Eee-vaah

Whirligigs, Wall-E, and the persistence of everything

If listening is best for you this week, I offer an audio version here.👆
But do come back for the photos, because spring!

I encountered a new term the other day and let out one of those snort-laughs you have to explain when you’re at a dinner party. Friction maxxing. Best I can tell, this is the practice of deliberately doing things the slow, effortful way, a corrective to a life so streamlined for convenience that it’s forgotten how to tolerate difficulty or finish a thought. Cooking from scratch, hanging the laundry, reading an actual book, gardening, shutting the door in Alexa’s face—which, yes, obviously—most of these things have been part of my life for so long I couldn’t operate otherwise. Look at me being a trendsetter.

But isn’t this a little like coming up with a name for hammering nails? Friction maxxing feels like what happens when hustle culture and chill culture make a baby: a productivity moniker for simply existing as a human being in the physical world. We took that shit for granted, surrendered it in increments, some of us willingly and some of us because the world made other demands, and now we’re gamifying getting it back? God help us.

Still, the maxxers have a point. Earlier this month I tucked into the couch with family to rewatch Wall-E and have spent the days since slipping “Eee-vaah” into conversation whenever possible. If you’ve seen the movie, you know. If you haven’t, it’s an unnervingly precise portrait of where we’re heading, wrapped in a children’s story so nobody panics. It’s about what happens when we engineer all the difficulties out of living, and what that costs us.

A single bedraggled plant travels from a ruined Earth to a luxurious space-liner where humanity has fled its own mess. The little green sprig finally makes its way back home. By the final frames of the film, aided by human effort, the planet begins to re-green.

Silver maple whirligigs ready to let fly.

Everyone I know is a little depressed right now. The future has never been predictable, but it has rarely felt this precarious, at least in our lifetimes, as though the systems and assumptions we rely on are, like many of us, showing their age. Watching this unfold, I notice a less obvious kind of sorting alongside the political divides: the hyper-vigilant and the unplugged. Some cannot look away, tirelessly pushing the rest of us toward action; others preserve their sanity with journaling, baths, and perfectly aligned spice racks. Both are valid ways to respond to unreasonable circumstances.

We are not wrong to fret. Most of what’s happening across the civilized world is being driven by people who are narcissistic, narrow-minded, and impressively incompetent, and that is something to call out. But I keep looking for the mythical middle ground, the place that acknowledges the severity without losing the thread of history, which has always been a pendulum. We have been riding this thing in one direction for a long time. The broken bits that now need fixing were entrenched on the upswing, while fewer of us were paying attention. My stubborn, possibly delusional sense is that we are about to tip back the other way, toward something more focused on cooperation and decency. These arcs take generations, and by the time we’re collectively ready to come back, the whole world has changed, except for the most abiding principles of existence: that things grow, that people need each other, that the work of showing up is never really finished.

I need to remember how to daydream. Not how to think—I am apparently always thinking—but how to let my mind go genuinely loose and unhurried, following a weightless idea until it takes on some kind of shape. So I leave my phone in the house when I go out to garden. Red and silver maples heavy with whirligigs prepare to helicopter their offspring into the human-level world, an ancient attempt to secure the future of their species. The fig tree’s dove-gray branches candle with chartreuse flames, their inverted flowers forming future figs now barely the size of peas. Sugar snap and radish seeds go into soil I’ve loosened and enriched with decayed leaves from the paths. We wait to rake out the flower beds, giving the beneficial insects time to finish percolating below ground. Temperatures will dip below fifty for the next five nights, and somehow, they understand this.

New leaves and tiny inverted flowers, otherwise known as figs.

I come back inside to twenty-three text messages in a group chat about dear friends who have pulled up stakes and moved to a homestead in North Carolina, where they grow most of their own food and live close to the earth in a way that the rest of us discuss admiringly while standing in our kitchens with our phones in our hands. I read the messages and laugh, feel something more complicated than laughter, and go back outside.

People who loved me when I was young said I lived to my own schedule, that I lost track of time easily. I’ve never thought of that as marching to the beat of my own drum. There was no pounding rhythm in my orchestra, just the fluidness of reeds and strings. Somewhere along the way I let someone hand me a snare drum and I have been a moderately willing, occasionally resentful participant in keeping up with that particular parade ever since.

Maybe we expect too much. Maybe we know too much. Maybe the mind, left alone for half a day, is still capable of surprising us. Things aren’t okay, but neither are they finished. A small plant becomes a cluster, the wind moves through the branches, I return to the garden with dirt between my toes, remembering what it was I thought I might forget.

~Elizabeth

Red maple and friend.

Oh, lovely people. What else is there for us to do besides hold each other up? Thank you for spending some time here today. Could we linger a bit longer in the comments?

What’s top of mind for you right now?
If your thoughts had an unstructured hour, where would they go?
What do you do when you’re not trying to accomplish something? Is that the same as trying not to accomplish anything? ☺️
Do you remember watching Wall-E, or will you watch it (again) now?

If you know someone who hasn’t been able to finish a thought lately, this might be the week to pass a bit of Chicken Scratch along.

Three years ago I wrote To This Day a piece I didn’t realize was a prequel to this one until I reread it this week. If you’re new here, it might be worth a few minutes of your time. There’s something about spring!

I write each week to do what I can to shine a little light into the world. It is a tremendous commitment of time and thought-resources. If you want to do more than read and can see your way to becoming a paid subscriber, that is the most direct way to keep this space going. A one-time tip is also a welcome option.

I’m grateful for all the ways you all support this work.

Afterward:

I include this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you’re so inclined. Each week I share one small, concrete way to make a difference, because our spheres of influence are wider than we sometimes think, and even simple actions have a way of compounding.

Try this:

Let your mind wander for a bit. Notice ideas drifting in like clouds, overlapping, shape-shifting. Get curious about where they take you when you stop trying to boss them around. You might find questions you forgot you had. It's less about focus or breath and more about setting the mind free.

Enjoy and see you soon!