#169: Read, write, listen

Hello friends

I hope that you’re well today.

A year ago, we took the decision to sell our house and look for a new place to live. Part one of that was accomplished a few months ago. Then, we found a new home, loved it, took it, realized it wasn’t right, reversed and now, as our exit date looms, we have yet to find that next place.

It has been a whirlwind of house viewings over the past few weeks. I am writing to you from inside a labyrinth of cardboard boxes. All of which is to say, I am tired.

On Wednesday, we decided to head to the rural hamlet of Greyton for the weekend. There’s a possibility that the mountain peaks will be snow-covered and as this letter lands in your inbox, I will have been offline for 36 hours or so.

Everything was moving too fast; in the midst of the protracted ambiguity, I was losing perspective and so we are drinking in some rural silence to reset the soul and self.

/ strategy

Two weeks ago, four Harvard Business School professors – Arthur Brooks, Hise Gibson, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Shunyuan Zhang – shared their summer reading recommendations.

Brooks also writes the excellent, How to Build A Life, for The Atlantic. It is described as “A column about pointing yourself toward happiness”.

I added Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag about the work of philosopher and psychologist William James and Unleash Your Transformation by Marco Van Kalleveen and Peter Koijen from their reading list to mine.

The description for Kaag’s book reads “In 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter century earlier. Indeed, as John Kaag writes, ‘James’s entire philosophy, from beginning to end, was geared to save a life, his life’―and that’s why it just might be able to save yours, too.”

There is no doubt that as the health effects of Covid continue to ripple through our communities and the economic outlook remains grey, mental health will affect all our lives. It feels like a timely read.

Gibson says that Van Kalleveen and Koijen “offer valuable insights and practical strategies for leaders who are driving successful organizational change”. Given the level of change that we are confronting and need, this seems like a useful addition.

I will share what I learn in letters yet to be written.

I loved that the esteemed strategy and leadership professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor immerses herself in fiction to improve her writing skills. I do the same.

I’ve just finished award-winning Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea.
Sentences like this “A man can live his whole life following the rules set down by happenstance and the cash-coated bait of security-cosseted cosseted morality; an entire lifetime and in the end he wouldn’t have done one thing to be proud of”, can only inspire one to write (and live) better.

You can find the full Harvard list here.

//self 

In all the busyness and uncertainty of the past few weeks, my anxiety levels kept rising.
I returned to a writing exercise prescribed by – I think – either John McPhee or George Saunders, I can’t remember which. One of them, or perhaps another greater writer entirely, takes their students to a sculpture created by one of the masters. The task is to bring that object alive with words.

I find that when I get really stressed, being mindful and calm in the moment eludes me. This exercise helps me to re-engage with a calmer part of myself.

I choose an object, this week it was Table Mountain’s sandstone cliffs in the afternoon sun, I challenge myself to bring the quality of the winter light alive in words, to describe how the colours of the mountain shift as time ticks by, to explain how the winter light is so clear that one can almost see it, that it seems to gently lift the mountain from its roots, to make it a little taller than it is under the pressure of summer’s heat that ripples the air around it. I have yet to find the words that satisfy me, but the exercise calms me enough to continue.

Give it a try. I think you’ll find it helps.

/// soul

This week I discovered Michelle Peñaloza All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems.

I often don’t understand poetry, it mostly eludes me, but there was something that I loved in this work. I think it was how words can hold centuries of knowledge. It reminded me of the Foclóir Farraige, or Sea Dictionary, a project to record the ‘sea-language’ of Western Ireland.

Here is Peñaloza’s poem:

anak                                   like a sigh born every day
ilong                                   lead by scent and know-how
tanong                               asking questions about the world
sayaw                                 like how dance that comes from joy
sayang                               can sway so close to sorrow
bayan                                 how shame could be an entire country
pinto                                  or an open-doored question
kailangan                          needing, needful, and needless
ilaw                                     illuminating a path
ikaw                                    to you, little bit of me, almost
dito                                     will you appear here
doon                                   are you still there, maybe
dahon                                 I hear you in the leaves
darating                             rippling in the wind, always arriving

I hope that you leave these words feeling a little more peaceful. I certainly feel happier as I end this letter than when I started it. Thank you for reading. See you next week.

Karl