Tiny Revolutions №62: Considering Coliving

+ what you love is your fate 🖤

Hi, I’m Sara, and this is Tiny Revolutions, a weekly-ish dispatch of personal writing and links about becoming who you are. Reply anytime, I love to hear from you.

"Yarn" by emmajanehw is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Greetings from Minnesota. I’m back here for a visit with my sister’s family for the first time since last fall. I have spent a fair amount of time here since the start of the pandemic. A year ago this month, when the initial shit was going down, I came in anticipation of the lockdown. I knew that an extended period of time alone in my apartment with nowhere to go and no one to talk to in person would not be good for my mental health, especially given we had no idea how long it would last. And it was a good choice – I ended up being here for five weeks initially, then came back two more times over the following months for a couple of weeks.

We exist peacefully together, my sister and brother in law and their two young boys and I. We’re all just good buddies. I wouldn’t say I’m especially helpful with childcare, but anytime small children are involved, having an extra set of adult hands around is useful. Plus I’m an excellent baker, a good quality in a houseguest.

This time I’m here because I felt like the well had sort of run dry and needed to be topped up. What well? It’s hard to put my finger on one thing, but some combination of too much work, not enough work, too many screens, too little human contact, too much pressure to make use of the enviable amount of time I have as a childless adult, etc. etc. But honestly? I think my real problem was just too much “me time," because god, I am so sick of myself.

I feel like by now we’ve all read a lot about how, for some of us, the pandemic has blurred the lines between work and play, which is insidious and true, but what I’ve been feeling most keenly lately is how I’m just really, really tired of my own shit. It’s exhausting, and frankly, after all this isolation, I would rather deal with some other people’s shit for a while, hence this midwestern sojourn.

I really enjoyed this recent issue of Anne Helen Peterson’s newsletter about reconsidering the idea of communal living.

“Even people who come out on theoretical top of this personal choice pile — because of income, race, inherited wealth, credentials, location, home equity — are still miserable. Everyone’s doing their own dishes and we’re all lonely. So what would other ways of living look like? We often don’t have to look too far to find them: they’re in our immediate histories, even in our immediate proximity, in everything from babysitting co-ops to barnraisings. You don’t need a lot of resources to start them. You just need an abundance of imagination, enough to overcome our current understanding of what the rhythms of daily life should look like.”

I currently live in a shared house with two other people, a decision I made last summer after six years of living alone, and it’s been a truly refreshing change. My siblings and I have often talked about buying or starting some kind of family compound so we can be around each others’ kids as they grow up. My girlfriends and I have often talked about buying a big old house together where we can live Golden Girls style in our retirement. Somehow it seems that living among people you love has become part of the zeitgeist.

I’d like to think that this pandemic has made us all appreciate the ways in which our real life, in person communities matter. Or how, if they’re lacking, it’s high time we get out there and build them. I’ll be curious to see how things on this front do or do not change as we come out of this year of pods and quarantines and all things virtual.

On to some other things I thought were worth sharing this week.

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If you’re interested in the coliving trend, Supernuclear is a great (if infrequent) newsletter about what it’s like to start and live in a coliving community, with case studies of existing ones people have built.

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“Emotion lets us know what things mean to us, instantly. We don’t make decisions based on our rational analysis of the situation, we make decisions based on how that rational analysis makes us feel.

This is not to say that logic – rational analysis – doesn’t play a part. It does (hopefully). But it’s not emotion vs. reason, as we’ve been led to believe since the time of Plato. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and. And after all the logical analysis, emotion is the ultimate decider.”

A fascinating interview with writer Lisa Cron about her new book, Story or Die: How to Use Brain Science to Engage, Persuade, and Change Minds in Business and in Life.

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New favorite Instagram feed: @depthsofwikipedia. Can’t beat this tagline: “Wikipedia is weird!”

depthsofwikipedia

A post shared by @depthsofwikipedia

(Don’t be a crab!!)

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Just three lovely things from nature:

Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno

Blossom trees and Fawn in Nara, Japan 🇯🇵

Hillary Monahan @HillaryMonahan

I'm supposed to be writing but instead I'm researching the star-shaped sand of Okinawa which are actually SKELETONS OF MARINE LIFE FROM 550 MILLION YEARS AGO.

Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno

Travelling with cranes along the Loire valley - France -

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A poem from Frank Bidart.

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That’s all from me this week. Thanks for reading, as always.

😘

Sara

p.s. The weekly Zoom meetup is on hold while I’m in Minneapolis – the Tuesday night sessions will resume when I’m back in LA. Don’t let that stop you from writing!