Hard to say when we met Tom*, but we’re fairly sure we disliked him immediately. He carried himself with utter confidence, always seemingly self-assured, which - when combined with his lanky six-foot-something stature - meant that we sometimes (rightly or wrongly) got the sense that he looked figuratively and literally down on us. He was, though, friends with our friends and over time we came to like him and consider him a friend in kind.
Tom had been, in his words, a crackhead when he was very young - but he went to rehab at seventeen, got clean, and had strung together two or three years of sobriety by the time we met him. It was - as it sometimes is - hard to imagine the younger, active addict version of Tom. The past version of him seemed very distant from the present one. We couldn’t quite see how his scrawny frame could withstand the weightloss that comes from smoking crack and how his constant firm resolve could have dissolved into manic paranoia. We didn’t, though, think too much about the version of Tom that existed before we met him. We enjoyed, instead, the even-tempered and level-headed version that sat or stood tall in front of us right then.
He was, at that time, a source of some comfort. He seemed very much to know what the fuck was up at more or less all times and acted as if he knew just how to deal with it (whatever it may have been). We came to rely on him for advice. We didn’t - of course - always take it, but we liked hearing it. It was nice to know someone who spoke with a sense of certainty even if (always) in the back of our mind we were certain that that kind of certainty was unearned and questionable. His surety (whether warranted or not) was a good counterbalance to our wholesale confusion in the face of damn near everything.
One day, we were at Tom’s apartment in NDG. We were in the middle of some kind of multi-dimensional crisis that was, almost certainly, overblown and overthought. We can’t remember the specifics, but it seems safe to say that we were anxious about the situationship we were in, a class we were taking, some political event that we’d heard about, a person who was being a cunt, whether happiness as such existed in the world, etc. etc. (We try always to ensure that our crises are incomprehensible and Rube-Goldberg-esque.) He listened patiently to our disjointed rambling and complaining while doing something in the kitchen - maybe washing dishes or making coffee - and then offered, as he was wont to do, advice.
“You have absolutely no control over most of this shit, so why’re you worrying about it? What does that do other than make you feel bad and probably do fucked up things because you feel bad? The only thing you can do is take care of whatever is within ten feet of you. That’s it. Take care of the ten feet in every direction. That’s enough. Everything outside of the ten feet will either never actually affect you or will have to enter the ten feet to do so and you can deal with it then. Unless you have a very long stick, but even then you can probably still only manage like fifteen feet at most.”
We were, urm, incredulous. We maybe raised our voice a little bit. We maybe even, facetiously, went and stood over on the other side of the apartment and told him that since we were eleven or so feet away he should forget we exist and not concern himself with us. (We are, when we want to be and often when we don’t, charmingly melodramatic.)
He seemed, to our eye, to be recommending a radical kind of quietism predicated on practical, material actions. It seemed irresponsible and, more importantly, impossible to live this way. The advice was so practical that it seemed absurdly impractical. We had BIG BAD THINGS to worry about and if we stopped worrying about them they’d surely get differently bad or worse. There were situations and events and circumstances and people beyond ten feet away that were, we felt, directly affecting our lives in less than great ways and we wanted to make that stop or change or something. The answer couldn’t, we were sure, be to stop caring about it all unless it was right in front of us. We aren’t a dog. We have object permanence. We weren’t (and still aren’t), moreover, happy to accept all the unacceptable shit that happens beyond our tiny little physical bubble.
So, we didn’t take his advice.
We didn’t center our thoughts on only the ten feet surrounding us at any given time. We didn’t stop worrying about BIG BAD THINGS.
But, well, he may have had a point. The crisis that inspired this bit of advice resolved itself somehow (and in such a way that we can’t really remember any particular parts of the crisis exactly). We likely, in resolving it or having it resolved for us, didn’t really do much of anything that extended beyond the ten foot perimeter around our body. We did what we could to manage the little segment of the world over which we had control and everything beyond that did whatever it was it needed to do.
Despite the (possible) merits of the advice in hindsight, we still don’t typically take it. As you can no doubt tell from what we write about on here, we rarely limit our thoughts and concerns to ten feet in every direction. We do, though, sometimes try to think about the world in these terms when something disastrous or overwhelming transpires on a massive scale.
We thought, for example, of our ten foot world during the especially bad times of 2020 and after. We could do little or nothing about what was going on, so we tried (as much as possible) to take good care of the space around us and everyone or everything that entered that space. We tried to be considerate of the people we were near - whether friends or strangers - and the places we went - whether private or public. We recognized, then, that Tom wasn’t suggesting we abscond from the world or shake off all indirect cares - but rather to attend deliberately and closely to what we could actually affect meaningfully and practically.
If we could do our best to sort out the ten feet around us, then at the very least those ten feet would be OK regardless of what was going on elsewhere. If we took care of our ten feet, then maybe that care would radiate outwards. Others could better deal with their ten feet because ours was tidy or whatever.
The idea that a chain-reaction of goodness would transpire ten feet at a time was, of course, maybe a little delusional and utopic (same difference?) - but it was a helpful frame for getting along in the world then. It also, sort of, seems helpful now today.
