You are a mist that appears for a little while
and then vanishes.
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall–
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
An Architect's Own House Situated on a Remote Beach (House Tour)
We’re still in a golden age of television… and one show I loved recently was ‘How To With John Wilson’. Ostensibly, it’s about John Wilson, the show’s creator, learning to do new things, like make risotto (yes, that’s a whole heartwarming, amazing episode). But it’s also about New York specifically and all the tiny moments that make it such a special city, and about humanity generally, and all the strange pauses that make us human.
How To With John Wilson | Official Trailer
Three movies I watched recently that stayed with me…
The Rescue, which tells the story of a group of amateur cave divers banding together to save a junior Thai football team from drowning in an underwater cave. The film shares a director (Jimmy Chin) with Free Solo, and it’s an equally epic story. The banding together of an informal, global network of the world’s best cave divers is astonishing.
Mystify is the life story of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. I was too young to grasp the global impact of INXS. Ultimately, the darkness that drove him to greatness, also contributed to his undoing, and in that sense his story is profoundly human.
jeen-yuhs, a four and a half hour Netflix documentary chronicling Kanye West’s early days establishing himself as a producer, and rapper. The scene that stuck with me most was the one where Kanye walks the halls of the Roc-A-Fella offices rapping to a demo of All Falls Down, and no-one reacts. Arguably the most influential artist of this century, wrote the album that would launch his career, and upon first listen, the people at his label barely blinked. What you’re left with is a morality tale on the necessity of self-belief.
jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy | Kanye Raps In The Roc-A-Fella Offices
Well, you're in your little room
And you're working on something good
But if it's really good
You're gonna need a bigger room
And when you're in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of how you got started
Sitting in your little room
That’s not a wrong note, you just lack confidence
“In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you, as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and hopefully in service of the other person. But unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than roughly half minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty. So the light turns yellow for the next 20 seconds— now the risk is increasing that the other person is beginning to lose interest or think you’re long-winded. At the 40-second mark, your light is red. Yes, there’s an occasional time you want to run that red light and keep talking, but the vast majority of the time, you’d better stop or you’re in danger.”
How to Know If You Talk Too Much | Harvard Business Review
Crispy Egg Toast Recipe : It's so delicious and so simple
“The lie that society tells us is that our friends can be our family. That’s the premise of TV shows like Friends, Seinfeld, and How I Met Your Mother. We can all leave our hometowns behind and have exciting adventures in the big city with people that we meet. And those people will love us and take care of us and be there for us.
But life is more like what happened to the actual actors on Friends. Their TV reunion was the first time all six had been together in years. They still cared about each other to a degree, but they had grown apart. They were living in different cities and working different jobs and had a million different things happen to them that they didn’t share as a group. It couldn’t be the same as it was when they were all single and working on the same TV set.”
You Can Only Maintain So Many Close Friendships | The Atlantic
“This is … how most friendships die … not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve. It’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you. And so you drift.”
Fred again.. - Studio Live 2 (London, 21 October 2021)
I’m back running. Going sub-23:00 with zero fitness base at 5k Parkruns in Lorne, and Casuarina earlier this year gave me a taste, and on a nudge from Anthony, I set myself the goal of sub-21:00 by Easter. I got in to the 21s… but only just - 21:53.
To avoid the classic fitspo trap of being jazzed to run, then overdoing it, then getting injured, I signed up with Pulse Running and am heading into my 8th week of a structured running program, with a remote coach.
So far, so simple = run easy Tuesday (5:45/klm), run hard Thursday (fartleks, or 4x1klms), run long Sunday (12+ ks at ~6:00/klm).
I’m alternating the ASICS Novablasts, and the Nike Zoom X Invincibles, but I look forward most to runs in the Invincibles - like running on a high-jump mat (in a good way). Spongy, cloudy, but still surprisingly responsive. Just as well I have that extra cushion… running when you’re heavy really adds up, thousands of steps multiplied by the extra downforce of every sneaky kilo I’ve added every year since my twenties.
Slowly, I can feel the fitness coming back - and you can see it in my resting heart rate dropping. The Mona Fartlek is my favourite hard run session. And YouTube is a wonderland of running inspiration if ever the motivation wanes.
Running 13:06 for 5k
Recommended Reading:
Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You
Dan Wang’s 2021 Letter. See also his letters from 2020, 2019, and 2018.
“There's a mythology that exists in people's heads when they join an organization that tells them it was built by smarter, better people in the past. To that, I say, “Are you kidding me? You're way fucking smarter than the first ten people we hired.” One of the first ten people we hired walked in off the street and we asked, “Hey, dude, can you write Java?” There was no coding test, there was no interview; it was like, “Dude, have a go. See if it works.”
“Where was I? Dights Falls, right, quick yet, and yet intact, austral spring, hot-brick night, shaking ourselves off,
shaking off the long-short winter – felt like forever, blinked away years – taking full in this new kind of blue.
(It’s only time. So much time. Only so much time.)
Watching, in the dim, our children’s bodies do the forgetful work of joy.
…
Everyone’s missed you. Everyone’s asking about you, worried about you, wondering how you’ve been.”
Best Moment: Rolex Oyster Cosmograph & Documentation, ca. 1971 | ANTIQUES ROADSHOW
“Before they moved into their house, Shirley had found and carefully replanted a 300-year-old olive tree to shade the front door. It was a project he never understood. Now, whenever he passes it, she’s with him.
“Life has dramatically changed for me, for the worse,” he says. “I am now a widower and a very sad one at that. After 67 years of being with her, now being without her is the most difficult task of my life. I don’t quite know how to handle it. I don’t quite know how to be.”
Riley’s Memories | Inside Out
I have been thinking a lot about core memories (which aren’t a real thing, just a moving idea from Inside Out). Probably because I have two young kids forming them all the time right in front of me.
It’s too late to form core memories in your thirties (I assume from the Inside Out scene) but I am fascinated by the concept of timelessness. Not just of memories but of music, and art, and architecture, and business… it is so rare to build something that outlasts a decade.
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and do try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Some of Steve Irwin’s back catalogue has been preserved intact on YouTube, and it’s aged well. Watching my six year old, transfixed as Steve drives the troop carrier all around his state, scrambling underneath old Queenslanders, identical to the one I grew up in, looking for poisonous snakes… the surprising cinematography, Steve’s energy, his love for the animals… there’s some timelessness to it.
Highly recommended.
Steve Irwin Finds Australia's Deadliest Snakes
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
One good movie for a topic on mindfulness, specifically the power of stillness, if you're interested - Sound of Metal.
Two scenes stick out for me, when Joe tells Ruben about stillness and when Ruben finally understands (will make sense if you give it a watch).
That scene in Jeen-yuhs is wild. Imagine a startup founder walking into BB and pitching their startup to the receptionist, the EA's, the partners, the associates. It's mad.