If you aren’t careful, so many pieces of your life have the tendency to drift. Neglect a hobby for a little bit and all that new gear you bought will start collecting dust. Quit putting in the work, and you can easily get out of shape. Fall out of touch with a friend and a couple months quickly turns into years.
Some of these drifts are more consequential than others, and not all of them are bad. You only have so much time and attention that a little self-selection of the things that fade slowly isn’t always bad. That said, I do think it’s important to have enough key pieces in your life that will last you from one season to the next. Lifelong relationships. Places that feel like home, physically or spiritually. Visions for our life that give meaning and focus.
My past few years have resulted in a little more drifting than building, and I’m looking forward to turning that around this year. Having a home base, a good team, and a little more experience definitely help. Anybody else finding their self at a switching of seasons?
Notes from Reykjavik: Prioritizing Beauty
On Encountering People
How many people did you come across today? Passing by on streets? Standing next to in stores? Seeing each others words in digital spaces? I don’t even know how I would come up with that number, but I know it would be pretty large.
How many of them noticed you? Acknowledged that you were there? It can be so easy to become invisible in our world.
Now flip that. How many people in the world feel unseen? Invisible? There are people who have every physical and material comfort in the world who still feel totally isolated. There are also entire cultures and groups that feel unseen in their surrounding environment.
When that nun in Lady Bird says that Love and attention aren’t so different, I think that’s especially true to the person who feels invisible. And that means it’s easily within our ability to make someone feel seen and validated. We don’t need to share their experiences, their beliefs, or even their language. We just need to stretch outside our own self-concern.
This kid made my day, just by bringing so much joy to the piñata bash.
For Lent I gave up trying to be a superhuman... but not right away
On Travel & Connection
I’ve taken so many different kinds of trips in the past few years– work trips and fun trips and ones that blur the lines. Iconic cities and warm villages. Service trips and food adventures. Weekend camping trips and living abroad for months. There’s one thing that ties together all the best kinds of trips.
Connection.
Sometimes that means traveling overseas to reunite with friends. Other times it means asking for help and getting welcomed in by locals. Other times it’s a spiritual connection that gets stronger. Or a bond between you and your travel partner. This can look so many different ways, but if you ask me whether or not I had a good trip, the answer comes down to whether or not I experienced connection.
The answer is usually a resounding yes.
The top ten countries I've been to, ranked by food
On Seven Years After Coffee
I met Tim in college. He was spending a year on exchange from England. I had just spent a semester in Argentina and wanted to hang with international students all the time. We grabbed coffee and hit it off. That was seven years ago.
I met Sarah a year and a half later when Tim was back in England and I was visiting London. They just started dating. Though we kept in touch, that was the last time I saw Tim in person until this weekend.
This is one of my favorite things about life. The simple coffee and conversation can turn into a wedding abroad seven years later. It really makes me wonder what seeds I’m planting in my life right now and what they’ll be in seven years.
Deliciously Ugly: What storytellers can learn from David Chang’s bingeworthy feast
On Making Change
I've been obsessed with this quote lately–
“Think about what you tried to build today and ask yourself if it will change the world into the one we need. If not, why not?”
–Elan Mastai
We don't need to accept the world the way that it's been handed to us. We don't need to take all of its assumptions for granted. Its very nature was designed to adapt, evolve, and improve as time unfolds. And there's no need to be a passive spectator to the process. Life is our invitation to get involved.
There are so many ways to help the world evolve into the one we'd rather live in. It seems like there's no wrong way to get started just as long as we, you know, start.
Doing good in an age of anger
On Tapping Into WHY
You know that part of Dead Poet’s Society where Robin Williams goes on a tirade against the word ‘very’ as a lazy person’s way to avoid richer, more descriptive words?
I realize I feel a pretty similar way about people doing things just because they’re “cool things to do.”
Travel’s a great example. There are so many great reasons to want to see places- to gain understanding, to satisfy curiosity, to recharge, to connect or reconnect, to serve others, to discover one’s self. But going places just as a status symbol is far less interesting.
Of course, everybody does stuff because it looks cool, just like everybody uses the word ‘very.’ But I think it’s worth encouraging ourselves to go beyond that. When we tap into the WHY behind the things we do, they come to life.
Want to move people? Make sure your message is as clear as possible
On Everybody Having a Struggle
What are you learning lately?
What I’ve been learning is that:
a) At any given moment, everybody’s got some kind of struggle
b) Those struggles are usually kept hidden
c) Those hidden struggles actually have a better ability to connect us to each other than anything else
This lines up so well with what Kevin Love recently wrote on an article I retweeted. It should be required reading for everybody. "Everyone is going through something we can’t see."
“The reality is that we probably have a lot in common with what our friends and colleagues and neighbors are dealing with. So I’m not saying everyone should share all their deepest secrets – not everything should be public and it’s every person’s choice. But creating a better environment for talking about mental health… that’s where we need to get to.”
The past month hasn’t exactly been the easiest, but I’ve also heard things that other people are going through that remind me that there’s no room to be bitter, and so much need for compassion.
Don’t overlook the way fired up young people can make change
On Presence Over Problem-Solving
What are you learning right now?
I’m learning- probably re-learning- that you can’t always solve everybody’s problems or remove their suffering the way you wish you could. If you have a strong impulse to help others, it can be really frustrating to just have to be a witness to their pain without being able to remove it.
I’m learning, that in spite of that, you can still look for ways to serve compassionately. You might not be able to remove someone’s pain, but you can go above and beyond when it comes to adding joy, love, and presence. Being a problem-solver is a good thing, but it isn’t everything.
Chasing Wakanda: What artists and activists can learn from the world of Black Panther
On Undivided Attention
Doing things with undivided attention doesn’t come natural to me. I like to think steps ahead. I like to get a lot done, often trying to squeeze in even more by making things overlap.
It’s a skill I hope to keep working on, that’ll I’ll probably always be working on to be honest.
The past few years have been good to me. But as I get older and a little more settled into a life I spent most of this decade building and working towards, I’m realizing that it’s actually easy to be so future oriented that you forget to enjoy things right in front of you that you used to dream about.
As we get deeper into the year, I hope to see it less as a race against calendars and clocks in order to check boxes, but more like a package of moments, each with its own scents and sounds and intricacies to get to know.