"accumulate enthusiasms"
Sep. 8th, 2024 08:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marcicatFor reasons I don't entirely remember, I receive a daily email from the New York Times (it's called "The Morning"). It's generally a roundup of headlines, and since I'm not subscribed to the NYT, I can't actually read any of them, but that's fine. There's also a puzzle at the end which is A+ great.
More importantly, on Saturdays the email includes the full text of whatever op-ed article got selected -- generally something calm and Saturday-worthy, like 'making a summer playlist' or 'why I love daylight savings time,' that sort of thing. (LOL when I went to link the author's page on NYT [Melissa Kirsch] I realized that apparently they are always the Saturday writer. WELL THAT EXPLAINS SOME THINGS!)
And THIS week (September 7, 2024), the article was about tennis. Or more accurately, tennis fandom. (I was much more interested when I realized it was more the second than the first.) It's a conversation that comes up again and again in fandom -- how much are you a fan of the thing itself, and how much are you a fan of the community that builds up around it. It was also about the joy of enjoying things -- not uncritically, but enthusiastically nonetheless.
I can't actually link to the article itself, but this is the concluding paragraph, and I thought it was worth remembering.
If we define ourselves by who and what we love, and I think we should, then it’s valuable to love as many things as we can, to accumulate enthusiasms and lean into them, to hold onto passions when we discover them and not let them fall away. This way, our identities become rich, multidimensional, expansive. Sometimes it feels like there’s more to dislike than to like, more to disdain than to embrace. My longing for tennis feels like an opportunity, a reason to open my arms wider, to take more of the world in. I’m going to seize it.
-Melissa Kirsch, "Love All"
More importantly, on Saturdays the email includes the full text of whatever op-ed article got selected -- generally something calm and Saturday-worthy, like 'making a summer playlist' or 'why I love daylight savings time,' that sort of thing. (LOL when I went to link the author's page on NYT [Melissa Kirsch] I realized that apparently they are always the Saturday writer. WELL THAT EXPLAINS SOME THINGS!)
And THIS week (September 7, 2024), the article was about tennis. Or more accurately, tennis fandom. (I was much more interested when I realized it was more the second than the first.) It's a conversation that comes up again and again in fandom -- how much are you a fan of the thing itself, and how much are you a fan of the community that builds up around it. It was also about the joy of enjoying things -- not uncritically, but enthusiastically nonetheless.
I can't actually link to the article itself, but this is the concluding paragraph, and I thought it was worth remembering.
If we define ourselves by who and what we love, and I think we should, then it’s valuable to love as many things as we can, to accumulate enthusiasms and lean into them, to hold onto passions when we discover them and not let them fall away. This way, our identities become rich, multidimensional, expansive. Sometimes it feels like there’s more to dislike than to like, more to disdain than to embrace. My longing for tennis feels like an opportunity, a reason to open my arms wider, to take more of the world in. I’m going to seize it.
-Melissa Kirsch, "Love All"
