Wednesday Post 2: I suck at adulting

In which Hilary learns her limits

St. Benedict of Nursia, egg tempera on gesso panel. A commission for a friend that I really ought to have finished by now.

Welcome to the new Free Folk: thanks for joining us

I wanted to start by welcoming another hundred sign-ups. We’re a group now of 211! Substack’s how-to pages say that the first hundred is the first big hurdle to get over, and if you can get to that milestone in the first week you’re doing great. Well, we were a hundred in the first 18 hours or so. And now we’re only at the second Official Wednesday Post, fifth post all together and ten days after starting, and we’re more than twice that! I’m amazed, really, that so many people even remember my previous work sufficiently to still be interested in a newsletter format.

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For The New, I’ll just quickly reiterate the general outline of what we’re doing here. We’re here to talk, like normal, civilised grown-ups, about issues that affect us all, even all the way over here in central Italy. The newsletter-direct-to-email format means that it’s a lot less “in the wild” - a much more controlled audience - than something like a public blog (or worse, Twittface) though all the posts for the time being are also available publicly on the Substack website. So, the idea is that it’s like a club more than a blog.

The basic framework for writing is two “Official Main Posts” per week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Supplemental posts, related to a “Theme of the Week,” will be added as time and inclination permit. (This week’s theme is still “Work”.)

About monetising, we’re not there yet, but I’ll be moving on that soon. Substack allows the writer to control which posts are “paid subscription only” and for the moment, all posts are open to everyone. Even after monetisation - which will happen as soon as I get my act together to set up an Italian bank account that I can link to the Stripe system - at least one post a week will continue to be available to all subscribers, Free Folk and World of Hilarity Citizens alike. Though it gives the writer the option to monetise them separately, I’m going to leave the comments open on all the non-paid posts. The whole point of this is to talk.

So, many thanks to the people who have signed up for the emails, and especially to those who have commented and conversed so far, both in commboxes and by email. And to those who have donated through PayPal. Let’s keep going, shall we?

Well, that seems to have touched a nerve: our societies aren’t really ours

And I’m massively pleased - and not a little surprised - at the reception so far. I was quite surprised by the strong reception of the Saturday Post, “Why are we really languishing?” about how we are now waking up to the idea that our societies are not at all what we thought they were.

I heard from quite a lot of people who said something along the lines of “This is what I’ve been thinking, but hadn’t thought of it that way…” And I can honestly say, neither had I, at least not in so concrete a way, until I wrote it.

On Saturday afternoon I went down to the coast to visit some friends- first time leaving the house since Christmas - so wasn’t really able to concentrate on writing. But really feeling very strongly that the people who had signed up deserved their post, starting about nine pm on Saturday, I hunched over the computer bleary eyed and longing for bed. (This is something I’m really quite determined about; Wednesdays and Saturdays are a promise I intend to keep.) But I was so tired by that time, after a full morning of energetic housework and gardening, followed by a two-hour car ride, that I felt like nothing was going to come out of my brain but gibberish.

I wasn’t at all sure I was making a coherent point. And then, without really thinking about it, I just wrote this:

“How can we be expected to maintain a sense of the value and purposefulness of our daily lives if they can simply be stopped, instantly and without recompense, on the apparently whimsical, arbitrary orders of our governments? Who wouldn’t be wondering in this situation whether any of the things we used to do ever had any value in the first place? If it could all just be stopped like that, by a government dictat, what were our societies really made of?”

… and realised that I’d almost tripped over something that I had been thinking for a long time but had never articulated before, even to myself.

We are all asking the question to one degree or another: “If our societies can just be shut down, our work and our citizenship completely devalued… if our polities and social order are not generated by our involvement and participation but are somehow just granted to us from on high by an unaccountable class of elites … then what’s the point of it all? Why bother?

And if we don’t, if we decide that a society that can just throw us out of work and civil participation without notice isn’t worth the effort of that participation - if we refuse to play along with a lie - then how else are we to live? I don’t want to participate in a colossal lie, but what else have we got? Where can we go? What can we do about this?

I’ve got quite a lot about it in my notebook: “Work” is really our voluntary participation in our larger social framework. Work is what connects us to our fellow human beings, fellow citizens. Without work, we drift away from society, we lose the reality of being in a social order, a part of something larger than ourselves, connected beneficially to other people. And that’s why it’s not good enough for governments - who have effectively stolen our societal participation - to simply hand us cash in recompense. Work isn’t really about money, and money isn’t enough to compensate for its loss.

