You still have to live in this world

Jenny Rosenstrach, Dinner: A Love Story

Because apparently a thousand-word love letter does not seem to be sufficient, I want to tell you one more story about my beloved, battered-and-beaten Le Creuset Dutch oven, and why I felt the need to write an essay about it in the first place.

In early October, my brother Phil came over to have some takeout BBQ and watch the Yankees-Red Sox playoffs with us. At some point during the game, while eating honey-glazed chicken wings and looking on as rookie right-hander Cam Schlittler struck out twelve unsuspecting hitters, the subject turned to breaking in baseball gloves. I didn’t know this, but when we were kids back in the olden days of the 1970s, breaking in your baseball glove — softening the stiff leather, molding it to your hand — was a rite of passage for young little leaguers. My brother remembers oiling his, pounding it over and over, and of course, playing ball with it, growing with it, working it, working with it, until it felt right. (Key word there: working.) Nowadays, Phil told me, it’s different: You can buy them for your kids already broken in, no work necessary. I’m not sure why, but hearing that depressed me, and launched me into a well-trodden “remember-when” spiral, featuring greatest hits such as Remember when kids read books. Remember when we didn’t have to wonder if a photo/video/essay was real or created with a single ChatGPT prompt? Remember when expressing affection took more than pressing a Like button? Remember when playlists came in the form of mixed tapes from your crush and not algorithms from your streaming service?Sometimes, I really dislike having Perspective.

When I went to the kitchen a few minutes later, I saw my stained and streaked, charred-bottomed, once-vibrant-orange Dutch oven, sitting on the stovetop as always. Well, I thought, appreciating its general well-loved-ness, at least that patina is something people can’t shortcut or fast-track or optimize. And then, another thought, as if delivered by lightning: You still have to live in this world. People say it for all kinds of reasons, but in this moment, staring at the heavy, hulking, realness of the pot in front of me, the concept felt almost like a religious mantra. The world may be changing at an alarming clip, I thought, but living and breathing and being a physical person in the world — specifically being a physical person sitting with my brother and my husband eating honey-glazed chicken wings and cornbread — as overwhelming as it can all be, that’s not changing. My two feet were on the ground, I was watching a live baseball game that I hope wasn’t manipulated by FanDuel, I was breathing air, I was eating food.

I swear I was not high!

Anyway, the essay evolved into something else, but it was important to me to tell you about the epiphany that inspired it, especially as we head into a new year where some of us might be looking for daily, right-in-front-of-us ways to feel more grounded. The answer, at least for now, seems to be: Cook dinner, share it with people you love. (You don’t even need a Dutch oven to do that!) Not always easy, I know, but hopefully we can all help each other along in this space in 2026.

training new horses

Emily Henry, Happy Place

It reminds me of something Hank told me a long time ago,

about growing up on a ranch, training new horses.

He'd been good at it, apparently, and attributed that to his

patience. He could wait out any bad mood. The anger of an

animal didn't make him angry. It helps you understand them

better, he told me. You don't want that anger becoming fear. You

want it turning into trust.

And while there were a lot of things he'd hated about

working at a ranch, he'd loved the feeling of coming to an

agreement with another living thing, of understanding each

other's needs, giving space when it was time for it, and pulling

close when it was needed.

the fight ahead

Tom Nichols, “Trump Has Won, but Democracy Is Not Over,” The Atlantic

“Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers.”

parenthood

“Who is trusted to have a child?”, Modern Love, The New York Times, Daniel Lam

Raw, beautiful, heartbreaking.

“One of the reasons I didn’t come out as gay until I was 27 was that I didn’t want to give up the idea of having a wife. At 33, I have learned to let that go, the faceless woman I’ve carried around in my mind for so long. I recognize her now as an embodiment of everything I was at risk of losing if I ever let my secret slip: a traditional marriage and family, including the notion of fatherhood, or at least how I was taught to perceive it — schoolyard logic that’s been seared into my mind in which there can’t exist a father without a mother, or a mother without a father, or a child without either of them.”

“It has been harder for me to want to have children since becoming a pediatrician. Admittedly, my perspective is skewed. I have been trained to expect bronchiolitis at every corner, pneumonia and sepsis a constant threat. I have seen skin broken too many times for chest tubes, burr holes, wound packing and nerve blocks, pudgy arms and legs poked for blood draws, fluids and antibiotics.

My niece and nephew are toddlers, both unstoppable, and it’s always an adjustment when I see them, how little they need me, how capable they are, how fragile they aren’t.

Especially after starting my fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine, experience has taught me to anticipate disaster. There’s a running joke among my colleagues that takes the form of a growing list of all the things we’ll never let our children do: eating uncut grapes or hot dogs, riding ATVs and visiting a trampoline park.

It’s a joke because we take it to an unfathomable extreme, each item laughable only when it is far enough removed from the tragedy it came from, the lesson learned too late that nothing — no one — is ever truly ours.”

grief

Jamie Anderson

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

surrender to the reality

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll need to go.”

the best parts of living

Rita Dove, “Last Words,” The New Yorker, January 25, 2021

I don’t want to die in a poem

the words burning in eulogy

the sun howling why

the moon sighing why not

I don’t want to die in bed

which is a poem gone wrong

a world turned in on itself

a floating navel of dreams

I won’t meet death in a field

like a dot punctuating a page

it’s too vast yet too tiny

everyone will say it’s a bit cinematic

I don’t want to pass away in your arms

those gentle parentheses

nor expire outside of their swoon

self-propelled determined shouting

Let the end come

as the best parts of living have come

unsought and undeserved

inconvenient

now that’s a good death

what nonsense you say

that’s not even worth

writing down

A moment

Joy

“I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been so excited about and supportive of the #WindowsofLight project. (This is obviously not a WOL photo—it’s from a newborn session.) This project has buoyed me and returned me to a place of hope. It has been such a beautiful opportunity to connect with so many people I love and admire without putting anyone at risk.


My heart is heavy with all of the losses we are suffering all at once. Beloved businesses (including my own) unable to operate, the loss of freedom, and especially the loss of lives. In my household, I’ve been the one to go out into the world for necessities and despite so much hand washing and disinfecting, I still hesitate to go near James for fear of what I may have breathed in or touched or contracted simply by picking up some groceries.

And yet.

And yet, I’ve found such a deep appreciation for my life in this strange time. Things that I once did to check off of a list are things I can sink into and be present for. I think I’m being reminded of how fragile life is, how much we need each other, and how hard stillness can be all at once. It makes me so grateful for the things I have long taken for granted.

This weekend, I hope you’ll find a moment to keep as your own, where you can close your eyes and just be a human. Not one in a world that seems to be collapsing. Not one that’s worried about how many rolls of toilet paper they have left. Just you, breathing in and breathing out.

Happiness

Pam Kiernan, “An Unusual Love Story”

“We’re all so much stronger than we think but you don’t know how strong you are until you know. Also, you’re just going to do it because you have to. There is no other option.”

“I truly believe happiness is not a product of the events of your life. It’s how you choose to perceive them.”

the accumulation of choices

Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry

“I heard from someone that the pattern of our breath isn’t supposed to be even, regular. Humans are not metronomes. It goes long and short, deep and shallow, and that’s how it’s supposed to go, depending each moment on what you need, and what you can get, and how filled up you are. I wouldn’t trade any part of my experience for someone else’s life, I felt then, even the moments where I’d wished I didn’t exist, not because my life was right or perfect or best, but because the accumulation of choices made had carved a path that was characteristic and distinct, down to the serif, and I felt the texture of it all around me for just a moment, familiar, like my own skin, and it was good enough.”