For your own good
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Jumpstack! I write this while recovering from the wickedly strong but thankfully quick stomach virus that has been churning its way through the city, so my thoughts are turned toward restoration. Let’s jump in!
Plight of the navigators
Everyone has a location where, no matter how many times you’ve been there, your internal compass spins in confusion, leaving you to slowly fumble your way out.
Put me on the street with a view of the CN Tower and I can find my way anywhere. But to ask me to find my way in the PATH underground system is an entirely different matter.
Heather Sellers explores her own difficulties in navigation and how needlessly hard we are on ourselves when confronted with our weaknesses in this long read, and provides a perspective on how to address them and ourselves with compassion and grace:
We all need help. We all have to ask each other questions to fill in what we do not know — everyone does. Just as wheelchair ramps assist adults pushing kids in strollers and people with troubled knees and scritchy hips, or trailing roller bags, any problem one person faces is likely a shared problem, forcing a question, an ask for help from a fellow human, and once you realize that, here comes the gentler world, the connected world, the world of contact.
It’s worse than you think
As you get older, you begin to accumulate wisdom: not in areas that you necessarily intend to, but become well acquainted with through practical experience.
Respiratory illnesses set their sights on me at an early age, and so every autumn I begin the preparations for the half-year siege against Fortress Jumpsuit.
But not everyone is prepared: these are busy months, and quite often we are so focused on outside goals and accomplishments that we lose track of looking after ourselves.
Every person I know who was eventually diagnosed with pneumonia thought it was just a stubborn cold. This thread I wrote last week provides a checklist of symptoms that can help you determine what you’re struggling with, and to seek medical help.
(Click here to read it all.)
I’m a mess
When her Netflix show premiered earlier this year, we were hit with a wave of Marie Kondo-mania. And as winter entered its last months, everyone had an opinion on her method of organization and eliminating objects that did not spark that most controversial of subjects, joy.
Ten months later, I’m still folding clothes in the KonMari Method™, which is the strongest personal indicator that the method dovetails with my needs. (I may still have things that don’t spark joy, but at least I can fit my clothes in my dresser.)
This article is typical Kondo: short and simple, but it also draws attention to things you may have sacrificed in the name of efficiency, yet has actually made you less productive.
As someone who works from home, I see myself engaging in a number of habits that don’t prioritize my goals or my needs. (I’m also writing this in my pyjamas.)
Based on the success of my dresser, I’m going to attempt Kondo’s tips and see how it plays out: if it works, be warned—it means I’ll be writing even more.
Fun and Function
When I was a child, for about a year I told everyone I wanted to be an interior decorator.
I wasn’t exactly sure what an “interior decorator” was. But it sounded impressive and had more syllables than “marine biologist,” another profession that kids said they wanted to be, although had only the vaguest idea of what it meant.
I’d have never survived as an interior decorator: I have strong feelings on the minimalist Airbnb aesthetic that has dominated for the past decade, which would have left me without clients.
But the Omega Workshops of early 20th century Britain, led by Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell, knew how to efficiently win tastemakers over:
With her confident aesthetic judgement and dedication to personal freedom, Bell embodied the Omega ethos. Planning the launch party, she wrote to Fry: “We should get all your disreputable and some of your aristocratic friends to come and after dinner we should repair to Fitzroy Sq. where would be seen decorated furniture, painted walls etc. There we should all get drunk and dance and kiss. Orders would flow in and aristocrats would feel sure they were really in the thick of things.”
Like Marie Kondo, the Omega workshops prioritized joy as a part of function, not separate from it. I hope our current tastes rediscover joy.
And that’s it for The Jumpstack this week! If you enjoyed it, how about hitting that heart or sharing with your friends? Let them know that we’re keeping the smoke break with your work wife tradition intact.
— Jump