Mountains in Ladakh. Click to embiggen And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this. ...
on a canal outside Keukenhof. click to embiggen If you get there before I do Wade in the Water Tell all of my friends I’m coming too God’s gonna trouble the water Wade in the water Wade in the water, children … 🎵 ...
goofing off near a canal, somewhere outside Keukenhof, in the Netherlands The last five years have been, to put it mildly, a bit trying. I lost my father, my brother, my clients1, and quite a bit of my sanity. I lost a lot of weight and then gained it all again. The career pivot is going slower than expected. I feel pettily jealous of the bright young minds I mentor, when they go on to accomplish great new things, while I am here, clawing the mud. There are days, I don’t want to get out of bed at all. ...
Dad “He’s dead?” said Princess. […] “Who told you that?” said Grandad. “We keep that name moving in the Overhead,” he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly […] His name is in the code, in the wind, in the rigging, and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying, ...
For the past twenty years, you’ve been the bane of my existence. I slept with the phone by the bedside, never knowing when Mummy would call, and one of us would have to come find you, and dig you out of the newest hole you dug for yourself. And none of those years have been harder, than the one where we were estranged for the past year. Two decades of picking up after you had taken their toll. ...
This post was first sent to my newsletter on September 5th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) It’s September! Time for a new letter :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the originals. Leo Babauta on the First Two Steps to Creating Resilience If you’ve known me for any length of time in the past decade, you know I set great store on being Antifragile.. While Leo says these are two beginner steps, to my mind, these two will bear the brunt of all the resiliency / antifragile weight. It’ll take you more than half the way there. ...