To Discard, To Preserve, To Bury, To Build | Friday Footnotes #2
Friday Footnotes is a weekly newsletter where reflection meets real life.
Each week, I share stories and ideas from the past week that enriched my life and invite you to share something that enriched yours.
What do memorial services, journaling, and bird's nests have in common?
Sometimes, things only make sense looking back. Last week’s newsletter was like a magazine: glossy, polished, and punctual. This week’s is more like a message in a bottle: hopeful, meandering, and late.
I share the following three stories about seemingly unrelated topics from things that happened in my life this week because, to me, they share a powerful theme. But instead of spelling it out, I want to leave space for you to create that meaning for yourself and share it.
Let me know what these mean to you, and don’t forget to share something that enriched your life this week, either in the comment section or via email.
1 | The Land of Enchantment
I scheduled Issue #1 from New Mexico, where I'd arrived for a memorial service for my uncle (my mother's brother) last Thursday. I had not spent a lot of time with that side of the family growing up, but I really resemble my Mom. Physically, temperamentally, and spiritually, we are similar. Going to New Mexico is always pleasant and strange for a lot of reasons. Chiefly among them is because a lot of stuff my sister and I thought were my Mom's idiosyncratic turns of phrase, speech affectations, design habits, fashion inclinations, etc., are all just normal things in New Mexico.
It feels corny to say this, but the effect of this is that visiting New Mexico and Albuquerque specifically, feels like going to an ancestral home. Every five or so years when we go, I find myself admiring everything and vibing with strangers. As a small example, we had dinner at my aunt's house twice and I was so struck by how she decorated her bathroom I had to take a picture and send it to my wife. (See below—the lighting doesn't really capture it, but I thought it was beautiful.)
My Mom was the youngest and her family didn't meet much when I was growing up. I was the youngest boy of seven boy cousins and my sister was the youngest and only girl. I was always told I looked like my Mom's side of the family, but getting my jaw surgery last year has made the similarities much clearer. Suddenly being an adult among men, in eerily familiar New Mexico, hearing stories about my uncle and the rest of my family I didn't know until now, I had one of those distinct feelings you get in adulthood that is a chasm across which it is impossible to communicate. It's like falling in love or becoming a parent: you learn so much about yourself, but this new depth of knowledge suddenly renders you aware of how much you didn't know you didn't know. It's paradoxically comforting and humbling.
My uncle died unexpectedly and his sons had a hard time sorting out his affairs, so my cousin's wife heroically and nearly singlehandedly booked everything, put together a beautiful ceremony, and cooked all the food (with some volunteers' help). We gathered in the main room of this beautiful Santa Fe Airbnb, wrote down messages to my Uncle, then had the option to read them to the rest of the room or not before throwing them into the fireplace. Then we took turns sharing memories of him around the room. Others knew him a lot better, but I kept it simple. It was a running joke that he could talk, like me. So I was honest: "He never made me feel like I talk too much." It got a big laugh.
He was larger than life: fiercely independent, brilliant, tenacious, funny, and never gave up on anyone. The whole ceremony was beautiful. There was a lot of crying and a lot of laughter. At first, we each spoke quickly, one after the other, then the spaces lulled after each tearful share or laugh, until eventually there were minutes of silence, and we shared a prayer or two, and we decided to call it a day.
I've been to a number of funerals, and up until this point, probably the most memorable eulogy I'd seen was for my wife's biological father. He had been out of the picture for a while when we met. They had been starting to reconnect when he unexpectedly died just before we got married. To say he was a colorful character would be putting it lightly: people had strong opinions about him.
The pastor who gave the eulogy was my wife's father's cousin's friend—a cousin with whom he'd had a falling out. The pastor showed up on the day of the funeral, not knowing anyone, interviewed a few family members for less than thirty minutes, and then did the most beautiful needle thread of anyone I've ever seen, perfectly summing up the polarizing nature of the man, preserving what was meaningful and beautiful about his life without saying anything insincere.
That was seven years ago, and since even before then, I'd been a "fan" of watching eulogies, reading obituaries in the paper, and gathering touching tributes. It had started because they are thoughtful, sentimental, good pieces of writing, but my habit of collecting them kicked into high gear as I got really into goal-setting. A lot of goal-setting advice says, "begin with the end in mind," and so guides to setting truly ambitious goals will often start with a question like, "what do you want people to say at your eulogy?"
I became a little obsessed with this "eulogy mindset"—with the idea of fitting everything I did into a neat narrative. At my uncle's memorial service, there was no one "eulogy." Crowdsourcing a eulogy organically this way was really beautiful. As much as a good eulogy can convey, it is not the same as hearing all those stories from different people.
Later that night, I saw a word I didn't know on social media and went to the Wikipedia page and it turned out that the word was a perfect metaphor for why this "group eulogy" felt like it conveyed more than a single one. The word was Tesseract. Bear with me, but if you take a square and then make it 3-Dimensional, you get a Cube. If you do this to a Cube to make it 4-Dimensional, you get a Tesseract. (See the picture below.)
