Passing thoughts as I have reconnected with old friends
Over the past week, I’ve had the chance to run into, and connect with, people I haven’t seen in decades.
In many cases, these were once close friends in my teens and early twenties. Through the vagaries of life, we have lost touch and built our own lives without each other. There was no formal parting of ways; instead we each rode our own wave and floated in the sea as we became enveloped in our own bodies of water—we drifted apart.
It has been nice to see all of them, to learn of their families, to learn of their experiences and lessons and journeys. I am glad to be reconnected.
There is a sense of inadequacy that often comes when re-connecting with old friends: you compare yourself with their lives—people who have written books, started their own businesses, travel the world on the speaking circuit, own multiple properties, have jobs that make an impact on the world—and start to wonder why your life feels so small when theirs are so expansive.
But then, you take a step back and realize that the comparison is unfair: that you have built a grand life in other ways. Your life does not need to mirror theirs to be spectacular. Your life is full of wonder and joy and delight, and that is enough—that is spectacular, expansive, wonderful.
Re-connecting with my old friends, in the end, reminded me of just how happy I am with who I am now, how happy I am with the people who make up my life, and how happy I am with the journey my life has taken. We all take different paths to happiness; I am glad to have taken the one I am on, now.
A poem
Famous
Naomi Shihab Nye
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
Some links
This has been going viral across the internet, so you’ve probably seen it already, but it would be remiss for me not to share it: De La Soul did an NPR Tiny Desk Concert on on March 3.
This performance, along with the release of Cabin in the Sky last year, really remind me of just how much I miss Dave. His vocals were sublime, his humor infectious. I’m glad that Pos and Maseo are making sure that his voice and spirit are still inflected in everything De La Soul still does.
It’s not up to me to tell you just how influential of a trio De La Soul was; it’s pretty clear that they are in the pantheon of greatest hip hop groups of all time. They, along with the rest of the Native Tongues, were my first real introduction to hip hop growing up; from them I learned that hip hop was about positivity and humor and taking from the past and honoring that past in the present.
I have a magnet of De La Soul on my fridge at home. When I look at it, I remember being young and falling in love with music and poetry and the power of a good beat and a clever lyric to bring joy to a day. Even if you don’t know much about De La’s music, I encourage you to watch the Tiny Desk Concert; it will buoy you in these tumultuous times.
If you’d like to learn more about De La Soul and their legacy, this piece in OkayPlayer that came out just before the launch of their new album, Cabin in the Sky, is a good place to start. OkayPlayer also has a great starter kit for anyone looking to dive into De La’s music. And Pitchfork had a great review of the new album and how it fits into the De La legacy when it came out, too.
I have a lot of thoughts about fatherhood—mainly on how rich of an experience it is despite how hard it can be—but I’ve never really thought about how the nature of being a dad is tied up in the fact that your child is growing so quickly that every day you’re being introduced to a whole new person:
To be a parent is to be a permanent tourist in a constantly evolving foreign city, which also happens to be your home.
The baby you bring home from the hospital is not the baby you rock to sleep at two weeks, and the baby at three months is a complete stranger to both. In a phenomenological sense, parenting a newborn is not at all like parenting “a” singular newborn, but rather like parenting hundreds of babies, each one replacing the previous week’s child, yet retaining her basic facial structure. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree. Almost. Parenthood catapults us into a permanent relationship with strangers, plural to the extreme.
When you become a parent, you meet your child. And then you meet your child again. And again, every day after that. You will never stop meeting your child. That is one reason to become a parent: To have a child is to fall in love with a thousand beautiful strangers.
A treatise about boredom and why it’s so important for us because it helps us find meaning in our days. The intro talks about how boring parenting can be; for me it’s paradoxical because parts of it can be mind-numbing, but other parts are over-stimulating.
One more thing about parenting: have you ever heard of babysitting co-ops? Something like this would be a game changer for us here, with no family in town.
Okay, that’s all about parenting for now, I promise.
My friend Sean Boots is one the smartest people I know, so I knew he’d have a good way to explain my thoughts on generative AI: I’m a genAI vegetarian:
I don't want any of them. I want to write my own emails. I want to write my own (mediocre) software code. I want to learn and think and ponder with other humans, not with a text-prediction system built by consuming all the text on the internet.
His reasons for adopting genAI vegetarianism are incisive. Here are just the first five, in brief:
- Generative AI tools have a dial for bias, discrimination, and racism that you can't control.
- Generative AI tools lead to a loss of critical thinking, creativity, and skill.
- Generative AI tools are optimized to create what's expected and predictable instead of what's insightful.
- The generative AI industry is destructive to occupations and human vocations that I value.
- Generative AI tools shift more power to the already powerful.
Even if you’re not interested in AI, his post is worth reading, if only to help you understand the impacts of genAI and get a better understanding of the thoughts of people who don’t want to engage.
I love the metaphor of listening as alchemy. Listening deeply creates change: in the speaker and in the listener, in what is being said and how it is being told. Listening then is truly transformational:
When we listen, something changes; not only in the speaker, or the sound, but in the space between. Listening thickens the air. It introduces a subtle gravity. It bends time slightly, slowing the rush toward conclusion. A room where listening is practiced does not behave the same way as a room filled with noise or declaration. It holds. It resonates. It becomes porous. […]
Listening as alchemy suggests that attention itself is a material force. Where attention goes, matter behaves differently. Consider how a voice changes when it senses it is being truly heard. Consider how a body relaxes when it no longer needs to defend itself against interruption. Consider how silence shifts when it is shared rather than imposed. These are metaphors as well as physical events.
The narrative that screens are ruining our attention spans is too reductive: it is the design of the things we do in those screens that constrain or expand our ability to concentrate—not the screen itself. In fact, being able to consume knowledge on different ways is better for all those left behind when the emphasis was strictly on reading text:
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
I’ve had some sublime tasting menus at restaurants in the past, and will likely have more to come, but I am starting to feel like there’s a glut of tasting menus out there; sometimes I just feel like ordering for myself.
An interesting look at what AI will do to jobs by looking back at the job of a secretary and what has happened to it in the face of computerization.
A gorgeous short film about growing older. This one really stayed with me.
A devastating profile of a family that had to leave their long life in New York and proactively move back to Mexico because of ICE—all because the father was undocumented.
A public service ad from the Norwegian Consumer Council all about enshittification. Cleverly done.
My media diet for January and February.
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