☕ saturday mornings - july 22, 2023

invincible summers, regrets & heaviness vs lightness

Happy Saturday!

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

What I’ve been up to:

• On Saturday, I got dinner in Toronto with a few (awesome) people from the Write of Passage team. It's a company I'm very optimistic about.

• I wrote an essay telling the story of one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life—summiting a mountain to watch the sun rise—and how I’m trying to integrate the idea that life is about the journey.

• Prepping for a 2-week backcountry hiking trip in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains in August.

Here's an inside look at the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.

Enjoy.

---

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Philosopher and author Albert Camus on resilience:

"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

---

📚 book passage i loved:

“Regrets are illuminations come too late.”

― The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

---

💡 idea from me: heaviness vs lightness

The Swan by Hilma Af Klint

"You smile less than average."

A friend says to me casually as we sip espresso at a cobblestone cafe on Porto's Douro River.

Ouch.

It stings, but her comment is unflinchingly honest and painfully true.

Recently, I've been thinking about the duality of heaviness versus lightness. (I think we have a deep intuitive sense of what each means that transcends language and escapes definition.)

We all have a natural tilt: some of us are heavier by nature, some of us are lighter. One isn't better than the other. They're just different.

And it's not a binary (am I heavy or am I light?) but a continuum (how heavy or light am I?).

I tend to lean towards heaviness: thoughts with no bottoms, questions with no answers, intensity with no end.

We aspire to the opposite side of the duality: heavy people want to be lighter, light people want to be heavier. We seek balance.

When I look back at my journal entries from 2-3 years ago, I realize so many reminders to myself remain the same: to smile widely, to laugh loudly, to tread lightly. But I’ve found it can be an uphill battle.

And we seek our counter-qualities in other people, places, things.

All of my best friends, the people I'm pulled towards, are unequivocally light. They force me out of my head and into the world. Make me worry less and smile more. And stop taking things so damn seriously. They counterbalance my heaviness.

Perhaps we can try to change things about ourselves. But perhaps there are some things so foundational to our nature that we must embrace them, and balance our imbalances through the environment we cultivate.

I can try to force myself to be lighter.

But I can also just spend more time around my friends.

---

❓ question i’m asking:

A question from poet Mary Oliver on the natural world as a doorway to ourselves:

Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observe

with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left—

fields everywhere invite you into them.

---

📸 photo of the week:

The complexities of human emotions is one of those things that will never fail to surprise me.

---

Thank you for reading! It means a lot to me :)

Spread the love—If you want to support my work, the best way to do so is by sharing it with others who would enjoy it. Beyond that, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it.

Get in touch—If my writing resonated or if you just want to be friends, please reach out 😊 Reply to this email, leave a comment, or find me on Twitter!

Much love,

Tommy