I have no clear ambitions in life. I am convinced that one’s idea of success is relative and that formulas for happiness are narrow. But where does my compulsive need for “more” and “better” - which both exhilarates and consumes me - come from? And what is its price? At the beginning of the year, between my hometown Carei in Romania and my new home in California, I weighed in my resolutions, looking for answers.
In the world, I'm laid-back and spontaneous. Late at night, for a few years now, I've been religiously compiling lists of my ambitions in a folder on Google Drive, which I've named Monthly Evolution. The general themes are the same every month, but the subcategories vary periodically. Recently, I placed at the top of the list online lessons on improving my swimming technique, a free Harvard course on happiness, and a series of carb-free dinner recipes. In the archives of ambitions, among links to jobs, internships and potential scholarships, I found the hopes below, underlined.
- less stress
- buy your external hard drive!!!
- finish what you start!!!
Before Google Drive, from my room in the small town of Carei, in Satu Mare County, I used to line up my aspirations in diaries. At 17, I wrote down: I feel I'm wasting away. To the despair of my parents, cleanliness-obsessed, I quoted poet Nichita Stănescu on my wall: Who is more beautiful: people?... or rain?, convinced that I must rise like the lyrical ego, somewhere above the world of ordinary people. Between pseudo-poetic notes and a perpetual rejection of mediocrity - a fear that obsessed me at the time - my adolescent mind returned to the same urges: do more and better. Although I was getting astronomical grades in school, was friends with everyone, and was dancing around at every event within a 20-mile radius, it just seemed like it was not enough.
After being part of the national Latin Language Olympiad team in 2011 (which actually exists), I went to university in London, where I studied languages, anthropology and documentary film, and reinforced my work hard, play hard philosophy. For six or seven years, I accepted most social invitations, even if it meant changing the metro three times after an evening shift at work, and took on every essay and exam with a messianic attitude. The huge city and the endless possibilities of interactions, discoveries and openings enticed me, and overwhelmed me. From time to time, I dreamed of a self-imposed army stint, a retreat to a sanctuary where I could read the stack of books next to my bed, thread my eyebrows at regular intervals, learn Russian or Spanish from scratch, and finally watch Tarkovsky movies.
2020 unexpectedly offered me such an opportunity, with the coronavirus pandemic, when quarantine and social distancing became a way of life everywhere in the world. I was ready to go into isolation. Maybe out of panic, maybe out of a selfish need for time to myself, or maybe both. After the cinema I was working at temporarily closed, I gave in to a kind of autopilot mode: I intensively cleaned every corner of the house I was renting with friends in London and, of course, I created a special quarantine folder in Google Drive. This time, I set myself up with a more disciplined routine than ever before: workouts with a friend turned personal trainer, a 9am to 5pm writing and studying schedule, 50 pages to read a day, news only in the morning, no alerts on my phone. When someone invited me to chat on Zoom, Whatsapp or Facebook, I would worry that I was running out of time, failing to tick everything off my elaborate schedule. In the evenings - as a relaxing activity - I'd devour The Last Dance, the documentary about the career of basketball player Michael Jordan. His blind motivation animated me. What time is it?! Game time, echoed the Chicago Bulls chant in my quiet, secluded evenings.
In the essay On Becoming An American Author, writer Alexander Chee talks about all the times he thought he was living through the end of the world, from the outbreak of the Iraq war, to the events of 9/11, to Donald Trump's presidency. At each of these possible ends of the world, the question that kept coming back hauntingly to Chee's mind was: "After all, what's the point of doing anything?" In 2016, when Trump's election victory shocked an entire world, the term self-care was among the most searched words on Google. Self-care remains one of the most searched for terms in 2020, alongside panic attacks, anxiety, and banana bread recipes.
"If I have an injured leg, there are two ways to get rid of the pain. One is to heal the wound. If the treatment is too difficult or uncertain, there is another way: to cut off my leg," writes philosopher Isaiah Berlin. This is also the strategy of liberation adopted by ascetics, stoics and Buddhist sages, and involves retreating into oneself, "into an inner citadel", as Berlin called it, whereby the individual becomes immune to the forces of the outside world. If we cannot control the outside world, we can at least try our luck with the one within.
