Kate Norlander

When I wrote about sayings to live by, I didn’t include one of the things taped to my office wall, because it encompasses more than just a short quote. What I wrote down is a shorter version of a tweet that one of my favorite podcast hosts, Linda Holmes, retweeted. Specifically I wrote: “‘Fangirl out’ – If you like someone’s work, you should tell them. Even if you don’t think they need to hear it.”

But while the tweet that Holmes shared is at the heart of what I want to live by, I loved her additional comment about writing a heart-felt thank you note. It made me wonder: What if I started sending fan letters — not in the hopes of getting something, but simply to tell someone “I like your work”?

A fan letter a week

Since then, I’ve been trying to write a “fan letter” every week. There have been plenty of weeks when I’ve missed writing that letter — we just added a new dog to our house, so I skipped this week’s letter in favor of helping her acclimate to her new home — but I’ve sent far more fan mail this year than I have throughout the rest of my life.

It’s not that I’ve never written such mail before. I wrote a lengthy fan letter to Bruce Cockburn about 15 years ago, because I think he’s amazing. After I published Geek Culture, I sent a copy to David Tennant, because I thought he might appreciate a book about fans and fandoms, especially one with a cover photo of someone cosplaying the Tenth Doctor. But I’ve only recently made writing fan letters a regular practice. Many of the people I write to are writers, from the famous (N. K. Jemisin) to the not-so-famous (Katie Langston — I’ll be reviewing her book soon). But I’ve written to other celebrities, too, including Tan France of Queer Eye, who helps me see wardrobe possibilities I don’t normally think of (I’m not good at putting together outfits), and political strategist Mike Murphy, because I appreciate his desire for a better world and concerns about the direction his political party is taking.

As much as possible, I try to send real letters. I figure if what I write actually crosses the recipient’s desk, and if it is meaningful to them in any way, a letter is a lot more fun to hang on to than an electronic message. But if all I have is a “contact us” page, or if, as in the case of Langston, I just want them to hear right away how much I love their work, then I will communicate electronically.

And, as I mentioned at the outset, I write with no expectations. I’m well aware that many people will probably never even read what I write, and if they do, I certainly don’t expect to hear back from them. These letters aren’t for me; they’re for the recipients. The important thing is that I reach out to let them know I enjoy their work — even if I think that they get so much fan mail that they will never see my words of appreciation. You never know.

Beyond fan mail

I’m concentrating on fan mail with my efforts, but of course there are other ways you can let people know you appreciate what they do. Folks who are fairly new in their field might see and be grateful for a glowing review on Amazon or even Google (there’s no reason you can’t write a fannish review of a plumber). You can thank a service person for their excellent work and then follow up with a positive note to their manager. You can email a coworker and say, “I really appreciate the way you kept the meeting moving along and kept us all on topic. I wish more people ran meetings that way.”

Whatever you do, the point is to let someone know that their work has made a difference in your life. Maybe their movie made you see something in a new light or their song brought you great joy. Maybe they made the best pad thai you’ve ever tasted. Whatever it is, let them know. Don’t let their fame (or lack thereof) stop you. Everyone can have days when they need the lift you get when hearing “well done.” You may never know whose life you have touched by reaching out to let them know you’re a fan.

Last year I wrote about adages that I try to live by.

More recently I’ve been collecting quotes from social media and pop culture and posting them on the wall beside my desk to remind myself of how I want to live.

Some of the quotes I’ve written down aren’t really about making a difference. Toward the end of my favorite anime (Hunter x Hunter), one character shares the following bit of advice: “Enjoy the little detours to the fullest, because that’s where you’ll find the things more important than what you want.” That seemed particularly apropos during a pandemic, but I don’t know that living by it will help me make a difference (other than perhaps being a more pleasant person to be around).

But three of the sayings I’ve collected can, I think, help us change the world in some small way. Here they are:

“Gentle but fierce”

I follow Mark Ruffalo on Twitter, not so much because I’m a fan (although I do like his work in the Avengers movies), but because I’m interested in what he has to say. Because I interact with others on Twitter far more than I interact with him, he doesn’t usually pop up at the top of my feed. Somehow, his birthday post last year managed to catch my attention — again, not for the reason you might think. The post features (tasteful) photos of him in a bubble bath. But what caught my eye was his message, which ended, “Set out to defy the limitations life, self, and others have in mind for you. Be gentle but fierce about it.”

