December 2020
Hi friends,
I realize that it’s been a very long time—nearly eighteen months in fact—since last I digitized some ideas and inundated you with them. This morning I opened my old todo app and had a few very old tasks about reorganizing Rhizome into something slightly less lofty and more rooted in my own self-exploration. I’ve learned in the last six months or so through my own therapy that one dyadic approach is for the therapist to force the therapee to give language to their feelings. To name them. I’ve actually thought quite a lot about this phenomenon over the years, once in this very newsletter (albeit indirectly). How I really feel about it is much more direct. Language turns the smooth, continuous space of thought into something discrete and parsable. As I read what I’d written in December of 2020 below, it dawned on me that that is exactly what was I was doing. Writing those two paragraphs was therapeutic for me.
So, if it seems as though I’ve let Rhizome die on the vine, think of it more as if it’s fertilizing for whatever grows next. The healthy Self is a permaculture.
What you’ll find below is two paragraphs that I wrote in December 2020 with the intention to turn it into a full post and send it to y’all. It’s about my running journey, which feels particularly sharp due at the moment to me being unable to run for nearly eight weeks now due to an injury. What I didn’t know in December 2020, though, was that running was nowhere close to being done changing my life—running and hardcore—stay tuned for more on this. Anyway, I’m sending it now because it feels just as relevant today as it did then. I hope you’re all healthy, well, and growing. See you soon.
dan
In September of 2019 I went to my first check up in six or so years, and Dr. Oliver asked me, “what do you do for exercise?” I told her, “oh, you know, we hike sometimes on the weekends.” She scoffed and told me that that didn’t count. She then told me that 40 was a cliff, and I that needed to get my act together. I loved that, and I tell anyone who’ll listen that story. While it took a few months, in December of last year I decided to give running a shot, marking the very first intentional exercise of my life. It’s been a climb, sometimes literally, given all the hills in SW Portland, but as I’m writing this on Christmas Eve, I’ve just gotten home from a run, my shorter route—a loop around Multnomah Village at about three-and-a-half miles—and it was my fastest ever: my average pace was 8:32/mi. This, I think, works as a metaphor for 2020. This year we dug in in those places we knew we needed to because we saw that we had no other choice.
My personal intellectual journey this year saw almost no math, though I did have some fun early in the year working on some proofs with a friend just for fun, I instead found myself reading books about race (Everyday Forms of Whiteness), Economics (Capital and The Deficit Myth), parenting (The Danish Way of Parenting (I know, finally) and The Carpenter and the Gardener), I’ve found myself properly, willfully, and happily haunted by Marx’s specter, being a burgeoning critical theorist in my book club’s reboot where we read Toni Morrison’s Sula and Coleson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. This theorizing isn’t ever met without some opposition of course, usually a rebuttal grounded in pragmatism that casts socialism as an idealist utopia. During one of those debates, though, I found myself replying with the rejoinder: If you’re not an idealist, what is there to look forward to? I, personally, am looking forward to 2021. I’m idealizing it, where the indispensable things we’ve learned about each other this year can finally go out into the world, anew and revitalized, ready to affect change.
I love you all, and will see you soon,
dan