But my conscientiousness has not stopped the pandemic. I couldn't move to California's oceanfront for the documentary film fellowship I'd been planning on for a couple of years. Instead, I headed to my hometown, Carei, where it felt as if I had gone back in time and space. The languor of my teenage days was still there, now paired with the inquietude and alienation of the pandemic. The lists in Google Drive gradually stagnated, and the strictness of a daily schedule of activities no longer motivated me as it once did. Instead of trusting the zeal I had relied on for so long, I began to question it. I have no clear ambitions in life, I am convinced that one’s idea of success is relative and that formulas for happiness are narrow. Yet where does the compulsive need for doing more and better - which both exhilarates me and consumes me- come from? And what is its price?
The family and the mythology of working hard
Before I moved home, I spent time in isolation in Brasov, with my brother, a psychiatrist and history fanboy. On the long Brașov - Carei route, telling our stories, we agreed that in Romania, urbanization was the first time that our grandparents' generation - those born in the 1930s - could more easily overcome the condition of their own parents. This is how people changed their physical place in the world and, with it, the order of their lives. In traditional, pre-modern society, there were no ambitions for self-improvement, explains anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu in a Dilema Veche article. In such a society, people could fulfil themselves, not improve themselves, but the "modern man detaches himself from fate and becomes his own project," Mihăilescu wrote. As my father pointed out at the dinner table, once we arrived home, after the urbanization and industrialization of post-war Romania, many had the opportunity to be the first something in the family: the first to finish more than six grades, the first engineer, the first to go to college, the first doctor.
My grandfather on my mother's side reluctantly left his land in the village of Hotoan in 1976 to work for CFR (railroad services) in the neighboring town of Carei. With a now stable income in the city and a new economic reality, he could provide a better living for his family. But my grandfather couldn't come to terms with the idea of collectivisation and the reality that his beloved land was no longer his. He had completed seven classes, and at 31, he was the oldest of all the trainees training for the CFR in Cluj. To keep up with the younger and more educated, he hid in the boarding school bathroom at night to study. Our parents, part of the generation born in the first half of the 1960s, were the first in their families to go to university, which gave them more career options: my mother became an economist and my father a judge. However, for them too, ambition and motivation came first and foremost from material need. When my parents were my age, now 27, they weren't dreaming of self-improvement, balance and happiness, but finishing college while working full time, changing diapers, taking care of family and thinking about building houses.
Hard work, discipline, self-sacrifice, resilience is something I always admired in my parents. In life you don't just do what you like, my parents would say half jokingly half seriously if I complained about anything. After their job hours, our folks would proceed to work on their allotments, turn their crops into pickles, zacusca (homemade tomato sauce) or multicolored jams out of all the fruits they’ve been tending to. On holidays - especially when we started going abroad - we did as much as we could, in heroic attempts to visit everything. In Vienna we passed through 6 museums, panting through rain and gloomy weather. When my parents came to visit me while I lived in Paris for a while, I set them up with a tour that physically wiped us all out. We dragged one another from one bench to another in the Louvre, perhaps because I thought it would fulfil their wish to not be lazy and visit a city properly.
Our folks worked and continue to work blindly because respect for hard work, industriousness, the shame around laziness, the categorical rejection of waste, familial duties, self-sacrifice, are principles that have remained well imprinted over generations, especially in small communities like Carei. Last summer, when I visited a good friend in the south of France, her mother asked us to pick the apricots that were rotting on their tree. In the balmy Mediterranean sea breeze, we slowly got to work, but soon broke for lunch. Chatting away, my friend's mother opened a bottle of wine, we lingered on, got lazy and then headed for the beach. It was a magical day, but I don't know if the apricots went bad after all. I remember thinking that my parents could never do that; they couldn't relax knowing that, in the tree, the apricots are rotting away.
At Christmas, when my mother prepared enough food to feed an army for just a handful of people, my father told us about the walls he is planning to break down, the changes that need to be made to the house we live in and the cottage he is building in our allotment, where we will rest sometimes in the future, unsure when. “The zeal of our parents, marked by the social context in which they grew up, is a social ritual that involves sharing the fruits of their labour with those around them, whereas the self-improvement of our generation is much more individualistic”, explains anthropologist Elena Trifan, author of a PhD on personal development. I ask my parents if the habit of working all the time prevents them from relaxing. They tell me that now that they are both over 55, they are taking it easy, but I knew the real answer. I remember swimming in the sea with my father when I was a little. His face was beaming in the sunshine and in childlike enthusiasm: we work all year round for moments like this, he said then.
