Go Forth And Putter

PLUS: a peek behind the curtain

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Dear Friend,

The word my partner Luke uses to describe himself most often is “content.” Can you imagine? Feeling, almost all of the time, like you are essentially at peace with how things are?

Drawings I made of Luke, a content person.

It does sometimes rub off on me, a person who is usually somewhere between anxious and excited (or doing yoga, when you’re supposed to actively release feelings of anxiety and excitement). The content moments pop up when I’m having tea, or listening to someone else talk about plants, or holding my daughter with her head on my chest. When they come, I try to hold them, like they are little birds who are visiting my hand for a short spell.

But Luke seems to feel contentment most of the time.¹ He is content enough to eat soup cold, out of the fridge, and find it delicious and satisfying. He is content enough to sometimes lie on the couch and actually read through a New Yorker, never looking at the table of contents. Enough to wake up from a bad dream and fall back asleep into a good one.

I’m not sure why he is this way. Was it nature? Nurture? Scientists could study him and never find out. But I’ll tell you something he does a lot, that you might not, exactly, do. He putters.

A putter place.

This is his word for what it is, and now I can’t imagine that there is another word for it. He likes to putter on the weekend; in fact, he says a good weekend is defined as one in which there has been time allocated to puttering. I like to fill my weekends with plans and people; Luke likes to make sure he putters. This is data for the contentment compendium.

Puttering has to do with cleaning and organizing; but it isn’t those things. You begin by identifying an itch in your personal space: something like a jar that has a lot of different types of things in it, or a shelf of plates where you can see a layer of dust underneath everything. Maybe a hem on a dress that has come undone. Maybe a timepiece that needs a battery. You scratch the itch — that is, you take on the implied task — and then, crucially, you let it lead you elsewhere.

It is a foil for the mental load — a concept describing the emotional work involved in managing a household. A quick caveat: I’m about to write about a common dynamic in heterosexual couples, particularly those with children. That doesn’t mean that this dynamic doesn’t exist in different configurations, or is confined to a single gender dynamic: rather, that this is overwhelmingly common, and it’s a problem. Also, you absolutely need not be cohabitating with anyone to putter. Onward.

In a wonderful, viral comic published in 2017, the cartoonist Emma describes what it’s like to take on “a simple task” in her house. She begins by clearing a table. Putting an item away leads her to a dirty towel, which leads her to doing a load of laundry, which leads her to a sack of groceries that were never put away, which leads her to a shopping list, and so on and so forth. Two hours disappear, and the table is still not clear. In contrast, men tend to (1) wait to be asked to do something; and (2) only do that one thing, without noticing everything else that needs to be done.

I remember reading this comic (and if you haven’t read it all the way through, do that now!), and recognizing the dynamic from… oh, every cis-het relationship I’d ever been in or directly witnessed? So much of the necessary emotional labor that it takes to keep a household working is shouldered, thanklessly, by women. This continues to be true eight years after this comic made the rounds. It’s maddening, and as a culture, we have to keep talking about it and challenging it until something changes.

I am about to be very vulnerable with you and share that I comforted by The Office. I don’t like this about myself, but it’s my truth. (Also, please don’t try to convince me not to feel shame. It is useless.) Anyway, there’s this episode where Pam, trying to move away from being a receptionist, refuses to make a copy at the new, three-person company where she’s working. She says, “I make that one copy, and I become the girl who makes copies, and by the end of the day I’m receptionist again. And the worst part is, I like making copies. The paper comes out all warm and stuff.”

A weird thing about the imbalance of emotional labor is that a lot of household tasks are inherently satisfying. It feels good to organize a drawer or put up a framed picture you love. When household labor is divided more equally, people have the opportunity to actually enjoy decanting the lentils into tall jars and dusting window blinds.

It makes sense that Luke finds contentment at home easier to come by; he grew up learning to be less burdened by the assumed responsibilities of running a household. In our 10 years of living together, we’ve had lots of conversations about how to manage tasks; some have worked better than others, and ultimately, we’ve landed somewhere that feels equitable. That makes it easier for me to approach the topic of puttering with curiosity rather than dread: a thing I greatly wish for you, too.

There are secrets to puttering that I was never taught, but have slowly learned. Here they are.

• Most important is to focus on joy over perfection. The aim of puttering is to feel vaguely useful and in motion, without a sense of how something needs to look when you’re done. This is nearly impossible, but if you can achieve it, it’s liberating. You probably don’t have two hours to putter. Likely, you have something like 20 minutes. And so:

• Put all the clothes that are on the floor in one basket. Don’t fold them or put them away. Just get them all in a basket. Wow, the floor looks so nice and clean!

• If you’re organizing a drawer, sort the items, but don’t commit to putting them all away right now. You might put a category of items (like “uncategorized”) in a Zip-Loc bag and then put it back in the drawer. Meanwhile, you’ve corralled all the quarters in that drawer! You have $3.25!

• Allow yourself to just clean off the table without feeling bogged down by all the other tasks it leads you to. If a task doesn’t feel pleasing to do right now (example: THE LAUNDRY), don’t do it. You are puttering.

