Category — Uncategorized

There’s a website called How Did You Find Me?, and it’s collecting the stories of how people ended up on the site. I found it because someone I know posted the link, and I clicked over to see it. But then there is the story of how I found that person. You can see how this can get interesting.

An explanation from the site:

How did you find yourself here? If you clicked on a Facebook link, what prompted you to click? If it was shared by a friend, how did you meet that friend? If you were searching Google, what were hoping to find? Why did you decide to check your email at the moment that you did?

I didn’t expect to like reading the path people took to reach the site as much as I did. I think it would be even more meaningful to hear how someone ended up on a certain blog in a community; e.g., how did you find A Little Pregnant and what got you to click over in the first place. I think A Little Pregnant may have been the first ALI blog I found. Unless my first was Getupgrrl’s. I can’t remember what came first by this point.

Like many people, I went to bed upset and woke up numb. This was not unexpected — the world has been moving toward this as a whole — but it doesn’t make it any less worrisome.

I’ve used two articles to keep things in perspective. The first is an article from Pew Research pointing out that our memories are fuzzy — consolidation of power (holding the White House, Senate, and House) happens almost every single election and is often gone by the midterms. I found the visual timeline helpful as a reminder that this too shall pass, hopefully without too much lasting damage. (Positive thinking.)

The other is an article about emotional circuit breakers. If you’re numb today, there is a reason. You will not always be numb. If the task ahead looks too large, that’s because it is. Instead of feeling you must hold the whole world in your hands, focus your efforts on one small area. Care deeply about one small area. Lend support to the other areas (as others will lend support to you), but keep your focus tight so you don’t burn out.

Today looks bleak. Hopefully, the future will not look as bleak. That’s where I need to be not to fall apart this morning.

The title of this piece spoke to me a few weeks ago: Addiction to Prediction.

That is how it feels these last few weeks have felt, trying to predict how this election will turn out. The reality is that if I just wait until the results are in, I will not need prediction at all.

Prediction is about knowing something ahead of time. Sometimes, we don’t know when we will learn something. But other times, we clearly know when the results will be in (beta results, college admissions, election tallies) or around the time the answer will be revealed, and we work hard, expending a lot of mental energy to know one day or a few hours earlier than expected.

Except we sort of only want to know good news early. Bad news, that can wait.

I recently read Liane Moriarty’s new book, Here One Moment, about a group of people who all receive the year and how they’ll die. On the one hand, if you know you’re going to drown, you can take steps to try not to drown for those 365 days, but most of the ways people were going to die weren’t avoidable. For people who heard they were going to die deep into their 90s, they felt a sense of peace. For those who heard they were going to die young, it weighed on them and impacted the present as they waited for the date.

But that’s the thing about prediction: If you’re working to find out something ahead of time, you’ll hear whether it’s good news or bad news, and you’ll have to live with that imperfect information longer.

Sigh.

I’m not sure we will watch the returns at all tonight. I may cave at the moment, though I’m saying that I won’t watch because it will only make me anxious. We’ll see what happens during the actual moment.

I read a statistic that only 28% of kids went traditional trick-or-treating, e.g., door-to-door. And in some places, it was much lower than 28%.

The trend now is to go truck-or-treating, where people set up in parking lots, and kids go car-to-car, collecting candy. It didn’t exist when my kids were little, though it makes a lot of sense to keep small children in an enclosed area without cars moving through. For other kids, it is less overwhelming than walking around in the dark or going up to stranger’s houses. It’s a solution to a trick-or-treating problem.

But it’s also a little bittersweet to think of the trick-or-treating from my childhood going away as fewer and fewer people do it each year.

Mari Andrews had a thought toward the middle of a newsletter that gave me pause. She was speaking about a podcast she found, and she said:

“Something that is both comforting and eerie to me is that you can’t choose your memories. You can ‘make memories,’ sure, but you really have no control over whether you end up remembering them or not.”

So you can do everything to make a moment memorable. You can plan out elaborate trips or plot out what you’re going to say or host an event, and in the end, there is nothing you can do to turn it into a memory for yourself, and even less you can do to turn it into a memory for someone else. I know my parents must have spent hours planning things for me, and then I forget all those things I did as a child, and I remember a random conversation with my mother while I watched her dry her hair.

It may help you to remember that whatever you do this upcoming holiday season, there is no guarantee anyone will remember any of it soon after the event. Maybe that takes some pressure off.