We seem determined to let no part of nature remain truly natural—for no part of the environment to remain truly untouched by our hands. Even our natural spaces are increasingly tamed and managed and planned, which means they’re not really natural spaces any longer.
So I thank God that we still have the experience of rain showers to provide a sense of the natural and timeless and lovely amidst our landscapes.
Roy Williams writes with a clarity and spunk that I wished the entire ad industry could channel. The Wizard of Ads was something of a revelation to me when I read it a decade or so ago. (But writing that arrests the reader, that transports him, shouldn’t be limited to ads. Roy is worth reading if you want to be a great writer, because he has this talent for conveying the spirit of a thing.)
His Monday Morning Memo is usually good, and one of my all time favorites is this one:
We won’t take the time to talk about Robert Pirosh as a writer for The Waltons, Hawaii Five-O, Mannix, Bonanza, My Three Sons, Family Affair, Combat! and The Fugitive. Our interest is directed at the letter that started it all, a letter blindly sent by 24 year-old Robert Pirosh to every producer, director and studio executive in Hollywood:
Dear Sir:
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.
I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.
I have just returned and I still like words.
May I have a few with you?
Robert Pirosh
385 Madison Avenue
Room 610
New York
Eldorado 5-6024
I think this is a contender for inclusion in Letters of Note.
David Leonhardt writes on George Shultz and living intentionally:
When George Shultz was secretary of state in the 1980s, he liked to carve out one hour each week for quiet reflection. He sat down in his office with a pad of paper and pen, closed the door and told his secretary to interrupt him only if one of two people called:
“My wife or the president,” Shultz recalled.
Shultz, who’s now 96, told me that his hour of solitude was the only way he could find time to think about the strategic aspects of his job. Otherwise, he would be constantly pulled into moment-to-moment tactical issues, never able to focus on larger questions of the national interest. And the only way to do great work, in any field, is to find time to consider the larger questions.
The psychologist Amos Tversky had his own version of this point. “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed,” Tversky said (as Michael Lewis describes in his latest book). “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
Likewise, Richard Thaler, the great behavioral economist and a Tversky protégé, self-deprecatingly describes himself as lazy. But Thaler is not lazy, no matter how much he may insist otherwise. He is instead wise enough to know that constant activity isn’t an enjoyable or productive way to live.
Two things I love about my role with the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network: (1) that my impact and performance are judged based on accomplishment rather than clocking in and out and (2) I have plenty of latitude to thoughtfully consider what we’re doing, and what we should do next.
I don’t think the problem with snooze buttons is the buttons, or that we’re pressing them. It’s that we’re not getting enough sleep.
This is related to the idea that, “Everyone wants more time, but few of us know how to spend it when we have it.” It speaks to how difficult it is to do things with intention or even clarity about why we’re doing something other than ritual or habit.
Rituals and habits are important when they’re repetitions of the right things. But even the right things can grow stale after a while, and in those times we need to reassess. When it comes to sleep, I think it’s fine to sacrifice sleep for limited periods of time if we’re sacrificing it for a good reason.
Watching another episode of some television show or binging on YouTube or beating the next game level? Those are bad reasons to wake up groggy and reluctantly, smashing the buttons on your alarm machine and cursing the world.
When you find yourself in that place, it’s time to reassess and make a change.
I saw Roger Scruton speak at Penn on Wednesday where he delivered the Collegium Institute‘s 4th Annual Elizabeth Anscombe Lecture on the topic of “Art and Morality: on the Relationship between Aesthetics and Ethics.”
Scruton has been a hero of mine for many years, since I discovered his book The Meaning of Conservatism and his humane and philosophical (rather than political) approach to answering who we are and what the uses of things are. Great introductions to his life on Sunday Hill Farm can be found on YouTube, along with his one-hour BBC special answering Why Beaty Matters. Collegium Institute filmed his talk at Penn’s Claudia Cohen Hall, and that’s available too.
Scattered/paraphrased notes from his talk:
Earlier this week I caught the train out of Philadelphia. It was a beautiful early spring evening, so I walked the mile or so from the suburban train station to where I was heading. Along the way, this little creek was flowing under the pedestrian bridge I was crossing. I stopped to snap a Live Photo, which I’m sharing here as a GIF of the scene. It’s a picture of nature as much as the technology and industrialization that have implanted themselves as a part of the fabric of our communities. It’s the creek, though, that’s the testament to the fact that nothing changes as much as we might imagine.
