☕ saturday mornings - september 23, 2023

true fairness, realizing potential & homesickness

Happy Saturday!

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

What I’ve been up to:

• After hearing how Jennifer Roberts, a professor of art and architecture at Harvard, offers this challenge to her students I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario alone on Sunday to stare at a single painting for 75 minutes.

• The Noah Kahan concert on Sunday was splendid. Dare I say, best concert I've been to. (1) Noah Kahan, (2) Tragically Hip, (3) The Lumineers.

• On Wednesday I flew to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with my brother! I'll be in Rio for 10 days then Buenos Aires/Patagonia until mid-November. I guess that makes me a digital nomad (although I cringe at the word). I'm curious to see if travel-working is everything it's cracked up to be.

• I've spent the past few days settling in, working, and exploring Rio. If you want to follow along, I'm sharing daily video logs and my best photos on Instagram (@tommy_dixon__).

• I'm putting a ton of time into this new essay. My intention was to share it Tuesday, but it won't be ready (currently +7,000 words and a huge mess). However, once done, I think it'll be something I'm very proud of and hopefully something you love... I want it to be the most raw and real thing I've written. (Spoiler: it’s on my addiction to work.)

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

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✍️ quote i’m pondering:

American philosopher John Rawls on true fairness:

“The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have."

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📚 book passage i loved:

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.

When there is a way or path, it is someone else's path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.

― A Joseph Campbell Companion by Joseph Campbell (edited by Diane K. Osbon)

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💡 idea from me: homesickness

Waiting at the gate in Toronto's Pearson Airport, I already felt very far from home.

Thoughts began to fire in my mind like loose canons. Am I really going to South America for two months? It’s so far away. Home isn’t so bad. Plus Fall foliage in Ontario is gorgeous. And Mom's been making some great dinners. Why am I leaving?

I always get like this. I miss people, places the most at the moment of departure. That's when my homesickness sinks in the deepest.

Memories flash back. Giving my Mom a last hug as she climbs into the car and tries not to cry, leaving me in my university dorm. Glancing back at A as I board the train, the words "I'll see you in 10 weeks" still tasting sad in my mouth. Closing my bedroom door after a final glance before leaving to live in Spain last Fall.

Now, waiting at the gate at Pearson.

The irony is, there's no escaping homesickness. Either homesick or sick of being home. Wanting to leave, then missing its familiar comforts.

I moved back home in April. But I've had the felt sense I can't remain there. I’d be limiting myself. "If I stay home literally, I'll stay home metaphorically," I wrote in my journal one morning.

It's easy to grow complacent, static, even lazy at home. Comfortable but constricted. Not expanding. Not meeting new people, challenging my beliefs, opening my eyes. Downloading scripts from family instead of writing my own.

I need to become my own person. Throw myself into the deep end, learn to swim. Stop fearing the ocean. Maybe it's because I'm the youngest.

I went through the early stages of the Hero's Journey. First, hearing the call the adventure. The sense I have to leave home, journey from a known to an unknown world. That there’s something more “out there”. Then, wanting to refuse the call. In early August, I thought this whole thing was crazy. I wanted to run to safety. Cancel the trip, get a full-time job, move downtown like all my friends. But I didn't. Despite the fear, I knew somewhere deep down I had to stay true. I had an adventure ahead.

As I was saying to my brother the other night, "this is it". This is the lifestyle, the freedom, the flexibility we glorified. Being able to work on a laptop from anywhere in the world. We're here. We're doing it. We're living the exact thing we want to be living.

I could be doing anything this Fall. Stoking a fire in a cabin in Vermont, hiking oceanside cliffs in Vancouver, staying home. Instead, I chose to be here.

I wish I could tell you it's the utopia it seems to be on Instagram. That salvation lies in remote work and geographical flexibility. I wish I didn't sound so indifferent.

I suspect I'll learn the same lesson as every time I travel: that if I can't be happy everywhere, I won't be happy anywhere. That a plane ticket won’t solve my problems. That I can't get away from myself by moving from one place to another.

Yet, I trust my decision to leave home, step outside of my comfort zone, do what is difficult.

As Rilke says so wisely in one of his last letters: We know little, but that we must attach ourselves to what is difficult is a certainty that never deserts us. It is good to be lonely, for loneliness is difficult. The fact that a thing is difficult must be for us the more reason for doing it.

Here in Rio, it's muggy and hot. The final few days of winter. There's a man down on the street corner outside my window selling cartons of eggs. He’s been at it all morning. I doubt we speak the same language but I'm heading down to buy some.

Goodbye for now.

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❓ question i’m asking:

Am I so caught up in the relentless hamster wheel of consumption that I can no longer hear myself think?

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📸 photo of the week:

Rio locals hanging out on a park bench

I committed to taking at-least-one-photo-a-day until the end of the year.

I'll share my best photo each week here.

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P.S. My good friend Nic Hurrell is launching a new cohort for his course, Sprouter Monday. I offered to share it with you because (i) I trust anything Nic puts out will be high-quality, (ii) people have found it transformational, and (iii) he walks the talk.

Sprouter is “A program for heart-led individuals empowering them to act on their ambitions within a month without being plagued by fear. It teaches the methods world-class athletes and performers use to be at their best.”

Online courses won’t solve all your problems, but I’ve gotten a lot more from them than from university.

If you’re interested, shoot him an email nichurrell@icloud.com

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Much love,

Tommy