Learning limits

And we’re going to talk about all that. But not today. Because I suck at adulting.

I ended that post a bit abruptly, because, as I said, I was just plain too tired to write any more that evening, and I promised we’d follow up with Part II. I came home on Monday and spent most of yesterday unable to accomplish much from sheer exhaustion, after another 2.5 hour drive home and quite a lot of furniture moving. (A good friend is moving back to the US and gave me a big stack of books, a book case, and some small storage units, and I was up much too late Monday night re-organising all my books and art supply cupboards.)

And this is the unfortunate reality of gathering years, (added to the long-term and apparently permanent effects of chemotherapy ten years ago) you just plain can’t do as much stuff as you used to. My brain can’t seem to get used to the idea that I’ve really only got so much juice per day. It seems to think we’re still walking around in an undamaged 35 year-old body, and gaily makes plans like, “Paint for eight hours and then write your Wednesday post.”

In fact, it is kind of about the things we’re talking about. In truth, I’m trying to re-organise my whole life. I’ve been trying to figure out how to live in the world without a job in the old labour-for-wages sense. Being self-employed as a painter and writer is a good deal easier now than it was 20 years ago, but it still requires a mental shift in the direction of being radically self-motivated and disciplined - not something this child of the easy-going ‘70s was well prepared for. And especially in the last year I’ve been struggling to sort out how to organise my working life so it… well… works. Being wholly in charge of one’s own time, with no externally-imposed structure or schedule and not much in the way of accountability to others, isn’t the picnic one imagined it would be when one was a teenager.

In the time since I came to live here four years ago, after being forced to leave Norcia where I had a much stronger sense of community and accountability, it’s been a struggle to create my own sense of life structure. A big part of what I am missing since leaving my news writing work, and then later leaving my town (where there is also a community of monks one is attached to, who pray 8 times a day and rather expected one to turn up at least semi-regularly¹) is a sense of having to work, and being part of something more important than my own whims. And most especially, having someone else expecting and relying on my participation, my work. Since the rest of the world joined me in being effectively isolated and exiled a year ago, it has become a kind of obsession to create that structure, participation and expectation. So, creating some external accountability is part of the reason I’ve started this project.

I figured two posts a week shouldn’t be that hard. With the St. Benedict commission I’ve been fairly successful at making myself paint six days a week, between 4 and 6 hours a day. And I thought I could do both the painting and the writing in the same day. My brilliant plan was to paint during the daylight hours and write in the evening.

Yeah… but no. I normally start painting when the light is strong enough in the (west-facing) work room, which at this time of year is about noon. Took a break at 4:30 to make lunch and then had to bike over to the village for groceries, and was back at it pretty steadily till about eight pm.

At which time I realised I was completely exhausted. I’m looking right now at the screen over the top of my glasses with that feeling you get like there’s sand in your eyes. You know that one? And I’m remembering now that painting is quite difficult, requires a lot of concentration and energy, and mentally wears you out after eight hours of it.

All of which is a very long way of saying that we’re going to have to reconvene tomorrow. Stay tuned for the Wednesday Post On Thursday -

“Why are we ‘languishing’?” Part II : it’s really Acedia

• What is Acedia and why do we all have it now?

• Living alone without going crazy: creating community and accountability

• Making things instead of watching things: recovering agency

• Scheduling and negotiating your way back to life: the Benedictine Way

• Rejecting convenience culture: build ourselves up by making things deliberately more difficult

~

Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom. For the time being, until I can wade through the Italian banking system, those who want to support me can make a direct PayPal donation here. Donations and commissions are at the moment my sole source of income,(and just at this time I don’t have the rent yet).

(If you’re already a subscriber at Hilary White: Sacred Art, deffo consider yourself done. And thanks again.)

1. One of the hardest things to adjust to since losing my home in the 2016 earthquake and coming down here to live in the Big Empty has been the absence of anyone who to miss me if I don’t turn up. One time, when I had missed Vespers three days in a row, I got a phone call from Br. Ignatius asking if I was sick. “No. I’m fine,” I said. “Well then,” he replied, “Vespers is in ten minutes. You’d better get your shoes on.”