Tag Archives: Alaska

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter

Leave a reply

Here’s another of the self-help genre I’ve been reading lately: The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter. These books pump me up for exercising and following other habits that are healthy for me, but that I don’t naturally gravitate toward, and that’s exactly what this book is about–doing the hard but healthy things.

Some of the best ideas in the book had to do with healthy movement and being outdoors. Like many, most of my exercise is not necessarily natural, and while not completely ideal, it’s still better than nothing. The book reminded me why yard work, harvesting, and shearing sheep feels so good (afterward). This kind of work can be hard. It can be annoying. It can be uncomfortable, but I always feel better afterward. The impact is tangeable.

I don’t necessarily know what to do about the increasingly sedentary life that I live and/or what it will mean for my kids or society, but for now the book reminds me to get outside, go for walks, and continue to prioritize the seasonal rituals I grew up doing, even if and when they become obsolete or inconvenient.

The Sun in a Compass by Caroline Van Hemert

Leave a reply

What a gorgeous book. Caroline is a friend from grad school, and so this book has been on my radar since it came out. However, it’s publication coincided with the birth of my son, and so I’ve been delayed in reading it. I’m so glad the time has finally arrived!

This story is undeniably epic. Reading it will reacquaint you with your adventuresome spirit, no matter how modest. At the very least, you will want to get outside and go for a hike. Information about birds and migration is artfully interspersed throughout. The uniqueness of the land and animals is overlaid with insights about climate change, and it’s impact.

Caroline’s book is the antidote to the seemingly cool, unemotional adventure teams that appear to work solely from complex datasets. And mostly male. She is fully human, full of life’s most pressing questions, full of fears and doubts, and also gumption and bravery. She brings readers intimately into the complex experience of a 4,000 mile human powered trek. We learn that just like the choices we make in life, sometimes there isn’t a well established path forward, and the answer is found in weighing options, wrestling with the odds, and searching one’s own preferences.

If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name by Heather Lende

1 Reply

This is basically Alaska’s version of A Prairie Home Companion (the Garrison Keillor version, not this new stuff). More specifically, it’s like the “News from Lake Wobegon” section of the show, which also happens to be my favorite part. (P.S. I thought Sara Watkins was going to take over the show. I love her speaking voice. I think the replacement needed to be a woman who sounds sort of like a church lady.)

Anyway, If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town by Heather Lende is full of that same kind of down homey, good timey accounts of a few births, a lot of deaths (Alaska is a dangerous place, and there many of untimely deaths), and some other stories in between.

For whatever reason, this was a slow read for me, even though the short chapters should make it very readable. I also found some of reflection to be cheesy. There are religious overtones, and, in my opinion, those are always difficult to pull off, and this was no exception. By the end, even though these townspeople are clearly beloved, I had a hard time differentiating one old, dying, charismatic local from the next.

That said, it’s still worth the read, but maybe only if you’re a fan (secretly or otherwise, of A Prairie Home Companion), if you’re from Alaska (I’m not), if you’ve visited Alaska (I have), or if you crave to be immersed in an idyllic, close-knit community that has the kind of face-to-face social interactions that some of us may still remember from before the days of social media (I do).