Last month, I wrote to you about winter and the kind of mental clarity it can bring. Unless you’re my neighbor in the the American Midwest, you’ve most likely moved onto spring weather. We have only just started to! On April 15, it was 85 degrees and sunny and we were sweating on our walk; 7 days later, on April 22, M and I were at a cabin, and we experienced approximately 8 million different forms of winter weather phenomena in a single day: sun, clouds, rain, sleet, hail, snow, wind. At the start of this week, a somewhat confused sleet fell, and 23 MPH winds were violently tossing around the just-budding tree branches.
Since I last wrote, I found myself thinking a lot about impact, big impact, small impact, deep impact. And no, not the 1998 disaster film starring Téa Leoni and Morgan Freeman—but also YES the 1998 disaster film starring Téa Leoni and Morgan Freeman.
This gif may have triggered your intense fear of water-based enviro-apocalypse scenarios, and if it did, I apologize! The pickings for Deep Impact gifs were slim, so I begrudgingly went with this one.
Looking at the roots and definition of impact was fun. This is a word that gets thrown around a lot in 2023, and it’s always good to remind ourselves what words actually mean and where they come from. Derived from the Latin in- + pango meaning ‘to fasten or drive in,’ evolving to impingere meaning ‘to push, impel, or drive,’ by the 17th century impact had come to mean ‘to press closely or fix firmly’, and use of the word grows exponentially after the 1600s. Now, Merriam-Webster defines the verb as ‘to have a direct effect on, to strike forcefully, to press together’ and the noun as ‘the striking of one body against another, the force of impression on one thing or another.’
Impact is a word I’ve been thinking about lately most definitely in tandem with running, but I can also say that, due to lessons in my life both constructive and destructive, I have always been obsessed with the concept of impact: how things are affected when they collide, come into contact, enact upon each other. There are, of course, obvious lessons that many people learn despite different life circumstances—do unto others as you would have them do unto you (do being impact), you get out of a situation what you put into it (get and put being impact), for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction meaning that if object A exerts a force on object B then object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A (action and force being impact)—but there are also many lessons we learn based on our extremely specific circumstances.
From a very young age, my bedroom, wherever it was, was a cherished and beloved space simply because it was mine. The only direct impact there came from me, and I was freed, however temporarily, from the various impacts of other spaces, other people. This maintained into my adulthood, and persists even today; it’s something M and I have had to negotiate, since he prefers to host, having learned the lesson in his life that his space was one he could control to help shape how other people were expected to behave. Despite having been trained to be a good host, I would always rather visit someone else’s space than have them visit mine, simply for the fact that I feel much more in control of how I respond to the impact of others than how others respond to the impact of me. My life has been spent analyzing my impact on others and coming away very confused at the results, and so one of the ways I dealt with this confusion was to try to reduce my impact on anything, wherever possible. But this, of course, is a fruitless endeavor, fundamentally impossible, since
IMPACT IS CONSTANTLY OCCURRING
By nature of the physics of the world we find ourselves in, bodies are always hurling around, colliding with each other, dinging up each other’s surfaces and then rolling along our merry way into the next object we must impact upon, and be impacted by. I cannot protect the surface of my very small planet from the marks and pocks of other bodies in space; for a long time, I tried to pretend as if I was unimpactable, damn near believed it myself, longing desperately for an existence where I didn’t feel so banged up by everything. And this feeling, too, was the result of impact, a lesson learned from constantly running into other bodies in my solar system: that above all else, we must appear untouched, a perfect marble floating through the dirt of space, a placid lake untouched by the tugs of tides. For someone to know they had impacted us meant that we had somehow failed—at what, we weren’t sure, but we knew the failure could not be suffered by us or by anyone else we looked to for guidance.
Impact is also a constant state of both/and: we are both perpetually impacting and impacted upon. It is a continuous state of duality. It is the meaning of relationship—to impact and be impacted by—and we are all, no matter how desperately we try to fight it, in relationship: with the many parts of ourselves, with each other, with this world and everything in it. We are the product of a million points of relationship, but too many of us careen around the cosmos pretending that we touch nothing and are touched by nothing,
A whole new world of agency, understanding, and accountability opened up to me when I was able to finally understand that impact is constantly occurring, and that I can either work with it, or continue to work against it to my detriment and to the detriment of those around me. When you acknowledge how little control you have, you are able to pinpoint exactly where you do have any semblance of control, and it is often in corners we wish it wasn’t. I cannot control other people’s orbits, cannot, for the most part, control whether pain, misfortune, or tragedy set a collision course with me. Within that, what I can control are some of the few, tiny, insignificant forces I exert upon myself and the world around me, and how I respond to the collisions I cannot control.
Anyway, all this is to say that this month, I’ve been paying particular attention to the impact I can control, and I’ve been trying to make better choices, choices that positively impact my well-being and the well-being of all those entities I’m in relationship with. This can look a lot of different ways depending on my focus:
🧠 brain (reading books, reducing screentime, single-tasking)
🖤 heart (practicing gratitude & acceptance, calling folks, acknowledging my feelings/successes)
⚡️ energy (silence, low-power mode at work, dedicated me time, putting anxious energy into action in service of healthy tasks)
🤸 body (stretching, morning yoga, running, taking breaks)
I’m definitely not making the best choices 24/7, but being able to dialogue with myself and have a better impact on myself more often is BRAND NEW for me, and means I get to reap the benefits of those choices more frequently. And let me tell you if no one’s ever told you: being healthy is hard, but when you can do it, it feels fucking great!!! I’m not old yet (and I don’t really have complicated feelings about getting older either—maybe a subject for a future letter) but I am aging, and I want to be able to head into the second half of my life continuing to feel as good as I’ve felt lately.
May we all continue to learn how to shape our own impacts, and to practice shaping how we respond to the collisions that are outside of our control.
latelies
Bringing this section back for gentle animal because I love it. Here are some media I’ve recently enjoyed:
📚 The Children’s Book by AS Byatt: I just finished this and absolutely loved it. Read if you’d like a sprawling and beautiful ~700 pages about the feelings and observations of a multigenerational group of artistic/intellectual Britons living through the end of the Victorian period into the Edwardian period and subsequently WWI. I don’t usually love war fiction, but I have to say, this was the most impactful thing I’ve ever read about WWI.
💽 ’Radiate Like This’ - Warpaint: Discovered this album via “From The Basement,” one of our favorite music series, and it has been a consistent go-to for me since. Good for rainy mornings, chilling out, introspection.
📺 That 70’s Show: Consider this personal homework, but I never really watched this prior to moving to WI, so M and I have been turning to this when we need something light and easy. For the most part, it holds up as a solid sitcom with some really great TV performances, and it holds up as a representation of the midwest I am coming to know, and it is also further driving my developing love of 70s aesthetics.
What have you been impacted by lately? What of your own impacts have you been contemplating?
Until next month.
KM
PS: I almost didn’t write this one because I already, after a SINGLE LETTER, started to get up in my head again and let my inner saboteur bully me out of it—but I didn’t. So I’m taking a brief moment here at the bottom of this to congratulate myself on that. Way to go, me.