I rather like his message about defying limitations, but my favorite part was the phrase “gentle but fierce.” And the more I thought about, the more I thought it’s a great way to handle life in general, not just limitations that are imposed on you. Angry confrontations are all around us; the world needs our gentleness. But gentleness doesn’t mean failing to stand up for what’s right. That’s where we are called to be fierce. What would the world look like if we resolved to try to embody being “gentle but fierce”?

“Live fully, love wastefully”

This is pulled from a quotation from John Shelby Spong, a retired bishop of the Episcopal Church. I believe I also saw this somewhere on social media, probably Instagram. The full quotation (more or less — I’ve seen different versions online) is “live fully, love wastefully, and be all that we can be.” I was presumptuous and decided I could improve on it. First, I believe that if you are living fully, you are already being all that you can be, so the third part of the quotation seems redundant to me. “Be all that we can be” also sounds far too much like an Army commercial from my youth for me to take it seriously. So I just wrote down “Live fully and love wastefully” and taped it to my wall.

My insistence on editing Spong aside, I do love the idea of living fully and loving wastefully — especially the loving wastefully bit. Again, it seems to me that the world would change drastically if we would try to live by those words, pouring out love, loving others extravagantly, recklessly, even wastefully. What if we loved others with no regard for whether or not our love would be appreciated or returned? What a beautiful waste! It’s a goal I’ll never fully achieve, but it’s one worth striving for.

“That’s how we’re gonna win. Not by fighting what we hate but saving what we love.”

If you’re a Star Wars nerd, you’ll recognize this line. Rose Tico says it to Finn toward the end of The Last Jedi after preventing Finn from sacrificing himself for the good of the Resistance.

Some fans hate that line, asking: Wasn’t that what Finn was trying to do — save the Resistance? They make a valid point. The writer gave Rose a great line, but he put it in a questionable context. (I wonder, though… Was Finn really acting out of a desire to save what he loved, or was he actually driven by his hatred of the First Order? In this series, the answer to that question really matters.)

Context aside, I love the notion of focusing our efforts on saving what we love rather than fighting what we hate. If we focus on fighting what we hate, then even if we “win,” we may find that we have been reduced to our hatred. But if we focus on saving what we love, we are more likely to come out of the conflict without having become the very thing we despised.

I think all three of these quotations belong together. The first combines the gentleness that can be found in love with the fierceness we need to fight for what is right. The second again calls us to love, even when that love seems like a waste, as well as to live fully, which can be difficult to do if we don’t bring a certain ferocity to life. The third calls us to exercise the strength that can be found in love as we face the things that would challenge that love. If we can do that, I have no doubt we’ll make a difference in the lives of those around us.

I am not a Mennonite, but I own four books published by Herald Press, an imprint of Menno Media. I cherish these books because they have a lot to teach me about topics like simplicity and justice.

Three of the books are cookbooks: the classic More-With-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre, Simply in Season by Cathleen Hockman-Wert and Mary Beth Lind, and Extending the Table by Joetta Handrich Schlabach. The fourth book, Living More With Less by Doris Janzen Longacre addresses sustainable living. If you want to learn more about making a difference, you can’t go wrong with these books.

More-with-Less Cookbook

This is the book that started it all. In the 1970s, the Mennonite Central Committee called for Mennonite and Brethren in Christ community households to consume 10 percent less food in order to address North American overconsumption and world need. The committee then commissioned a cookbook with recipes that could help households respond to their call to use less. The cookbook is filled with recipe submissions, mostly from the United States and Canada. Think of it as a church cookbook on steroids, covering a larger territory than your typical church cookbook and built around a specific purpose: caring for the hungry by reducing overconsumption.

