til Tuesday

finding some peace in the before the after

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Greetings.

I’m catching you four days before Election Day in the US, a moment when we’re all in a collective before an oncoming after.

We know something will happen on Tuesday, and if your small talk is like mine, it’s become a boring drone of people trying to manage their anxieties about uncertainty by making forecasts with incomplete information. Despite our best efforts, these conversations usually make us feel more helpless and uncertain, not less. We just have to get to decision day and see what we learn in the night, days and weeks that follow.

So this week, let me humbly offer a few things that are getting me through until then.

It starts with Kendra Adachi. She’s my guest on Death, Sex & Money this week, and I can sincerely say that her new book The Plan has given me some new actionable tools to cope with swells of anxiety and listlessness. It’s ostensibly about productivity, but Kendra’s signature style of “compassionate time management” encourages me to let in a broader spectrum of items to my rolling to-do list. Alongside emails I need to respond to and recordings to prepare for, I’m also scheduling hangs and walks and group zooms, so, come what may, I don’t end up alone in a remote work clicking spiral that makes me feel powerless than when I started.

On the show this week, you’ll hear more about Kendra Adachi, how she nearly broke herself with unrelenting expectations for herself and her care of others, and how, after that burnout and a stint with a total “messy hair don’t care” attitude, she built back confident but flexible systems for planning and managing her work and family life.

I especially like her emphasis on INTEGRATION — so much so I took a picture of that page of the book. I hope you enjoy our fun and useful conversation this week.

I also found some peace this week on a walk with my dogs along the San Francisco Bay while I listened to an episode draft. The pirate art at the former construction debris landfill near Berkeley reminds me that there’s an opportunity to make beauty out of trash.

And a few days later, I found more peace at Peace, a great new-ish vegan place in Berkeley. Highly recommend eating at the big communal table under the big skylight!

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Other Recommendations.

I’m still integrating all that I learned in sessions and corridor conversations during my stop in Richmond at the Resonate podcast conversation last week.

A standout experience was hearing Ray Christian tell a story. He’s an educator and oral historian based in Boone, North Carolina, who stood in front of a packed auditorium for about an hour and wove a yarn about growing up in segregated Richmond, family interdependence, military service, professional disappointment, and finding an alternative path after a dead end.

He hosts a podcast called What’s Ray Saying?, produced with The Moth. Start with this episode called A River Runs Through It. His profile in The Bitter Southerner is also worth a read.

The tone and cadence of Ray’s speech reminded me of Bill Withers, so as part of Operation Pre-Election Self-Soothing, I fired up some of those classics and then dug a little deeper into the catalog of Booker T. Jones, the producer of the first Withers’ album.

I’ve played the song “Sunday Sermon” by Booker T. and the MGs over and over a few times. Sometimes, an instrumental and soulful groove is just the thing that’s needed.

Until next week,

Anna

p.s. Remember when I told you we were recently nominated for a nice award? We learned this week the Signal Awards awarded us GOLD in the Interview/Talk Show category for our episode “A Sociopath’s Guide to Death, Sex & Money.” Thank you, Signal Awards!

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