This is My Happy Place
and the power of paying attention
Early last week, it was “see how fast you can run a quarter-mile on the treadmill” day in Orangetheory and it shocked me at how uncomfortable it was to run very fast for just a minute and a half. Later in the class, the coach gave us the chance to try again, perhaps to beat our time if we were feeling up for it. And even though it sucked, I ran two seconds faster. As is often the case with exercise, I tell myself the discomfort is so temporary, and I repeat a crasser version of the Nike tagline: “Just fucking do it.” That I did something I didn’t want to do, even though it hurt, and that I accomplished my goal gave me a high for the rest of the week. As I left the class and stepped onto the sunny street (on a rare DC summer day with no humidity) I thought “This right here - coming from a workout, riding high, ready to accomplish anything, this is my happy place.”
Later in the week, one of my best friends, Brandi, came over and I made us lunch and then we walked around my neighborhood and grabbed a coffee. Brandi and I talk a mile a minute together, always have, and our Venn diagrams of interests overlap a great deal, partly because we’re both interested in a lot of things. I recently bought an antique bench at a flea market when I was home in Michigan and I was telling her about it. When I did a Google lens search on the bench, I learned it had something called “barley twist” legs and it was Jacobean, a style which fell in between Renaissance and… I couldn’t remember. Not missing a beat, Brandi said “Tudor.” There’s really nothing she doesn’t know, so it makes sense that friendship was forged on trivia night in a DC bar called Stetsons (RIP). I had the thought while hanging out with her that my happy place is a day just like what I spent with her: A couple of hour break from doing productive work for a great catch up with dear friend and the feeling that it would be an utter impossibility to run out of things to talk about.
That same evening, I took a walk past the mansions in Kalorama, past the Secret Service SUV that’s parked on the street where the Obamas have a home, past the castellations and minaret of an Islamic center that always makes me remember fondly all my years of living in the Middle East and North Africa, and onto a treed path in Rock Creek park. To be just thrust off a street onto a dirt path in the forest, the traffic noises a din above the tinkling creek, it really expands something in me, makes more room in my chest to breath deeper. This is my happy place, I thought. Not so deep in the woods that I’m not by civilization, but just tucked into a forest enclave, knowing the city and all its energy and people are right there for me, just beyond the tree line.
Final happy place vignette: My apartment. Thursday night. I’d decided to stay in. In the two years that I’ve been navigating life as a newly single person, I’ve noticed that I don’t take much pleasure in sitting around or laying on the couch in the beautiful apartment I’ve created. Call it restlessness. But lately, I have been able to settle into stillness a smidge more. This night, I'd shaken myself a Perfect Slightly Dirty Gin Martini so cold that a thin iceburg floated atop and I settled on my sette, the one I’ve had since I was 22 but got recovered in a mudcloth fabric when I lived in Algeria. I read a chapter on “Seeing” in Suleika Jaouads beautiful book about creativity The Book of Alchemy. Seeing, she says, takes time and practice. Simone Weil says “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
I recently heard the author Hisham Matar talk about the transformative power that paying attention has. It can both change the object of the attention and the person paying the attention.
My actual favorite saying/piece of advice, which I attribute to myself but probably I stole it is: Pay attention to what you pay attention to. This is maybe more about self-awareness as a path to further discovering oneself than it is about the power of attention, but I do believe that the little things we notice have the potential to become the big things that define our lives.
What I’m reading: I just finished a poetry memoir called Bluets by Maggie Nelson which purports to be about the color blue but is really about recovering from a breakup. I pulled this book off the memoir shelf at the wonderful Lost City Books (they have THE BEST staff picks!) Bluets is 240 numbered verses that build on each other in unexpected ways and say beautiful things like this:
Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping - its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.
About a year ago when I was feeling so incredibly sad, I went on a long hike on the Western Ridge Trail in Rock Creek Park. I attempted to take a selfie of my face that was as sad as I felt but I failed. I am not an actress and I don’t know how to make my face express a deep emotion. I think I wanted to feel witnessed in my despair.
I also just discovered The Story Club, George Saunder’s Substack and it is so good. He is my absolute favorite writing teacher. In fact, he’s got a whole book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, the audio version of which is celebrities, like Nick Offerman, reading Russian short stories and then Saunders interjects to teach you how writers like Chekov and Tolstoy did what they did. I listened to this while cross country skiing in Michigan a few years ago and it is one of my top reading experiences of life. In a recent newsletter, Saunders responded to a man who wrote to say he feels like he has a book in him but how does he even get started? Maybe he will once he retires from his job as a doctor. Saunders gave some advice that I’ve repeated maybe five times this week:
Sometimes I have this feeling: “If only I could get my ducks in a row, I could really, for sure, start.” But actually, once I start, the ducks will, then and only then, start lining up on their own.
My takeaway: You do not have to have everything figured out before you start a business, start a new activity, take the next step in a relationship. Just do it. Just fucking do it. Get started. Things will fall into place. Those ducks will line up but probably in a formation is different from what you envisioned.
Art I’m vibing with: There’s a new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in DC that takes specimens from the Museum of Natural History and puts them aside Dutch paintings of these bugs and birds. This exhibit will make you see the beauty of insects and feel a sort of connectedness to the painters and other creatures that have come before us. I like that the curators of this exhibit brought a modern artist, Dario Robleto, into the fold to add something contemporary to what otherwise could be seen as a bunch of old dead bugs and old oil paintings. During a panel talk to open the exhibit, Robleto said “One of art’s fundamental aspects is to identify barriers to empathy and to move past them.”
Music I’m playing on repeat: I am adding so many songs to my “liked” Playlist lately, nearly all sort of hispter dancy pop or lyrically brilliant folk. I am really vibing with Cherry by Harry Styles (especially the lyric “I confess/I can tell you’re at your best/I’m selfish so I’m hating it”); also Moves by Suki Waterhouse, Eventually by Lucious, and True Blue by boygenius, which is the first song I know of that uses one of my fave modern expressions, “Fuck around and find out.”
That’s all for now. Hope you all find your happy place. May I suggest one place to look is to pay attention to what you pay attention to and go from there.
