all we have to give each other

enduring life on a threshold

Dear friend,

I was sitting in the airport last week next to an elderly woman who was on speaker phone talking to her niece. They exchanged some back and forth about holiday travel when the woman next to me asked how her niece’s burgeoning nuclear family was doing. The response, in all its resolve broke my heart: “Everyone’s good, we just don’t have enough time to be together. Our jobs are so demanding but they pay very well . . . so I guess that’s the trade off.”

This overheard conversation has haunted me. It encapsulates a kind of concession that I’ve heard many times over the years: Relenting to the brutal shape of our lives that don’t allow for caretaking, rest, or nourishing relationships.

When I made the decision to transition out of a fast-paced, full-time work environment over two years ago, I was committed primarily to recalibrating what was severely warped: my understanding of time and energy. There was always something I was running toward—some elusive golden carrot pulling me forward. Behind loomed an ominous threat—shame, failure, punishment. Ahead was the coveted raise; behind was the rising rent payment. Ahead was the new car, clothes, cocktails, organic sheets, luxury vacation. Behind was the 40+ hour work week demanding I discipline myself. Stay fastidious. Climb the ladder. Advance.

I believed if I stopping running, everything behind would trample me and everything ahead would disappear out of view. When I finally paused and looked closely, I realized it was all smoke masquerading as steel.

my shadow

I watched as everything that felt like Truth, Safety, Success, Normality, blew away on the breeze, curling its tendrils around my body and then disappearing. What was left was Life, unobscured and beautiful and terrifying. What was left was everything that had always been here—the sky and the flowers and the quiet snow—and everything ephemeral (mostly you and I)¹.

When I’m engaged in everyday acts of intimacy, chatting with a stranger at the grocery store or taking a sip of my friend’s tea, I often think about the pandemic and it’s ripple effects. I’ve watched many of my loved ones change as a direct result of that collective trauma and all the compounded traumas we’ve experienced simultaneously these last few yers. Part of that change is an acclimation to the entropy of life in late-stage capitalism. I see folks’ growing disillusionment as they experience relentless disrespect, exploitation, and judgement on social media, on dating apps, at the post office, in the job market.

As the systems and structures we depend on continue to bring out the worst in us, we’re ultimately quicker to turn on each other. As we lose faith in our neighbor, we place our trust in the myth of money, control, and self-sufficiency as adequate replacements for human relationships.

At an event a few weeks ago, I listened to Céline Semaan talk about her new book, A Woman is A School. She spoke about the radical generosity that’s foundational to her Lebanese culture. Hospitality and gift giving are considered privileges and social responsibilities. As a result, an endless cycle of reciprocity is formed that spans generations and geography.

What I’ve found surprising over the last few years are the ways having less money has allowed me to practice more radical generosity. I’ve stopped² trying to hoard or hide my talents until I find the highest bidder. I’ve stopped putting price tags and time stamps on experiences and exchanges that by nature defy the limits of quantification. I’ve stopped trying to make everything add up perfectly, remembering that some summers, there are no tomatoes and other years they grow faster than I can pick.

We’ve both inherited and co-created a culture of punishment and reward that we all suffer under. Still, I believe wholeheartedly that the way to free ourselves is not to become masters of this system—to “hack” it or “win” it—but to steadily invest in something different. Something human: reciprocity, celebration, kindness.

At the beginning of last month, I found out a work project’s start date was being moved back by two months. I’d planned on using the earned funds to pay some bills for the coming months and felt the imminent gap in my income. A few years ago, this moment would have felt like everything was slipping through my fingers or about to crush me—the steel figures lurking behind and fading into the horizon. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find how quickly those feelings arise and then dissipated like smoke.

I understood this was not a disaster, it was a season that I knew how to navigate from a place of faith—not in my ability to be a more ambitious, aggressive worker—but in my ability to remain present and connected; To let the material uncertainty continue to be a teacher, not a tyrant.

A few weeks later, I woke up with the idea for a spending fast. I’m not using the word “fast” to assign unwarranted importance to declining invitations to brunch, but to acknowledge the spiritual roots of the term: turning toward God by pausing our unconscious habits and impulses. The overlap with the Advent was only brought to my attention in an email from a favorite writer of mine, Cole Arthur Riley, where she writes:

“As winter approaches and the days get shorter and the night begins to stretch on, we make space for a season of darkness. We grant ourselves permission to tell the truth about the terrors of the dark—our collective fear, despair even. But we also reclaim the dark as a sacred site. The darkness of the womb. A time of formation, and mystery, and rest. We slow down. We keep silence. We remember how to endure life on a threshold.”

It’s becoming clear to me each day that “fasting” isn’t about living with less or withholding something from yourself, but understanding generosity more deeply. As external options diminish, my imagination and gratitude expands: How can we create the conditions to laugh together? How can we feed each other well? What resources do we already have to encourage play and creation? Why weren’t we doing this all along?

During my most recent trip to visit a friend in Oaxaca, Mexico, I sat on the rooftop of the home we were staying in and listened to church bells ringing in the distance and the sounds of farm animals waking up. Transitioning from 500 feet of elevation in Chicago to over 5,000 in Oaxaca, the sun felt so close to my skin I can only describe it as kissing me awake.

Looking at the mountains surrounding me on all sides, I wondered: What more is waiting for me when I stop grasping so tightly to the things I’m afraid of losing?

watching the sun rise on a rooftop in Mexico

Over the last two years I’ve experienced and learned more than I could have dreamed of or prayed for. I’ve also had to bury a lot of dreams and beliefs that for most of my life made me feel safe and important. Sometimes I look at the growing void between my new, nascent beliefs and the empires-old beliefs I see projected all around me in laws, media, and the actions of people I love. The fear of being abandoned as I walk further in a new direction, scares me but that fear is no stronger than the curiosity, deeply humility, and wonder that have brought a new kind of connectedness to my life.

There are times when I grieve the old path—one that felt straight, linear, inclined. I’m not immune to the anxiety and insecurity around choosing something inconsistent that lacks the definitiveness of fitting into a singular title or role. I’m not arrogant enough to believe I can evade all the sacrifices and compromises our economy and culture demand of us. Still, I am committed to the ongoing journey of denouncing the worship of hyper-independence and willfulness so I might become more interdependent and changeable in a way that makes room for vulnerability and as a result, true intimacy. So Life in all its chaos and joy can reach me. Can touch me. Can take my hand and guide me to places I never would have known existed. Showing me all that we have to give each other. Reminding me of all that’s already been give to us.

My dream, my wildest dream, is that I might know what it is to give of myself freely, expecting nothing in exchange and believing—truly knowing—I will never be without.

This month and every month, I practice.

With love,

Jas

1. This letter is full of hyperlinks to poems/writing that I love. If you don’t read the letter, definitely read the poems. They say it all so much better than I ever could.

2. By “stopped” I really mean “decreased.” I dream of a day when everything in my life can truly exist outside of quantified value.