The Sunday Letter #25: Chaos Theory
The Sunday Letter #25: Chaos Theory
Today’s Sunday Letter might feel a little different, friends. I haven’t been musing on some large part of the cosmos of late so much as I’ve been musing on a hundred tiny, and also large, things all at once. So if today’s letter feels a little scattered, that’s probably why. It might just be a smattering of all the things that have been ricocheting through my head over the past few weeks.
Onward, upward, here we go.
I’ve started doing The Artist’s Way again, which is probably at least partially responsible for the scattered nature of my brain (and then also, by extension, this letter). I decided to start the course again after reading about it over on Ali Griffin Vingiano’s newsletter, Little Things.
If you aren’t familiar with The Artist’s Way, it’s essentially a twelve-week self-guided course in creativity, created by the writer and artist Julia Cameron. I first learned about TAW over twenty years ago, when a friend of mine told me about it during my third year of undergraduate studies back at UVic. I fell desperately in love with this friend around the same time. She was the first woman I’d ever been in love with and though things between us did not work out (see: desperately in love, the modus operandi that would come to define my romantic excursions with both men and women for the better part of the next two decades), we are still friends. She lives on the opposite side of the world now and my heart still does a little soft expanse whenever I see her name in my inbox.
There is something about the kind of love that changes you, isn’t there, that never goes away.
Anyway. I decided to do the course again—I’d purchased the workbook two decades ago, when my friend had been extolling its virtues, and had carted it around with me ever since—and when I finally located the workbook and opened it up, I was delighted to see a whole bunch of pink highlighter smeared across the first few pages. Twenty-two-year-old Amanda, sending me a little flare from the past. I saw those highlighter marks and felt myself transported to those days again—that joy, that excitement, the inevitable anguish. Crying uncontrollably in the bathtub of my little studio apartment in Victoria’s Cook Street Village. Everything had felt so large and exciting and possible then, and also so scary and wild. Insurmountable. Inconceivable. So many big dreams, the world stacked against you.
I felt so tender, reading through the parts of the book that I’d highlighted. Some of those sentences still resonate with me now, these decades later, and others not so much. It feels both impossible and also the easiest thing in the world to look back and say look how far I’ve come and also I still feel like the same person I was then.
I wonder if this is how light feels as it travels across the universe. Photons, as we know, do not experience time. It takes hundreds of thousands of years for a photon to travel from the Sun’s core to its surface, and hundreds of thousands of light-years more for that light to stretch out across the universe and reach distant galaxies. But to the photon, it’s all the same. No time has passed at all.
It feels strange and also inevitable, somehow, to be sitting here writing this newsletter in a state of what basically feels as close to bliss as I’ve ever experienced. Life is so simple these days, and also so perfect. I write, I read, I take Sitkapants for walks. I make delicious things for breakfast lunch and dinner. The next day, I do this all over again.
I’m not talking to all that many people. I love that too. I love this so much that a few weeks ago I realized that if I were to meet someone now and start dating it would screw everything right up. This blessed silence? This blessed rhythm? Having to talk to another human being at regular intervals throughout the day? I don’t think I have the energy for it!
In the summer of 2021 I took two weeks off of work and finished the first draft of Wild Life, the novel that will hopefully hit bookstore shelves next March. Those days were blissful in the same way—distilled down to their smallest, most quiet essence. I filled my fridge with delicious things to eat and cancelled all social obligations and put my phone to Do Not Disturb during all my waking hours. My poor neighbour kept asking if I wanted to go on dog walks and I kept saying no, I can’t, I have too much work to do, I want to get this done! At the time I felt so guilty for saying this, for clinging stubbornly to solitude in the face of a world that encourages social interaction basically everywhere I turn. But now I think it’s just my process.
More than that: I think it’s just what I need.
The writer Katherine May spoke about this beautifully in a recent post she shared about starting her next book.
Make space, not time, she says. For me this means both physical space and time—I find it very hard to write when I’m surrounded by other people, or by obligations. It isn’t impossible, and I can make it happen when I need to, but still: it’s hard for me. And it’s become that much harder the older I get.
I realize this probably makes me a very inefficient writer—I have so many friends who have children and day jobs and other obligations that force them to make the time that they have really count, and sometimes I’ll look back on a week or stretch of days that I’ve had in this year of doing-nothing-but-writing and think: all that time, and what do you have to show for it? But the answer, truly, is space.
So much of the reaching for this year away from work (and, yes, the crossing-my-fingers for more time after this year is over) was about answering that need for space. I needed time to get my head in order to write this book, and now that I have it, I am letting the time and the space do whatever it needs to do.
Yes, this, I can feel my soul saying. Let’s keep on doing this.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Universal Basic Income, and how that would be a game-changer for writers. (Really, for artists of all stripes.) Can you imagine what life would be like if you could spend your days writing and researching (and maybe promoting and speaking and doing whatever else you needed to, for your books) and not having to worry about paying for a house or for putting food on the table?
Can you imagine living in a world where the amount of your output doesn’t dictate whether or not you starve? I don’t think any of us need to be greedy, or unrealistic. I don’t think saying that all artists deserve to have a place to live and something to eat means that we all need to be living in mansions. As much as it pains me to say it, I think it’s even possible for something like capitalism to co-exist alongside UBI, as much as I’d also be happy to set capitalism aflame with my own two hands and watch it burn to cinders.
Imagine: Writer A writes a novel of literary fiction that takes them ten years to write. UBI gives them the space to make this happen. Writer B writes detective thrillers and manages to put one out every other year or so. UBI pays for their minimum lodging and food, but the income they make from their books means that they do get to have a mansion. Maybe even two. I don’t think this is unfair. In each scenario, the artist is able to do what they love. One artist has an audience that’s perhaps a little smaller, but this doesn’t impact their ability to survive in the world.
