In no particular order:
The future belongs to those who walk the fine line between stasis and excess.
Running. 5K once a week at least. 10K once a month at least. Resenting it. Dislike pounding pavement. People pay money to join marathons? Really?People enjoy this stuff? Isn’t running just practice for fleeing? I don’t intend to ever flee. And yet–
Rucking. 20lbs in the bag and just head in a direction and don’t stop. Especially when it’s drizzling. When it’s raining? Up the stairs and back again. 5 storeys each time. Then ten stories. Accumulate an hour.
Reading. Starting Arthur Dayne’s 3 Year Nobel Prize Reading Challenge. Making time to stay on it.
Newsletter Year 1. Reaching 200+ kind and noble readers. And growing. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Thank you for all that you are, all you can be. If you’re new to this blog, check out the archives for access to every post I sent out in 2021. It’s free, and always will be.
Reaching 2,000+ followers on Instagram. These are notes to myself more than anything. I don’t presume to know any better, for I am just a humble man. But I have been fortunate enough to live a bit, to meet people from all different walks of life, to quote St. Teresa, to encounter God in all His distressing guises, and now I can share some of what I have learned with you. I’m not stopping.
Air travel. Getting used again to the sensation of crossing proper distance. (what the author George Saunders calls “that airport feeling”). In times past our ancestors grew old and died, having never left their villages & towns. Oceanic travel was unreliable and sometimes ended with you singing sea shanties two miles beneath the watery surface. And so they died – 5 miles from where they were born. We moderns have the temerity to complain about airline food and uncomfortable layovers.
Teaching is easy, no matter what you have heard. It’s no trouble at all to go into a room and speak extemporaneously on a subject for an hour. Care about the subject matter, understand it well enough to not need a script or rely on a visual aid or book, and just run with what you get. Don’t be boring. That’s all it takes, and is the key difference between an educator who knows his shit, and someone who is just a shit. Leading a team of teachers and coordinating them and all the associated administrative work? Now that’s a challenge. Humbled to have been graced with the opportunity to learn from this.
Speaking. Training presentation skills over the summer. The day is approaching where I leave teaching in schools behind, and start training adults. Summer 2021 closed that gap.
All my great students, past and present. Seeing them flourish and take their first steps into Becoming Who They Are. Some of you reading this now have been in my classrooms. Maybe I’ve coached you for WSC before. Drop me a line sometime. It’s good to talk.
Snow on Christmas Eve. The sight of fresh snow has taken on different symbolisms and meanings for me over the years. I had not seen snow since 2019, and much has happened since then. I woke up and saw a world covered in quiet, bright yet subtle purity. The purity of purpose, of incorruptible certainty, of knowing what I must do in this life. Priceless.
Being a guest on the Blood & Rain podcast, by Arthur Dayne. Brother, it is a privilege and honour. We did not get a chance to meet in California; we will meet in Texas, count on it.
Being a guest on the Dodcast, by Luke Dodson over at Symbiotic Culture. Luke is a fantastic host and I strongly recommend checking out his website.
Knowing how to live like a king for very little. Taking things in my life as they are, without prejudice and without ego. Grokking that I am not my things, the clothes I wear, or the places I go.
Corollary to 14. Paring down to what is essential. The best sculptors can see in their mind’s eye, the statue waiting within the block of marble to be revealed. Michelangelo said that. I don’t make a big deal out of minimalism because frankly it’s enjoyed a culture moment, and it’s been done to death, and the last thing I want is people asking me if this is about to turn into a blog about minimalism. No, it isn’t. Essentialism seems more fitting, and carries with it less cultural baggage than Minimalism. I will be revisiting the topic of essentialism in the future. In the meantime, read the book of the same title by Greg McKeown.
2-hour long conversations with mom. I hadn’t seen or visited my mother since 2019. This was easily the best decision I made in a year of good decisions. Winter sunlight streaming through the blinds leaving shining traces on the floor, the salt shaker, the still-life portrait of a kitchen. Learning more about my maternal family, where we come from. There’s memory in the blood, don’t you know?
Revisiting the question: What if I stopped thinking all the time? Have struggled in the past with anxiety caused by overthinking. I am convinced that the prevalence of anxiety and overthinking is a historically novel phenomenon, and it is caused by life being too easy. We are soft because we no longer have a genuine struggle for the right to survive and live, and that excess energy we would have spent on survival has returned into our brains and inner realities.
Letting things sit until they tell you what they want to be. Bit of an Ancient Chinese lesson here. There is a difference between passivity and passivism. Passivity is knowing what you can or should do in a given situation and not mustering the energy to take action. Passivism is about situational awareness, evaluating the risk and reward, and only acting when victory is assured. But once you decide to act, you go all out, empty the tank, don’t lay down the sword until the war is won.
