Tabs Open #46: Right Now Is At The Speed Of Light
There’s this very short false season that takes hold in Seattle around this time every year. It’s cherry blossom season, and I always seem to fall for its duplicitous promise that spring is here to stay even though it’s February. No matter that it’s never true; I’m grateful for its brief burst of color.
It reminds me of the close of a story that I’ve almost certainly shared in here before, Primo Levi’s “Bear Meat”. It’s my favorite short story; I think I get something new out of it each time I read it. The bit the cherry blossom reminds me of is as follows:
And, trust me, I am grateful to Carlo for having deliberately got us into trouble, for the night he made us spend, and for the various enterprises, senseless only on the surface, that he involved us in later on, and then for various others, not in the mountains, which I got into on my own, by following his doctrine. He was a young man full of earthly vigor who had a wisdom of his own, and may the earth in which he rests, not far from here, lie light on his bones, and bring the news, each year, of the return of the sun and of the frost.
If you don’t feel like reading it, I recorded myself doing just that about a year ago. (I may also have shared this in here before. Forty-six newsletters means a lot to try to remember.) I’m happy to report that in the past year I’ve stopped over-shampooing my hair and have learned to trim my beard more efficiently. But this video will have to do.
This is going to be one of those weeks where I lean heavily on the smart/profound words of others because my brain has been so thoroughly used up by my other commitments that pulling together all the disparate threads of the things I care about has proved too trying a task.
First, from my favorite Welsh gardener, Medwyn Williams:
“You can’t put water into a sponge full of water, can you?” Sound advice for growing large onions, and sound advice for all of us in general (especially me this week).
On Sunday I had the singular pleasure of seeing Brandi Carlile perform with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. I’ve loved her music for a long time; “The Eye” was one of the songs that got me through the toughest, loneliest stretches of the Pacific Crest Trail. Just before she closed her set, as she sat at a piano, she told a story about a producer or songwriter of hers (I wish I remembered the name) who passed away last year. She said that this person would regularly say the same thing, a little bit of wisdom that she’s still not sure she fully understands:
Right now is at the speed of light.
I’m not sure I fully understand it either, to be perfectly honest with you. But aphorisms that you can chew on are the best kind. Anyway here’s her version of “Hallelujah”, from the first time she played Benaroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony. Breathtaking stuff.
If you happened to watch the brain-rotting spectacle that was the most recent Democratic Primary debate (tickets just $1,750 a pop, I wonder why the crowd was the way it was), and you hated yourself enough to stick with it until the bitter end, you would’ve caught the penultimate question of the night: what’s a motto that guides you, or some such. I liked Bernie Sanders’ response the best—that’s sort of baked in at this point, which you’ll know if you’ve been reading Tabs Open for any length of time—and I thought it was worth sharing here. Sanders paraphrased a (possibly apocryphal) Nelson Mandela quote:
Everything is impossible until it happens.
That’s worth keeping in your heart, I think. You are going to hear from a lot of people for the next 8 months who are scared of their own professed convictions. I want Medicare for All, I just don’t think we can pass it. I want to stop climate change, but we’ll never have the votes. I think the justice system is rigged, but what can I do besides educate myself? If you’re talking to someone like that and they say those things, remind them about the nature of impossibility.
Anyway I won’t beat you over the head with the connections here—this is a nice video that’s sort of a microcosm of what I’m talking about. I’d like to be treated like this octopus and I’d like to remind myself to treat people like the diver does.
See you next week. Feel free to shoot me an email with the motto that keeps you going, if you have one.
-Chuck