My copy of the cookbook is a reprint of the original 1976 edition. It contains introductory chapters on the world food situation as it was at the time, a theological reflection on the importance of reducing food consumption in North America in order to address global hunger, suggestions for building a simpler diet, and reflections on how such a diet does not need to be plain or joyless. The chapters that follow include sections with recipes for breads; cereals; beans, soybeans, and lentils; main dishes and casseroles; eggs, milk, and cheese dishes; meats and fish; soups; vegetables; salads; desserts, cakes and cookies; preserves; and snacks and non-food items, such as laundry soap and play-dough.

This is the cookbook I use the least, because it feels a bit dated. Some of the recipes call for margarine, which I never use. But despite the fact that I don’t turn to this book that often, I find it valuable. It does include recipes my family enjoys, especially easy lentil stew. It also has suggestions for leftovers at the end of many of the chapters, including listings of recipes elsewhere in the book that can help you use leftovers.

The 40th anniversary edition, published in 2016, apparently includes some updates to recipes, which may be just what the cookbook needs to keep it fresh. Regardless, using it can help cooks focus on more responsible eating.

Simply in Season

This cookbook is particularly useful for those who wish to cook more in-season foods. Once again, the cookbook is based on contributed recipes. It is divided into five main sections: one with recipes for each season and an “all seasons” section. A short introductory section gives advice on storing and preparing different fruits and vegetables. Some of the recipes I’ve tried have been just “okay,” but others are quite good, particularly the taco soup and slow cooker chili in the All Seasons chapter.

There’s lots of additional material scattered throughout the cookbook, including information on things like crop diversity and personal reflections on food. At the end of each section, there is a list of “invitations to action,” such as visiting a farmers market, starting a community garden, sharing meals with others, buying fairly traded products, and encouraging your grocery store to carry locally grown food.

Extending the Table

The Mennonite Central Committee commissioned this cookbook “to promote global understanding and celebrate the variety of world cultures.” It is by far my favorite of the three cookbooks. It’s one I turn to often, because so many of the recipes I’ve tried are very flavorful. Once again, the recipes were submitted, but this time they come from around the world. Among our favorites are African greens (sukuma wiki) from Kenya, an assorted vegetable sauté (oseng oseng sayuran) from Indonesia, bang bang chicken (bang bang ji) from China, and shrimp curry (chingri mash torkari) from Bangladesh. Like Simply in Season, this cookbook includes supplemental information scattered throughout, including short essays on subjects such as water, marketplaces, and cornmeal porridge, which can help give us a more global perspective on food.

Living More With Less

Living More With Less is very different from the three cookbooks I’ve mentioned. The 30th anniversary edition, the one I own, is made up of three parts. The first part is introductory material. The second addresses five “life standards”: do justice, learn from the world community, nurture people, cherish the natural order, and nonconform freely. The third part is made up of personal stories from people who are trying to live just, sustainable lives. This part is organized around topics such as money and stewardship, cooking and eating, recreation and schedules, and strengthening each other and organizing communities.

The chapters on the five life standards are informative and include practical suggestions. In the chapter on learning from the world community, contributors from Indonesia and Paraguay ask if Americans could try to make do with fewer kitchen appliances. In the section on nonconforming freely, one person from Canada wrote about choosing to live without their van for a year.

We announced our decision to members of our small Mennonite congregation. In the weeks that followed, another couple said they were retiring their old car. With money from a provincial incentive program, they went car-free and bought bus tickets. Another couple sent around an email and said they intended to keep their car but set up a borrowing policy for those who need it. … With these actions in our small, faith-based community, we were embodying a hint of what a more sustainable, interdependent society could look like.

Part 3 is even more useful, filled with ways we can lighten our impact on the planet and care more for our neighbors. In a chapter on homes, one contributor wrote about how his family chose a roofing contractor based on what the company planned to do with the old shingles; the contractor they chose takes the shingles to a place that recycles them into road substrates. The Clothes and Bodies chapter includes a story about a couple who consciously decided to wear shirts that promote nonprofits rather than clothing with brand names. In the Recreation and Schedules chapter, the director of athletics from Eastern Mennonite University shares ways families can balance kids’ sports time with family time.

Some of the ideas in this book won’t be new to you. I wasn’t surprised by a suggestion to wash laundry in cold water; for years, I’ve rarely used anything but cold water to wash clothes. But there are so many ideas for living more simply in this book that I doubt anyone could come away without something new they could try.