Over the last couple days and still right now probably (we haven’t looked much outside), there’s an ominous and disastrous amount of smoke or smog or whatever in the air across Quebec (and the rest of this northeastern neck of the continent) as a result of a “record-breaking” (congratulations, everyone!) number of wildfires up north. Neither we nor the people we see walking around are able to do much of anything to stop or change these circumstances. We are, mostly, not firefighters, politicians, or people endowed with enough power to alter policy or the past. The high-order causes of current air troubles are, of course, beyond the ten feet surrounding us - but the on-the-ground effects are much, much closer than ten feet away. These grand, worldly things are now also tiny, inhaled-into-our-lungs things.
On a very bad day, breaking things down between what we can control and what we cannot control, what is within or without teen feet of us is (to us) useful. It, at least, stops us from slouching towards the abyss or spinning frictionless into doomer fantasy. Whatever the circumstances - climate change, economic catastrophe, rampant bigotry, creeping nihilism - we can, at least, recover some semblance of agency if we curtail our concern and keep an eye only just on our ten foot sphere of influence.
But, and here’s maybe what made us most angry with the advice in the first place, even if we do all the cognitive and emotional legwork to keep ourselves within the bounds of ten feet - how the fuck ought we manage it? How on earth are we meant to sort out the local matter of living in the face of global disaster? The advice to think small, act local is maybe good - but what the hell does it entail? How can we act reasonably and responsibly when we face the consequences of the unreasonable and irresponsible actions of people way, way beyond our ken? How to comport ourselves deliberately to these ten feet without slipping into complacency or apathy or unfiltered egotism? What are we meant to do, other than make jokes or express alarm, with the disentagrating natural world? Mask up? And then?
No one wants to be that stupid meme dog saying “This is fine” in the midst of the fire, but it’s a little unclear what else one is meant to do. We are pretty sure that a dog sitting in the burning building is pretty fucked no matter what it says to itself pr subsequently does. It’s a dog. It can’t work a fire extinguisher. It has no thumbs.
What, then, to do with the world as it exists, on fire, within ten feet of you?
Under certain circumstances, even ten feet seems like a vast and staggeringly uncontrollable area full of little but fraught, imperfect possibility. A lot can happen or seem to be happening within the space of ten feet. This, really, then, might be the last bit of soundness in that advice.
Given the inordinate complexity that sometimes comes from ten feet alone; it is maybe in everyone’s interest not to enlarge the scope of our concern. It is more than enough to, somehow, keep yourself outside of the (literal or figurative) fires raging at any given moment. It is more than enough to, to whatever extent possible, ensure that you and the people closest to you are safe or safer from hazard or otherwise maybe a little bit better off due to discrete and mundane actions. Ten feet is more than enough especially when what’s happening beyond ten feet cannot seem to be managed by even those that have been elected and entrusted to manage it.
Do what you can for yourself and whomever you can and try, maybe, not to let the atmospheric badness that haunts the air (literally and figuratively) diminish your life any more than it has to. It’s impractically practical advice. Surely impossible to achieve fully, but a decent enough thing to attempt occassionally.
Tom, we’re sure, would be a little too smug for our liking were he to find out that we were taking his words so seriously. He’s unlikely to find out, though. We fell out of touch with Tom some time ago. Not, to be clear, because he gave advice we didn’t immediately like. (We’re cold and impulsive, but not that bad.) Circumstances changed is all. He drifted outside our ten feet and we out of his.
We found out, somehow or another, that some tragic things happened and he relapsed a couple times and went back to rehab a couple times and now lives somewhere off the island. No one we know knows exactly how well or poorly he’s doing. We’ve reached out a couple times, but with little meaningful response. He mostly, we hear, keeps himself to himself. We like to imagine, since imagining is all we can really do here, that he’s taking a version of his own advice. He’s finding some way to manage his way through the chaos of this large world by way of taking good care of himself and the small space surrounding him.
By thinking and worrying about him now, we are, we know, violating his advice. We are, once again as almost always, concerning ourselves with matters outside our control, anxious about the well-being of someone quite far away. But we can’t help but hope that what’s going on in our head and being translated out into these words, this act of writing, is, in its own way, a good use of our ten feet.
We are just taking the abilities and agency in our limited possession and trying to do what we can with the means at our disposal. We are trying, in our imperfect way, to comport ourselves with care towards the practical things within our reach and not get too, too lost amidst the actual smoke and threatening misfortune of it all.
We only, really, have this. Here. It’s not much or maybe enough, but it’s something and actual and all we know, right now, to do.
Besides, we don’t have a long stick to extend our reach and, what with inflation and timber shortages and supply chain fuckery, long sticks are hard to find and way beyond our price range and we probably wouldn’t be very good at wielding one well at all, so…
*Btw, for whatever it’s worth, Tom isn’t his real name.
"The advice to think small, act local is maybe good - but what the hell does it entail? How can we act reasonably and responsibly when we face the consequences of the unreasonable and irresponsible actions of people way, way beyond our ken? How to comport ourselves deliberately to these ten feet without slipping into complacency or apathy or unfiltered egotism? What are we meant to do, other than make jokes or express alarm, with the disentagrating natural world?"
For me yeah the dog joke dogs not having thumbs not being able to work a fire extinguisher That's my way I guess, I can't even manage a 2-foot long stick's worth of proper attention.
Nowadays, that 11+ space is really getting me down; maybe I should have a go at his advice… It does seem practical to me.