Surroundings and technologies of the self
One autumn evening in the pandemic, my cousin who lives in Copenhagen and I were feeling sorry for ourselves on Facebook Messenger. She's the same age as me, studied microbiology, and would like to work in a brewery. Out of selfishness, I ask her to move home for a while too, so we can isolate together. "I can't, I'm on a journey bb :))" came the reply. Without knowing that I was writing about it, she asked me to recommend some self-help books. I suggested she wasn't a plant, so she doesn’t have to grow. She replied that unless she constantly motivates herself, she's not doing anything: she's either at the peak of productivity or somewhere very low, where she can't do anything. She sends me notes from her phone explaining her relationship to self-improvement. In one of the notes she writes that she hides her problems - even from herself - in some sort of inner drawer, but after a while they all collapse on top of her. “To get back on your feet, you have to rebuild. And why not learn how to do it from some Americans who have made it in life?” With their help, my cousin believes, you can learn to identify the negative thought patterns that you keep repeating, solve your problems in a rational way that doesn't destroy you, and cultivate your love and self-esteem. "Why not use the revelations of others, why not learn from their mistakes, their successes and failures?"
My childhood friend Hary had also returned home to Carei because of the pandemic. Almost daily, we had coffee together, shared our hometown anxieties and techniques for living with our parents. When I asked him what gift I should bring him before my visit, he wrote: “a new life :))”. Hary wants to work out properly, and feels guilty about eating the béchamel sauce on the previous night's chicken vegetables, plus popcorn after dinner. He tells me he's obsessed with cleanliness and needs to stop wanting to vacuum every day. It's not good for him to sit around, and to keep from getting overwhelmed by all the practical impulses, he orders his list of priorities according to their level urgency, constantly trying to remind himself that he can't tick everything off and that he needs to choose times to focus on studying, sports or whatever is most important in that moment. When I ask him what would make him happy, he tells me that he would mostly enjoy starting his residency in internal medicine, a confirmation that all the lists and expectations so far have served a purpose. In the meantime, Hary has moved to Hungary, where he has been working on a Covid ward at a hellish pace. He also went through Covid, and has started vaccinating people. He tells me he feels "important :))", but not necessarily happier.
In my case, lists and plans are reassuring my fear that I am able to do absolutely nothing. It feels that way in the moments of inertia I sometimes find myself in, between daydreaming and guilt, staring at the ceiling or somewhere in the infinite internet. As the philosopher Michel Foucault explained to American students at the University of Vermont in 1982, we all invent and resort to technologies of the self. Foucault defines them as "operations on one's own body and soul, on one's thoughts, behaviours, on one's way of being; to transform oneself in such a way as to reach a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality". In a way, my Google Drive lists are attempts of technologies of the self, through which I map out tasks so that I don't let time slip through my fingers.
I haven't encountered depression or deep forms of anxiety, but I do know that the obsession with perseverance and motivation, central to the concept of self-improvement, affects people who are already struggling with their mental well-being. As I write this text, I'm unfolding the ways in which the productivity obsession has impacted me too. Both at school and at home, I was told over and over that I was smart, beautiful, and would succeed in life. A priest with supposed prophetic qualities told my mother that I was born under a lucky star and that everything would always go well for me. Maybe, even without the prophecies, I realize that I have the context and the tools to do anything in life and that it would be my fault if I don't. That's how an enthusiastic zeal is born, but also a very tight knot in my stomach.
I have high expectations of myself, which inevitably makes me think a lot about myself. I listen, absorb and strive to be attentive to the emotional needs of those around me. However, I realize that I've often set my priorities according to my own imperative of success and performance rather than my concern for others or even my own feelings. Doesn't the pursuit of supposed perfection actually alienate me more from others and also myself? I often wish I could be kinder and more forgiving of others, of time, of myself, but here I go again with a self-improvement wish, good for framing on Google Drive. The odyssey of self-improvement is obsessive and inevitably, a mirage.
