☕ saturday mornings - july 1, 2023
studying spirituality, fated paths & perpetual kindness
Happy Saturday!
I hope you’re having an excellent start to your weekend.
What I’ve been up to:
I published an essay Tuesday on the dangers of deservance. It's far from perfect, but I'm proud of the final product. Perhaps one of the best (and most honest) essays I've written.
I'm spending the Canada Day long weekend in Niagara, Ontario with good friends.
Here's an inside look at the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.
Enjoy.
✍️ quote i’m pondering:
American poet and naturalist, Mary Oliver, on the spiritual background to her life:
It’s been one of the most important interests of my life, and continues to be.
And I have no answers, but have some suggestions: I know that a life is much richer with a spiritual part to it. And I also think nothing is more interesting.
📚 book passage i loved:
Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with the thought of the road tonight.
Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them.
― The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
💡 idea from me: compliments & kindness
When I was a boy, my grandfather told me I had shoulders like Gordie Howe.
Howe was a Canadian hockey legend, from the prairies of Saskatchewan. A man of titanic power. Built like a bull, muscle wrapped tight as steel.
At 5 years old, I clearly looked nothing like Gordie Howe. (Yet...) But I remember looking in the mirror, proud of myself. Smiling.
Now, as an adult, those words are one of the few things I still remember from that age.
Tolkien taught me language is powerful. Words matter. Words shape the world.
Sometimes small gestures can have a big impact. Sometimes people need to be told about their amazing qualities to see them for the first time themselves. Sometimes a compliment that took seconds to say, sticks with someone for decades.
As simple as looking someone in the eyes and saying you genuinely appreciate them.
As sophisticated as noticing potential in them they don’t see.
Leo Tolstoy: “Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
When you notice something you admire in someone, take a second and tell them.
❓ question i’m asking:
Where am I spending energy trying to please someone who actually doesn't care? Where am I creating expectations that don't exist?
📸 photo of the week:
Last March, I spent two hours in the Maud Lewis exhibit in Halifax.
The repetition in her creative process was remarkable: Maud would paint the same scene, again and again, until she felt she got it right.
I also loved the personal thank-you notes she’d send to each of her customers.
Thank you for reading! It means a lot to me :)
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Much love to you and yours,
Tommy
You’re a good writer Tommy. That’s a compliment that sticks for us writers. I saw a friend from high school today and told her about this Substack thing and she said, you’ve always been a writer. It felt nice.