Welcome. In a meeting of the At Home and Away team on Monday, we discussed the preliminary way in which we are planning now.
Minju just received an email informing her that her daughter’s gymnastics class is starting in four weeks, time to sign up. With news of the Delta variant changing our perception of what’s safe by the hour, how could she commit to anything in four weeks? I have a dinner scheduled for Thursday, but my date and I have agreed to decide on Thursday afternoon if we go ahead with it. We change our minds and our plans day by day, hour by hour, keeping tabs on case counts, weighing risk and reward.
My inbox is filled with emails from readers telling of postponed plans: the birthday dinner swapped out on the grill at home for steaks, the road trip from Oregon to South Dakota to visit Mom, the bucket-list cruise to Malta canceled. (“We upgraded the flights and booked a veranda room and the LIQUOR PACK. Absolutely crushed,” wrote one reader.)
If you work to live in the present, this moment can prove to be an effective teacher.
I asked how you were last week, and Linda Adams in Montreal cleverly edited my question: “When my husband died, people often asked, ‘How are you?'” and I thought it was such a big question I couldn’t even begin to answer all the different and often contradictory ways I felt and experienced my new solo life,” she wrote. “In grieving, they would ask, ‘How are you today?’ By adding ‘today’, it suddenly became a question that I could answer. Today I feel a little exhausted, but also immensely grateful for the little kindness I experienced from a stranger this afternoon.”
How you are today is not how you will be tomorrow. How you do it now will change in the next. Your long-awaited August break may be cancelled, plans you’ve made for tonight may be changed this afternoon. As Rilke wrote: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror./Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
Change the subject.
Sometimes it feels like the virus is all we can think or talk about. The next time I meet up with friends, in person or virtually, I’ll be talking about this as well:
According to an inspiring new study on the potential of high-speed workouts, just four seconds of full exercise, repeated two or three dozen times, can be all many of us need to build and maintain our fitness, strength and physical strength. .
-By “Practice vigorously for 4 seconds. To repeat. Your muscles can thank you.”, by Gretchen Reynolds.
PS
Tell us.
How are you Today? Tell us: [email protected] Please include your full name and location and we may include your response in a future newsletter. We are home and away. We read every letter sent.
We’ve been getting some questions about the artwork at the top of the At Home and Away newsletters. Every month we fill that ‘gallery space’ with the work of a different artist-in-residence. This month’s artist is Brooklyn painter and illustrator Jackson Joyce. You can view his illustrations from earlier this month here and here.
As always, below you’ll find more ideas for living a full and civilized life, whether you’re at home or on the go.