Nowhere have I found a more pertinent and painful description of the obsession with self-improvement than in the article David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue, about journalist Sam Anderson's obsession with the perfection of David, Michelangelo's statue, and the perfection Anderson has always sought in life: “Perfection, it turns out, is no way to try to live. It is a child’s idea, a cartoon — this desire not to be merely good, not to do merely well, but to be faultless, to transcend everything, including the limits of yourself. It is less heroic than neurotic, and it doesn’t take much analysis to get to its ugly side: a lust for control, pseudofascist purity, self-destruction. Perfection makes you flinch at yourself, flinch at the world, flinch at any contact between the two. Soon what you want, above all, is escape: to be gone, elsewhere, annihilated. “
To America, land of promise and self-improvement
Although, after almost a year, the pandemic still shows no signs of abating, the scholarship let me know that my departure for the United States of America is no longer postponed. In early 2021, when California has one of the highest infection rates in the world, I fly to San Francisco. During my first transatlantic flight, I have no ambitions for self-improvement: for 10 hours, I drink free beer under my mask and watch Bill Murray movies.
I've been in quarantine for two days, and in California I've seen only the clear, starry skies at night and the bright yellow lemons in the garden of my aribnb. By day, I watch on TV a country undergoing its own internal turmoils of reckoning and becoming. The avalanche of news from the White House insurrection on January the 6th is interrupted from time to time by life-coaching ads in which smiley people promise me a more fulfilling life. In America, self-improvement is at home.
Much of the contemporary self-improvement industry is rooted in positive psychology, a branch of psychology defined in 1998 by Martin Seligman. Then president of the American Psychological Association, Seligman believed that too much attention had been paid to psychological disorders. The mission of positive psychology was no longer to solve psychological problems, but to improve people's satisfaction and happiness. Positive thinking was already well entrenched in the American imaginarium by 1952, when the book The Power of Positive Thinking was published by Norman Vincent Peale, the Reformed pastor who was a close friend of Richard Nixon, and years and years later, became Donald Trump's pastor. Peale found inspiration in the Bible and compiled a collection of practical instructions designed to build unshakable self-confidence and an optimistic, positive attitude about life, no matter what. Repeat If God is with us, who can be against us ten times a day, or Imagine you will succeed, says Peale. By the middle of the last century, the middle class was embracing the idea that you can be successful through your own strength, positive thinking, and help from God, at a time when the unemployment rate in the United States was deepening the generational conflict ignited by the civil rights revolutions and the Vietnam War. At the same time, the counterculture, in the hands of the younger generations of the 1960s and 1970s, was also cultivating the fetish of self-improvement, but through alternative methods, such as spiritual practices appropriated from faraway cultures.
However, the first book considered personal development as such - Self Help - was published in 1859 by a Scotsman, Samuel Smiles, a doctor and journalist frustrated by a not very successful career. The context of the late 19th century was favorable for Smiles' ideas, considered a "bible of Victorian liberalism" and a testament to the power of perseverance. The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the consolidation of capitalism and free trade inspired major changes in society, alongside industrialisation and modernisation. Although the gulf between classes remained deep, the world was more open to those who wanted to climb the social ladder and to the belief that this was only possible through their own strength. Smiles believed that self-determination was more necessary than a well-structured social system: No law, however harsh, can make the lazy industrious, the profligate discerning, and the drunk sober. According to Self-Help, poverty is a consequence of the actions of individuals, and those who fail to lift themselves out of poverty should be left to fend for themselves without any support from the state. "Heaven helps those who help themselves," Smiles concluded. More than a century after the publication of Self-Help, Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher planned to give a copy of the book to every schoolchild in Britain, an almost cartoonish evidence of the strong link between self-help and Western liberalism.
With the explosion of capitalism in the 1990s, the realm of self-help became a lucrative industry. Preachers of positive psychology, professional and life coaches, and authors of self-help books have colonized a whole realm of promise, where the solution to any problem lies within our power, through the products or guidance of others. Today, we can have business coaching, hook-up coaching, relaxation coaching or divorce coaching.
That's how personalities like Tony Robbins, one of the most popular motivational speakers of recent decades, came to be. Robbins is a tall, charismatic, tanned guy with a deep voice and very white teeth. He dropped out of school at 17 and worked as a security guard before becoming a promoter for self-help events and then a guru who has influenced more than 50 million people through his books, shows and lectures. I listened to him too, just after moving from London to Carei and feeling a bit apathetic between the pandemic’s many waves. His seminars have a rock concert flair combined with something of a religious cult. Tony Robbins insists that problems help us grow and are necessary for our development. In the Netflix documentary I Am Not Your Guru, Robbins declares that if his mother hadn't been abusive, he wouldn't have become the man he's now proud to be.
