Spicy Peanut Sauce Brings People Together🌶️
So make some Gado Gado, the perfect salad for sharing with friends.
I’VE NEVER MADE A SECRET of the fact that before I moved to Atlanta in late 2021 I had lived a monk-like existence in the North Carolina mountains for over five years, reveling in the spiritual glories of nature, sure, but also finishing writing a book, making a lot of salads, and attending to some long-deferred psychic maintenance—all with mixed results.
It was extremely good for me except when it absolutely was not. But as far as I’m concerned, the same could be said of just about any lifestyle. So I refuse to examine this period of my life with too unkind an eye.
Which is mighty big of me, to paraphrase what the philosopher-sleuth played by Matthew McConaughey in True Detective tells Woody Harrelson’s philandering lug of a partner after he proudly proclaims that he tries “not to be too hard on myself.” (I love that brilliant season of the show and consider the two of them absolutely Bergmanesque together.)
Lone pilgrimages to personal enlightenment, while initially constructive and restorative, lose both their power and efficacy faster than you’d expect. I find support for this broad conjecture in the fact that two writers famous for doing the whole isolation in nature thing weren’t even actually doing it—living in isolation in nature, I mean.
Annie Dillard, whose book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won a 1975 Pulitzer Prize, was living with her professor husband the whole time she was tinkering around the creek banks just a couple of hours from where I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains—although she never mentions him. And everyone knows that the twenty-something transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau went into town often and had friends over during the two-year, two-month, and two-day period he lived deliberately in his pastoral little cabin (which Dillard herself once mockingly referred to as “an extended vacation.”). Plus, he was a stone’s throw from a very large Trader Joe’s. (Not really, but Walden Pond was close enough to Concord, Massachusetts—about 2 miles away—that his critics bring it up a lot.)
My experience is that the deep reflection-isolation combo quickly falls prey to the laws of diminishing returns. You can come extremely close to running out of fresh/constructive thoughts and instead become ruminative. And rumination’s best frenemies are fret and worry. As a firm believer in the mind-body connection, I can tell you that you really can get sick of yourself.
Plus, during my time in the sticks, I realized I was ill-equipped to deal with spiders and snakes, which were everywhere, and I woke up in the middle of the night many times convinced that a bear was knocking at my door. I crossed the road to my mailbox one afternoon to find it overflowing with tiny, just-hatched spiders. I went back inside, boiled a kettle of water, and stood on the road pouring it over my mail, as if that were a thing you do. I don’t even want to talk about the snakes, which I had to try to scare off all by myself. (Pro tip: you can’t scare off snakes.)
Anyway, having given this sort of lifestyle a whirl myself, I feel like I’m qualified to say that Thoreau and Dillard definitely did it the right way.
Life without community—which is much more common than you might think—becomes a vacuum. Which is why, in this modern world we occupy, loneliness has become an epidemic. And it is quite literally killing us, even though we are completely surrounded by the cure, which is other people. (Here’s a gift link to Nicholas Kristof’s terrific piece about the matter).
People were invented so that we would all have company, here on this gorgeous, tragic, wonderful planet!
Which is why I finally picked up and moved to Atlanta two odd years ago, almost on a whim: It was time—and I was starved for big-city life, which I’ve always loved.
But more than two years later, I have to admit that I have not been to the High Museum once, much less to hear live music or to a baseball game (although why would I? The White Sox are in Chicago). And I’ve probably spent as much time alone in my car going back and forth to the grocery store in hideous traffic as I spent in quiet meditation (once) or writing at my little desk that looked out over a pretty meadow and a stream at the bottom of a small mountain.
Community, it turns out, is not just a matter of access; it’s a matter of effort.
As usual, this entire newsletter is a roundabout path leading to salad. I realize that I’ve probably been less social than I might have been had I not moved to Atlanta during a pandemic. And the pandemic and other perils of the modern world can probably be blamed for how out of practice many of us have gotten when it comes to having people over, although obviously I’m speaking to myself here.
We all need to have more company! We all definitely need to eat more salad. And the salad that comes to mind when I think about feeding a small crowd is Gado Gado, the Indonesian dish with a glorious, spicy peanut sauce at its core.