On A Need To Know Basis, Pt 1

or, seeking a moment of quiet

There’s this thing I do. I often do it when I’m falling asleep, it takes me swiftly into dreamland. I also do it when I am walking my dogs. Sometimes in the mornings, after everyone has left in a whoosh out the door in the morning and I have that first moment of actual quiet to myself, I practice doing it.

I imagine.

I play pretend.

Recently I took my girls out to shop for birthday supplies. It’s Gracie’s THIRTEENTH birthday this month (yes I am shouting, like how in the frig is this possible that I have a teenager?! Aren’t I basically still a teenager myself! Oof) and she’s celebrating with a high-tea/pool party. Pretty dreamy stuff really. So out we headed, me and my three in tow, to source adorable china for the tea service.

Did you know that everything in thrift shops is cool now? And because it’s cool it’s not thrifty, it’s not cheap. Someone’s grandmother’s tea set that has been gathering dust for decades gets donated to a thrift shop and then they slap a $9.99 sticker on a tea cup and saucer. One tea cup and saucer!

I guess I’m also at the age that I'm outraged and flabbergasted by the cost of everything (but also inflation is a real actual thing and don’t forget for a moment that a median house price of $750,000 is not actually normal or affordable - those are topics for another time).

It’s just that I guess I imagined a really different scenario for shopping for these tea cups. I didn’t think it would cost $100, I didn’t think there would be hardly anywhere to park on a weekday afternoon where everyone should be at work or school, I didn’t think it would take over three hours to do this very simple and presumably joyful errand of party supply shopping.

Thinking isn’t working for me a lot right now, which is when I play my game of pretend.

The world is becoming increasing loud, full, busy. My little small town is not a small town but the infrastructure hasn’t changed much, so every day the commute to anywhere takes a bit longer with so many more cars on the road. The parking lots are fuller. The stores are always busy.

There’s the real practical ways that the world is changing as our cities swell with newcomers, and then there’s the overly loud way we live by being plugged in all the time. It just feels so much harder to get a moment of quiet.

Today the wind changed directions for the first time in awhile and, wow, I forgot that I don’t always have to hearing blaring traffic. Today it’s just the pond, the birds, my dogs savagely barking because the fox is back.

There are some weekend days when my kids are allowed the freedom to watch tv or play a video game where suddenly I can hear the different pitches of kids shows, crime dramas, racing games all colliding in the background. It makes my head want to explode.

And obviously I’m not immune to it, I use my computer (right now case in point), I scroll my phone. I like to think I have a decent level of awareness about my use of it but I’m still plugged in. I’m still tethered to this device which makes me feel on and available 24/7. We were never meant to be.

We were never meant to be aware of the news in every corner of the world. Sure, you like to be informed, everyone wants to feel in the know and hold self-important opinions about all the things. But it wasn’t that long ago where we kinda didn’t know that much. We were driving around with paper maps and just seeing where the road went. We didn’t have a Google earth visual to guide us or flesh out our perception before we had actually arrived somewhere.

So we had to imagine.

I was telling the girls about my long journey in Australia. About how my girlfriends and I bought a car, a 1985 hand-painted orange Ford Falcon wagon (Matilda), large enough for 8 adults and all their gear I’m certain, and we travelled up and down the east coast of Oz. We had no navigation besides literal paper maps, which astounded my kids (“you can’t read a map, mom! HA!” I can actually, so HA back), about how I don’t really know how we knew where we wanted to go…I guess we would chat with other travellers we met along the way, IRL, we would hear about a cool hostel somewhere and we’d probably find the address when we visited the INTERNET CAFÉ (remember?!) and then we’d just — drive there. See what it was all about when we got there.

Figure it out.

We allowed our brains to not need to know that much, just take it easy driving down a stretch of highway during the biggest forest fire season in 100 years (who knew), our clothes practically melting off us (to the great joy of the road workers, I’m sure), smoking cigarettes (me), blaring Sweet Child of Mine (Kendra), taking the odd pic on the super futuristic digital camera with likely a 3 mega pixel resolution (Pam) and just letting it all sort itself out.

Maybe we’d end up at the hostel, maybe we’d camp somewhere instead, maybe we’d sleep in the car. We just…figured it out.

Now our brains are wired to the Cloud, we’re thinking in this pixelated way, disseminating information as if we ourselves are computers, and really not allowing much to go to chance. To be imagined. ‘Cause we always have to know. EVERYTHING.

Right now I am writing this but simultaneously have tabs open to order essential oils in July, check real estate listings locally, do my taxes and ferrying liquids and tissue to Edie who is in my bed with allergies.

RANT/TANGENT alert

We’re fractured in our way of being, our minds whirring over so much information and to-do lists constantly. I think often about the push on mental health right now, and the barrage of labels people are ascribing to themselves - ADHD, neurodivergent. I feel like I could write an entire book about this but mostly what I want to say is that maybe it’s less about how un-normal you and your brain are and more about how normal was a lie from the beginning. Though I think there’s a messy flood of information for kids to adults about labelling and managing their mental predispositions, what I do think is helpful about it is that a conversation has started. And I hope the conversation is turning us closer and closer to hitting upon the real issue here; that we live in a world that was built to never allow us to thrive. That for generations we just fell in line, plopped down on the conveyer belt of life in the industrial capitalist life, shoulder to shoulder, pushed through years of (indoctrinated) school and into systems that boxed us in and took us away from our wild and free nature. But something has broken down and now many of us are peering up from this grey, linear chute we’ve been ushered in on and seeing a world all around it. Noticing that it wasn’t us that was wrong or broken or weird, it was that we were all made as individuals pushed into a collective soup, thinking that somehow all children should perform the same way in their classes (standardized testing), that all adults should operate on the same work schedule. The mere fact that we, here, live in the northern hemisphere that sees a tangible seasonal difference between summer and winter — 7 hours less of sunlight, frigid temps, no produce — and yet we don't change anything about our daily routine, it’s madness! And the craziness isn’t about us, it’s about the system and we’re finally recognizing the difference. So yes, it may be helpful to get a diagnosis because you’re finally given permission to be YOU to behave in ways that feel aligned with you, but overall what we’re needing is to drop the labels and the stigmas, which ultimately still pigeon-hole us, and to live life on our terms without the need for validations, categorization or pathology. But I digress.

We don't all want to run away to a chateau in the Loire Valley or homestead in the wilderness of Canada. We just want to live in this 2025 version of life without medicating ourselves in order to be “ok”. We want to buy tea cups from a lady named Betsy and a sandwich from Al who knows that we want extra mayo without having to ask for it. We want community and connection and the freedom to be ourselves without need for a parade or a label or every corporation to back us.

Back to tea set shopping.

I hated the experience, I was frustrated that the whole thing felt like a fight, not an experience. Afterwards I took my dogs for a walk and I let myself imagine what a more ideal version of this would be.

Part 2 next week.