The human eye (and most human minds, unless you're mathematically gifted or have a great imagination) struggles to imagine what a Tesseract would do or look like, but most people get—hypothetically—"OK, yeah, so square to cube, therefore, cube to tesseract." Like, you get an impression, and why that might be useful, but you can't wrap your mind around the fullness. It's not something that could live in your mind full-time. It's not a concept native to your consciousness. You get that it exists, sure, but it's not all there.
A Tesseract is therefore a fitting analogy for the fullness of a human life. People are not just photos, job titles, or single memories. They are not one-dimensional squares. They are more multi-faceted than that. The real thing is more like a Tesseract. We do our best to hold them in their fullness, but we confine them into nonetheless neat Cubes, rounding edges, leaving stuff out, whether through choice, ignorance, or for rhetorical flair like the gifted pastor at my wife's father's funeral. The kicker is we don't get to pick which parts of the Tesseract people pick to put in their Cubes when we leave.
2 | It grows as it goes.
A few years ago, I bought an ebook from someone whose Twitter presence had done a lot for my thinking and writing, but it was only available to download as a PDF. That book was Introspect by Visakan Veerasamy, known as Visa or @Visakanv on Twitter. I simply cannot read PDF books. I don't know why. So, I appointed myself the official Head of Product - Introspect ePub division and Reply-Guy-in-Chief, and every single time he mentioned the book on Twitter, I replied asking him when he was coming out with an eBook or print version. He was a great sport about this for two years.
Well, a few weeks ago, he formatted an ePub version and sent it for free to everyone who bought the book already, so I downloaded it to start reading it and it's incredible. I've been reading it and doing the exercises, but one thing that it’s brought back into my life in a big way is journaling. He makes a bunch of great arguments for why to journal, but a lot of them can be summarized into this one quote here:
"If you do barely anything with your life but take little notes every day – snapshots of your opinions, impressions, perspectives, predictions – and then you thread these notes over time, say, 10 years by the end of it, if you reflect, review, corroborate, verify and discuss them with others, you will develop a robust, dynamic worldview. You will deeply appreciate the nature of human reality in a way that you cannot get from any single book or person or experience."
I journaled off and on for years but actually stopped around 2017. The reason I stopped is funny and sad. My wife (then girlfriend) and I were taking a dance class, when my car got broken into and someone stole my backpack that had my laptop and journal. That journal had my last two years of living in China along with the first three or four years of meeting my wife. Maybe, the five most pivotal years of my life up until recently.
(I used to joke that somewhere, there were some street-level criminals who were laughing at all my insecurities and admiring my meticulous written goal-setting.)
I scoured all the dumpsters for a few miles around and all the pawn shops across a much wider area, but found nothing. Eventually, I gave up and bought a new Moleskine notebook.
But for some reason, when I started journaling again, the blank page was more intimidating than before. I thought I needed some kind of system. I started bullet-journaling, then tried having multiple journals for different purposes, then got in my head about who might read these someday, or if my journal should double as a daytimer as well, or if I should have a separate notebook for a journal and morning pages, etc. I got lost in the sauce and just stopped journaling completely.
Visa's book gave me the permission I needed to say, let's just start writing again. Just get things down. Write down what you need. I don't need to know the entire structure of how I'm going to use it in my head—just write down the things I need that day, the things I want to say, or remember, or organize, and then be done. If I have a little free time and feel like writing, do that. Record some stuff at the end of the day.
Transformative is a word I probably use too much, but I don't know another way to describe how it's felt in just the last week and a half to journal again. I really do start to feel like journaling has made my writing better, my thoughts clearer, and my work more productive. It has, unfortunately, also made my problems clearer, and my feelings more pronounced, but I think that I will take the good with the bad and keep going.
I guess if I had to distill the main difference, it is that I am noticing myself rather than defining myself. At the end of the day, or whenever I feel like it, I jot down and cast off whatever needs to be written down. Then a day later or so, I go to add more, skim through, look back, and something meaningful and useful emerges.
3 | Nesting Season
The day after I got home from New Mexico, I was feeding our baby when I absent-mindedly told my wife, "that's crazy," as she tried to warn me there was a bird near our front door. A couple of hours later, I realized what she meant when I returned home from running an errand, put a key in our front door, and a small, brown bird flew directly at my chest and up over my neck and shoulder away from the house.
I had what was probably only a minor heart attack and stood for a moment to get my composure, then played the conversation back in my head and realized she told me a bird had built a nest in our Easter wreath hanging on the front door. I peeked into the wreath and saw five or six speckled eggs.
Inside, we sat around the dining room table. We had a family meeting and decided that we're not going to use the front door for up to five weeks. That is the maximum time the internet said it would take for the eggs we can see in the nest to hatch, and the birds to mature and fly away.
We read online that if you try to move the nest, the risk of ruining it is high. You might impart your smell to it. Or you could physically disturb the nest. Or you could put it too far away and the bird may not be able to find it again. Assuming we could even move it correctly, there are only a few places it could go. It would need to be close by, in the shade, and high up off the ground—on account of the cats. (Our neighborhood has something of a feral cat presence. It's not like we're overrun with predatory tabbies or anything, but there are three or four that walk along the street and fences often enough that seeing an errant bird here or there away from their usual "safe zones" is rare.)
