Sometimes I think I want a tattoo.

I want to want one,

but the logical part of my brain

isn’t convinced

that regret won’t overwhelm me

once I permanently engrave my body

with a phrase or design.

I’m not doing art. I am doing life.

What if we start seeing things from the point of view that a big part of what we are meant to do here is to figure out what we’re doing here? Certainly, it is the job of artists, if not all of us, to examine the world, try to make sense of it, and distill it into something a little more understandable.

I think, especially now, a lot of us are confused and don’t understand why the world is the way it is.

I recently talked to a friend who is approaching 60 – ten years older than me - who said that they hadn’t accomplished anything yet. My friend and I are similar in a lot of ways. This person, like I do, spends a lot of time trying to understand their own relationship to the world. I told my friend that their bit-by-bit increased understanding is a big accomplishment. I certainly feel like it is for me.

The threads tying the different parts of my life together have gotten a bit tangled over the past 20 years or so. I haven’t felt much cohesion between “real life”, work, and the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent online since the mid-2000s. I’ve had the good fortune recently to find the mental space for the tangles to start unravelling on their own and I’ve also had the extremely good fortune to have always been able to have my place in the working world be truly connected to my goals and intentions even if I haven’t always been able to feel or see the connection.

I mostly ignore the online multiplayer video games that my husband plays, but it caught my attention recently when he mentioned that he and a friend of ours have been unhappy with the new game, ARC Raiders, that they had been excited about before it was released.

The game is like a lot of popular online “shooter” type games – people who choose to play without a partner or pre-selected group will be randomly placed with other single players in a team, and they can encounter other players and teams within a game session. The goal is to collect certain items without being eliminated by the “non player character” opponents or other players within a certain amount of time. In this game, unlike some others, when a player is eliminated, they lose all the items they collected during that session as well as anything they had with them from their collection of items from previous successful sessions.

This morning, I am planning a trip to a store in a small town nearby to do the first of my Christmas shopping for an early holiday party. It’s still before Thanksgiving – unnecessarily early even for this particular party – but I like to avoid the crowds.

Thanksgiving is this week. I mentioned to a friend that I like to listen to recordings of Aaron Copland music at this time of year because it evokes particularly “American” feelings and Thanksgiving is an American holiday. She questioned that – saying that Thanksgiving is celebrated in Canada, as well.

We’ve been taught that Thanksgiving originated when the Pilgrims fleeing to the “New World” to escape religious persecution celebrated their first harvest by having a meal with the Native Americans who helped them learn to farm in their new environment. In reality, what they were thankful for was not starving to death.

First thing this morning, my husband said “It’s November…” meaning several things, I think. Another year has gone by quickly and it’s November AGAIN, we’ve hit the rapid slope to cold and snowy weather, it’s almost time for the holidays AGAIN, and our weekend flea market- attending, driving-around-New England season is over for another year.

I love November. I love the quiet winding down of the world outside our insulating walls. I love the deep reddish brown of the oak leaves that stay on the trees longer than the rest, and I love the way I can focus on more of the small details in the woods. The riot of life and greenery and new things growing and changing every day is over. I can see the tiny hemlock cones left on the trees after the seeds have been pillaged by the birds and can see the lichen and mosses on the trunks of the trees that have recently been burgeoning with life.  I can see the seed pods on the dead wildflower stems waiting to be blown off or eaten and redistributed to other areas.

Recently, I have been having a hard time sticking with what I choose to believe about the world. Since childhood, I have spent time making a conscious effort to fight against negativity as it pops up in my mind and in the thoughts of people I am close to.

My first conscious decision to do this was sparked by one of the books my father read aloud to the family after dinner when I was 11 or 12. The book was “What Do You Care What Other People Think” by the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. As an 11- or 12-year-old, the content of the book didn’t make much, if any, impact. It was the title that struck me. I had never considered the fact that I could choose what to think about the world. At that age, I had been thinking a lot about the opinions of others and had been struggling for two or three years with the - not even conscious idea - that maybe I didn’t fit into the mold as neatly as other people did.  

So, does that mean that every cell is full of instructions and not just the ones that when you combine them, make something alive that turns into a whole COLLECTION of cells? The answer is - yes; that is actually what DNA is, which makes up all organic life. Each cell in and organism carries the complete set of instructions, even though it may only use a small portion of them depending on its role. A skin cell has the same manual as a heart cell or a leaf cell, but it only reads the chapters it needs to do its particular job. In a way, this is like every member of an orchestra holding the entire score of the symphony, but each instrument only playing its part when it is time. Back when I first learned about cells in school, I didn’t yet grasp the elegance of this arrangement. At the time, it was just another fact among many, rather than a wonder worth pausing over.

The point is, that in reading those books in my 20’s it shaped how I see the world in broad strokes. I was able to see the major themes even though I may have not understood some of what I was reading. This is an example of how our brains work when we are younger and they are still developing. We don’t have the past experiences to compare things to that allow us to notice everything that is going on.

I was recently traveling with my husband in Lubec, Maine and he was excited to ride our bikes into Canada – to Roosevelt Campobello International Park on Campobello Island. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make it over the arched bridge spanning the Lubec Narrows, flowing to the Bay of Fundy. This summer, I have spent more time than normal on my bike, (my new “short people” bike), but that has been almost entirely on flat trails.

The world is stupid place. I’m irritated by the fact that we are facing problems that are entirely solvable and which are defining life in the 21st century. Many of them would have been inconceivable a few centuries ago, if not within the lifetimes of some reading this.

I’m talking about intense poverty, widespread substance use disorder (which has always existed but is now magnified by manufactured drugs and global transportation), pollution, species die-off, poor education, loneliness, and isolation. These are not mysteries; we understand their causes and even their potential solutions. And yet they persist.

When we defund the arts, we do more than eliminate paintings, concerts, or poetry readings – we erase the scaffolding that helps individuals and communities understand who they are, where they’ve been, and what they could become. New Hampshire’s drastic cuts to arts funding are not just an economic misstep; they are a blow to the spirit and cohesion of its people. Art is not a luxury. It is a mirror, a map, and a memory. Whether through a child’s first violin lesson, a mural honoring overlooked laborers, or a memoir born from struggle, the arts help us tell the truth about ourselves. If we want a future in which New Hampshire continues to grow, inspire, and include all its residents, we must fight to keep the arts not just alive – but thriving.

My back-of-the-mind opinion of pine trees didn’t change until I moved to Maine for college and started being excited about the ways the world was different in different places. Where I went to college for my first year, many of the other students were from rural Maine towns and had had different experiences growing up than I had. While I didn’t entirely embrace Maine life, I developed a deep affection for the northern New England woods and coastline. This was because of my good experiences making friends in my new environment. If I had had a bad experience, I’m not sure if my loathing for pine trees would have deepened, but maybe there wouldn’t have been any change.

I was at a higher-end flea market in NYC recently and overheard a college-aged woman saying to her friend “I can’t tell if it is ugly or pretty”. Of course, I had an opinion on this but, bucking nosy middle-aged woman tradition, I kept it to myself. That’s an aspiration for when I’m 75.

Entropy and unpredictability aren’t bad — they are the forces that drive evolution, art, learning, and growth. The more we experiment, observe, and accept variation, the more we understand our place in the ever-changing system of the natural world. We’re not separate from it — we are it. And like the patina on a ring, our knowledge, abilities, and identities form layer by layer through change.