/reader

 I've spent the past month deep in thought. I've meditated at least twenty minutes every day, journaled daily, and I've studied Stoicism like I've never studied before. I did everything in my power to find comfort in those things while I processed my grief and contemplated how I wanted to live my life.

The problem with going all in on something so serious like this is you can get lost in it. I stopped watching TV, reading, blogging, exercising and so forth. My life was deep thoughts, all the time, without a break.

Despite having written about this before, and repeating this cycle a hundred times prior, I found myself a bit too deep and without a little joy and fun in my life, eventually I started feeling bad. Things were getting bad inside my head until the end of last week when I finally snapped out of it. I spent the weekend relaxing as much as possible, watching goofy 90's comedies, and I didn't study or meditate at all. I just took a deep breath.

Part of me wondered if philosophy was truly good for me. I actually journaled out my experiences with both philosophy and religion and came to the conclusion that I always end up a bit too deep. I contemplated swearing off any serious contemplation going forward and just trying to live a mundane, distracted life since maybe a pursuit of peace is not good for me. Maybe I just can't handle such a concept.

After four days of stepping away from meditation and Stoicism I was pretty happy with my decision. It's not like I saw immediate effects from all the work I was doing.

Then, I did.

Out of nowhere, I got a text that a good friend of mine found himself in a very dark place. After spending some time on a suicide hotline, he went to therapy, and was working on himself. Suddenly, as we talked, the words of Marucs Aurelius rang out. While I didn't flood him with quotes or anything, I do think some of my advice and comfort were enhanced by all the time I've spent contemplating and studying.

Then this morning I walked out of the house and something felt off. I reached back down into my pants pocket and my wallet was missing. I'm not the type of person who loses things, ever. I mean, I can count on my hand the number of things I've lost in my life, so this is unusual for me.

I didn't have much time to look but I quickly checked the laundry I did last night to see if I left it in my pants (it's a super light front wallet pocket). Then I glanced around my drop off station where I empty my pockets and still didn't find it. I needed to get to work, so I went out to my car and glanced around the parking spot as well as inside the car, and I still didn't find it.

A year ago, or maybe even a couple of months ago, I would have been distressed. I wouldn't have been able to concentrate on work or even driving to work, because I'd be retracing my steps and freaking out all day. I'd find excuses to rush home from work on my breaks to keep looking and I wouldn't be able to focus until I eventually found it.

Today, I drove to work calmly. At the first stop light, I pulled out my phone and locked my cards and then I drove the rest of the way to work. As I sat down, I couldn't help but notice, this is not the usual Brandon response. Where is all the anxiety, pressure, and self-abuse for being so careless to have misplaced my wallet?

It reminded me of last week when I was in the grocery store. I was in the self-checkout area with my small cart when a lady came barreling into it with large cart. She smashed right into my cart and just kept on walking. I looked over, moved my cart closer, and finished scanning my groceries. On the way to the car, I thought to myself, where is the rage? Why am I not mad about this? Why am I not swearing to never go out again or regretting not ripping her a new one for being so rude?

I've meditated off and on for well over two decades, but never with any true consistency or length of time. After a month of regular practice, I'm actually seeing results which is startling to me. I guess, in some ways, I thought meditation was a bit overhyped. Maybe I was wrong.

Going forward, I need to balance this quest for peace and living authentically, no matter what that looks like. I think it's time to just be myself, without judgement and without constraints. Maybe that means a twenty-minute meditation session following a King of the Hill marathon, or maybe it's writing about deeper thoughts and following up that post with something about some obscure 80's toy. I think I need to mesh my worlds, and stop separating myself, my writing, my interests, this concept of who I am, and the idea of who I want to be.

Thanks to Eric, I ordered a Zike card to place into my wallet. I use a very thin front pocket wallet that you basically cannot feel in your pocket and there is no place for an Air Tag, so I'm glad to have a bit more protection than just the tiny Post It note attached to my driver's license.

The DOJ found that, of 58,000 books published in a year, “90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.”

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

Prioritization of themes

Respondents are asked to select their top three priorities for Parks from these options:

1. Safety and belonging
2. Equity, representation, inclusion, and access
3. Maintenance, repairs, and staffing
4. New parks, trails, recreation opportunities, and infrastructure
5. Information, education, outreach and engagement

Five feels like a reasonable number of options to choose between. There’s also a space for folks to answer if they “don’t relate to any of these themes.”

