"Feeling this Moment" and the Endless Search for Inspiration
On visceral self doubt, chart-topping hits, and doing history
Imagine you’re me, sitting here, trying to find the perfect combination of words to introduce this second newsletter and the only thing you can hear through your living room window is Pitbull’s 2013 hit song “Feel This Moment” ft. Christina Aguilera. At this point I’ve acquiesced to the random mid-2010s bops that come from the ether beyond my window on a random Tuesday but this one really struck me. Between the two of them they say “feel this moment” so many times (14 to be exact) that as the listener I have no choice but to sit here and feel this moment! Turns out I do not like it.
I say this because over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to workshop some ideas for a second newsletter topic. I felt that specific sort of impending pressure that can only come with a voluntary creative task: the sense that there are a group of people and they are waiting! I wanted something topical and punchy but loosely related enough to what I was researching so that I wouldn’t have to do extra work. You know, the usual newsletter topic.
I came up with some half-baked ideas but the process of writing those drafts always looked something like: have an idea, write idea on paper, hate idea, find holes in the logic, close tab. I even very briefly considered a sort of comparative analysis of the “Feel this Moment” genre of music from the 2010s and Fidel Castro’s public speeches from the 1960s (which now that I write it down I’m not totally convinced has no merit to it). But in general I became paralyzed by a new, yet profound fear: what if isn’t that deep? Or worse: what if I’m not capable of writing this? I had suddenly become hyper-aware of my limitations.
Upon further inspection I came to the realization that perhaps it was not the world which had suddenly become less interesting nor was it that I lost my ability to produce critical thoughts about it. Rather it seems it was/is an inability to sit with a thought. To trust myself enough to follow my own curiosity, no mater how inconsequential it may be. And this I think gets at the heart of the matter: a fear of pointlessness.
For 6 hours per week I sit in a sterile classroom, justifying to myself and my peers and my professors why my research matters. Explaining my “so what” as it were. I had become conditioned to value only those thoughts which had a wider purpose and could be substantiated with thoroughly curated evidence. Of course I can’t speak for every field but for historians especially, the sense that your work has to have impact beyond your subject area pervades our discipline. Perhaps it is an occupational hazard of writing about the past. How can we raise the stakes and justify our funding? How are we changing the world around us by writing about something that has already happened? It is a tricky business and one I’m now realizing has its consequences beyond the ivory tower.
In my pit of despair I turned to an Edge Effects podcast episode featuring an interview with an historian I’ve been studying recently named William Cronon (because frankly I couldn’t look at a page any longer). The TLDR is that Cronon wrote a really impactful book called Nature’s Metropolis that reframed the way historians think about this concept of “wilderness” and its relationship with everything else. During the interview someone in the audience had asked him: is there a “wild” in America or is it lost? And he responded with:
I am of the view as an environmental historian that the wild…is a human experience of the world. Which is to say that without a human consciousness to perceive the world, I don’t think that there’s something called wild. I think wild is a human emotion and an experience of the sublime, an experience of the sacred when standing in the face of something larger than ourselves.
I was struck immediately by his choice of words and the innately spiritual terms in which he set his answer. Sublime. Sacred. Emotion. Not only the words but the content of the answer itself. This implication that you can create meaning by simply acknowledging the world around you. That we are not just studying the world around us but ourselves. It was a refreshing take from someone so deeply familiar with the world of academic history (side note but I highly suggest checking out that podcast episode).
As I finish writing this I can’t help but feel a painful yet welcomed sense of irony. That the fear of writing something devoid of meaning is in itself meaningless. That the solution to writing something isn’t to shut out the noise and double-down. It’s to allow ourselves to “experience the sublime.” It’s to allow ourselves to feel the moment.