Live with Sass pt. 1: What does it mean to live with sass?
Sass has been a key element of my life for about the last ten years.
In that time, I started using hashtags withsass to describe things I was doing: #runnerwithsass, #cyclistwithsass, #triathletewithsass, #hikerwithsass, and eventually #thruhikerwithsass.
I used various “with sass” things so often that when I was talking about my first AT trail leg with a friend in my prep, and I got excited because there was a Sassafras Mountain, my friend said: “Hey, it’s your mountain!” Which is how I started my thru-hike with a trail name: Sassafras.
For a time after I finished my thru-hike, I thought I had to do big, intense adventures to keep doing things with sass. But over time, I realized that all of these things really just reflected a mindset or philosophy about how to live. To live with sass.
So, what does it mean to live with sass?
Merriam Webster’s dictionary lists three definitions for the noun sass:
impudent speech; back talk
bold rudeness or impertinence especially when considered playful, appealing, or courageous
an appealingly exciting, lively, or spirited quality
Anyone who has gone on a hike or practiced a sport with me knows that #1 and 2 are definitely a key piece of my life. 😂
But when I say I’m doing something with sass, or living with sass, the space I’m thinking of is more a combination of #2 and #3.
The key words here are playful, appealing, courageous, lively, and spirited.
At its core, it has three tenets:
Do things on your terms
Do things that feed your soul and feel right to you, regardless of what society at large tells you you “should” do or want
Live life as fully and as presently as possible
Living with sass: doing things on your terms, in ways that make sense for you, regardless of what the rest of the world tells you to do.
Thru-hiking is a great example for a variety of reasons:
I had a deep personal desire to do it
I didn’t want to wait until I retired; I chose to leave a well-paying and generally awesome job/company to do it
I stepped off of traditional paths (career, homeownership, relationships) to do it
My choices leading up to and during my hike focused my entire life around a purpose that resonated for me (and one which most of the people I knew did not understand and could only vaguely support me in)
I was incredibly present and alive during the hike and for several months leading up to and following it
That’s all well and good, but thru-hiking is a fairly extreme example and it’s something you can only do for a finite period of time.
So how do you live a “normal” life with sass?
This question has become increasingly important in my own life, as Long Covid (LC) has stripped away the likelihood that I’ll be able to do another thru-hike or the kinds of intense physical efforts I used to structure my entire life around.
Do things on your terms: Normal does not equal average
Utah Phillips was a fantastic folk singer, labor organizer, storyteller, poet, and anarchist. Ani Difranco turned a lot of his recordings into two different albums. The first of those, called The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere includes a recording titled “Mess with People” in which Phillips speaks explicitly to this idea.
He recounts a story of being at the supermarket with his daughter Morrigan and her godmother Dorothea.
Phillips hammed something up for a kid in the checkout line and his daughter Morrigan, in typical embarrassed-child-in-public fashion, yells at him and says: “Why can’t you be normal?”
And Dorothea raps Morrigan on her shin rudely with her cane and says: “He is normal. What you meant to say is average.”1
That’s a distinction that’s stuck with me.
We often consider “normal” to be the same thing as average.
To return to Merriam-Webster for a moment, the first three definitions for normal are:
conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern : characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine
according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, procedure, or principle
occurring naturally
Phillips didn’t live his life according to other people’s definitions of “normal”; but he was acting in a way that was totally normal for him. A natural behavior, something that didn’t deviate from his own internal principles and norms.
So in the context of living with sass, we first have to recognize a fairly simple thing:
We define what normal is for ourselves.
By extension, we also define what a normal life is for ourselves.
At some point while I was thru-hiking, I stopped referring to the rest of my life as “normal” or “real” life. By thru-hiking, I was doing something that was totally normal for me. I started just calling the rest of my life my “off-trail life,” since that seemed more accurate.
So step one here is to redefine how we think about normal life, to recognize that it needs to be a natural life consistent with our own values, expectations, hopes, fears, and joys. Not anyone else’s.
The world will try to force you to be average. To be ordinary. To follow the same kinds of paths and growth that others do.
This might mean college or career.
It might mean getting married and having kids.
It might mean having a career others expect of you, watching the same things others watch, being a fan of the sports team in your area.
It might mean buying a home or taking over the family business.
There are a wealth of expectations on what our lives should look like.
Some are explicit and direct (such as your parents or friends telling you what they think you should do); others are a lot more implicit and harder to see (such as cultural expectations on having a career or a family, systemic racism, heteronormativity, etc.).
First and foremost, living with sass is about stepping outside of those ingrained expectations and figuring out what is normal for you.
Some of them may strongly overlap with what others want or expect for you. Some of them may not. I’m not here to tell you what they “should” be: all that matters is that you can figure out what matters to you.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more posts to help you do this. Be sure you’re subscribed to get notified when I do:
For now, I’ll close with Mary Oliver, who encouraged me down this path using far different words:
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
We forget, too often, that this is our one wild and precious life. And because it is wild AND precious, it deserves to be lived with sass.
This story takes place around the 5:00 mark if you want to jump right to it.