We don’t have to be Mennonites to appreciate the ways the contributors to these books are dedicated to justice, the environment, love, and the global community. Any or all of these books are worth checking out from your library or purchasing for yourself.

A note about my next post…

Life is very full right now. I’m enjoying good things, like seeing a family member for the first time in more than a year now that we are all fully vaccinated. I’m also dealing with difficulties, like a pet who isn’t very interested in his food any more. I’m going to take a short break from the blog and return when I have a little more bandwidth. I believe this will be sometime in mid- to late June.

The pandemic isn’t over yet, but I think most of us are feeling hopeful that the end is in sight.

It would be wonderful if we all woke up tomorrow and discovered that COVID-19 was just a collective nightmare. Since that isn’t going to happen, perhaps we can look at what we have learned and how we can use that knowledge in our post-pandemic lives. While I think it is important to look at lessons learned on a large scale (early in the pandemic I reflected on some of these lessons in my post on what COVID-19 can teach us about making a difference), I want to focus this two-part post on the good things I can extract from this global tragedy on a personal level. This post will focus on what I learned, or what was reinforced for me, about making a difference. My next post will focus on the lessons I absorbed about finding things to enjoy during dark times.

Lesson #1: It’s important for me to stay home when I’m sick.

I mentioned this in a post about sick leave early in the pandemic. I’ve gone to work sick in the past, and now I see how serious the consequences can be. In early 2019, as a major work event approached, I came down with something that primarily consisted of a bad cough. I could have accomplished my work at home, but I chose to go into the office. I believed I’d be more effective there, and I wanted to demonstrate that I wasn’t slacking off.

The following week, one of my coworkers had the same cough I’d had. I apologized for coming in sick, and she graciously told me, “Oh, it’s going around. I could have gotten it anywhere.” While it’s true she didn’t necessarily get it from me, I certainly didn’t reduce her exposure by coming in sick.

Now that I’ve worked remotely for more than a year, it’s clear that I don’t need to be in an office to be effective. I also don’t need to prove anything by being bodily present. My productivity speaks for itself. I’ve promised myself after the pandemic I will no longer come into the office sick. I hope that for many of us this will be a cultural change on both an individual and organizational level.

Lesson #2: My choices really do affect others.

Ever feel insignificant, like nothing you do really matters? There’s nothing like a pandemic to show the ripple effect of individual actions. A wedding in Maine resulted in at least 178 COVID-19 cases, including seven deaths. When we make choices that take the welfare of others into consideration — such as wearing a mask or getting vaccinated — we really can make a difference.

Lesson #3: Driving less matters.

As I mentioned in my early-pandemic post, there was a significant decrease in carbon emissions last year due to the shutdowns. After the pandemic I will be driving more, but I hope I can keep in mind how driving impacts the environment. I want to drive less than I used to in “normal” times. Can I establish a habit of not driving at all one day a week? How else can I limit my driving compared to what I did in the past?

Lesson #4: Little things can make a big difference.

I’ve said this one almost word-for-word before, but I’m continually reminded of how we don’t need to do newsworthy things to make a difference. Sometimes a card from a friend has been enough to make my day.

Likewise, a recent encounter in a grocery store reminded me of the importance of choosing kindness. In this particular case, a bag of kale was on the floor. I saw it and maneuvered around it. I can’t explain why I didn’t pick it up. I’ve picked up fallen items in the past, but this time seeing something on the floor somehow didn’t sink into my brain as a task to take care of. It was simply an obstacle on my way to the produce.

A woman behind me asked me, “Excuse me, did you knock this over?” When I let said “no,” she replied, sounding very annoyed, “Well, you could have picked it up.”

She was right. I could have — and should have — picked it up. But I was hurt by the anger she directed at me. I responded with an offended “sorry,” followed up with a muttered, “But you could be kinder.” Then I remembered what I’d recently written about hitting the pandemic wall. While I didn’t like how she lashed out at me, I realized that maybe she was having a difficult day. Mentally excusing her helped me not carry my annoyance with me during the day, and it reminded me of how important it is to treat people with kindness.

What good things are you taking from this pandemic that you will use to make a difference?