The stories of radical change, triumph and salvation in his speeches reminded me of my time spent in a Pentecostal community where I wanted to make a documentary. At first, I feared no one would talk to me. Eventually, several of them offered to tell me in detail the stages of their spiritual transformation. But eventually, their stories resembled one another so much that at times it seemed that the stories had become one and the same. Any hesitation had disappeared altogether, in favor of a narrative about the power of the individual to overcome any obstacle through faith. Motivational speakers also don’t leave room for doubt and wavering, and certainty costs money. Between a thousand and three thousand dollars for a lecture hosted by Tony Robbins, for example.
The Californian dream
While heading to the US for a while, I was ecstatic to be experiencing the beauty of California and to live between the ocean and the redwood trees. Herself a Californian, Joan Didion wrote in Where I Was From that the landscape of the “golden” state’s nature, like a litany, has inspired its inhabitants to dream guided by heroic imperatives. After the Gold Rush of 1849, the Californian dream attracted 35 million new residents eager for new beginnings and prosperity, for “more and better”, an ambition that had gruesome consequences. Over 150,000 Indigenous Peoples lived in California before the Gold Rush but by 1870, the Native population of California had declined to around 31,000. Some died from disease and starvation but tribes were also systematically chased off their lands, forcibly relocated to missions and reservations, enslaved, massacred. The California State government paid $1 million for scalping expedition ($5 was paid for a severed Indian head in Shasta in 1855). The 2,000, 3,000 years old redwood trees I was going to live among, they knew all of this history. "You are perfectly welcome," it tells him, "during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don't blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don't cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.” notes author Christopher Isherwood, who lived in California at the end of his life.
Ever since I arrived in the US, I've been trying to resist the temptation to spend the entire quarantine with my laptop on my forehead, convinced that I have so much to do. In between quick emails, I frantically pull the blinds I don't know how to handle and think about what would be the most relaxing lunchtime podcast, whenever that might be. On the phone, a good friend of mine was telling me that her sister, ambitious and with an impressive career, tried to go for a walk on her lunch break but kept hesitating. She couldn't decide where to go so that the walk would be as efficient and relaxing as possible. The generations born after the 1980s to mid-1990s, the so-called millennials, Generation Z (those born after 1996), the so-called snowflakes, artists, creatives or corporates, we all live in a culture that tells us that we can excel not only in a professional field, but also in our own happiness and well-being. Equating productivity with fulfillment swells the tides of guilt that invade us and our free time. Breaks or indecision become a waste of time while overworking blindly turns into a trance, a goal. The fact that we breathe on social media platforms, where everyone's life seems to be a series of achievements, enhances the feeling that those around us are doing better, looking better, have more fulfilling relationships, and are happier.
In their book Manufacturing Happiness, anthropologists Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz question the happiness imperative that should govern our lives. The two propose the term happychondriacs to describe happiness enthusiasts, always preoccupied with self-improvement, convinced that they are always missing something or not doing enough. In fact, eternal dissatisfaction drives consumerism, say Cabanas and Illouz, and creates the perfect economic context for profiting from products, apps and experiences that promise happiness. Thus, self-care becomes a popular hashtag on social media to sell products of all kinds. Goop, actress Gwyneth Paltrow's wellness business, for example, sells egg-shaped pelvic muscle trainers in various colors, including quartz pink, for $55. The race for this never-quite-good-enough self has roots firmly planted in the sanctuary of neoliberal democracy in the US. According to the logic promoted by the self-help world, if we change, the world will change with us, regardless of our circumstances. In the meritocracy imaginary, individuals are either winners or losers, and the only ones able to decide their happiness, success or poverty. While there is increasing talk in the world about the structural inequalities perpetuated by institutions, legislation, the distribution of wealth in the world, and the effects on the most vulnerable communities in society, the world of self-help insists on the centrality of self-determination. According to anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu, once individuals become responsible for their careers, health and happiness, the state can increasingly withdraw from its duties in these areas. If the individual does well, fine, if not, he or she is left alone. Because he has not been good enough.
