letter #52 It's Nearly Autumn

The magpies are sleeping in

My dear friend

I am sort of just started, but also deep into, my season at the Adelaide Fringe. I am putting on a season of all of my previous shows. There are six of them all together, and this weekend for three nights I’m performing The Forgettory and An Evening With the Vegetarian Librarian.

If you’re in Adelaide and you want to come along, you can buy tickets to The Forgettory here and tickets to An Evening With the Vegetarian Librarian here. I’d love to see you there. And I’m not sure I’ll be performing The Forgettory again, so this might be its last weekend. You could use the code friends2025 and it will give you a discount off full price tickets from $35 to $25 which is nearly 30 percent (I didn’t do that sum, so you can have confidence in it!).

It does sound a lot to put on six shows at the same time, and it’s definitely hard work, but it’s also far easier than putting on a new show. It’s the first February I’ve had in many, many years that I haven’t spent with a knotted neck and a churning stomach. Because I’m definitely nervous. I’m always nervous. I’ll never not be nervous. But I don’t have the existential dread of putting on new work, wondering whether it’s going to land, how it’s going to land, how I’m even going to remember it.

But because those feelings of dread have been a part of my life’s annual cycle for seven years, they’ve also become entangled with this time of year and the changing of the season from summer to autumn. So as I wake every morning, my body notes that the mornings have become a little darker, the magpies are calling a little later, the air is a little gentler; and at the same time, I feel the first stirrings of the dread. Until I remember: it’s all right; there’s no new show.

I’m enjoying the lack of existential dread. (I mean, I’d love to get to a place where I don’t have such dreadful nerves before every performance. But that lack of dread is a nice start). One of the reasons I’m enjoying the lack of dread is because this is my favourite time of year. The gentle closing in of autumn, with the occasional spark of summer to remind you that it’s leaving, marks the time of a beautifully contemplative time for me. And I’m always a little bit disappointed that I have to delay sinking into this time while I concentrate on getting a new performance onto the stage.

Of course, the lack of personal dread doesn’t mean there’s no dread. It’s hard to be gentle and contemplative given the global situation right now. But I really liked this from Oliver Burkeman’s latest newsletter:

…there’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.

This will make you happier. It will make you more meaningfully productive. And to whatever extent it falls to you to be an active citizen – to be engaged in politics, say, or in otherwise addressing world events – it’ll make you better at that, too. There really is no downside.

I feel the truth of this very strongly. I’m not ignoring the truth of the state of the world, but I’m trying really hard to focus on my immediate world and what I can do from there.

It’s coming up to Lent, and while I’m not a religious person, for a few years now I’ve been giving up scrolling for Lent. For me, giving up scrolling is the perfect fit for this gentle time of year because of course the biggest impact of giving up scrolling is a quiet(er) mind. And I don’t think now is a bad time to be spending less time on social media.

I guess if I’m successful with my attempts to give up scrolling, I’ll report back in a week or so with stunning insights made while letting my mind relax and expand. And if not, I’ll be too busy scrolling to write and it will be another six months before I land in your inbox.

Either way, until then, I will think of you often and with love

Your friend

Tracy xx