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It’s week thirty-five. How did the writing go for you this week? I’m not going to lie: after my final, peaceful, productive writing session for my novel on Monday—which I spent finishing up a scene and making a list of research topics I want to dig into before I start revising—I let myself drift. To be fair, it was a big week in our house: a second kid started back to in-person school, and we had two birthdays to celebrate. It was also a big week in the world: the Caldor fire is threatening Lake Tahoe, one of the most beautiful spots in the world; a single hurricane managed to cause significant damage to a huge swath of the country, including New Orleans and New York, two more of my most beloved places; and the Supreme Court refused to strike down a law that effectively blocks abortion access in Texas. I knew, of course, that climate change is upon us and that the systems we use to govern ourselves in this country are under strain. But these are the kinds of enormous, existential problems that often get shoved aside while I tackle more immediate problems. My individual actions can help my daughter manage her anxiety at school. My individual actions cannot solve climate change or repair our political system, though that doesn’t absolve me of doing my part to work for change. So that’s where I am this week. I was grateful that my daily word work took me to alternative worlds this week: a retelling of the Norse sagas, an immersive LitRPG book with a game world inside a future world, a short story in a now-familiar fantasy world. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the newsletter I wrote two years ago, in week thirty-five of 2019. It was ostensibly a review of David Lynch’s weird, wonderful book on creativity, Catching the Big Fish, but it was really about Fuck It Fall, which is maybe the closest thing I have to a life philosophy. You can read the full piece here, but what it boils down to is this: Our weeks might feel long, but our lives are short. Fall is a time to celebrate our aging and remember our mortality. It’s a time of harvest, of things coming to fruition, and a time of loss, of things waning. When I wrote that essay, I had a particularly glorious fall laid out in front of me, full of events to look forward to: a weekend with girlfriends in Grass Valley, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco, JS Ondara at the Independent, Lucinda Williams at the Fox, the two-night spectacle of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with my kids, and Thanksgiving with my family in North Carolina. Last year’s fall, of course, looked completely different. There were a few virtual concerts, a couple tentative backyard gatherings with a friend or two, a quiet Thanksgiving in the desert. But, looking back, I was largely in hibernation mode, just conserving energy to outlast the pandemic. As I step into fall this year, it feels like the colors are more vivid and the shadows are deeper and darker. I have had to weigh the pleasures and the risks of every event on my calendar in the coming months, and I know that any of them could still be canceled. Fuck It Fall is not the carefree, joyous embrace of life it was in 2019. But I also know that I will savor every moment of every experience I do get to have this fall—that I won’t take a single moment for granted. The question that every Fuck It Fall leads me to ask is this one: If not now, then when? It can be a practical one: If I’m not ready to attend a concert now, what are the conditions under which I will be ready? And are those conditions ever likely to occur? (This article from UCSF infectious disease specialist Monica Gandhi has helped me wrestle with the long-term outlook for the pandemic.) But it’s also a deeper, more philosophical question: If you want something different from your life than what you have right now, when will you get it? How will you get there? The weeks are long, but we only get fifty-two of them a year. Here, in week thirty-five of 2021, you have a moment to take stock of what you have and what you want in your life. Maybe you are still hibernating. Maybe you are mourning. Perhaps this is a period of shadows for you. But when you start reaching for the colors again, what will they be? Start imagining the joys you want in your life and—if you can, if you are ready—yell Fuck It Fall and start navigating toward them. This week’s Thing of Joy is a video for Kevin Morby’s song “Campfire” that I think captures that bittersweet Fuck It Fall feeling. I hope it brings you joy. Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights. Kristen
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