☕ saturday mornings - may 27, 2023

walking in the woods, small things & cultivating your environment

Tommy Dixon

May 27, 2023

Happy Saturday!

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

What I’ve been up to:

I finished Write of Passage and the altMBA on Thursday. It's been one of the most intense and challenging months of my life, but I did some important work and met some amazing people.
I published an essay curating the best work from one of my favourite writers on the Internet:
Isabel
. Her ideas have had a huge impact on how I think about my life path. You can read it here.
On Friday, I drove 3 hours North to Algonquin National Park for six days of hiking. No people, no phone, no books. The Aboriginals in Africa used to say modern life is “three days deep.” In three days in the wilderness, you learn what’s important. I've been looking forward to it as a reset and way to connect with my self.

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

Enjoy.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Henry David Thoreau, author and naturalist, on the value of walking in the woods:

"I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified.
I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.
...
This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging—though invisible—companion, and walked with him."

📚 book passage i loved:

“And so it is that most people have no idea how beautiful the world is and how much magnificence is revealed in the tiniest things, in some flower, in a stone, in tree bark, or in a birch leaf.
The grown-ups, going about their business and worries, and tormenting themselves with all kinds of details, gradually lose the perspective for these riches that children, when they are attentive and good, soon notice and love with their whole heart.
And yet the greatest beauty would be achieved if everyone remained in this regard always like attentive and good children, simple and pious in sensitivities, and if people did not lose the capacity for taking pleasure as intensely in a birch leaf or a peacock’s feather or the wing of a hooded crow as in a mighty mountain or a splendid palace.”

― Letters on Life by Rainer Maria Rilke

People are different in cottage country.

There's almost an invisible barrier you cross, roughly 100km North of Toronto, where people go from calling the city on their neighbours for parking on the street past 8pm, as they lurk behind the curtains, to warmly waving hello or cutting their grass or sending over freshly baked bread.

For a while, I thought my internal state was all I should focus on: My happiness is internal and has nothing to do with external circumstances. I have to be happy with where I am now, or I'll never be.

To some extent, this is true.

I've met people who were extremely successful (based on society's definition of success) but weren't happy. Their millions of dollars, followers, and high-profile connections didn't help.

However, I'm beginning to appreciate the impact of the external world on my state of being.

It would be much harder for me to be calm in Manhattan during rush hour than in a secluded cabin bathing in the serene silence of the mountains in Utah.

Despite my daily efforts to create a peaceful internal state (with daily exercise, meditation, journaling) spending five hours on Zoom calls ruins it.

I have a good friend who went from feeling stratospheric anxiety, while working from home and doom-scrolling Twitter all day, to feeling a depth of joy he hadn’t experienced since childhood, while hiking the Appalachian Trail. In a single week. Simply from changing his environment.

Simon Sarris: Regardless of where they live, most people have more control over their environment — and their environment has more control over them — than they realize.

The droplets of the external world trickle into your inner world.

So, I've been thinking about how I can curate my environment more intentionally.

I've been asking myself questions like:

How can I cultivate an environment that makes it easier for me to be peaceful and happy?
How can I surround myself with the work, people, art, activities, and experiences that energize me?
How can I make my space a beautiful sanctuary that supports and simplifies all of my daily activities?

For example, I've learned filling life with beauty is such a simple way to improve my day to day.

We all have a natural tilt. A natural environment we feel most alive in. And while you technically could reach the same feeling of aliveness in any environment, with a mastery of your inner state, it'd be like trying to swim upstream instead of taking a water slide.

Like yin and yang, both the internal and external world matter. Neither can be a replacement for the other.

The key is to cultivate both.

❓ question i’m asking:

What does play look like to me? How can I make time today for a bit of play?

📸 photo of the week:

Thank you for reading!

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Much love to you and yours,

Tommy