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I read this back on Halloween and thought it was beautiful. (I acknowledge that I wake up on the macabre side of the bed most mornings.)

Especially the opening: “A human being is a haunted animal. We live in the knowledge that we will die, and we interpret everything that happens to us through the lens of something past.”

Isn’t that such a strange idea? Beorn moves through his day, and he never thinks about death. I mean, I’m assuming he doesn’t. At the very least, his existential crisis never stops him from popcorning through his day. So he makes his choices using a completely different set of criteria, and I make my choices always cognizant of death. Of staving it off. Of getting enough time with people before we die. Of getting enough done before I die.

“Everything present is made of the past—the cities we inhabit and the language we use and the clothes we wear and what they make us feel. Every word in this sentence was first given significance by people now long dead.”

Every single thing is infused with memories, whether we can access them or not. So we’re always surrounded by ghosts, and if we’re uncomfortable with ghosts, we’re not seeing them for what they are. The elements that shape who we’ve become and how we move through the world.

Gorgeous.

I was agonizing about not finishing a book. I am a finisher; at least, I am a finisher after I get past a certain point. If I’ve read 53%, I’m going to read the remaining 47%.

That’s where I was in a book. 53%. And wishing I was at 100%. Or at least 98%. It felt like such a waste of time to walk away from it, especially because the writing was beautiful. I kept highlighting phrases I enjoyed. But while I enjoyed the phrases, the book had no plot. It made me realize that author’s other two books also had no plot. So why did I enjoy those and not enjoy this one? Maybe the main character. I knew I would never want to spend time with her in real life.

I was complaining to my cousin. She pointed out that the DNF is your friend when your reading life is half over. Do I want to spend some of those remaining minutes on this book? A book that was making me feel like not reading?

No. I didn’t.

Onto the next story.

COP26 is at its midway point; everyone gathered to talk through what is wrong and what we should do. Which is simultaneously the time when journalists report what experts say is wrong, what experts say we should do, and why humans are not going to do it.

It’s madness, right? I mean, we can see the effects of climate change right now. And there are companies that can take steps to curb carbon emissions. But they are not going to take these steps because… cost? Because the people making the decisions will not be alive to see the impact of these decisions?

I love this essay that touches on this phenomenon of not taking steps to fix a problem. She writes: “It’s not enough just to notice there’s something wrong, although that is a necessary and often difficult stage of finding a solution to a problem. You have to then do something.”

She goes from wet to dry, realizing it was always in her power to make her life better. (Or, at least, a lot less damp.)

Thinking about how the solutions are out there. Will we enact them immediately?

Sometimes it happens. I drop a post in the Roundup, which usually releases it from my brain. But then I continue to think about it the next week.

A case in point, Infertile Phoenix’s post about Too Much and Not Enough. I kept coming back to the idea of how we use tiny good moments to get through the hard ones, but what do you do when there are no tiny good moments? In moments of great grief, the sadness swallows up the happiness. A cookie just can’t stand up to loss, and it’s unfair to put that on a cookie.

She writes: “I don’t know how I endured infertility. I couldn’t enjoy the little things back then. I don’t know how I got through those years. I can barely believe I survived.”

How did I get through those years? The only thing that made me feel happy was the hope, and the hope was the thing that made me feel terrible at the end of each failed cycle. There was no cookie, no trip, no book, no music that could clear away the heaviness.

And when there are no emotional hand holds, it is hard to keep pulling yourself up.

But how do you find those emotional handholds when it feels like you’re facing a wall of stone?

I’m just kidding with that title. Masks are on, always on, forever on, I love my masks.

But our area lifted the mask mandate last Thursday at midnight. By Friday, mid day, less than 12 hours after the mask mandate lifted, they were talking about putting back the mask mandate. By the weekend, they announced the mask mandate would be back in action as of tomorrow (Wednesday).

This is the thing: I get that there are people who do not enjoy wearing masks. I hear you. But masks stop the spread of more than just COVID-19. I’d like to be flu-free this winter. (Yes, I have my flu vaccine, but a vaccine is not a promise; it’s just protection.) And they enable parents of unvaccinated kids to move freely through public spaces with less stress.

So masks were off for a hot second over here. And now they’re back. And I hope they wait to make the call next time until we’ve had some stability with the numbers.

Patience.