Follow-up: Starting the first issue of my newsletter with a link error feels like some kind of bad omen, right? Thank you to those who reached out and alerted me to the fact that I messed up the link to the tweet about learning and body paint. Here’s the correct link. Sorry about that!
I finished reading The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal (of Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me! fame) last week. It was a weird, but very good, book. Part memoir part and love letter to running it covers a lot of ground. I particularly enjoyed the following passage:
“Then as time went on, I started to give up my headphones for training runs as well. I am typing this, obviously, staring at a screen. The computer is also playing music, which I enjoy as I write. When I finish writing in a little bit, I will go have myself some lunch, and of course I’ll play some music or news, and maybe even look at another screen. After lunch, I’ll go rake some leaves or do other tasks, with headphones firmly in my ears; I’ll enjoy music over dinner, and then finish my day by watching another, larger screen, with some content that, I hope, can command my entire attention. If I don’t leave my headphones behind when I run, I wouldn’t spend a single minute of my waking life free from input.”
This speaks to the sense of connectedness I’ve felt between my various anchor habits: reading, writing, exercising (running), and meditating. When I’m meditating well it’s easier to run for longer distances. When I’m running consistently I seem to have the focus needed to write. And when I’m writing consistently I feel like running. The causation direction between all of these habits are bidirectional, for sure. They all orbit around a central theme of cultivated attention. They all pull from a central well of being able to focus deliberately. The more I can remember that these practices don’t happen in isolation the better off I think I’ll be.
“I think about my motion, and my breathing, my muscles, and their state of agitation or stress or relaxation. I note my surroundings—the downward slope I would never notice driving this street, the hawk’s nest I would never see for lack of looking up, the figure in a window caught in a solitary moment of their own. I think about the true meaning of distance—about the learning that comes from running a mile in your own shoes. I think about blisters and bliss, and the voices quiet.”
It’s early — and slow — days for my own rekindling love affair with running and this book helped remind me that a running practice is also an attention practice.
Deliberate Links
• I recently read The Coddling of the American Mind by Jon Haidt and Greg Lukiandoff and Blood Sweat and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier. Both were good and have generated some potential writing topics for this newsletter. I’m currently working on Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson, Abbadon’s Gate by S.A. Corey, and OpenSpace Beta: A Handbook for Organizational Transformation in Just 90 Days by Niels Pflaeging and friends.
• I’ve gone through periods of time using only my iPad for all of my work (I’m writing this on my iPad right now, actually) and this article is a great entry point if you’re thinking about trying to go iOS only in your work life.
• This article was making the rounds recently about how you should just consider not responding to your emails because Inbox Zero is an impossible ideal to reach for. Go ahead and read it, but do me a favor afterward and watch Merlin Mann’s actual talk and check out some of his original writing where he first introduced the idea of “Inbox Zero”. The media has absolutely destroyed the interesting nuance of the original idea.
• After reading Blood, Sweat, and Pixels I stumbled across this article by one of my favorite authors, Clive Thompson, about the doomed game Duke Nukem Forever. I vaguely remember the excitement around this game way back in the day and reading this article was a.) a fun walk down memory lane, and b.) an interesting case study in the lack of creative constraints (e.g. unlimited money). Also, turns out the game did eventually come out and it was bad.
• I’m kind of in awe at how closely David Foster Wallace read self-help books.
Let’s wrap this issue there, eh? Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter over the last week and especially to anyone who shared it with a friend. I’m not going to explicitly ask for help spreading the word about this, yet, because I still feel like I’m very much still figuring things out. For now it’ll just be our own little (poorly kept) secret.
Until next time!