Taking a leap
Writing, investing, speaking, even sitting, can vault us into the unpredictable but potentially fruitful unknown
January-February 2024
I recently started going to a pub trivia night with friends. This week, the host tried to do a set on things that happened on February 29 – but, he complained, not surprisingly, the pickings were slim. Not much happened on a day that only comes around a quarter of the time. One thing that is happening, though, is this newsletter. The end of foreshortened February sneaks up on you. It’s a relief to have that extra day to catch up.
And there’s a bit of a leap theme here – in the sense of jumping into the new or unknown. I jumped into the stock market a few years ago and have been figuring it out since. Humans made an evolutionary leap into language, and children might echo that leap in some circumstances. Writers always make a leap when they write something, hoping but never being sure they’ve hit the mark until they put their words out there for all to see. Sitting might seem like the opposite of leaping, but sometimes the choice to just sit takes a leap of faith.
And hey, squirrels are famed for their jumping.
The Sneak Peek
It’s quite a privilege to see a creative work progress from near inception to a finished product. When I began my MFA in creative non-fiction just before the pandemic, one of the first pieces I read from my classmates was a memoir chapter about when the writer was a girl running an extortion ring at her skating rink in Vancouver. She still exulted in the memory of the sense of power it gave her. The piece was so fresh, forthright, and engaging.
The writer was Robin Pacific, an artist and fellow Torontonian. Once she got going, Robin tore through writing her book. We kept in touch after our degree was done, and I felt hugely honoured when Robin, knowing I was starting a career as a freelance copyeditor, hired me to copyedit the draft she was going to send to publishers. I felt very fortunate to be one of the first people to read the whole book and experience her voice, her tales, and her insights. It’s hard not to fall into cliches – “fearless!”, “a life lived in full!”, “a unique voice!”; but they’re all true. Loves, causes, conflicts, experiments, explorations, all looked upon with the wisdom and wit of experience. The format was perhaps a little unfamiliar – a memoir made up of fragmented essays – but I felt sure it would find a publisher.
And it did. Skater Girl – the title inspired by that very first chapter I read – is being published by Guernica Press this spring. It will have gone through many further iterations, and I can’t wait to read it again in its final form. I can only hope that I will eventually look back at my life with the same wisdom and, most of all, acceptance, as Robin does.
The Tidbit
My mom used to tell the story, with great amusement, that the first phrase I uttered was “It’s gark!”, looking out a window at night. But I recently learned that this is a common mispronunciation by children learning to speak. I’ve been reading Canadian popular science writer Jay Ingram’s book Talk Talk Talk, and it seems that the “g” sound is easier to make and picked up earlier than the “d.” He even quotes his own children saying “gark”!
I picked up the book at a little free library, and it’s very old – 1993. Occasionally it’s wild to read a popular science book written before the internet was a standard feature of life. And I’m sure some of the science is now outdated. But it was still full of the kind of fascinating facts I love. For example, apparently humans are the only animal that’s at risk of choking, and it’s specifically because of the way our larynx and throat evolved to enable us to make the unusually wide range of sounds necessary for our speech. Other animals can eat and breathe at the same time – as can human babies, so that they can suckle. But as we grow, the configuration of our larynx and throat shifts to enable us to speak – but it also exposes us to the possibility of having food go down “the wrong way.” It supports my feeling that humans are kind of jury-rigged for our distinctive characteristics (such as language and bipedal walking) rather than elegantly adapted.
The other bit that particularly struck me is the hypothesis that some or even many creole languages are created by children. When adults from very different language groups are thrown together, they’ll develop a pidgin language – a very basic language with limited grammar – to communicate. The theory is that when their children are growing up, they’ll apply their instinctive language learning to the pidgin they hear and develop a fully-fledged grammar for it. Apparently widely diverse creole languages have similar characteristics, perhaps a kind of Ur-grammar. The science around this hypothesis might have evolved since 1993, but I do love the idea of children creating their own languages.
