⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🍯 The Art of Doing Nothing: Stories from the Commons revisits the moment in A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner when Christopher Robin tells Pooh that what he likes doing best is Nothing, “just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering,” and asks whether nothing might be exactly where wonder has room to show up. Read it here.

🐢 The Bombarding of Childhood: Early childhood researcher Natalia Kucirkova argues that the real problem with kids’ media isn’t only screen time or content but pace: shows have become so fast, loud and bright that a child never gets the time it takes to grasp an idea, feel for a character, or wonder about what they just saw. Read it here.

🧹 How to Simplify Your Life: Tim Ferriss asks Chip Conley, Greg McKeown, David Allen, Elizabeth Gilbert and Oliver Burkeman for the one to three decisions that could make life dramatically simpler, from treating your inbox like your home to Burkeman’s case that real simplicity is “not a question of techniques; it is an attitude.” Listen here.

🎙️ Where Wonder Went Episode 4: A year-long effort to recover a single recording from a dead laptop and what it taught me about grief: that loss can slow the rush of time and return us to the preciousness of life as it is, right now. Listen here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Light made visible. Look up through a canopy at night while mist drifts past a lamp, and the light suddenly has a shape: shafts of it pour out in every direction, cut into rays by the shadows of leaves and branches. This is the Tyndall effect. In clean air, light passes through unseen, and you only see it when it lands on something. But the tiny water droplets in mist scatter part of each beam sideways toward your eye, so the path of the light becomes visible for as long as the fog hangs in the air. Filmed by your_he4ler. See it on Instagram.

🤔 Inconvenient Convenience

I often think about the experiences almost imperceptibly lost as we march forward towards our notions of “progress.”

We cherish technology that makes our lives more convenient.

But value isn’t only stored in ease of access and speed of delivery.

When my father was young and new music would be released he would go on a whole journey leading up to the actual listening.

He’d head to the record store, find the record in question, make his purchase and perhaps interact with the employees a bit.

Then head home and remove it from its packaging before placing the needle on the vinyl and allowing for the auditory odyssey to commence.

He’d absorb the art in its entirety.

Now we have what feels like all the world’s music at our fingertips. An astonishing accomplishment. Even going back in time and showing Spotify to a human living in the walkman era would seem like wizardry.

I don’t have that same journey with music that my father did and part of me feels like it diminishes the value of the music.

Somehow it’s harder to cherish.

But this isn’t about music.

It’s about all the ways our shortsighted pursuit of convenience can unintentionally commodify what made something precious.

Limitations have their usefulness. Going through a process to obtain something of value is part of why we value it.

I’m not suggesting we revert to a time before streaming music or throwing our phones away. I’m a technophile who has greatly benefited from technology so I’m not preaching death to digital.

But this is a bit of an ode to analog.

And an encouragement to explore the ways we can optimize for reverence over convenience.

Write a letter. Develop some film. Make a time capsule.

You might be surprised by the kind of significance these sorts of activities can imbue into your daily life.

These letters are free and always will be. If they’re worth something to you, you can support the work here. Always optional, never expected.

🐌 Slowness Might Be Our Revolution

Reflect on these words from Charly Oakley:

🤓 Learn This Word

Methexis: Greek for “participation” or “sharing in.” In ancient Greek theatre, it named the kind of ritual where there was no wall between performers and audience: everyone took part, creating and improvising the action together. Plato used the same word for the way a beautiful thing takes part in Beauty itself. It is often set against mimesis, imitation, where one hero performs and everyone else watches.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Tell me every boring little detail

“you’ll want to know if you had children. if your career was successful. which people stayed in your life.

whether all this uncertainty ultimately made sense.

but for once, i want to be a little selfish. i won’t answer any of your questions. not today.

today, i want you to answer mine.

i want to know what you did today, every boring, useless little detail you can think of.

[…]

you didn’t make all the right choices. thank god you didn’t.

all those missteps, failures, tries. they allowed you to live. they made life taste richer.

i miss that. having so many choices left to make. they hurt, yes. but they are part of it.

i miss not knowing. i miss having my parents downstairs. i miss the voices of people i loved. i miss having them a phone call away. i miss ordinary saturdays i didn’t know i would one day miss.”

[Continue Reading]