I’ve been enjoying Black Library’s ongoing Siege of Terra series. Specific mentions: Dan Abnett’s Saturnine and Chris Wraight’s Warhawk. The world of Warhammer 40K continues to be the richest, most vibrant and fully alive science/fantasy setting ever created.
Deepening my Christian faith and laying bricks for a strong intellectual foundation undergirding the faith. Francis A. Schaeffer’s Death in the City. The works of the late and great R.C. Sproul. I confess, despite all the good things I have heard, I will not be taking the plunge into Eastern Orthodoxy. At least not yet. There is a time and place for all things. This is not the right time, this is not the right place.
Accumulating kettlebells. Meeting Steve Cotter from the IKFF and doing the Level 1 Kettlebell workshop.
Approaching 30, realizing how much I can’t afford to lose friends. Calling them on the phone. Meeting up. Planning to get together in a big way and more frequently.
Almost anyone you meet is addicted to something. The solution to a crumbling world is not to numb yourself or seek mindless pleasure in hedonism and casual sex and substance abuse. It’s to build. To create. Explore. To conquer & overcome & thrive. To provide something of value to others. You want to be addicted to something? Get addicted to that.
Slowly becoming someone who enjoys running. It came down to getting comfortable with repetition. Just moving inexorably across the environment. Hating it the first 2km. Loving it the next 5km. And so on. Suffering. Suffering. Suffering. And then, cruising.
Committed to 75 Hard in October-December. Noticeable improvements to mental clarity, energy levels, overall strength & conditioning, but as Andy Frisella has emphatically stated, it is not a fitness challenge, it is a mental toughness challenge. It goes without saying that I will be running 75 Hard at least twice in 2022.
Celebrated 2nd anniversary with a wonderful woman.
60kg/135lbs strict press for 3 reps. For the longest time this was a mental block. Now it’s gone and I regularly see the blue plates, I’m sanguine about hitting 84kgs/185lbs by the end of 2022. Interim: 135 for a set of 5, then 155 for a triple.
“Strength is like education: you don't know how important it is until you have it.” Also: You don’t know how important it is until you need it, and don’t have it.
If you live a modern sedentary lifestyle, you are severely undertrained relative to your potential. Not everyone will look like Hercules, but most haven't even tried.
Reading 60 books. It’s true what they say. Quality > Quantity. Quantity has a quality all of its own though. If you have never read more than 52 books a year (a book a week), I recommend. It will teach you much in the way of time management, discipline, and expand your inner world in all kinds of positive ways.
I started praying regularly. You can meditate if that’s your faith-system, but after years of meditating and praying I conclude that prayer is better. Some time in the middle of the year I realized the problem with zen meditation and why it never stuck is that when you sit and breathe and contemplate the void, the void begins to take up residence within you. How cold! Prayer is the life-affirming spiritual practice because prayer is relational. Prayer builds you a bridge to the transcendent. It reminds you that you’re part of a bigger story. It takes you out of your silly little bubble and silly little problems and makes you pay attention to the macro. It helps you remember that you aren’t actually in control, it gives you permission to surrender to mystery, and most importantly, it teaches you to trust.
In about 15-20 years, most degrees will be useless. The implications of this are not yet been widely realised by students and institutions. If you're a student or an employee/employer, the sooner you grok this and can begin responding meaningfully, the better off you will be.
How social media isn’t complete and utter garbage terrible yet. Blood and Rain. Totallynotanacreon. The Renaissance of Man. The Solar community in general. There is a broad constellation of content creators out there, building quietly the communities and values that will slide in and replace this ugly and fake “culture” of trash world. Virtuous men and women stay winning despite the mainstream attempt to glorify degeneracy and vice.
Reading an essay and then finding out the writer has a Substack or blog, and reading the ideas and posts that adumbrate the original essay.
Listening to a bunch of interviews with obscure people you wouldn’t otherwise find on Spotify. Listening until you absorb their big ideas.
Watching the masterpiece that is Dune! Once in IMAX, once in Atmos, and once in a regular cinema. Expecting nothing from Tenet, and liking it anyway.
Discovering monster mash. Making monster mash. Eating monster mash.
There are five ways of looking at Modernity.
Once you understand the nature of the beast we are fighting, that from the moment you were born you have been thrust into a war that spans all conceivable dimensions – political, cultural, economic, intellectual, spiritual, you are faced with a grave choice. You can proceed in ignorance or you can learn the name and shape of the enemy. The enemy is nothing less than the idea-structure we call Modernity, and there is no compromising or bargaining with it. Only by Exiting Modernity will you create the conditions necessary to live and fight another day, and not be dragged down into the morass of sleeping enslaved humanity. Asceticism is the beginning of the path.
PARTS AND WHOLES
Good collection of points!