The Sunday Letter #8: Forty-one turns around the sun

I’m forty-one years old today. What a gift—and yet also, how ordinary. How lucky we are, those of us who get these years, to call these days such ordinary, mundane things. Another day where you wake up with the sun and go about your business. Water the garden and walk the dog and feed the dog and make yourself breakfast (love those birthday lattes until the end of time) and then maybe take that breakfast out onto the porch in the humid air of late July.

A few months ago I had coffee with my cousin in downtown Hamilton. He’s the creative director of an ad agency outside of Toronto and we sat in the large windows of a coffee shop and marveled, for a few hours, at how impossible all of it felt. Creative director. Communications and Development Coordinator. Adults. When once upon a time we were tiny children racing up and down the stairs, sleeping over at one another’s houses and watching The Man From Snowy River until we wore out the tape.

At our coffee meet that day he talked about how his Saturday morning routine—making himself coffee, sitting with it in his front room as the sun spilled through the windows—felt so normal and mundane and yet also somehow sacred. The way that growing older has turned both of our heads to the small and the wondrous as a way of filling each day with magic. Life might be boring and small and mundane, yes, but the very fact that—for a while—this boring and small and mundane keeps coming back to you? Miraculous. How miraculous a thing, to make oneself a coffee on a Saturday morning and relish every sip. To sit in a room with sunlight spilling in through the windows and think: there is nowhere else I have to be except right here.

To sit with your grief, in your darkest moments, and think the same thing.

It has taken me the better part of forty-one years to learn this lesson. Every step has been worth it.

The movement of the dwarf planet Eris, discovered by astronomer Mike Brown and his team at CalTech, as it makes its 557-year orbit around the sun.

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A lot can happen in a year. This time a year ago I woke up on my fortieth birthday with the sudden, strange realization that I liked myself—that I actually liked who I was, who I’d grown to be. That all of the years of struggle and turmoil and joy and grief and impossible sadness had carved something unimaginable out of the human rock that I was, spinning my way through the universe.

How wonderful, to wake up and realize you were right where you were supposed to be.

The year that followed has been filled with work (probably too much of it, at times) but also with this steady reminder, like a heartbeat going through the days. You are right where you’re supposed to be. Everything has led you to right now. It carried me through September, when we went to spread Jess’s ashes on that beach, and it carried me through the rest of the fall, through the flurry of doing the writer-in-residence position at McMaster alongside my work at the FOLD, through filling out all of those grant applications in support of a growing dream of taking a year away from work just to write. When I woke up on January 1 I knew that the fall of the new year would see me in Scotland. I’ve talked about this before.

I’m not sure where the knowing came from (though I definitely have theories about it), except to say that it feels, on some strange cosmic level, as though I’ve finally learned the lessons that needed learning over these last few decades. Like finally unlocking that level you could never get over in the game.

What a surprise, then, to realize that the lessons have all been so small. Why couldn’t I have woken up when I was twenty-five and loved myself the way that I do now? You try and try and try to unlock that level, that final door in the game, and then one day you look down and realize you’ve been holding the key in your own goddamned hand this entire time. You move forward and unlock the door and it falls open for you, with little to no effort. Like magic.

And yet it hasn’t been magic at all. It’s just been the same key you’ve been carting from one catastrophe to the next, convinced that it has nothing to give you.

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In his 2010 memoir, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, astronomer Mike Brown recounts the journey(ies) that he took, both personally and across the night sky, in finding Eris, the dwarf planet that eventually contributed to Pluto losing its status as the ninth planet in the solar system. It’s a lovely book, the perfect kind of science writing that explains concepts of the universe in slow, easy-to-understand terms that are necessary for non-science people like me.

Eris, a dwarf planet that lies roughly 10 billion kilometres from the sun, takes 557 Earth years to make one round around our star. 557 years! Think about how many people live and die and fade from history in a time like that. Think about how many things are known and discovered and then changed in a time like that. The things we understand for absolute certain that are then, in a hundred years’ time, or two hundred years’ time, or a decade’s worth of days, shown to be different from what we thought they were.

It feels like a real gift—a true gift—to look at that and realize that if the only thing I take away from this life is the understanding that I like who I am, then I’m doing pretty well. It only took the better part of 40 years to get to this point, which feels like no time at all when I consider Eris, chugging along in its 557-year orbit.

One of the things that I loved most about Brown’s book was his recounting of his daughter, Lilah’s, first year of life in and around all of the excitement of discovering new planets. For Brown, in fact, there were plenty of times during that particular year when his daughter’s milestones eclipsed his excitement around his work. The way that the most ordinary and mundane things can take on cosmic significance if we have the space to see it. The first time your daughter smiles.

A cup of coffee on a Saturday morning.

Or waking up on your birthday, glad that you get to embark on another turn around the sun, secure in this bag of flesh on this rocky little planet that, as it turns out, you happen to like very much. Mundane or not, it’s a great place to be.

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And so, 41, here we are. 40 was a great year and I’m hoping that this next one holds lots of joy too. But one of the most wonderful discoveries from this past decade has been the knowledge that even the terrible moments—the grief, the sadness, the depression that felt like it would never go away—even these are necessary. Even these—perhaps especially these—contribute to who you are. They hollow you out in ways that no one would choose, but the gifts and the wonder that they bring are immense. And also, tiny and mundane and simple.

I am grateful for those lessons. And now, having opened that door, I wonder what lies in the future. I hope for magic in Scotland—both of the cosmic and the mundane variety!—and also for the year ahead. I hope I can hold tight to the knowledge that even grief, when it comes in force again, can be a gift. I hope I can let go of the worry around being too earnest in this newsletter! Wonder is not a bad thing!

My goal for the year is to believe in my writing, no matter what it does or where it goes. This feels like the next step—that slow first step along that mountainside staircase. Please consider upgrading your subscription if you’d like access to Drafts and Glimmers (first post comes out later today!), or if you’re just looking for a way to support the work of writers like me (the recent news that publishers are looking to include AI in book contracts is a whole other newsletter, but let’s just say: the years ahead might be dire), or if you’re feeling in the birthday gift mood.

There are a variety of options for subscribing and of course, The Sunday Letter will always be free. Thank you so much for being here and reading as the next orbit begins. Here’s to another turn around our favourite star.

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Currently Reading: How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell

Currently Watching: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season Two (Melissa Navia is my absolutely favourite)

Currently Eating: This Crispy Baked Pesto Tofu, from The Minimalist Baker