James Parker writes in this Atlantic article about poet Seamus Heaney:
What is the opposite of poetry? What slows the spark and puts sludge in the veins? What deadens the language? What rears up before you with livid and stupefying power—in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day—to make you feel like you’ll never write a good line again?
Stuff.
Not physical stuff, but mental stuff. You know: things you should have taken care of. The unanswered email. The unpaid bill. The unvisited dentist. The undischarged obligation. The unfinished job. The terrible ballast of adulthood.
Parker writes that in Heaney’s letters the revered poet and translator revealed feeling weighed down by that same ballast. An ongoing mental load. And Parker felt something like comfort in learning that one of the major poets of the 20th century felt weighed down by the mundanity of life’s tasks…just like us.
#relatable
Heaney’s never ending to-do list strikes me as a signifier of “adulting” — what one dictionary defines as “the practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks.” And this practice has been on my mind for a while it seems as I wrote a piece last year that I called “The Tyranny of the Urgent.” It now reads to me as a preemptive response to Parker’s “The Tyranny of Stuff.”
Both tyrannies are linked, I think, forming a heavy chain that many of us wear much (if not all) of the time. I’ve yet to come up with a mitigating strategy to lighten the load but here are a few ideas I’ve turned to in my ongoing effort to model healthier behaviour for my 9-year-old:
This Vanity Fair article about the woman who coined the term “adulting” and her painful relationship to it. I found it a useful reminder that one creative work will beget a new one and then another whether we recognize the links as they happen or not. Thus, reflexivity.
This painting by Virginia Chihota that hangs in the Tate Modern. It’s called “Fighting One’s Self” and I relate. For me that recognition of shared experience is helpful.
This little movie about about very busy ants who are unwittingly making art in the Brazilian rainforest with confetti: Artistic ants! (I filmed this clip when walking through the Tate Modern last week with
. Take a moment to click the link and enjoy. It’s less than five seconds long).
My takeaway: there IS beauty in the mundane and insects are great teachers.
As Frankie helps me to reframe “the terrible ballast of adulthood” I would love to learn from you who your teachers are. Insect or human, art or the mundane. Relieving the mental load is a group effort.