The alarm rings at five. By seven-thirty, I’ve completed tasks, answered emails, woken my partner. Two coffees, three glasses of water, four vitamins. The car arrives at ten. The plane departs at one. I flicker between stress and ease, anticipation and rest. The airport is a zoo, a field hospital in hiding. Look, that guy’s not wearing a mask. That guy’s not wearing a mask. That guy’s wearing a mask made out of a silk sock.
William James, one of my favorite writers, delivered a lecture in 1907 on the concept of functional psychology, about the amount of energy available for running one’s mental and moral operations.
Practically every one knows in his own person the difference between the days when the tide of this energy is high in him and those when it is low, though no one knows exactly what reality the term energy covers when used here, or what its tides, tensions, and levels are in themselves.
Travelers through LAX and JFK during the era of COVID-19 know what the man is getting at. It’s a very good lecture, but what piques me is when he talks about the phenomenon of a “second wind” – that feeling when a person feels it urgent to press on with a task. When “enough” has been met, perhaps exceeded, but necessity says otherwise. And suddenly, after a breath, there’s renewed vigor, an ease in the fingers, a freshness of mind.
I find second winds to be incredibly interesting. They show how little we know of our own reserves, our potential; the human mind and body have depths of resilience and suppleness its inhabitants rarely touch. And not only of motion or “productivity,” whatever that means, but peace and feeling and depth of thought.
I don’t have to tell anyone that globally, this animal, our animal, is undergoing a trying period, yet another, and here comes the Omicron variant, on top of an exhausting two years of pressures and illness – and it all can seem, I think, somedays pretty difficult to sustain. The rate of life has changed. Each evening we feel more alive or less alive, sometimes acutely. Parents of young children (and carers of older people) know the grind’s wax and wane much deeper than me, and also its impossibilities. But look at humanity’s resilience and our adaptations. How we find new muscles and new tones. It’s a period of difficulty and struggle and mourning, but also one with so much to admire.
The plane landed in the evening. I’m variously half awake, half asleep. A dulled traveler, sick of the book I’m reading and thirsting for a martini. But on the drive from the airport, I look out the window, riding into a glittering Manhattan, with all of its rhythms, and think how a new calendar year is around the corner, and here I am lucky and fortunate to have a mind to think and decide and write, a partner to love, a body to walk. And so much exists out there to inspire – the thing on which, for me at least, I trust tides of energy to rise and rise.
From tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement” for supporters – my Sunday bulletin with three-plus things I loved recently – some recs this week for a bunch of high-falutin’ because why not.
The French know not all butters are equal. Some for cooking, some for casual scraping, some for jambon beurre. And then there are the butters you bring out for guests.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly email published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful. “The Sunday Supplement” is his weekly recommendation bulletin.
Rosecrans’s latest book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.
Why was this one published on a Friday? Because my clumsy thumbs pressed the wrong button on my phone in a windy park in lower Manhattan. 😵💫