Long distance thinking

“I sit beside the fire and think

of all that I have seen

of meadow-flowers and butterflies

in summers that have been;

...

I sit beside the fire and think

of people long ago

and people who will see a world

that I shall never know.”

— JRR Tolkien

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth (1948)

I spent two weeks this summer back on the Hill in Newfoundland, ten acres of untamed land running along the Atlantic, a twenty minute hike from the closest road. Every morning, I'd wake early, the sky still dressed in a blue and gritty light, visit the sheep, then make coffee, sit outside, and think. Sometimes, I’d just sit. Watching the day grow bright. The vista of ocean and sky surrounding. The varieties of quiet. In open space, I am able to lift the guardrails of reason and productivity that pen in the modern mind and let my thoughts roam, untethered.

Thinking of the future is perhaps my favorite hobby. It is a kind of visceral pleasure that is hard to put into words. I know everything I said about the danger of falling in love with overly-architected, romantic visions because life may have other plans and won't turn out as I think, blah blah blah. In practice, I am not so sure I was right. In practice, romantic visions are the genesis of all quests and adventures. The hero sets out to save the world.

It's worth thinking about how the stories we love start like this. A grand, almost impossible ambition that seems doomed to failure, rather than a "iterating series of low risk experiments".

In the desire to be present, we can forget the presence of desire. In other words, we can forget that goals and dreams, even outlandish ones—maybe especially outlandish ones—are an essential part of a vital existence. “There is a version of yourself ten years from now that is begging this version of yourself to enjoy where you are currently just a little bit more”. True, but I would say the same of the inverse: “There is a version of yourself in ten years that is glad you moved from where you once were.”

~~~

Dreaming comes and goes in my life like a dew. Some mornings I wake and dreams are there, glistening. Other days, they are burned away by the midday sun of anxieties, office efficiency, and busyness. But when I am at my most vigorous, I am reckless in reverie. I think often of the future, what I want to build and do, and who I want to do it with. I keep a long list of projects and plans and lofty ideas, goals that practically spill out of my pockets, more than I could ever reasonably accomplish.

I started to think and plan about what job I wanted over a year before I could start work, not sure if I would keep writing and wandering the world. Only through this slow, patient gestation period of pondering how my past points towards my future did I discover work that works for me. I dreamt of planting roots for two years before settling somewhere. I wrote about familiarity and belonging while I was in an unfamiliar country that I didn't feel I belonged in. Now, after planting roots in a place and beginning to cultivate a community, I find happiness visits more often. I do not wish to be somewhere else again.

In general, I would say my life now works quite well for me. It took years to get here, crashing and burning through different lives that didn't work so well for me, but the success I’ve had I attribute to this kind of long-distance thinking. To casting my gaze as far ahead as I can, contemplating five, ten, even twenty years out on what I want to build and do in my life. Things important, but not urgent.

These are the dialect of dreams I cherish most: those that sit long in the heart, being heated and shaped, revisited for strength and hope, waiting for when they can be brought to fruition. Until then, out of a kind of fidelity to my future self, I remain faithful to what may someday be.

Mind you, it is easy to become estranged from my vision unless I make an effort to continually remember. Man is a forgetful creature.

~~~

There is the enduring fear that none of it will come true. That I will fail to extricate myself from the numbing parts of reality I am currently beholden to, and find myself stuck, dreams once close now feeling far and fugitive. What if there is no old stone home and wild roses? No late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair¹? No dark winter mornings, restarting the wood stove and watching the flames, the room filled with an almost cellular stillness? What if I run into reality and reality wins? What if I fold? Worse, what if I settle? What if the vision cracks and my hands are not calloused enough to caress the broken pieces?

Of course, there is a danger in trying to force my plans and refusing to reimagine my life when new information is discovered. If there's one thing literature is clear about, it's the tragedy of living in the past. Being a dreamer who inhabits only the surface of the world. Yet I've come to think of it less as exerting my will, and more as creating a clearing for possibility. Leaving room to grow, perhaps. This requires a posture of humility (because what the hell do I know), but also taking my plans seriously, as if reality is a malleable thing and I could have what I wanted if I worked for it.

This is the paradox of planning, although I’m suspicious of something much larger at play, too: how to be open-handed and close-handed at the same time. Open to life as it emerges, open to surprise, but also closed enough to take what’s in front of me and run with it. Balancing both truths that what I want will neither fall into my lap, but also will not succumb to the cold calculus of reason and design.

The more I move toward my goals, however small the steps, the more I have licence to dream². Desire must always be accompanied by action, or it languishes into a kind of longing that makes the heart sick.

~~~

There remains a certain beauty to dreaming that I think can rarely be found or felt in actual lived experience. There is a glory in the yellow lit windows on a crisp October evening walk, as long as you remember it is only real on the outside. There is a kind of sweetness in the not having. In yearning for what may never be had, or what must be unreasonably waited for. As long as these moments are held lightly, it is when I feel the burn of being most.

Marilynne Robinson:

"For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweet as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? For to wish a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

Naturally, this shade of sentiment dissipates as soon as you have. That question has sat heavy on my heart these days: Can I learn to love the waiting? Can I, even, be moved to praise it?

For I believe that all will be made whole. It is only a matter of when.

Although I have no social media apps, not even Substack, I am fond of Pinterest. It is full of images of a life romanticized. Baking cookies on a rainy day, dirt roads and berry stains, a clattering coffee shop in Paris with a dog-eared copy of Proust. I continue to collect images that shape my vision of the life I want to create, the home I want to live in, the family I want to build. What the shape of romance is, to me.

May you always look forward,

---

If you’d like to support my work in a more meaningful way, consider becoming a patron:

Paid subscriptions help me continue to prioritize this work and write ambitiously.

Or, you can contribute in a smaller way and buy me a coffee.

---

How I wrote this essay (My writing process)

This essay started as a stream-of-consciousness note I typed out in twenty seconds one morning at work.

Usually, my essays start with some abstract idea, but I must remind myself that it has to be paired with a personal story or no one will find it interesting (including me!)

Then, remembering the idea was similar to some cutting-room-floor material I had kept from earlier this year, I printed out my old notes and looked for anything interesting.

With my seed of an idea and some notes, I wrote out a first draft by hand.

The initial idea wasn’t on long-distance thinking but rather on romanticizing life. “I'm starting to think romanticizing life will actually make it better.”

But by this point, I realized the essay I was writing was really about dreaming and thinking into the future (which I should have realized since I’ve been talking about it in conversations). I cut away the parts that didn’t fit with the new direction of the piece.

With a fancy new title, I went through and edited. Again by hand.

Now with a decent rough draft, I used a voice transcription software (Otter.Ai) to get it into text, then did another edit. Here I was reminded of a few quotes I had come across that fit nicely (as well as other quotes I loved that sadly did not).

You can tell I have access to a printer since then I printed out the updated manuscript, and did another two passes of edits by hand, before updating the document and doing another three or four or six read-throughs, reshuffling and tweaking, wanting it to sound pleasant and good.

And that is roughly how you got the essay you now hold in your hands.

Of course, this does not count all the long walks and morning runs with nothing but my thoughts, or waking up in the middle of the night, racing to write a new idea down before it leaves me, but that is what a writer lives for.

1. Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning.

2. The psychology literature is pretty clear that positive emotion is not generated by accomplishment but by felt movement toward a worthy goal.