Anti-self-improvement
My brother says he doesn't feel guilty if he's not continually productive. Maybe because he's a psychiatrist or because he's wise, I suggest. He laughs. He admits he doesn't like to do nothing, but he doesn't have lists of everything he should tick off in a day, week or month. I don't know if that's precisely why he's perhaps the person in my life with the most cultivated interests, from second division football to obscure history episodes. Whenever we lack information in a family conversation, we conclude: we have to ask Răducu.
When I tell him what I'm reading for this text, he gets especially excited about anti-self help books. One such book was published by journalist Will Storr in 2017, Selfie: How We Became So Obsessed with Ourselves and What It's Doing to Us. Storr starts with the high suicide rates in the US and UK, and blames society's cultivated perfectionism and the fear of failure on astronomical expectations of ourselves. The author finds several causes for the obsession with being perfect. First, he says, the way our brains operate dictates that we view life as a movie in which we play the lead role. In addition, the hyper-competitive, globalised economy in which we work forces us to constantly become better, smiling, faster.
Storr believes that we absorb neoliberal ideology because greed is encouraged in the culture we live in. Meanwhile, parents convince their children that there are no limits to their dreams, and children blame themselves when they don't find their place in the world. Storr says that if we are aware that this pressure is a consequence of the cultural context in which we live, we can begin to free ourselves from it. Let's settle for mediocrity, suggests Danish psychology professor Svend Brinkmann in his anti-self help book Stand Firm. He also encourages us not to think about ourselves all the time, and if we want to stir up our souls and do some self-analysis, let's do it just once a year, possibly during the summer holidays.
In the face of pressure to excel all the time, Californian artist Jenny Odell teaches us how to do nothing. In her book, How to Do Nothing: How to Resist the Attention Economy, Odell argues that the mythology of constant progress prevents us from resting and appreciating where we've come. In a logic of capitalism that is based on myopia and dissatisfaction, doing nothing becomes an extraordinary thing. A form of resistance.
Odell, who teaches at Stanford, wrote the book after the 2016 election, in a personal crisis that made her need to do nothing. The artist doesn't urge us to be lazy and literally do nothing, but she is cautious when it comes to all the products, platforms and structures, news, posts, networks, apps around us that feed off our attention. When pressure and overload become a daily reality, we need to learn to divide our time so that we have enough leftover time to think, to heal, to support ourselves and each other. For Odell, the work of maintaining our well-being and that of those around us is already a form of productivity or an alternative. For this reason, we must learn to say no sometimes, to miss events, in a world where it would be impossible to know and do it all.
The experience of life itself is an absolute goal, I read in her book. Odell writes about breezes, light and the unspoken, about plans without specific goals and aimless walks. She also quotes Zhuang Zhou. The 4th century Chinese philosopher wrote the story of a carpenter who sees a tree of impressive size and age. But the carpenter considers it worthless and mocks it: it is so old that it is not even good for timber. At night, the tree appears in the carpenter’s dream and asks: Are you comparing me to those useful trees? Useful trees are always felled. Perhaps one day, Odell suggests, the only shelter from the burning sun for this carpenter will be the very shade of the useless tree.
Though in quarantine, I tiptoed for five minutes outside into the alley behind my Californian beachtown airbnb cottage, eager to see where I ended up in the world. I was overwhelmed by the wonder of an unknown world, of sunshine, of clear skies. I faltered before a tree I couldn't identify, with pink garlands and a sort of round, soft, red fruit. In front of the smooth, almost polished tree trunk, I reached out for its amber branches. The gardener vacuuming up the leaves on the opposite sidewalk must have witnessed a scene worthy of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam.
***
Through her essay, "The Myth of Self-Determination," Jenny Odell helps me remind myself that all my encounters with wondrous trees in California, the freedom to court with self-aggrandizement or self-improvement only happen because of a whole infrastructure of circumstances that have nothing to do with me or my zeal. The freedom I hunt for while holding it in my arms is built by privileges large and small, by cultural and social vectors far greater than any routine I would add to my list.
Out of my little quarantine, when the global pandemic seems unmanageable and a civil war seems to be looming in the US, I find that from time to time, I continue to make and unmake plans with a ludicrous conviction. On the way to the pink wreath tree, which I am still getting to know, I'll make a note in my Google Drive list that I'll stay out in the sun for a while longer.
