Weekend reads: On renewal

Lean Out returns - refreshed and energized - for 2025

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When I worked as a radio producer, I sometimes had to take shifts over the holidays. I didn’t mind going in between Christmas and New Year’s, though, as the days had their own rhythm, distinct from the tempo of the rest of the year. Nothing much was happening — it was almost always a slow news week — and the lull proved to be restorative.

There was little to cover but no less airtime to be filled, and so we had to get creative. The editorial mix tipped toward the contemplative, and, often, the sublime. We abandoned the drama of news and politics for the quiet beauty of everyday life: nature and books and art, food and music and family traditions, community and hobbies and human interest.

When people came on the radio to talk about these things, they sounded relaxed. As if they were perched in an armchair, cup of coffee in hand. Or else crowded around a kitchen table, ready to dig into a chocolate cake. They lingered over their stories, laughed freely, offered up intimacies. There was an expansiveness to these conversations. You could feel yourself exhale. The old year, with all its painful developments, was thus wiped away. As we gazed at the blank slate of the year to come, we thrilled at its possibilities.

Things are probably not like that now in newsrooms. These days, the news is relentless. Our broken world continues to shatter apart, irrespective of holidays. And, as we know, this exacts a human cost. It’s hard to find perspective when you’re on a hamster wheel that never lets up. It’s hard to maintain equilibrium when you are perpetually at the mercy of an out-of-control news cycle. But it is equilibrium that buffers us from the insanity, and so we must strive to cultivate it.

Working in independent media has much to recommend it, but perhaps one of its greatest superpowers is that those of us without bosses can, unlike our legacy media counterparts, choose to take breaks.

I am no longer in the newsroom, and so I am fortunate to be able to enact my own restorative rituals and my own self-imposed lulls. Since I am only one person and can’t possibly cover everything all the time, I am forced to sometimes leave the news to others. That choice, difficult as it is to make, allows me the freedom to log off for a time. Which I did this holiday season, filling my days with other things.

Who could attend Tafelmusik’s annual Sing-Along Messiah at Massey Hall, standing shoulder to shoulder with two thousand Torontonians belting out “Hallelujah,” and not come away revitalized? Who could eat forkfuls of flaky homemade Tourtière — that festive Quebec meat pie — and not feel their spirit nourished? Who could read Abigail Thomas’s Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing, or Lily King’s Writers & Lovers, or Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller, and not feel invigorated? Who could ring in the New Year feasting on pastrami and sour pickles at Linny’s, followed by the world’s most delicious chocolate babka, and not feel restored? Who could roam Toronto’s snow-covered streets at dusk and not feel a sense of awe?

I realized over Christmas just how much I needed my stores of hope replenished. I return to you energized and filled with gratitude. Optimistic about the year to come.