In the meantime, we can use the door on the side of the house plus the garage doors and have placed an ornamental park bench in front of the door so that postal workers and solicitors don't walk all the way up to the nest. It's inconvenient, but we decided that it's worth it to keep the birds alive. Perhaps I am more sentimental after last week visiting with family at my Uncle's memorial service.
There is also something marvelous about a bird's nest. I've seen them all over, my whole life, but inspecting this one is the first time I've ever looked at one up close. It had lots of leaves, twigs, string, a little trash, and what I think was even a bit of old fur one of my dogs had shed outside. There's something beautiful and sensible about gathering things that have been cast off to build a home to bring something new into the world.
It makes me think about our own home. I found out last week that our interior decorating style is called "Grand-Millennial." It's for millennials who have a mixture of inherited heirloom furniture, kitschy bohemian decor, and homemade stuff. It is spot on. Our dining room set is a hundred-year-old handmade table that seats eight and expands to seat twelve, with a matching cabinet and buffet. I have three of the chairs that match—all broken—in the garage attic for the day I can afford to commission a matching set to be custom-made by a woodworker. Everything else in the house is thrifted furniture, homemade art, and photos of people we love.
For the last few nights, my daughter has sat with her Mom and me at the hundred-year-old table eating off of plates we got for Christmas, sitting on thrifted chairs, surrounded by paintings her Mom made, asking questions about the birds' eggs just feet away on the other side of our front door. She has gotten accustomed to the inconvenience, as have mail carriers, delivery drivers, friends, family, and even the one solicitor who has respected the bench. (I plan on making a homemade "no soliciting, beware of bird" sign.)
She's a little over three years old, so my daughter might actually be at the age where she remembers the month when we walked from the driveway all the way around the garage every morning and afternoon before and after school for more than a month while the birds lived on the front door. She probably won't know the story about: how the mama bird flew right into my face, or about the research notes I took in my journal about whether birds' nests need to be in the shade, or about the plans her Mom and I made for where we'd hang the wreath on the brick if we moved it and how I'd rent a hammer drill to do it, and she will probably never even put it together that this nest is why we decided to never have another wreath again after the birds mature and fly away. There's a lot about this she won't remember.
But I like to think that this silly little inconvenience, this choice to not use the front door for a month, to say bye to the birds when we leave for daycare and hi to them when we get back home, to make a little game of keeping the baby birds alive, to preserve something that could have been so easily discarded and keep it beautiful and meaningful, is a piece of me and her Mom that she will always have to keep with her.
Before next week, a few thoughts and a question.
I hope you enjoyed this. There are a few things I wanted to share that didn't fit neatly into these three sections.
I love New Mexico. I wrote a Note (on Substack's internal social media platform) about how I find it kind of "spiritual" here, where my friend
reminded me that it’s called the Land of Enchantment.
"It grows as it goes." in Latin is Crescit Eundo, which is actually the state motto of New Mexico I thought this was fitting.
Every time I travel, I try to stop by a bookstore. While I was in New Mexico, I stopped by Collected Works in Santa Fe. They didn't have a used section, and my to-be-read pile is exploding, so I replaced my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’ve been wanting to re-read it for years and I think I was inspired by being around multiple generations of family.
From Friday Footnotes #1, thank you to
, , , Jason, and , for your comments about what enriched your life last week, and a special thanks to Ann (aka Mom, for taking me to New Mexico), and Sam (for the excellent article recommendation on journaling, very timely).
What's one thing that enriched your life this week?
The current tagline for this newsletter is, "where reflection meets reality," but I've also been toying with, "making small things meaningful and big things legible." So if you're not sure what one thing that has enriched your life is, consider the questions, "what's one small meaningful thing that happened to you this week?" or "what's one thing that helped you make sense of the world this week?"
So happy to have stumbled upon your Substack—my last ten minutes reading this post were a beautiful break in my day, a chance to slow down and consider some of the small delights in life, as well as something so ambitious as a life-by-eulogy.
I’ve lived in NM for almost 4 years now, and moved here because something vaguely spiritually pulled me. Between the vastness of the landscape—which also feels ancient in a way that just north in Colorado it doesn’t—and the type of people who live here and move here, and of course, famously, the light, I feel every day the proof that I am living in the land of enchantment.
Thanks again!
I wanted to share a few small things that happened to me this week that gave me great joy.
I was allowed to hold an eight week old baby. He is so innocent, pure, beautiful, and content. He observed everything around him with total wonder. It was a rare gift.
I was also blessed to honor a woman in my life who has energy, talent, perseverance, intelligence, and passion for life and uses her gifts to enrich the lives of others.
I received a text from a golden friend with brain cancer who reported that she is traveling to Chicago in July to reunite her oldest gals on her "I'm not dead yet tour."
Thank you for reminding me to celebrate these wonders.
I love your writing and look forward to your next inciteful post.