⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🍂 The Peace Of Letting People Come and Go: A quiet argument for holding people loosely. When you stop treating every departure as a failure and start seeing relationships as seasons, what is left is gratitude for the time you had rather than grief for the permanence you were promised. Read it here.

🎨 A Chaotic Guide To Making Stuff Instead Of Doomscrolling: Campbell Walker of struthless offers ten things you can do right now to break the circuit of the drained, overwhelmed, endlessly scrolling brain. The cure for consuming, it turns out, is to make something badly. Watch it here.

🌿 How to Find Meaning in Ordinary Days: Ayushi Thakkar makes the case that meaning never announces itself in grand gestures. It settles quietly into rituals, small attentions, and the steady rhythm of the days you were not planning to remember. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The Star Tunnel inside Star Axis, the naked-eye observatory that artist Charles Ross has been carving into a mesa in eastern New Mexico since 1976. Its 147 steps run exactly parallel to the axis of the Earth, so the climb points your body at the north celestial pole. At the top, that circle of sky. Ross is 88 and still building it. See it on staraxis.org.

🧭 The Most Important Questions

It’s easy to slip into an autopilot mode where each day mirrors the previous one.

Falling into these patterns can mean we are missing out on opportunities for deep meaning.

I’ve been asking myself, “What are the most important questions?”

The answers to these questions can act as guideposts, directing how I conduct myself in the world and what experiences I choose to foster with others.

I hope to inspire you with this message to contemplate this as well: What are the most important questions for you at this moment?

Let me provide you with an example of a question I’m currently grappling with:

“How can I best express my love to my parents while they are still here with me on earth?”

This question holds significant importance to me. I’ve interacted with enough individuals who have lost their parents to understand how easy it is to wish you had said or done something differently.

The answer to this question is not a simple sentence to jot down and move on. Certainly not.

The answer is a living one. I utilize the question as a tool to direct my attention towards opportunities to demonstrate my love for them.

Sometimes it’s just small moments and other times for more elaborate projects.

I often fail to answer adequately. But I’m working on that.

There are many “Most Important Questions” to ponder over the course of our lives. What is one for you?

🌌 I Could’ve Just Said The Sky

Reflect on these words from the writer Jessie Raelynn:

🤓 Learn This Word

Contronym: a word that is its own opposite, holding two contradictory meanings at once. To cleave is to split apart and to cling together. To sanction is to permit and to punish. Dust can mean to remove fine particles or to sprinkle them on. Only context tells you which way the word is pointing.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Living in an Alive World

The difference between soft eyes and the implied contrast—perhaps we can call it “hard eyes”—took me back to something that the composer and sound artist Pauline Oliveros wrote about her practice of deep listening. Oliveros defined the practice as “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.” For her, deep listening was something directed both outward and inward, to include the sound of “one’s own thoughts.” Oliveros wrote that she found deep listening necessary because we are culturally trained to do the opposite: to quickly analyze and judge, rather than to let something else in. The implication is that learning something like deep listening or soft eyes requires its own form of training.

In How to Do Nothing, I write a lot about art, mostly as a kind of attentional training ground. I mention my friend Scott Polach’s piece Applause Encouraged, in which audience members were ushered to a row of seats at the edge of a cliff, where they witnessed the sunset and then clapped before refreshments were served. I write about attending a performance of a John Cage piece that permanently changed how I hear by rendering me more attuned to the incidental sounds of a cityscape.

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