It is too hot out to write
Or: excuses are what we call living in a body
[this may be an image from my front window — or yours]
A heatwave has overtaken much of the country. And while it is no hotter today in Terre Haute, Indiana than it was every summer day I spent in Newnan, Georgia a few years ago, it is of a different quality because, if you are unfamiliar with the nature of things, Indiana is not, in fact, Georgia and the climates are not comparable.
I left the house this morning at approximately 8:35 to run an errand with the twin understanding that the heat index at 8:35 in the morning was insufferable and also downright balmy next to what it would be when the sun really gets going for the day. And yet, despite the earth’s best intentions, I survived that trip to collect some modest groceries.
It was just after noon when I made another trip out, this time to the post office. Now the heat is really getting going and the car’s air conditioning has never been its strongest skillset. The sweat makes my shirt stick to the seat and the swamp that exists beneath my clothes is as unpleasant to experience as it is to read about. And yet, it is in this suffering, that we might delight in the knowledge that the package going out to the young counsellor in training (CIT) at Waycross’s summer camp will be received with joy and appreciation. We do these things for the people we love.
It is on these hot days, relaxing back in one’s air conditioned home that the mind tends to drift toward those less welcome thoughts of human finitude and a general appreciation for living in a society that possesses this technology that allows us to survive in such relative comfort while also acknowledging the precarity of such a life. The precarity of lifestyle, which can be born, not of chance or skill exactly, but from the strange lottery of being born into a middle class family with enough opportunity to maintain that lifestyle into adulthood during an era in which this was both possible and altogether quite likely for me. But also, the precarity of such technology persisting given our great ecological overshoot and a future that is likely to be hotter and indoor air conditioning scarcer. Yippee!
I am two weeks into a sabbatical, which, like air conditioning and all manner of other things, I am lucky to be able to experience, and I am finding it even more difficult to concentrate, what with the whole list of nothing that needs doing right now. There are things that I ought to get to, but nothing that is required or that I couldn’t beg off on another family member to do for me. The only thing I am fundamentally responsible for through most of the day is the basic welfare of the thirteen year-old who is home with me and our two cats. And, I think, it is this basic structure: that there is no thing I have to do mixed with a vague sense of what we might call “care”: that makes being productive so difficult at the moment. Having responsibilities and deadlines, ostensibly structure and order, makes the sense of ought come alive.
This idea of ought, often so deadly to the psyche, has also a hint of necessity to it. Like one’s conscience reminding us that good choices are, in fact, better than bad ones. My tendency to denounce suggestions like “ought” and “should” is due to their relative negativity — they are the unfair assessment that resting is somehow bad because there are other things we could be doing. We recognize this distortion more than we care to admit. Mostly because we’d rather accept that the idea of rest, even laziness, as some intrinsic badness rather than the neutral act it is. Perhaps I ought to be writing something more substantial or reading something edifying, but also, I’m not doing crimes. That’s the actual bad thing. Sitting, daydreaming, heck, flitting about on Substack? That is, at worst, merely OK, given a healthier mindset.
So now, hear I am,
leaning too far back on the couch with the computer on a lapdesk propped on my crossed legs in a posture that is far too close to lying down but is somehow comfortable and comforting, writing a letter to you all while the teen plays Roblox and the kitties snooze and the air conditioning is blowing and of all the things I’ve put off, this is something I can do. I can tell you that few things are less motivating than heat. And perhaps we ought to adjust our expectations.
Be well,
Drew
The fresh hell of new war
Many want to paint war as virtuous, distorting the mercy of God as weak. These would steal your soul and have you thank them. Read more here.
dreaming is a newsletter about the brave act of dreaming in a culture of now. Join in the revolution.