How to write a great sentence

The first few days of fall quarter at the UW are always crisp and bustling. Back in my sophomore year, I was already done with my required classes for the day when I saw a throng of excited students spilling into a brick building and decided to follow them.

At the beginning of the quarter, classes are tentative placements and you can sample classes and drop others to join the ones you are more interested in. Or just sit in on something you think is interesting.

There was this electricity of possibilities all around. After the murmur of students settling in quieted down, the  professor asked us to “Write a great sentence” He gave us 5 minutes. 

I don’t think I heard a single pen move. Not for a while. The majority of the class sat there staring at the blank paper like it was a parking ticket or an eviction notice. Confusion, horror, frustration, resignation, desperation, it all flowed through the room for 5 minutes.

I was bemused. What did he mean, great sentence? Without context? In 5 minutes? Could such a thing even exist? And if so, wouldn’t it already have been written? 

I wanted to know what he’d say next. 

“Anyone want to share what they have?” 

I suppressed a giggle. It would have been a very bold person indeed to have stood up to share their GREAT sentence. 

He smiled and said, “Okay, now write me a sentence about Thanksgiving.”

Pens all around started moving furiously, including my own. 

After we set our pens down, he had a few people share their sentences. Some were actually pretty good, but all of us had something written. Whereas the first time, I doubt even a third of the class had a sentence.

“You see,” He started, “you need constraints. Too many possibilities lead to paralysis. You will never write a great sentence or even a good one, if you never write anything.”

That was my only day in that class but I will never forget it.

It’s helped guide me many times throughout life when I’m feeling stuck.

I struggle with constraints. They are undoubtedly useful and necessary - but I often find the fear of missing out or the whittling down of possibilities haunt me. Especially when it comes to a career. I’ve always been lucky enough to be employed - under paid - but employed. Sometimes you just need a steady paycheck, but I often find my day to day fails the fast forward test. 

The fast forward test is simple yet revealing. How much of your work day or even personal life do you often find yourself wishing you could fast forward?

Half? All? Then maybe it’s time to find something else that makes better use of your time.

I’m at half. There’s about half of my day at work that I find myself wishing I could fast forward. I know I’m lucky because I didn’t get fired or “layed off” this year. My company has reduced its workforce by about 60%. I’m still here but the whittling down has left an impact. It’s not easy to watch your team be overworked and under-appreciated. I don’t like seeing people worked beyond regular hours all summer and then let go a week before Thanksgiving. Leaves you with a bitter taste and mistrust of management. 

Not a great environment for healthy morale and team building. 

On top of being an industry that does a lot of work with plastics and other environmentally unfriendly materials, the work is sedentary and screen focused. After my years at the farmer’s markets, I’m learning I need variation in my tasks, flexibility and independence. I like to be active in my work. But market work is a seasonal gig and doesn’t have great benefits. This honestly wouldn’t be a problem if we had universal affordable healthcare that wasn’t tied to your employer. But here we are. 

The adult world can be so vast. It’s so hard to decide where to focus your energy and time. It always seems like you need to be doing everything at all times and faster than before. And there remains so much to be done. 

But I’ve always been a slow and steady type of person. 

We are not living our best balanced lives. Thinking back to my poetry class in college,  I think a lot of our issues come from a lack of proper constraints.

I think humanity has spent most of its existence trying to escape our natural constraints that it’s hard to think about adding them back in.

With our modern technological advances, we honestly don’t even have environmental constraints. We can have whatever we want shipped from across the globe overnight (or the span of a few days as most). We can have avocados year round. Do you even know when an avocado is in season or out? I certainly don’t. 

You can have your electricity on all night if you want, thus circumventing your own body’s circadian rhythm. 

You can fly across the globe chasing summer if you want to and never encounter winter. A journey that would have taken a chunk of your life only takes hours.

It’s miraculous that we can do this. The comforts that we enjoy are so lovely and I wouldn’t want life without them. However, all life has a balance. I’m afraid humans are not very good at balance when constraints disappear. 

Because of this same technological advancement, we are constantly working. You are always accessible. Always plugged in. Always racing to the next thing. And because we have eliminated limits, the race is endless. And yet, never enough. There’s a reason burnout rates, suicide and mental decline were so rampant even before the pandemic.

The surplus and ubiquity of sugar and over abundance of cheap nutrients has led to obscene weight and health problems across the westernized world. Everywhere the constraint-less western diet goes, it takes with it the Pandora’s Box of supersized horrors.  

On top of the health challenges we face, our constraint-less industry and agriculture has ravaged the health of the planet and its people. Our seasonless growth and consumption have been a cancer to the entire Earth. We can see the desolation and perhaps even anticipate the disasters to come, and yet, we seem content to pass the time pretending it’s not as bad as it is. 

Perhaps some of that is because we don’t feel like we can make much of a difference.

In response to this, I say add constraints back into your life and see the difference it makes. 

I recently read Alice Water’s We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto. This book felt like a memory and a message from the future simultaneously. Waters is the world famous chef and owner of Chez Panisse in California. She is one of the first people to start a sustainable farm to table restaurant where all the food served is in season, sustainable and locally sourced. 

She also has started an “edible education” program with local schools where youngsters plant and tend their own sustainable gardens as part of their schooling. It brings in the whole community and educates them about food and food systems. 

What Waters says is not unknown. But the way she delivers the information with stark simple examples from her own life and solutions she herself has employed, makes the book into a nutrient dense meal of storytelling and journalism. 

This book is hope. It’s a seed. I hope you will plant it in your own mind soon.

As Mary Oliver wrote in one of her many essays, “attention is the beginning of devotion.” Bring attention to the things in life that are most essential. Give those things proper attention. Even if it’s painful or scary or uncomfortable. I feel like that’s the only way to truly be alive. Otherwise you live on autopilot. Like some oppressive instinct. 

I’m starting to pay attention to what I really care about and adding limits to my behaviors as much as I can. I will continue my study to see how much more sustainably I can live. 

And I will add this information into my job search. I will try and apply for opportunities that allow me to live the life I think nature would prefer. We spend so much of our lives at work. If that work is killing us and the planet, what’s even the point? 

Everything is connected and until we change the way we eat and work and live, we will continue to face the epidemic of never feeling like anything is enough.

The only way to remedy this is to slow down. 

I know the pandemic caused us to lose much and many, but it also allowed us to learn to live differently. We know it’s possible to slow down and yet keep going. When we had time away from work and had to really sit with our thoughts, people were able to repair relationships, leave broken ones, learn new languages and bake bread the old slow way. The healthy way. 

Slow is nature’s way. It’s a good way. 

There’s a reason meditation and sleep can increase your brain’s functionality, repair your immune system and allow you better focus. They are ways to slow down and re-energize.

There are so many health and personal benefits to slowing down.

Maybe you get less done in a day but maybe it’s time to re-evaluate what is possible in a day. Or what should be expected. It’s okay to do less. I will wager that what you do get done will be of much higher quality than before. Speed doesn’t often result in quality.

I often find when I have too much or too little to do, I am sad or restless. A balance of activity and rest is important. 

The very first newsletter I sent out this year started out with this quote: “you don’t have to go fast, you just can’t stop moving”. I can’t think of a better philosophy for life. Go slow. Go all the way.

Things take the time they take.  

Enjoy it.

Time is not something to get through or endure. There is no gold at the end of the rainbow. So just enjoy the rainbow. 

We are the process. Witness it. Own it. 

We come full circle :) It’s been a glorious year. Here’s to another one!