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From yesterday’s newsletter comes a new acronym I made up: SHITT, or “Should I Try That?”

We know that social media can cause FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but reading about how other people work can cause a variant of FOMO we’ll dub SHITT — SHould I Try That?

A silly example of SHITT: You’re having trouble with your writing and then you read about how So-and-So only writes longhand and all the sudden you think maybe you should start writing longhand. So you spend the whole day shopping for pens and paper, only to sit down the next morning and remember you hate your own handwriting.

Much like FOMO, how susceptible you are to SHITT depends on your mental state, how tender and vulnerable you are, and how well your own work is going.

Read more here.

I had a nice long chat with Jaime Rodríguez de Santiago about creativity, parenting and Don Quixote. The full video is on YouTube and here’s a little excerpt.

I had a shorter but still sweet interview with Jane Ratcliff on being (not) too weird to be popular:

I assumed everything I cared about was too weird to be popular and that I’d always have a day job. The fact that I have readers and make a living from the stuff I make is a blessing beyond belief and every week I try not to squander my luck.

Filed under: interviews

 

Here are some pages from Tom Sachs’ zine, Ten Bullets. (More bullets here.)

He suggests that in the studio one should “always be knolling.”

See also: “When in doubt, tidy up.”

 

In his book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, the Jungian analyst James Hollis recalls being asked to speak to women’s groups who ask him to help them understand men: 

I have suggested that women look at men this way: if they took away their own network of intimate friends, those with whom they share their personal journey, removed their sense of instinctual guidance, concluded that they were almost wholly alone in the world, and understood that they would be defined only by standards of productivity external to them, they would then know the inner state of the average man. They are horrified at this notion. 

They then ask Hollis if there’s anything they can do, and he replies, “No.” (It is up to men.)

Hollis has told a variation of this story in several audiobooks and podcasts I’ve listened to and his diagnosis always chills me. I found myself recalling it to a friend yesterday on my bike ride.

One thing I find hopeful is that I think you can reverse-engineer a to-do list from this diagnosis: 

• build a network of intimate friends (start by being a good node)
• learn to listen to yourself, pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, authorize yourself that what you notice is important, and trust your intuition
• search for meaning in your life outside the realm of the quantifiable 

Easy peasy, right? Ha. (Cries.)

As for being a man, finding myself a member in a club I never asked to join: Whenever I think that we’re making no progress whatsoever, I think about the fact that I have two friends, grown men my own age, who, unprompted, within the last year, have told me that they loved me. And I told them I loved them back. 

It’s a start.

 

John Holt in 1983, talking to WBOS-Radio, on how teaching is like gardening:

The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher… The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by going out with Scotch tape and sticking leaves onto the stems. The plant grows. But the gardener creates as far as she or he can the conditions for growth—in the case of plants, soil, fertilizer, acidity, shade, water, etc. It’s simple with plants. With children, it’s more complicated. What the teacher does—and the parents at home—is to create an environment, which is in part physical—there are books, records and tapes, and tools—and in part emotional, spiritual, moral, intellectual, in which growth can occur. Now that’s a very subtle, very difficult, very interesting task. Nobody in any school of education that I’ve ever heard of would describe it that way.

So where do teachers learn to teach?

You learn to teach by teaching. I never had any educational training, luckily. I say “luckily” because I went into the classroom knowing that I didn’t know anything, and therefore realizing that if I wanted to learn something, I’d better keep my eyes and ears open and think about what I was seeing and hearing. The only way you learn about teaching is to do it and to see which of your inputs into this environment produce helpful results and which don’t, and maybe to talk about your problems with other teachers and say, “How are you making out?”

Filed under: gardening, John Holt