⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

❤️‍🔥 James Van Der Beek Wrestles With Mortality: I encourage you to watch this moving video from the late actor as he struggles with his identity being stripped away. Watch it here.

🧘 How to Practice the Jhanas: The basic technique and common mistakes. Read it here.

🫂 Reasons To Stay: Anonymous letters written by people who care. Read here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This image is a screenshot I grabbed from a video posted by a snowboarder named Takumi. The video is worth watching as he captures a spontaneous “snownado” while he’s wandering in the snow-clad wilderness. Watch it here.

⌛️ Time Famine

I saw popular author and podcaster Tim Ferriss tweet this a few days ago:

"I need to get back to the slack.

To the pregnant void of infinite possibilities, only possible with a lack of obligation, or at least, no compulsive reactivity. Perhaps this is only possible with the negative space to—as Kurt Vonnegut put it—fart around? To do things for the hell of it? For no damn good reason at all?

I feel that the big ideas come from these periods. It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music.

If you want to create or be anything lateral, bigger, better, or truly different, you need room to ask “what if?” without a conference call in 15 minutes. The aha moments rarely come from the incremental inbox-clearing mentality of, “Oh, fuck… I forgot to… Please remind me to… Shouldn’t I?…I must remember to…”

That is the land of the lost, and we all become lost."

Then I listened to the On Being podcast episode (linked above) where John O'Donahue put it quite nicely:

"Philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim. And time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven't had a true moment for yourself and you know, to relax in and to just be."

These quotes paired nicely to remind me of the common affliction of time famine: the widespread feeling of not having enough hours in the day, the pervasive sense of racing against the clock.

When I find myself in this place I try to remember that the way out is counterintuitive. I shouldn't race faster to try to get more done to finally shore up time. Instead, I need to introduce more slowness, some space to pause.

Taking this time, even if it is just 20 minutes, helps me rebalance so that the seconds don't feel like they are ticking in fast forward.

It's not that there isn't enough time, it's that there isn't enough time spent occupying a space that nourishes the soul.

❤️ On Kindness

Consider these words from George Saunders:

🤓 Learn This Word

Ataraxia: A state of serene calmness, free from emotional disturbance or worry

🕸️ From Around The Web

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower: Rilke’s Timeless Spell for Living Through Difficult Times

“There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration — the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear becomes new light.”

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