Good morning. Fall weekends bring an imperative to get things done, but we need not over-engineer our days to get the most out of them.
Free reinIt’s the first Saturday of fall, and the urge to use it productively is almost automatic. All those tasks postponed and decisions left for after summer come due in that back-to-school buckling-down that happens even long after we’ve graduated. Get up and start checking things off the list! It could all wait until fall until it was fall, and now we’re running late. Or are we? A few weeks ago, standing waist-deep in a lake as the midday sun convinced us it would warm us completely forever, my friend Randi told me about how she’d managed to stop seeing her days as a list of jobs to be done. Her usual approach, like my own, had been to attack every day with a conqueror’s ambition, accumulating points on some imaginary scoreboard for each item completed. Too often, this is how we receive an unscheduled day. The answer to the question “What shall I do?” is “What needs to be done?” The drive to accomplish, to finish the work and get in some exercise and move on to chores — it all feels so virtuous. Check, check, check. Randi recently retired after a career teaching. Her husband, witnessing her default to industry, suggested: “Let the day come to you.” What if she leaned back a little, and allowed the day’s agenda to unfold moment to moment, without needing to achieve a certain level of output? This mentality changed how Randi viewed the unfilled time before her. She stopped imposing so rigid a standard for success on an innocent morning and instead greeted the day with a spacious curiosity. Any philosophy that advocates doing less is attractive. We’re usually so busy trying to earn the A from a nonexistent teacher, to prove to ourselves and anyone else that we’re not lazy, that we’re earning our keep on Earth. To let the day come to you is to trust that we don’t have to project-manage our lives. The way I picture it, you don’t lean back so far that you sprawl out and take a nap, but you take a beat before deciding what you’re going to do, taking note of your energy and your desires and those of the people around you. When the day comes to you, you greet it with an open mind: “Why hello, day, what have you got in store? What shall we get up to?” Perhaps a rigorous day of accomplishing, but one undertaken deliberately. Perhaps you’re inclined to sit quietly thinking this morning, and then spring into action later. Maybe it’s a stay-in-and-putter kind of day. The day might, in fact, come to you with that nap — listen to it. I’ll admit this approach feels a little dangerous. I’m skeptical of advice that seems likely to nurture something too soft in me, the part that if indulged might just crawl under the quilt and sleep until March. When I say the words “Let the day come to you,” I feel like a parody of a benevolent yoga teacher, as if I’m sprinkling confectioner’s sugar over a freshly frosted cake. I fear frivolity, I fear words that sound good and feel good but leave one feeling sapped of what the French philosopher Henri Bergson called “élan vital,” the creative force in all of us that’s responsible for growth. My fear, I think, is that if I’m not keeping my eyes on the prize, if I’m not punching the punch list, then the things to be done will never be done, and chaos will follow. But letting the day come to you doesn’t have to mean abandoning the day or relinquishing our healthy diligence. A day is not a horse we have to break. In James Baldwin’s 1968 novel, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” Barbara tells her friend: “Throw everything out of your mind, Leo, eat your supper, read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there’ll still be everything left to do.” This same wisdom must be inherent in letting the day come to you. We can throw everything out of our minds, read a little, sleep. We can let the day come to us, let our foot off the gas for an hour or an afternoon without losing our place in the world.
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“My father was very, very cold and tough. There was a cat making noise outside the house. He went out, got the cat, took it into the laundry room, shot it and left it in the wash tub. I think he did that to impress me. Like, you’ll never be as tough as your old man. And I won’t.”— Sylvester Stallone, whose memoir “The Steps,” comes out next week. He and the host Lulu Garcia-Navarro talked about how his abusive childhood affected his work and how that work affected our culture. Watch the interview.
Soccer: Cavan Sullivan, a 16-year-old phenom, may take the field as part of the U.S. men’s national team for the first time this afternoon. It’s the team’s first game since the World Cup. For those who know Sullivan best, his debut on the world stage is a long time coming. As a toddler, a family friend said, “he couldn’t talk, he could barely walk, but he literally had a ball at his foot.” Read more about his life. Hockey: A new N.H.L. season is just around the corner. To prepare, The Athletic’s hockey newsletter answered a question that’s been bugging fans and non-fans alike for years: Why not just put a sumo wrestler in front of the relatively small goal? The answer, in short, is that no sumo wrestlers are actually big enough to cover the entire space, leaving plenty of room for the sport’s best scorers. For more fun hockey coverage, get the newsletter, called Red Light, delivered to your inbox.
Grilled Tofu SaladWho doesn’t love a double-duty ingredient, making less work for the cook? So it goes in Kay Chun’s grilled tofu salad, where lemon-miso vinaigrette serves as both basting sauce and dressing. The recipe is flexible; you can use a grill, a stovetop grill pan or a broiler. Any which way, the tofu and zucchini will pick up the requisite smoky char in just a few minutes. Layered with fresh herbs, raw snap peas and shaved Parmesan, it’s savory and satisfying. Save leftovers for lunch during the week.
The Hunt: A pair of musicians looked for a vacation home in the English countryside. Which did they choose? What you get for $700,000: A farmhouse in Vermont, a rowhouse in Philadelphia and an American foursquare in St. Paul, Minn., are all on the market. Where would you most like to live? Pick your favorite: An Art Nouveau-style home, a four-bedroom with guesthouses and a modern home with views of a fjord, all near Gothenburg, Sweden, could be yours for about $1 million. Catios: The hottest item in real estate isn’t for humans. The market for covered enclosures for cats could reach $2 billion by 2033. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
