RESTACK: Let Yourself Be Left Behind

Rosie Spinks on embracing the work that is never done

Summer has a way of warping our relationships with obligations, productivity, expectations, and even time itself.

Sometimes this creates stress—hello all parents navigating both inconsistent camp schedules and our kids’ inconsistent responses to these camps.

And sometimes this distortion creates an opportunity to sit back and consider what we feel we owe our days, lives, dreams, and families.

For this month’s RESTACK, I am delighted to share this essay from Rosie Spinks which pushes us to consider the latter.

What does a “full day” look and feel like? And, what could a “full day” look and feel like if we were more attuned to the ongoingness of parenting and caregiving? Rosie has thoughts.

Enjoy!

I do not find any of it easy, in fact I often suspect that I find it harder than a lot of moms I know and observe. But I also experience it as a necessary 24/7 reminder, one that’s helpful whether you’re a parent or not: To see that the reason why life is worth living is because of its limitations, imperfections, constraints. To recognize that the work that’s never done is the work. You can’t optimize it. You can’t escape it. But you can create ritual and find meaning in the act of showing up for it.

Rosie Spinks

FIGHT THE WIND
On doing the work that’s never done
by Rosie Spinks

The other day, during an unusually quiet walk home from childcare, my son asked me, out of nowhere: “Where does the sun come from?”

Here we go, I thought. I knew this was coming—the moment he would ask me something that I am absolutely not smart enough to answer.

“Well, the sun is in the sky,” I offered weakly. “And it’s so big, and so hot, that we can feel its warmth all the way down here.”

My answer was a pathetic dodge, answering where the sun is, not where it comes from. But he seemed to allow it.

I am regularly humbled by moments like this, witnessing the creative and ever-changing way he is using language and cognition to make sense of the world. “Last night” means any thing that has occurred in the past tense, which, fair. “Not today!” is said with a polite curtness when he stands up from the potty prematurely, with the heavy implication that he’s not interested in further negotiation. “But I want to be a sensible boy!” is deployed when I am about to take away the treat because he’s not listening. I still have no idea where he got the phrase sensible boy.

If large language models like Chat GPT offer the sum total of written human knowledge, produced on-demand in seconds, with no emotion, morality, or context attached, then I’d argue this is something far more miraculous. It’s the slow, incremental, and seemingly infinite process of a human brain taking shape. His output is dotted with factual inaccuracies, sure, but also moments of uncanny creation.

And unlike AI, his discovery process is circumscribed by context, morality, culture, and relational stakes: What he has been exposed to thus far, what he can negotiate, what impact he understands his actions have on the world and people around him, and what he believes he can create out of thin air.

I’ve never witnessed anything so obviously alive.

At the same time, it’s so easy to feel completely held under by the inhumanity of being alive right now. I’m not sure if it’s age, exasperation, or exhaustion, but I agree with Jia Tolentino who wrote “there is now a category of things I see online which I register simply as indications that the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.”

For example, I can no longer tell if the NYC wellness girlies in my algorithm are standard issue white women, or simulations of them engineered to sell me more VC-backed supplements and 37-step skincare routines. They all behave and speak in exactly the same lifeless way, but whether it’s by choice or by design, I’m really not sure.

When people tell me about the cool ways they are incorporating Chat-GPT into their personal creative practice—the prompts, the iterating, and the idea generation—I smile and nod. Why do they want to do that? I wonder, genuinely confused. I now feel like a mystical witch woman who prefers to have her ideas and sentences visit her, as if by magic. I’m still out here slowly collecting sap so I can maybe, one day, turn it into syrup.

The other day I watched a 90 second trailer of the Netflix documentary, Don’t Die, about the venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, who purportedly wants to live forever. I was struck by how his life of protocols, supplements, data, chambers, and masks seems completely devoid of pleasure, joy, spontaneity, and ease. I felt sad for him, and equally perplexed that this is being put forward as aspirational entertainment.

Taken together, these moments leave me feeling increasingly left behind by the culture’s direction of travel. But simultaneously, I feel more and more at home in that feeling. As it all accelerates, I feel my urge to keep up dissolve. When I allow myself to take in the worst predictions about where AI’s ascent (or descent?) will take us, I become more and more convinced that being left behind is the most sane course of action.

That’s the thing that has been the most transformative about the work of caregiving for me: How much it grounds me in the physical day-to-day practice of being alive. How effectively it disavows me of the notion that I can outrun the disappointing realities of being a human being. It’s a lesson I really needed to learn.

I couldn’t believe the magnitude of physical labor involved in early motherhood. The repetitiveness of dealing with the body’s needs, its waste, its wants (both his and mine). And now, with an almost three year old, I’m regularly brought to my knees by the enormous job of tending to another person’s inner world: the constant whys, the comforting and cuddles, the moments of emotional ransom, the questions you can’t answer. It’s the kind work that’s never done.

I do not find any of it easy, in fact I often suspect that I find it harder than a lot of moms I know and observe. But I also experience it as a necessary 24/7 reminder, one that’s helpful whether you’re a parent or not: To see that the reason why life is worth living is because of its limitations, imperfections, constraints. To recognize that the work that’s never done is the work. You can’t optimize it. You can’t escape it. But you can create ritual and find meaning in the act of showing up for it.

Our house and back patio is littered with cardboard boxes, sticks, rocks, and random objects that were taken out of the recycling bin. My son loves this stuff, far more than any of his toys, and it’s how we got the best of his linguistic inventions: “Fight the wind.”

It’s a game where he chooses a stick from his collection, and suits up for an epic battle outside our back door. He furrows his brow, goes deep into character, and we see him out there just waving his stick around, valiantly fighting the wind.

There’s a sense of defiance, unchained imagination, and utter certainty to it. It’s a world of his own making, an entirely human creation. It’s exactly the kind of world I want to live in.