Be Chalant

and sticker your notebooks

My kids’ tutor died a couple of weeks ago.

Maggie was

a force. She ran a tutoring centre that had multiple tables of kids working at the same time and she would sit at her desk and look witheringly at one poor student and say “Jake, are you finished with your math exercises?” and in the next sentence say to a kid at another table “You are not authorized to leave until your French homework is done, Taylor. You have a quiz tomorrow.”

She knew

what every one of her students was working on at any time. She knew how each local high school (public and private) taught each subject, and when all of the exams were. She would send the kids to the grocery store to buy her snacks and teach them to count her change and check the receipt. She would make them do pushups if their homework was late or incomplete. She did not tolerate disrespect but was fine to use the f-word with a twelve year old. She swore like a sailor that had not been in polite company for decades.

At her funeral

the Rabbi said that when Maggie was interested in a topic she wrote a paper on it. Just for herself, just to learn more.

I like to put stickers on my notebooks.

I like to decorate them with found objects (also known as junk). And sometimes I’m embarrassed about it. Because it’s silly, because it serves no purpose, because I’m too old to care what my notebooks look like.

The other day on TikTok

I saw an artist who had amassed quite a following by showing the audience her journals that were filled with found objects (also known as junk). She didn’t just decorate the covers. She completed whole pages with collages of receipts, stickers from bananas, price tags.

Putting it all together,

I conclude that it’s not necessary to be nonchalant. We can all write research papers for no reason, just because we’ve found a topic that interests us. We can care about decorating our notebooks, or rearranging the rocks in our garden or painting the candles on our coffee table or any other seemingly frivolous project just because we enjoy it.

Persistence can be hard,

don’t be afraid to entertain yourself along the way. Don’t feel pressure to be nonchalant, to act like you were busy reading Kant or dissecting a frog when it all just fell in your lap.

Be as chalant as you need to be to keep going.

(Or, in Maggie’s name, I will ask you to drop and give me twenty.)