Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
I’m back from a trip to Europe visiting friends and family. The flight across the Atlantic is barely seven hours long. When my mom was a kid, it took her a full five days to make the crossing between New York and Normandy to visit her grandmother. Air travel might not always be a delightful experience but it’s easy to forget how far we’ve come.
See you in two weeks,
Florian
Weekly Wisdom
🔧 Maintenance as Craft: I’m adding this article to my collection of pieces about maintenance. Told through the lens of what it takes to maintain New York subway trains, the author argues that we ought to value maintenance over sustainability as a way to tackle climate change.
🪷 Monastic Focus: If you think constant distraction is the affliction characterizing our phone-addicted generation, think again. Medieval monks were desperate to tame their meandering minds. The author shares the techniques they used to maintain their focus.
🦫 Living Like Weasels: In this very short but masterful piece, Annie Dillard uses her encounter with a weasel to reflect on how humans live by choice instead of necessity. She envies the way of the weasel: “open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will”.
Lateral Thought
“To someone who has lived for many years, the door is obvious. The house is obvious, the garden is obvious, the sky and the sea are obvious, even the moon, suspended in the night sky and shining brightly above the rooftops, is obvious. The world expresses its being, but we are not listening, and since we are no longer immersed in it, experiencing it as a part of ourselves, it is as if it escapes us. We open the door, but it doesn’t mean anything, it’s nothing, just something we do to get from one room to another.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard
And at times outside influences lock that door, but the stronger qualities of our subconscious knows the combination.