Finding quiet in a world of breaking news
A little beauty amid chaos.
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Have you ever woken up one day and just not wanted to add to the noise?
It’s been a crazy week—and if you’re American, I’m sure you’ve experienced emotional whiplash in a span of mere hours this past Sunday. Our brains may have adapted to the gunfire of breaking news firing at us multiple times a day, but I question our capacity to process all this information without going into psychological and emotional overload.
We’re adapting because we have no choice; it’s a matter of survival because everything is consumed as it happens, in the moment. I see posts and memes circulating of how we’re “sick and tired of living in unprecedented times,” but this is life now. Media, tech, and news moves too fast for it to be otherwise. But it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
Like many of you, I jumped on social media Sunday afternoon (Threads is the only place I’m at, currently) refreshing and scrolling my feed. Yes, in this historic moment of a president stepping down from a re-election bid and endorsing a woman as his successor in candidacy, I wanted to be part of the energy shift as we collectively processed what was happening together, in real time. And it was amazing. We moved from shock, anger, panic, and eventually to hope.
Maybe this is how we’re learning to cope with unprecedented levels of unprecedented events, processing it together in a collective act of connecting while doom scrolling (or joy scrolling, as I’ve seen it called as of Monday—the vibe shift!).
By Monday morning, however, I hit a wall and all I wanted was quiet. I didn’t want to post or read anything and I didn’t want to talk to a single soul. But it was striking to me that I still had to fight the urge to share because reaching for our phones and sharing our thoughts, our reactions, our opinions, our vacations, our cats, our meals, our lives is just our default behavior now. It’s become second nature and I’m not sure we even think too much about it when we tap that share button.
How did we get to this point where quiet and sitting with our thoughts is the thing that takes effort?
I realize that I’m writing this to you in a newsletter that I share. I acknowledge the hypocrisy and I apologize. If you’re still reading, I urge you to go outside and take in beauty, art, conversation, and friendship in real life. I am the worst offender in staring at screens, but I’m motivated to change that more than ever.
Little steps.
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My moment of finding beauty last week was making time to go see this fashion exhibit at the Met, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. It’s something of a ritual with my 17 yo where we’ll go see The Costume Institute’s show at the museum, get a slice at a pizza joint on Lexington Ave, and then for a coffee and pastry at a cafe called Maman.
If you happen to be in NY before Labor Day, it’s well worth the visit. Escapism at its best. But if you aren’t, here are some of my favorite dresses from the exhibit.
The two Marni dresses (bottom row by Francesco Risso) below were among my very favorites.
We also took a day trip to Beacon, NY to visit Dia Art Foundation. Like the Cloisters a few weeks before, the kid had no recollection of past visits here when she was younger, but we were pleasantly surprised to see the same popsicle store still open since our last visit maybe 10 years ago.
In a summer that keeps surprising us, we ground ourselves with beauty and quiet wherever we can find it.
Link & Things
The Met’s “Sleeping Beauties” Exhibition Is Designed to Awaken Your Senses (Vogue) A review of the exhibit at the Met. My photos didn’t capture the experience.
Night owls’ cognitive function ‘superior’ to early risers, study suggests Research on 26,000 people found those who stay up late scored better on intelligence, reasoning and memory tests (Guardian)
Say what now? If this is true, then I must have super powers.A Song of Tomatoes to My Grandmother (Electric Lit)
The life sabbatical: is doing absolutely nothing the secret of happiness? (Guardian)
Yes to real life connections! And conversations. ♥️
The Iris van Herpen is just phenomenal! It engages the imagination so much, plays with the sense of scale, to my eye at least (can flowers and dragonfly wings be larger than people? can people live as flower petals?). Thank you for sharing your trip