Syllabi

Nostalgia, Reinvention and Other Stuff

Today the air is crisp, like the McIntosh apple I will soon bite into as berry picking time turns into plucking apples from a tree time. Standing on tiptoes, I stretch my arm high to capture the reddest and fattest beauty that beckons almost just out of my reach. I always seem to reach for something in the Fall. My fingers close around the fruit. I feel its weight and heat from the sun in the palm of my hand, and I just can’t wait. A wide-open mouth, a satisfying crunch. I can feel the juice dripping down my chin, leaving its sticky trail after that first delectable bite. I wipe it away with the back of my hand.

It is still August but getting close enough to the end of summer that one thinks about going back to school. The end of August filled me with excitement, unlike other children who felt sad. Time to go back to school. I just loved and still do, being in school. New pens and empty notebooks that require a cracking of the spine to open, still to this day, elicit an excitement that wildly surpasses that of any thousand-dollar piece of jewelry or piece of clothing I was gifted as Accidental Icon. My mother would often joke when I became an academic that I had cleverly found a way to “be in school” for the rest of my life.

Perhaps it is because I was an academic for 20 years, my body and emotional life seems to default to academic time. I used the end of August to create my syllabus, brainstorm fun activities for the first day of class, and decide what to wear. When I became Accidental Icon, I would also prepare for New York Fashion Week, always nipping at the heels of the new semester like a noisy, dressed up and excited little dog. Now I am retired from academia and social work consulting. I also stopped going to fashion week for a couple of years and finished writing my book. I revealed the cover. After nurturing and protecting my grandson from unnamed viruses and other hazards during the first year of his life, he is walking, literally and figuratively, into the social world of day care. I will serve as the backup caregiver by default, if the need arises. If I remember back to my parenting experience accurately, that will mean fairly regular sick days at my house until a little immune system gets up and running. Rather than excitement these last two weeks of August, I feel a bit scattered. There is too much of a loose, undefined thing ahead in my life now.

July found Calvin and I using our new, unfilled with diapers and formula days, to attend to our health and fitness. We hiked five miles a day, and I rode a bike again after 40 years. I’ve been able to do 16 miles at a clip. We camped and ate at nearby farm-to-table Hudson Valley restaurants. We plan to do more of this through the early months of the Fall. I love New England in the Fall and Acadia National Park has carriage roads to ride my bike on. There has been a brief interruption in my biking routine as I took a bit of fall. Luckily, no broken bones, just bumps and bruises. I picked myself up off the ground, recovered a bit, and then rode the six miles back to my car.

In my old blog and in my book, I talk about interruptions; the ones that come from outside of us and those that come from within. When I read the reinvention stories of the many older women who post on my Instagram and Facebook, I see deferred and interrupted dreams being realized at this time of life after work and family responsibilities disrupted them in the past. Now these women inspire me because of their dogged determination not to let anything get in their way.

I interrupt my writing self once again through an unanticipated impulse to attend fashion week as I did in the past. I am taking time away from writing to make that happen. I fear the nostalgia that seems to grip the culture right now is getting under my skin, too. Nostalgia is a retreat to the past because the present is scary and unpredictable. However, when you get stuck in nostalgia, you lose the capacity for innovation because you prefer to live in the past. We're facing tough and psychologically challenging times, but we shouldn't get stuck in nostalgia and instead focus on creating a better future.

I saw my syllabus as a document that helped us get to a desired future state. I didn’t just put in favorite readings of mine or those with an ideological perspective I agreed with. I put in those that would be a step towards the journey I wanted us to take to get where we needed to go. Which for me always landed at the gold standard of “capacity to think critically”. I used “backward design”, starting from your endpoint and then working backwards to see what you needed to get there. Designing a syllabus involves leaving space for unexpected learning and the ability to make adjustments if needed. Universities see syllabi as a contract between students and professors, a way to hold each other accountable. So perhaps this sort of contract is what I need for myself right now and the embodied rhythm of an academic year is telling me now is the time to do it.

I started following someone named Craig Mod after reading an article about his approach to newsletters. He is a writer, photographer, walker and lives and works in Japan. He recommends creating newsletters that are time-limited, with a set frequency and short form writing to help you complete them despite interruptions. No charging for it either until you have been consistent for a couple of seasons. I like this plan; I’ll use a semester for my time limit which means now until December. I think once a week could be manageable. Reinvention seems to be a topic that really gets some traction on my social media platforms. I like that as a theme to delve into as so many of us are in the thick of it, including me. When writing about reinvention, we can explore how it implies a hopeful future and how we can bring elements from the past to shape it rather than become mired in nostalgia.

If I think of outcomes I’d like to achieve this semester, the first would be to write regularly on my Substack. By that I mean 1x per week until December. Then I will reassess. I would like to write some fiction as the second outcome for this semester, starting with short stories (even though I will still feel compelled to write about myself!). Finally, improve my creative non-fiction writing skills, specifically the form of the braided essay. The context will be the topic of reinvention. My assignment for the week ahead is to identify the methods I will use to achieve these learning outcomes. I’ll also start cultivating a reading list.

Here’s where this becomes a community project. All suggestions about methods or articles and books to read are welcome. For those who are stuck or getting started on a reinvention, want to design a syllabus too? Share your process here. My readers, who are experienced, brilliant, and generous, always give constructive feedback.

For inspirational purposes, please share how you are reinventing, and whether you made a road map to do so! Until next week and hold me to it…Lyn