• Here I will say that I often forget to put the vegetables away when I go to the fruit market. Luke almost never does it. Our vegetables don’t rot; they get put away tomorrow when someone realizes that a broccoli is missing.

• Refuse to apologize when someone comes to your house and you haven’t vacuumed.

• Alternatively, if you like vacuuming (I LOVE vacuuming crevices, sometimes more than sex), don’t be afraid to pile everything that was on the floor onto a couch or something and vacuum. It’s great to have big plastic bins in rooms that get dirty so you can just throw shit in there.

• Let one thought lead you to another thought. Do not beat yourself up for not finishing a task. Part of puttering is being unfocused. If you are clearing a shelf and go to put away cereal and then feel like sorting the cereal boxes by color, go for it. The shelf doesn’t have to get all the way cleaned off!

The suggestion I’m making here is simple, but it’s also not; it’s the main thing I try to do in all aspects of life: Allow yourself to hold multiple contradictory things as true at once. You can have hurt and baggage and long-held triggers around household tasks, AND you can enjoy them. You’re allowed to engage in joyful nesting even when there are worse and more boring tasks that ought to be done. There is a restful space inside of doing that you can choose to occupy from time to time.

And now a secret that no one has known before this moment: I have a little drawer labeled “Junk” that exists among of set of other labeled drawers. Into this drawer I put objects that I’m excited to sort someday; things that sort of tickle me when I hold them. There’re rolled up two dollar bills in there, tubes of lip balm, an unopened cat toy, nail clippers. The Junk Drawer is a present that I give to myself on days when I want to putter. I put on my audiobook, pour a glass of bubble water, and shut off all my obligations, while I idly decide where a keychain of a seahorse should go.

In a month where so many people strive to set goals that are measurable, realistic, and three other acronym letters that I always forget, here’s an easy one: from time to time, do a mediocre job at a task that calms you. Just because. Life can take place in small strokes, too.

With Love, Love, Love,

Sophie

PS - As always, good luck out there bravely facing all that breaks your heart. I didn’t include that line in this email because this is not a heartbreaking email. This is an email about breaking down your cardboard boxes if it brings you pleasure. Nevertheless, a lot is heartbreaking right now — especially in the darkness of winter. The realities of climate change are front in center in the news; and the endless horrors of war. And here we are, talking about puttering. Your heart is breaking anyway. I love you. Good luck.

Housekeeping

• I posted this on Instagram this week, but I’ll put it here too. It’s the GoFundMe for a student I worked with this year who isn’t going to be able to finish the school year – let alone his degree – because of debt. He is a tremendously special kid, and it breaks my heart that he has done everything he was supposed to do, but still won’t be able to earn the degree that would be the difference between one future and another for him, because of systems of oppression way beyond his control. Any amount you give makes a difference. If you want to learn more about him, or about my thoughts on why this matters, throw me an email. I have lots and lots of thoughts about this.

• A little behind-the-curtain, too: I finished a manuscript for my book KIN: The Future of Family last month, but it’s about 25,000 words short of where it needs to be. I have roughly a month to turn around the next edit. I’m working with a fabulous team — my editor sees the vision for this book better than I do, only because I have trouble believing in my own capacity to write it (hence this newsletter’s existence), and I believe strongly in its message. But if you hear from me a little less these days, know that I’m working nonstop on that. I am hoping that the heavy lift will be worth it in the long run.

• Finally, I’m overwhelmed and moved by the number of you who pivoted to paid subscriptions during the holiday season. That’s a huge gift; it allows me to continue prioritizing this newsletter, which is my favorite project, hands down. (It’s my favorite because of you, and you know that, right?) If you’d like to join those ranks, here’s the link.

Loose Thoughts

• I really need suggestions for background music as I’m doing all this writing. What do you like to work to? I’m tired of my go-tos (Alan Gogoll, Cosmo Sheldrake, Gia Margaret, h hunt), and am seeking new pastures.

• I have had a really clear Top Ten Favorite Foods for the last 20 years or so, but I think that it needs a rewrite for my grown-up palate. The absolute, honorable truth is that my favorite food (listed as PIE since I was 15) is actually bread. Like, bakery bread that’s warm. A boule. A new boule. There is no time that I am not going to eat a fresh bread.

• To answer your question: 1) Pie, 2) Broccoli, 3) Kale salad, 4) Tacos (sweet potato and black bean), 5) Popcorn, 6) Popsicles, 7) Bagel, 8) Pizza, 9) Burritos, 10) Sweet potato

• To answer your question: Yes, some of those are more categories than they are foods, and people often want me to be specific. It is less about content than it is quality. For pie: whatever fruit is in season. For pizza: wherever they do the crust right. For burritos: a vegan one that isn’t mostly lettuce and slimy peppers.

• And actually, I lied. I pulled this list up in my Evernote app and my jaw dropped. I had already changed number one to “morels on toast.” I really love morels on toast, but does that beat out just a really good slice of bread? Probably not. Back to the food list drawing board.

• After years of waiting, we got a Terra for our yard. The main takeaway: there is DEFINITELY a great horned owl out there.

• I’m more excited about this than I’m letting on.

1. I asked him, and he said, “Yes, that’s true.”