☕ saturday mornings - october 7, 2023

pain, wisdom & me complaining about my week

Happy Saturday!

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

What I’ve been up to:

• I arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina late Sunday night. I've been excited to visit ever since I read the 4-Hour Workweek in early 2020. I'm trying to do a new thing every day and avoid falling into a rut. So far, I have loved it here. Top 3 cities I've visited.

• Write of Passage kicked off Monday. I'll be busy as I add an Editor and partial Student role to my plate.

• I published an essay Tuesday painting the landscape of my ideal life in the countryside. (My BIG essay I'm working with Alex Dobrenko on is taking longer than anticipated and still far from publishing... yet I think it'll be worth the wait).

Early take on Buenos Aires: cheap steak, beautiful people, French architecture, bakeries on every corner, vibrant flower stands, cozy cafes, safe streets, warm weather.

Happy Thanksgiving to Canada :)

Here are the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.

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✍️ quote i’m pondering:

American writer, Joseph Campbell, offers perspective:

“Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror — but, by God, you’re alive.”

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📚 book passage i loved:

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else...

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”

― Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

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💡 idea from me: how my nice week went to shit

It has been a tough week.

I have been busy, stretched thin, like too little butter scraped over too much bread, and have edited this little, not enough to edit out my attempt to sound Oxford-ian (and remove useless sentences like this).

I was hesitant to write this.

One thing I wish more of my favourite Substack writers did was humanize themselves. Balance their beautiful becoming with some ugly reality. I’m not much for podiums (In fact, I fell off an Olympic podium in Lake Placid).

Netwon said every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So perhaps sharing my journey on the struggle bus may do you some good.

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I haven't been sleeping much. I get into bed by 10pm but my mind races. Ideas run back and forth in my head like a blind man knocking over furniture. I try to focus on my breath, clear my mind, 4-7-8 myself into a sleepy submission. But it lasts sparse seconds. My head constructs a to-do list and writes tweets that sound smart and drafts emails to send. It must be an hour or two before I finally enter the kingdom of sleep. Except it has felt like less of a kingdom and more of a jail cell.

I wake in the dark hours of the morning. My sheets soaked in sweat. Blankets kicked onto the floor. Tired but unable to return to rest. I lay in bed until dawn. With dreams that slowly return to memory like a strange polaroid still developing. Dreams I dare not whisper to a bright-eyed old man through a curtain. I try to nap in the middle of the day but I am never able to fall asleep.

I think I'm getting sick. My forehead has been running hot like a car radiator. My throat is sore and scratchy. I've been popping Tylenols like tic-tacs.

I'm still writing, working, exercising. “No zero days,” they say.

Chasing my to-do list like a dog chases cars. Never able to catch up (and not sure what to do with myself if I ever did). Like the White Rabbit Alice meets in Wonderland: always in a hurry, time always just out of reach.

In typical Tommy fashion, I have piled more onto my plate this month with no intention of taking anything off.

Write of Passage is underway until early November. As an editor and student, it adds 20 hours of working screen time to my week. But I still want to keep up with my journaling and the Artist's Way and publish this newsletter as well as high-quality weekly essays you'll love & resonate with and this huge meaningful essay I'm working on with Alex, and start Jordan Peterson's Genesis Lectures and continue to share ideas on Twitter (so I get more followers and then finally my anxiety will vanish and I'll feel validated) and get all my work for Noah done and my daily photos and the video logs I'm sharing on Instagram. Plus Jack wants to get out and explore Buenos Aires more while we're here, and he's right, but I could sit at the desk and work the whole goddamn day.

I haven't been reading much, which is sad to admit. When I finish up my work by the evening, my brain is too burnt to process anything meaningful. 

I know I'll have to make some hard discerning decisions of what to cut. I know I'll have to shoot some of my desires in the head. At least for this month, this season. "Hard decisions, easy life," they say.

More realistically, my desires will be torn from me.

That's the thing about trade-offs. There's no precise right way to make them such that all my wants will be satisfied. I'm slowly starting to accept that trade-offs mean some of my wants certainly won't be satisfied.

I think people underrate how intensely painful focus is. It nearly kills me to say "no" to the good things, so I can say "yes" to the great things. Or just so I can have time to not go crazy. I don’t want a backburner, I want four frontburners.

"Less but more," they say.

I get frustrated with myself. I fantasize about this simple, sweet, reduced life where I have this rich existence outside of my laptop. Yet I tend to take on so much "laptop stuff".

I get frustrated with my meek human abilities. How dare it fall ill? Why is my head so muddled past 7pm? Does it know how much work must be done?

I'm just beginning to get better at listening to my body—admitting when I am tired or burnt out and need a break without feeling guilt.

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These were disjoint thoughts, as are so many of my thoughts these days.

My new plant sits beside me on my desk. I forgot to water it for two days because I was busy. Its leaves started to wither and drop. But this morning I took it to the faucet and gave it a nice sprinkling of water, like Spring Argentine rain, and placed it on the windowsill to bathe in sunlight.

Already, its leaves are beginning to rise.

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❓ question i’m asking:

If my only goal today was making my day tomorrow excellent, what kinds of stuff would I do?

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📸 photo of the week:

seen in the streets of rio de janeiro

My favourite photo from week two of learning photography in public.

Sorry for the bad quality. If I still had my iPhone 8 it would be much better.

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Much love,

Tommy