☕ saturday mornings - september 16, 2023

rose gardens, fate & eternal recurrence

Happy Saturday!

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

What I’ve been up to:

• I'm working with a writing coach! The very talented Alex Dobrenko

  Both Are True
  is helping me with my next essay. If I pour even more of myself into my work, I want to see what I can create.

• I finished Devotions, a collection of poems by Mary Oliver. She’s my favourite poet yet. I also read my second Joseph Campbell book in a row and promptly bought a third. Sue me.

• I'm seeing Noah Kahan in Toronto tomorrow and I'm pretttyyyy pumped.

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

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✍️ quote i’m pondering:

American writer William Faulkner on his productivity:

“A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station...”

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📚 book passage i loved:

The little prince went off to see the roses again.

'You're not at all like my rose; you're nothing special yet,' he told them.

...

'Of course, any ordinary person walking past my rose would think she was just like you. But she is much more important than all of you put together, because she's the one I watered. She's the one I sheltered under a glass dome, she's the one I protected with the screen. She's the one whose caterpillars I killed (except for the two or three for the butterflies). She's the one I listened to complaining, or boasting, or even sometimes being silent. Because she's my rose.'

― The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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🖋️ poem i adored:

by David Jones

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💡 idea from me: fate & freedom

I went for a walk yesterday afternoon, the first colours of Autumn beginning to show.

Flurries of red and yellow fading into ochre and brown, the trees bathed in dull golden light, as the last of the bugs leave their homes again. Crisp air breathing new life into my lungs. Clouds gathering thick in the West, silver seeds of cool cleansed rain beginning to fall.

There's something symbolic about nature coming to life with a final burst of colour before fading away into death.

Fall has always been my favourite season. Reading nooks and mugs of tea and sweater weather and candles and apple picking and hints of the holidays. What's not to love?

As I walked, I reflected back on my year. How little I knew of what was to unfold. How much life has been calling me to open to the unknown, to receive the unexpected. How foolish I felt to set plans with any semblance of confidence they would play out.

I thought about how much control I really have in shaping the narrative of my life.

I try so hard to make the right decisions. I get caught up in the fantasy of executing my life perfectly. Crafting a life -- if I'm only thoughtful and intentional and patient enough -- where all my needs are met and none are forgotten.

But I look back at the past few years and get the subtle sense that I was swept along to this point. Led through the labyrinth of life by a thread of fate, not bushwhacking my own trail. I can't recall any crossroads, big decisions, going right instead of left.

It more feels like I fell into things.

Both of my long-term relationships arose unexpectedly, without any intention. I found Substack and Write of Passage through a perfectly timed phone call with a friend I met by chance. My job with Noah Kagan I'm still scratching my head about.

I set things in motion, sure, but momentum takes a life of its own.

So do we happen onto life, or does life happen onto us? How much is under our control? And how much is fated?

The questions bounced around my brain as my pace slowed, my steps became smooth, timed, rhythmic.

I have a friend who sees life as a hyper complex video game that God has already coded. You have some freedom of choice, where to run around and stuff, but the storyline is fixed. All you have to do is hit play and watch.

It's kinda wild how you can make one decision and it can be years before you understand how meaningfully that altered the trajectory of your life. It's ever wild-er how it's these small passings, these chance events, these tiny moments that ultimately shape our lives in momentous ways. We just don't know which ones and we don't know how.

It's never more acute than when I hear stories of how my friend's parents met. A party they almost didn’t go to, a table at a restaurant they almost didn’t sit in, a class they almost didn’t take… becomes a family they never started, a home they never bought, a person they never raised.

As the saying goes, life can only be understood backward. But it must be lived forward.

Tolkien seemed to believe we retain a degree of freedom but much of our fate is decided, out of our hands.

"Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with 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 unknown is where beauty and surprise emerge. Our plans for life are never as wonderfully, painfully true as life's plans for us. I could never craft a life in my mind as beautiful as my life proves to become.

Perhaps — as my friend argued — that's why it’s crafted by God.

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❓ question i’m asking:

A question from Nietzsche on Eternal Recurrence:

What if a demon were to visit you and announce that you must relive your life exactly as it is, with all its joys and sorrows, for all eternity?

Would you greet this prospect with joy or despair?

Nietzsche says forget the "live each moment as if it were your last" nonsense.

How would you live if you were destined to relive everything for eternity?

Differently?

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📸 photo of the week:

My definition of "made it".

A wall of books and floor-to-ceiling windows.

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Love you more,

Tommy