couch), and a large bathtub and a rain shower. The tub was big enough for two people, which is really the thing I most want in a bathtub. Would the world be better if every single person always had access to a private, hot bath that would cover all their body parts? YES. DEFINITELY. WE SHOULD PRIORITIZE THIS. Other things were not as great: like, there was only one light switch for all the lights in the whole suite. Or, I called the to ask if I could get another pillow (pregnant Sophie really likes an overabundance o pillows), and the person at the desk said, “I will look for one and then I’ll call you back,” but she never did. In truth, I liked that the fancy hotel was imperfect. It reminded me that all things humans try to make and do are really just performances, and that perfect only exists in nature (like in bones and in milkweed pods). I also decided that I don’t have a lot of interest in brushed steel or large, granite design features. The hotel was a few blocks from my doctors’ office, and I had an appointment this morning at 8:30 a.m., where everything about the fetus was declared to be “perfect,” and that took three minutes to discern, and then I left. (The doctor also had a lot of questions about keeping chickens in the city, because apparently it is on my chart that I have chickens.) I would have found this an annoying use of my time if I hadn’t been able to walk back to a room with a big cozy bed very quickly. I am coming off as really snobby here, and I apologize. I am not usually a fancy hotel person. I don’t usually need more pillows. I do not normally feel annoyed when doctors have questions about chickens. Pregnancy has made me kind of a worse person, and I’m hoping that will go away. Anyway, really my point was that you can get a great deal on a hotel room if you go mid-week — and also they gave us a 30 percent discount for being Illinois residents on a “Staycation,” which also seems like something the rest of the world should know about. And also, we went to the Chicago Comics Artists exhibit at the MCA (really that was the whole point), and while it was hard to walk for that long, it was AMAZING, and it closes in October, and I highly recommend it. I’ll probably write more about that below. And a “Babymoon” doesn’t really have to mean anything except you and a partner (or partnerS) gazing at each other and talking about how grateful you are for each other. Because that was the highlight.
Extras.
If you’re in Chicago, please go to the MCA and visit the Chicago Comics Artists exhibit. The artists were so generous with their time and their artifacts, and the catalog is a never-before-collected collection of Black Chicago comics artists, which is very very freaking cool.
Wasps and moths are really impressing me this week, even though yellow jackets just decimated one of our beehives (and actually, it seems to have decimated both of them, but I don’t want to be too negative).
I’m back in the classroom again, and I recommend talking to seventeen-year-olds.
I bought a large spinning wheel from Ikea this summer, and I have already used it a TON. Let me know if you get one and need ideas.
We made this recipe for shelling bean minestrone soup (how do YOU pronounce that?), and found the techniques to be really interesting. The soup itself is terrific, especially right after it’s done.