Good morning!
Skipped last week because I was sick (cold & flu season in NYC is no joke).
But today’s letter is about just that: did I need to skip writing an issue? Probably not. I spent plenty of time on Hulu and I saw Parasite twice in a row. I wandered around the internet with my laptop in bed more than once and could have easily written something. But I didn’t! Here’s the story.
For Christmas, my brother gifted me a book called Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World.
(Since childhood, my favorite untranslatable word has been “tingo,” which comes from the Pascuense language of Easter Island and apparently means “to borrow objects from a friend’s house, one by one, until there is nothing left.”)
So, while housebound, I flipped through my new collection and came across this excellent word: Tíma. It’s an Icelandic verb that means “not being ready to spend time or money on a specific thing, despite being able to afford it.”
(Note: because I have no way to fact-check this or give you context on the Icelandic language, I’m going to take it as written for the purposes of this letter.)
The author also leaves a little message next to the definition that says:
It can be difficult to part with things of value, such as time and money, as they aren’t infinite and they can slip through our fingers with surprising ease. We can’t get them back once we’ve given them away, and so wanting to keep them for as long as possible is understandable.
My first three reactions:
If the above note is meant to confirm the universality of the sentiment, why is this a universal sentiment?
I love that tíma is a verb because it’s rare that sentiments are verbs. Usually, I find sentiments to be those annoying vague emotions that make us unable to take action (i.e. an anti-verb).
I love even more that this is a verb about enacting a selfish sentiment because it makes selfishness appear to be an active choice, which I believe it is, but so rarely am I willing to admit it.
Giving up time or money in exchange for something else can feel like a terribly difficult decision to make if you have a scarcity mindset (i.e. there will never be enough money or time and I have to use it wisely). If you have an abundance mindset, on the other hand, it’s a little easier to make (i.e. I’ll part with the money and make some more).
As I’ve gotten older and developed a practice in my life that allows me to (as Buddhism calls it) expand my capacity (and therefore time and resources) pretty infinitely, making trade-off oriented decisions has become easier and easier.
But one area that I’ve found myself stuck with recently is in the tradeoff between career work hours and care work hours. As mentioned previously, I’ve been tracking my time pretty carefully since last year, and in any given week, in my allotted “work” hours (roughly 75 per week), I find that if I give more time to career work (my job, writing, self-education), I give less time to care work (finances, health, my home, family) and vice versa.
So I’m usually tíma-ing in favor of my career work, and I find myself daydreaming about having the guts to spend more time on care work, which I don’t do, despite being able to afford it.
Last year I interviewed a homemaker named Lauren Tucker, who shared that as a stay-at-home-mom (who adores her job and documents it incredibly well), she gets quite a few emails from working women who want to stay home but also don’t have the guts to.
Personally, I extract too much value from the person I am in the workplace and the types of tasks I get to do with others to ever give it up, but it’s an interesting problem: We are the daughters of a generation of women who fought for the right to work outside the home and now, for those privileged enough to be able to afford it, we don’t have the guts to choose to work in the home because… stigma?
It makes me think that we need to clearly define for ourselves why we work and where work takes place, and we also need more language, diversity of perspectives and public examples of how working in the home (however many hours you allot) can be an empowered choice made by women who thought it through and/or intentionally set up their careers to make it possible. I follow tons of them online and will probably write something about them soon :)
More on this in a future issue, I’m sure.
Jihii
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Parasite is magnificent.