What’s Up
I’ve long been interested in how money and capital works in our society (perhaps inherited from my economist father). I’d always been curious about the stock market but, until a good contract a few years ago, didn’t have the resources to really start to explore it in practice. On the other hand, I’ve always been someone who likes reliability over risk, and isn’t really interested in gambling, which a lot of stock market dabbling can end up being.
So when I started buying stocks, I was drawn to dividend stocks. It’s not just that they pay a steady return, but also that the rate of dividend gives one an anchor for deciding if a stock is a good buy, and for (to continue the nautical metaphor) holding fast as the waves of the stock market go up and down: if you’re still getting your dividend, the stock price isn’t that important in the short term.
I realized that dividends are particularly useful within that Canadian innovation, the Tax-Free Savings Account. The money you earn in that kind of account isn’t taxed, so you can re-invest dividends within it tax free. It also means that, eventually, you’ll have a convenient tax-free income supplement. I developed all this into a strategy of sorts and shared it on Medium, in case anyone is interested:
On the other hand, and at a deeper level, dividend stocks also embody a lot of the core problems with capital and capitalism – but I’ve found dipping a toe inside the whirlpool is a good way to help get a sense of those, too. Perhaps more on that later.
Quotable
“The part that was the same about this service was how much kneeling, standing and sitting we did. I got my Apple Watch Stand! quota for the day in that 45-minute mass.”
Cathrin Bradbury, “In defence of sitting: The much-maligned practice has been pathologized — but here's what's missing” (Toronto Star)
I loved reading this bit, because after attending a few masses in recent years (as a non-Catholic) I’ve taken to referring to this as “Catholic calisthenics.” Sit, kneel, stand, sit, kneel, repeat. Exercising the body along with the soul!
But the article itself is interesting. It talks about the value of sitting as a way to listen (which is what the sitting part of the mass is for, it notes). As someone with a fairly sedentary body but a restless mind, it was good to reflect on both getting my body moving more, but also on my mind moving less. I did a mindfulness course many years ago now – lots of sitting, though also some yoga – that did indeed help my mind to also sit, as it were, and simply listen, both to itself and the world.
“Sometimes I notice someone at a party who sits in one place the entire evening, and the way people come to them.”
I used to never do this. But recently I’ve ventured to try it a few times. And it does work, sometimes, leading to great conversations. The trick, the challenge, though, is if it doesn’t, and no-one comes to you, not to mind. Just be happy to sit and observe or reflect, and not be part of things, until it’s time to move again. I don’t find that easy – sometimes sitting takes work.
Pic Pick
I love this art deco banker’s squirrel, spotted in the old Bank of Commerce tower at 25 King St. W. (for several decades the tallest building in the Commonwealth, thanks perhaps to being started in 1929 just before the stock market crash wiped out the capital other corporations might have used to build tall buildings). A squirrel is indeed an apt mascot for bankers, specializing in storing wealth for the future – literally squirreling things away. This one somehow has a mane and a peacock-like tail – perhaps the bankers liked the savings concept but merged it with showier animals, wanting something a bit more impressive than a simple rodent with a bushy tail decorating their walls.
The Shout-Out
I know flash fiction is a thing, but what about flash non-fiction? I sometimes muse that I’d like to see more of it. Complex ideas expressed succinctly. Where you spend as much time thinking about it after as you did reading.
I know there’s some out there, but I think it tends to be edgy and experimental. But here’s a piece, in plain language, a little vignette, yet it says so much in three beautiful paragraphs about motherhood, masculinity, and Shakespeare:
Generation Gap, by Sarah Moss (in Granta)
(I was perhaps particularly affected because I used to go to performances with my mom as a teenager.)
And, if I can boast a bit, here’s another, by my wife. It’s inspired by our garden, but it’s not really about flowers:
Flowers, by Molly McCarron (Emerge Literary Journal)