☕ saturday mornings - february 25, 2023

pursing obsession, enjoying life & surrendering to your timeline

Happy Saturday!

I hope you’re having a great start to your weekend.

What I’ve been up to:

• I've spent the week skiing, snowshoeing, and unwinding with close friends in Kelowna, BC. I’ve been toying with the idea that you have to take recovery as seriously as you take work. Billionaire founder Brunello Cucinelli has had a big influence on me in this respect.

• I'm working on my application for the Write of Passage Student Success Team.

• I struggled for hours to write this week’s newsletter. “Like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth” (Vonnegut). I returned to an idea from James Clear that has helped when I hit blocks: Reduce the scale, not your standards.

Here's a recap of the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.

Enjoy!

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✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Franz Kafka, Czech novelist, on pursuing your obsessions:

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion.

Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

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📚 book passage i loved:

You're going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter.

So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love.

Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.

― The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

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💡 idea from me: surrendering to your timeline

At the Cafe-Concert (Edouard Manet)

Growing up, I was obsessed with Carey Price. The NHL goaltender from the Montreal Canadiens. I would pull up a chair to the creaky wooden desk in our living room and study Price with a ferocity that outmatched the lazy speed of our dusty old Mac computer. I spent hours mapping out his life path, down to the year, to figure out exactly what I had to do, at what age, to be like him.

If you're an ambitious person, comparing yourself to others is second nature.

You want to know how you're doing and can't help but compulsively evaluate your timeline versus others. Maybe you ask yourself the same questions I always do: What was this person doing at my age? How successful were they? How do I measure up? Am I behind or ahead? Am I even doing the right things?

If you do this exercise often enough, ingeniously selecting people who were hyper-successful at an early age and ignoring late bloomers, you end up at a single destination: Feeling behind.

Feeling behind is an act of pure comparison. You look at the lives of others in glorious awe, only to glance back at your own with subtle disgust. You compare your progress, milestones, and "success" at each age. Try to figure out just how far behind you are.

One spring morning, I went for a walk by the lake with my brother. It was one of those days where the earth was finally beginning to thaw, and you're excited to smell the sunshine and feel real warmth on your skin. Summer was just deciding to make itself known again.

I had spent the week researching one of my favourite writers, and feeling utterly insignificant in comparison. (I learn slowly). But, while chatting with my brother, I dragged myself to an important conclusion: Comparing your timeline to others is a useless, and often harmful, exercise.

We all have unique lives. What's in store for me is different from anyone else. It exists on its own unique timeline, invisible to me today but nevertheless, welcoming me to uncover it gradually as I make my way in this world. Just because I can't see it yet, or it unfolds at a slower pace, doesn't make it flawed or inferior. It just makes it mine.

Your timeline is meaningful because it's uniquely your own, and no one else's.

When I was rejected from Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarship, it stung. I spent an hour scrolling the profiles of students who were selected, struggling against the riptide of envy. Feeling behind. But then I found comfort in the realization that the Rhodes simply wasn’t on my timeline. I have something else in store for me. Even if I can’t see it yet.

Viktor Frankl: Each individual person is imperfect, but each is imperfect in a different way, each “in his own way.” And as imperfect as he is, he is uniquely imperfect. So, expressed in a positive way, he becomes somehow irreplaceable, unable to be represented by anyone else, unexchangeable.

We each have a unique and specific mission in life. The mission is meaningful because it must be fulfilled by you, and you alone. It distinguishes you from everyone else. It makes you uniquely irreplaceable.

Pressfield: We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become… Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

Life is a process of discovering the mission you need to fulfill. Of what needs you the most. You don't do that by comparison. You do that by connecting with your own self, your own soul.

Comparison makes you rigid. It says, "You have to be here by this age, and there by that age". But life is remarkably unrigid.

The more I live, the more I view life as a dance. One that gives and takes, ebbs and flows.

Henry Miller: The art of living is based on rhythm. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, ‘the dance of life'. Acceptance is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live. It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.

Surrender means embracing our unique mission. Avoiding frustration with the inevitable speedbumps, setbacks, and detours of life we must face. Accepting our timeline, because of how little we control.

"We feel less anxious about the timing of our lives when we surrender control to a timeline that is intimately our own" (Nix).

Life has its own rhythm. You can't control your timeline down to the millisecond. You have to listen to it instead. Listen to what life is asking of you, at each and every moment.

The future is uncertain. We have no clue what is waiting for us.

A man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment was deported to Devil’s Island. When the ship, the Leviathan, was on the high seas, a fire broke out. Due to the dangerous situation the prisoner was released from his shackles and took part in the rescue work. He saved ten lives. As a result, he was later pardoned.

I ask you: if one had asked this man before embarking, whether continuing to live could have any kind of meaning for him, he would have had to shake his head: What could possibly be waiting for him?

But none of us knows what is waiting for us, what big moment, what unique opportunity for acting in an exceptional way, just like the rescue of ten people by that man aboard the Leviathan.

My excessive focus on my timeline created an excessive focus on the future. But, by focusing intently on the forecast, the glorious projection of the life I wanted, I forgot about the present. How simple, peaceful it was. How much fullness and meaning can be found in small, quiet moments. How I was the youngest I’d ever be, living and breathing and playing in the world.

As my friend Isabel pointed out over coffee, you need to be present. Life demands it. You can't make the right decisions, the right adjustments, the right pivots if you're not in tune with yourself and what feels right. We're all equipped with that intuition, but it exists only in the present. Not in the future. Not in comparison.

I reconcile the ambiguity of not knowing what lies ahead of me with the certainty that there’s something beautiful about living fully absorbed in the present, despite not-knowing.

The hard thing is remaining patient. To take pressure off your timeline. To trust life. Trust the flow of events. Trust that if I do the right things, good things will happen. Have faith.

Learn how to wait for things. Have patience and a little more self-trust. Surrender to this big, glorious, unpredictable dance we call life.

All I have to do is focus on the day in front of me, trusting that every deep curiosity I kindle, every internal calling I answer, and every flicker of excitement I pursue leads me closer to my true self.

I can’t see the future but I trust in it anyways.

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❓ question i’m asking:

How can I consume more information out of obsession, rather than obligation?

I've been deciding what to consume out of obligation. Someone tells me I have to read this, or I feel like I should listen to this, or the media says I must know this.

But, if you consume out of obligation, you always have another thing to get to. Your list will grow like a weed and weigh on you like an anvil.

If you consume out of obsession you only have one: whatever interests you most.

Ask: What am I most interested in learning? What am I excited about? What pulls at me?

Consume that.

Ignore everything else.

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📸 photo of the week:

A few of the best pics from this week in Kelowna, BC.

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Much love to you and yours,

Tommy