We wake up, and we check our phones where once we might have paused to take in a morning birdsong. We trundle down the hall to the bathroom or kitchen, where likely a radio or TV is turned on to the news or weather. We climb behind the wheel to work, and our cars beep and honk at us—beep!—fasten your seatbelt!—beep beep!—you’re too close to the trash cans as you’re backing out! Then we turn on the radio.
We pass the time each day necessarily attenuated in meetings, mail, and meeting workday demands. Yet the moments of respite in the days of our fathers or grandfathers—the 20 seconds in the elevator, twice per day, the trip to the restaurant to grab lunch, the stop at the bakery to pick up a pastry, even the time spent fueling our cars—all these moments once meant bits of fragmented quiet.
These demands take our halfhearted attention while refueling. The bakery likely has either a television on someplace, or worse, a store-wide sound system playing the latest from Lady Gaga. The elevator music lulls us in with its mundane melodies, and the lunchtime restaurant amplifies this sin against music, likely with a sort of amped-up, elevator-music-on-steroids jazziness.
Not all businesses or social areas are best served by piping noise for the sake of everyplace having its own soundtrack. This is a subtlely maddening aspect of the present, a sort of audio-sensory schizophrenia seemingly designed to never allow for a situation where we are left alone to tie together our own thoughts in public places.
Warren Buffett felt something of the need to recapture mental clarity after living in New York. It’s one of the reasons he decided to return to his hometown of Omaha. It’s explained that:
Much of Buffett’s success in managing Berkshire Hathaway’s investment portfolio can be attributed to his inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy or sell stocks. While Buffett worked in New York, he remembers “people coming up to [him] all the time, whispering into [his] ear about some wonderful business…”
Alain de Botton explained the same idea: “Because of the internet, I now do far more work when not at work. My real thinking happens in bed and while shopping.” PBS addressed these themes a few years ago in Distracted By Everything.
What’s the key to a better life? Intentionally constructing your daily life and built environment to be as free as possible from outside distractions, and as regulated as possible from interior distractions.
Why are people silent? The two clearest reasons: you either are trying to listen rather than speak, or you’ve got nothing to say.
I grimace when hearing the most common broadsides leveled against social media and communications. “What could I say in 140 characters?” “Who wants to know what I had for lunch?” Et cetera.
Can you imagine if people had had such lack of imagination 150 years ago? We would have let the telegraph rot. We have the means today to draw ourselves closer and share more intimately than ever before in history, and suddenly many of us seem to be struck mute.
Witness. Speak. Share. If you refuse to speak using the media of our time, it’ll be assumed in the future that it was because you didn’t have anything to say. That you didn’t have much to witness to. That maybe there just wasn’t much going on there—much soulfulness, much vitality, much life. (That won’t be a fair perspective, but the future often marginalizes the past and so it’s worth thinking about how to defeat its stereotypes while we still have time.)
I think about everything that my grandparents left behind in heirlooms and artifacts and especially in writing, and how my heart aches for the same sort of things but from every generation of my family over the past 200+ years in this country. How I wish I could read even the slimmest diary entries from my frontier ancestors and what their lives were like. I know some things from newspaper records, church records, etc. These aren’t particularly intimate things, but they’re something.
We have the means to speak and to be heard more simply than ever before.
Figure out what’s worth saying, and say it.
“Hey, great to see you. Nice hat.”
“Oh, it’s pretty old actually. I really need to get a new one.”
A better response?
“Thank you.”
I had this exchange almost verbatim recently. A simple compliment, given earnestly. But not well received, and instead turned into mild self pity.
How often we do this to ourselves. Turning our strengths into a weakness, and in effect complaining about a strength.
We don’t always conceive of the thing as a strength, though. Others often do, because they’re not in our doubt-filled heads. They just see the nice hat, and want to give a compliment.
Even when a strength is only perceived (rather than real), better to just go with it:
“Hey, thanks.”
David Eagleman, in short: seek novelty if you want to savor time.
I think of seeking novelty often in the form of running small experiments. An experiment from a few years ago while staying in a State College came from asking myself, “What happens if I leave my door unlocked for my stay?”
I stayed eight days without locking my door. Nothing happened.
Statistically (and especially in State College) perhaps this isn’t too surprising. But the liberty of not carrying keys with me for a week was worth the experiment alone.
A friend to whom I mentioned this experiment, incredulous, asked: What happens if you’re robbed? “Then I wouldn’t have my things any longer,” I replied. Life is simple if we let it be, and if we let go.
This experiment (or novelty) slowed down time for me initially because I was left wondering (more out of curiosity than worry) whether or not my things would in fact be there when I returned. So that week in State College sticks with me.
Seek novelty. Run experiments. Let go.