Often, But a Little at a Time

One formula (among many) for dealing with catastrophes or with nuisances

I don't recall precisely when the oven hood's lightbulb went out. It's been out for at least a month. We had our Xmas, then our New Years, then the fires arrived, then our blackout, then a birthday we decided not to celebrate, and then the furnace needed to be replaced.

I bought a lamp that ran off of an Energizer Power Pack to stave off the darkness of the blackout. Then I bought the Power Pack, which also kept our phones charged. Our power was restored before I had to buy another Power Pack.

Then — the furnace went out at the coldest point of the year – and our contractor was busy, in part with fire victims, and it couldn't be replaced for five days. We tried to heat our space with two small space heaters. The heat they threw off was quickly absorbed by the overwhelming cold. For five days, the indoor thermometer never climbed over sixty.

So we had nuisances; one was very slight, one was mid-level, and one was considerable, and it was pretty costly too. But none of this measures up against the broader catastrophes. Over 10,000 homes in Los Angeles County have been destroyed – so how could we carp about anything? How could I even dare to carry around the spare thought that our stove hood's light bulb was out?

Yesterday, I stuffed the small, burned-out bulb in my pocket, walked to the hardware store, found the right kind of bulb, and was able to replace the bulb once I came home. The furnace was busy doing its work: after the kind of weekend we had had, sixty-eight degrees felt like eighty-eight. All the electricity was humming. Had I also forgotten to prune the roses, which usually happens the second week of January? I had. It was time to do it.

One of my favorite quotes in Proust is "Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann." I feel seen by that one. That's me, poor old Swann. The adage perfectly fits the way I do things, often to Lynn's frustration.

But this is one idea about how to do things in general, even perchance to rebuild in a catastrophe — it’s how to pace yourself, how to deal with the terrible triangle of lassitude, obstruction, and toxicity, whether your city is fumbling for you and ten thousand others or you are having little fumbles within your little life. When you don't quite know exactly what to do, when there is no clear path, you can still work at something, even at anything, often, but a little at a time – and maybe, after many little times, one kind of work makes sense, and the opportunity arises to make some kind of larger progress, whether political, medical, professional, or personal.