Welcome to Newsletter Twenty-Two of Once More, With Feeling.
Another year draws to a close. The days are dark (and darker) and the nights sparkle with dawning celebrations of lights. Many of us are both wrapping things and wrapping things up. I keep waiting for "let’s circle back after the holidays” email season to start but there is a lot more of “let’s get this settled before the holidays” instead.
Maybe this is a good thing? We have some verve and energy left this year? I’m going to hope that’s the case, rather than us all having trouble disconnecting from the grind.
A break in format this newsletter, this one just a brief menagerie of things I’m reading, thinking, and feeling during this end of year.
Let’s stop meeting like this. Everyone is reading this latest post by Anne Helen Petersen on meeting (and productivity) culture post-pandemic, and I’m no exception. Look at that figure below. Read the post. We’ve all been having this conversation, Anne just articulated it best (as she is wont to do). Let’s do something about it in 2024. Are you with me?
Mental health silver linings? There are few indications that the tide on the youth mental health crisis may be turning, as we put the pandemic disruptions (if not the pandemic) behind us. Let us hope.
A new article by me, on supporting kids to take on challenges. Psyche magazine (part of Aeon) commissioned this Guide from me on How to Support Your Kids to Be Brave. It was such an interesting experience to be assigned a topic (like being a student again! gosh I loved being a student), and the editorial process was both more thorough than I was used to for online essays and really rewarding. I would be honored if you would give it a read.
A slender book I loved. A number of years ago, I visited Salt Lake City Community College for what endures as one of my favorite campus visits. While there I met the wonderful Lynn Kilpatrick, whom I began following on Goodreads after we had several great fiction conversations during my visit. She recently recommended the book Mothering Sunday, and I immediately inter-library-loaned it and gobbled it up like a snack. If you’re looking for a little fever dream of a novella where you’re plucked out of your life and tucked into one sunny Sunday in your twenties (as an English maid having a love affair in the wake of the first world war), I thoroughly recommend it. Though this other Goodreads review has a point and is also hilarious. I remain grateful that I don’t write fiction and accidentally give away all my little quirks and fixations.
Should we spend it all? In a recent newsletter, author Austin Kleon quotes a few people (varying from Larry David to Annie Dillard) on the idea of spending your writing ideas rather than hoarding some of them for some perfect moment to share them.
Which I loved, but it got me thinking about the idea of “spending it all” more broadly. Not money, obviously, that would quickly go wrong - but the other things, the important things. Time. Love. Energy. Saying yes to the game of gin rummy with your teenager instead of continuing to plug through your inbox. Telling that person you love them, you have always loved them. Throwing the elaborate Halloween party, manuscript deadlines be damned.
I write these words as I make arrangements to head north to say goodbye to my beloved aunt and godmother. Spend it all, indeed.
Hope your new year dawns like a gentle pat to the head you can lean into, eyes softly closing as you savor the sweetness.
Catch you on the flip side, newsletter friend.
as always,
Sarah Rose