The Emotional Support Errand
I have an errand I run when I am tired, restless, mildly discouraged or simply need a break from myself.
It is not, strictly speaking, an errand. Nothing needs to be picked up, returned or dropped off. No household member is waiting for me to come home with dishwasher tablets.
I go to the Chapters bookstore at Broadway and Granville.
First, I order a grande extra-hot caramel macchiato. I know this order has too many adjectives, but each one is necessary. A regular caramel macchiato is over before I have made it through New and Hot Fiction. Extra hot buys me time.
Then I browse.
I read the jacket copy. I examine the author photograph.
Eventually, I arrive at the notebooks.
The notebooks are important.
I own many notebooks. Waiting on the shelf for me to finish my current one.
And still, I look.
I can spend more than an hour doing this. Sometimes I leave with nothing, which feels virtuous. Sometimes I buy a notebook. And sometimes I buy a book despite owning close to 100 books I have not yet read yet.
I have not counted them recently because there are facts about oneself that become less troubling when expressed as estimates.
There is a Japanese word for buying books and allowing them to pile up unread: tsundoku. I appreciate the existence of this word because it upgrades my problem into a cultural practice and lets me know that I am not alone in this habit.
My unread books live on shelves, beside my bed and in small architectural arrangements throughout the house. Their presence does not prevent me from entering a bookstore and believing, with complete sincerity, that what my life currently lacks is another book.
This is because I am shopping for Future Danielle.
Future Danielle has long, unclaimed afternoons. She reads literary fiction without checking her phone. She understands global affairs. She reads one book at a time, finishes it and remembers what it was about.
Future Danielle also appears to have no laundry.
Each new book is a small vote of confidence in her eventual arrival.
The bookstore trip belongs to a category of activity I think of as the Emotional Support Errand. It resembles a real errand closely enough to justify leaving the house, but its actual purpose is restoration.
You may tell yourself you are going to the garden centre for potting soil, but you are really going to stand among the hydrangeas and imagine becoming a person who deadheads regularly. You may go to the hardware store for one hook and spend 45 minutes looking at tiny drawers intended for screws.
The destination is personal. The principle is the same.
You are not trying to accomplish very much. That is the point.
We have become terribly efficient about wellbeing. We track sleep, steps, water, workouts and screen time. We meditate for ten minutes because that is apparently how much peace can be accommodated without affecting productivity.
The emotional support errand has no outcomes.
You do not return transformed. Your inbox remains full. The laundry is still at home, quietly advancing through the house. You have not solved your career or learned Italian.
You have merely spent an hour among books.
But sometimes an hour in which nothing is required of you is enough to return you to yourself.
I used to see my unread books as evidence of failed follow-through, each one a small hardcover accusation. Now I think of them as stored possibility. They remind me there are still subjects I want to understand, stories I want to enter and selves I have not ruled out becoming.
There are worse things to accumulate than evidence of continued curiosity.
And so, when the week has become too administrative, or I have spent so long being useful that I cannot remember what I actually like, I go to Chapters.
I order the drink with all the adjectives. I inspect the notebooks. I visit Future Danielle and see what she might be reading.
Sometimes I come home with another book.
It is not what I went out for.
But then, I didn’t really go out for anything.
~Danielle