Book club: The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz.

(aka a solid tool of REAL LIFE IMPROVEMENT.)

Some of you have already Fritz’s Path of Least Resistance, and you’ve let me know you’re eager to reread and talk more about it.

I’m going to reread the book in preparation as well. Carefully. But I think a fair high-level description is this:

You experience quite a bit of frustration in life. It seems like a struggle to get what you want, things like love, money, time to pursue your interests.

And/or the struggle is to be the way you want to be: a person who goes to the gym, a person who eats a healthy diet, a person who meditates, a person who hides from her to-do list.

You know what you want. Why can’t you get it?

Why can’t you overcome what’s in the way? Why can’t you … see what’s in the way? WHY THE SAME OLD STRUGGLE? Why do you find yourself back at Square One so often?

Robert Fritz has a very interesting set of answers to these questions. In this book club, we will examine his answers: the structural problems we find ourselves ensnared by, the structural solutions we can create instead, and the new life that awaits.

We will meet three times in September, aka Trad Back to Learning Month, to discuss the material and how we’re integrating it into our lives. Meetings will be recorded. Registration opens at the end of this week. It’s a discussion group, so the price will be low: $22. (My lucky number.)

Be on the lookout for that notice. In the meantime, hit Reply with any questions you may have. I will answer them for everyone.

There are so many other things I want to write about!

I have mentioned so many other things I plan to write about. My own teacher Mike Monteiro (I recommend his $2 newsletter so highly) writes that he had a teacher in art school who would say “don’t tell me what you’re gonna do; show me what you’ve done.”

I’m ignoring that today to say Here are some things I’ve either already promised to write about, or am promising here and now, I’m gonna do them:

• an update on my 2026 Use it up! project and how it’s been fulfilled and also subverted and burnt down a little bit

• an update on my peptide journey, and why I don’t recommend weight loss peptides to ANYONE and instead suggest self-education, because, man, has it ever been a miracle for me

• my month+ in Santa Fe and what it’s like to be torn between two locales because you have one home and your kid has another, and this is because you couldn’t wait to get away from home! And your parents. Because you were young and stupid and couldn’t be told anything! (And also my plans for next year, God willing.)

• the depth and breadth of the life changes and treasures I continue to unearth, dust off and catalogue from the rubble of my divorce

• and my recent self-guided retreat at a crazy hotel and how I realized that I, Max Daniels, a mature woman LIFE COACH who might have known better, was getting random strangers to do emotional labor for me. (Thank GOD I saw this. I thank God.)

In the greater world, David Hockney.

I don’t seek out the news anymore. It has to come to me. One of the things that came to me recently week was the death of David Hockney.

Tell you what, I am so glad that I lived in David Hockney’s timeline. When I discovered him, I had much the same reaction as when I discovered the work of the painter Gauguin for the first time. I was young when I encountered Hockney, so I must’ve been in my single-digit era when I saw my first Gauguin? Tweens, anyway.

I do remember this about Gauguin: enchantment. I couldn’t get enough. But eventually, in his paintings, I saw emerge the presence of a monstrous ego.

This culminated for me in my late 20s in New York. I think I must’ve been at the Met. They had hung a Gauguin painting of a steak, I’m talking about a steak on a PLATE.

And it was obviously, NAKEDLY obviously, a self-portrait.

I mean, it was a slab of raw meat! AND it was a self-portrait. I so clearly remember standing there, dumbfounded in front of this weirdity and its OBVIOUSNESS, its right-there-in-plain-sightness, thinking Are you guys seeing this?? Thinking There is no possible way I am the only person to have noticed this.

But this was in the late 80s and it was harder to uncover evidence of anyone having a similar experience or thought. Anyway, that was the end of my love affair with Gauguin. Years of enchantment, burnt to a crisp. Just the way I like my steak.¹

This never happened to me with Hockney. I loved him instantly (Denver Art Museum shout out, shout out, WHAT an underrated institution) and love him today. I love his pools, I love his Celias, I love his boyfriends, I love his Yorkshire, his Joshua trees, his photo collages, his self-portraits. I love every Hockney I’ve ever clapped eyes on. And I still do.

I don’t know that much about him. But I’m gonna guess: that man was not an egomaniac.

Here’s Wendy MacNaughton’s tribute, which came to me via Robin Sloan, another newsletter I highly recommend.

Okay, wow, that is the week! LOVE YOU.