Maybe that’s what my next novel will be about. Right now I’m making space for grief; next time, I’ll make space for science fiction.
In science and mathematics, chaos theory is a “field of study that focuses on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities”. In simple terms, the theory basically explores the so-called chaos of the world around us, examining things at the discrete level and uncovering patterns—and the connections that both result from and cause these patterns—that don’t seem immediately apparent. Sometimes those connections can take years to uncover.
Twenty-some-odd years ago you buy a creativity workbook because you’re in love. Then you fall out of love and put the book away, and two decades later you come back to it, recognizing that the person you needed to be in love with then, and now, is yourself.
That’s a kind of connection I can definitely get behind.
Several weeks ago, Elizabeth Gilbert—one of my favourite writers—filled out the Oldster Questionnaire. I loved everything she said—I love everything Liz says, all of the time—but my favourite part was this:
[A]s someone who has now been twice-divorced and once widowed, I am amazed by how great it is to be on my own, to live alone, to travel alone, to chart my own course in life without having to run it by anyone. It’s the fucking bomb. I never met any woman who was like me when I was a kid. They were all deeply responsible housewives, who took care of everyone, and had precious little time for themselves. If I had someone like me, I feel certain I never would have married at all.
I really, really, really like being by myself. And I never in a million years thought I would say this. At some point in the near future I’m going to write about the daughter I once thought I would have, and how letting go of her has been inextricably bound up with letting go of all of the dreams and futures I thought I’d have with Jess. But the more time I spend with myself, here in my little house with my dog, the more I realize that I have always been aiming for a life that looks like this one.
I always feel strange talking about writing and sacrifice. It feels pompous and full of hubris to me somehow—look at these sacrifices I’m making for the well-being of my art!—even as I also acknowledge that sometimes writing and sacrifice just go hand in hand.
Maybe it’s better to put it like this: a writing life, like any life, is filled with choices. Sometimes you make choices that prioritize your art, and sometimes you do not. What I’ve been realizing, slowly, over the course of this year is that I’ve always on some level made choices that put the writing first. I have been ferociously cognizant of my writing time and space, the atmosphere I needed to write in, the things that made me thrive and feel truly warm, to the point where a time would always come where I would feel the urge to draw away from the world deep down in my bones.
Time to go on retreat, my body would say. Let’s go to Banff or apply to Hedgebrook or apply for a residency because we need to get away and be by ourselves. I talked about love and wanting children but I only had so much energy left over after the work day and trying to pay down debt, and I sent that energy to writing—every. single. time!—even as I groused about being alone.
In her Letters from Love series, Liz Gilbert talks about the letters that she’s written to herself for years—letters written from Love, that all-encompassing love for yourself that we all find, eventually, when we dig deep enough. I’ve been thinking about these letters and writing letters of my own as well. From Love, to Me. From Me, to Love.
Oh, Love says to me. My dearest fluffy human. How frightened you were, when you were younger, of a life spent silent and single. How desperately lonely it made you feel, this wretched, looming future where you were not married and did not have kids, this life where you did not own a house of your own or have an Important High-Paying Job or a Fancy Car or Really Nice Clothes, all of these things that you thought, secretly, you’d need to someday mean something to the world.
You remember that night, don’t you, in your early thirties, when you fell asleep crying because you felt in your core that you were never going to meet someone? That night, like so many others, when you worried that you were never going to fall in love with someone who loved you back, that you would always be the one having to make decisions for you, that your life would be one long stretch of nights like this until the day decades in the future when your neighbours found your rotting corpse in your bedroom, half-eaten by neighbourhood squirrels?
Yes. You remember that night as well as I do. How the pain of it felt like your heart was going to collapse on itself, how something black and bottomless was going to eat you from the inside out.
And now, here you are a decade or so later. Still alone (except with dog). But also, just like Liz Gilbert says: alone with you. You are not by yourself, beloved human. You are with yourself. With yourself, and with your writing, just like you’ve always chosen over and over. You knew, even back then, what would make you truly happy. Because I knew.
Because I loved you back. Me! I did! I always have! And, not to brag, but I always knew you would get here too. It was only a matter of time, of letting that initial condition of your far-flung, aching heart to fully grow and manifest. You needed to love, but also to lose, in order to understand that you can never lose.
This is what we’re thinking about now, aren’t we, in this year of writing and Jess. This book about your beloved soulmate friend who was lost to you, but also not lost in so many ways. She loved you the way that I do, and showed it right from the first day that you met. She still loves you! She is still cheering you on, as am I, from that wider place of love and mystery to which we’ll all, eventually, return. Think of her blue butterflies. Think of how she winks at you from glass shop windows.
Think of all that as you meander through the rest of this year and into whatever comes next. Your life is nothing like what you’d imagined and also everything that you dreamed about. And it is all of these things because you knew, in your deepest heart of hearts, that I—me, Love—was holding everything the whole time. Even when you didn’t think that you deserved to have Me here.
I am that initial condition for everything you reach for. All of your chaos theory-ing, all of your backwards-spelunking into the old connections that surface and disappear and then resurface again—they’re all me. I am the one holding everything together.
Loving you with the power of all the universe’s photons,
Love
Last week I gave my Jess book over to the power of that Love. This weekend, I finished the book proposal for it.
Now it’s time to get those sample chapters into shape, and from there…we’ll see what awaits.
Onward and upward, through chaos and love.
Currently Reading: The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Currently Watching: The Expanse
Currently Eating: This vegetarian Pad Thai! (Again!)
Currently Substacking: The Practice of Life, by Maia Duerr