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Go Gentle by Maria Semple is a stunning, stunning, stunning book, and I’ve loved all of the philosophical questions woven through the book, even more once you learn how she got into philosophy.

On page 60, she’s watching the ground crew at her workplace tend the library’s massive garden. They switch out the annuals to go with the season, and she muses: “The efficiency and finished product never failed to impress. But ultimately, it felt airless and safe. Me, I’m a God’s-will girl.”

Of course, you need to pause and ask yourself: Are you a wild garden sort of person or a tended garden? Does “tended” automatically mean airless and safe? Does “wild” automatically give you room to breathe?

Me, I’m definitely a tended garden sort of person. I would rather have safe over surprises.

How about you?

I feel everything in this essay very deeply:

By most objective measures, I’m doing quite well, financially … But there’s this hum underneath everything. This feeling that no matter how much I accumulate, I’m never going to feel financially “okay” — which is as much a state of mind as it is a number.

I think it began for me when I started to think about retirement. How much would I have to save to think we’ll be okay? What about the stuff we can’t predict? You very rarely come into unexpected money, but it’s pretty common to have hidden expenses.

And then it spilled over into pre-retirement life. What is enough? Where is the “okay” line, where you actually feel okay and not just rationally acknowledge that you’re okay?

And then it’s not just me. It’s this next generation. Will they be okay? And if they’re not okay, that’s going to impact all of us.

But mostly, I loved this piece near the end:

Be suspicious of any analysis that makes you feel only helpless. The doom-scroll economy benefits from your nihilism … Some of the doom is real. Some of it is a very specific class of writer describing their own anxiety and universalizing it. In other words, take everything with a grain of salt.

Thank you for this reminder.

And passing this along in case it resonates with you, too.

Quentin freaked himself out. One morning, he decided the left half of his habitat was too scary. He refused to go onto that side of the cage, even though his water bottle was on that side of the cage. We tried to get him over his fear, gently coaxing him to the left side of the cage while we quietly told him that nothing on that side of the cage could harm him. He wasn’t swayed. He would lie down on his stomach and stretch himself as far as possible to grab things on that side of the cage with his teeth and drag them to the other side.

What does Quentin know that we don’t know?

*******

I did a massive clean-up of my TBR and Libby holds. No mercy. If there was no chance there would be a day I’d want to read the book, it moved over to my “no longer interested” tab on the spreadsheet. Hundreds of books ended up on that tab, opening up new spaces on my Libby holds list. It feels good to be organized.

*******

I now see better without my glasses than with my progressives when it comes to close-up stuff, like pouring olive oil from the larger bottle into the smaller carafe. I cannot see where to aim the olive oil (and should probably use the funnel rather than eyeball it) if I leave my progressives on. I have to take them off and look at the carafe opening, glasses-free. It’s weird not to be able to see things close to my face after a lifetime of not being able to see things far away from my face.

While I’m fairly neutral about cleaning in the real world (love a clean space yet would rather read than clean), I have realized that I love cleaning games. Someone recently passed along a link to a game where the whole point is to shelve imaginary books. You are cleaning up a library. And I thought, wow – this sounds fantastic.

It is like the game 2025, which involved organizing items into lists. Cleaning up a screen? Heavenly!

I’m not sure what this says about me — that I am deeply interested in cleaning games while less interested in actual cleaning that will make my living space better.

I underlined a passage in Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. The main character asks her mother how she made adulthood look so easy and effortless. The house was clean and orderly, the kids were cared for, and the mother worked full-time. The mother points out that what her child perceived wasn’t how the mother remembered things, but she tells her daughter her little secret:

“Whenever I was reaching my wits’ end, I would pause for a moment and do you know what I would do?” Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial register. “I would imagine I was being watched.”
I opened my eyes and frowned at the tiles on the bathroom floor. “Watched?”
“It’s lonely, you know. Housework. But it felt a bit less lonely when I pretended I had a little audience sitting on the couch with me. Watching me vacuum or take out the trash. Cheering me on!” (page 191)

We know that the daughter will become an influencer in the future, so she clearly took her mother’s advice one step further to get an actual audience cheering her on, rather than just an imaginary one. But it was a strange phrasing: Being watched. That you pull your shit together and present the best version of yourself because people will know if you don’t.

It gave me pause when I was reading.