Defining success

I like that they ask users to define success (in up to 450 characters) because I actually went back and changed the prioritization of the three themes I chose after I started putting down what each meant. I settled on safety first, equity second, and maintenance third. New parks are exciting and all, but I’ve been seeing so much talk about the value of maintenance — and know how constantly underfunded it is — that I had to “put my money where my mouth is.” I’m sure there’s plenty of other good stuff I didn’t think of under each of these, but that’s where crowd-sourcing comes in 😊

“Safety and Belonging” in parks

I answered that success would look like:

• People feel safe getting to parks and trails on foot or by bike.
• People feel safe to use the park by themselves.
• Parks are welcoming and provide ample, comfortable seating and all-season bathrooms.
• Safe needle programs reduce use of drugs in urban parks and support is provided for unhoused folks — shooing people away doesn’t solve the problem of homelessness.

I tried to think beyond just the parks themselves, but that getting there is part of using them.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people in the Seattle area seem scared of homeless people camping in parks and there’s a lot of fearmongering around needles — if we could re-route those fears into productive responses instead of just doing clearings, that would be swell. (I don’t know how much of an issue it is in King County Parks specifically but the housing shortage is severe, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was common.)

“Equity, Representation, Inclusion, and Access” in parks

I answered that success would look like:

• Information is available in multiple languages.
• Outreach and access supports communities that would otherwise have a hard time accessing, or not feel welcome in, County parks and trails.
• Most parks have ADA accessible activities.
• Where appropriate, Parks involve Tribes in co-management of lands and resources.

Eyyyy, fit in some #LandBack ethos. I don’t expect anything of it, but I’ll say it wherever I have the chance 🤷‍♀️

“Maintenance, Repairs, and Staffing” in parks

I answered that success would look like:

• Catch up on backlogs and fix what needs to be fixed.
• Maintain paved trails for bike access.
• Hold the line against invasive plant species.
• Keep bathrooms clean and open year-round.
• Staffing is appropriate to maintenance needs.

Squeezed in some ecosystem recovery 💪

Other priorities

They provided a space for other priorities that weren’t covered by their themes. I answered “habitat restoration and wildlife connectivity.”

Park locations

I didn’t look at the levy webpage before answering the survey, but that probably would have been helpful to refresh my memory on where the parks all are and what programs they offer 😅 I might have been tempted to bump “new facilities” up because there are literally none in Seattle proper and the north end is pretty sparse too. The Cross Kirkland Corridor / Eastrail is a less than ten minute walk from my house 🙌 But other than that, the two nearest King County parks are both a 20 minute drive away.

It probably makes sense for them to prioritize purchases in unincorporated King County and leave local parks to the cities to manage, but I wonder if there’s an opportunity for King County to help cities acquire or link more land than they might be able to afford otherwise, and to enable land purchases when choice parcels come up for sale so they don’t get missed out on. Also, I wonder if it would make sense for King County to spearhead more expensive facilities like aquatic centers.

 

Today’s newsletter is about understanding perfectionism, and how I misunderstood perfectionism for the longest time, so I wasn’t able to detect it in myself.

But the letter really began with this image:

I built this collage around a drawing that my son wadded up in frustration before running out of the studio in tears. In the past, this is what I thought perfectionism was: an inability to deal with the disconnect between what a drawing looked like in your head and how it came out of your hand. I thought perfectionism was a problem for the uptight, for big babies who can’t just loosen up and let ‘er rip.

You can read the rest of the newsletter here.

Something I wasn’t able to weave into the newsletter — because it’s not really about perfectionism, it just got me thinking about it — was this instagram post by Lynda Barry about “drawing with four year olds and being there to see how they figure something out”:

I often find drawings begun and then abandoned… Something is not quite right and they need to start over. Then comes the issue of wasting paper. And of finishing what they started. But what if we were…talking about a kind learning to play the trumpet, trying to play a certain note by repeating it… Getting the hang of it, making it natural. Would we say they are easing notes? It took 12 index cards to come to this image. The kid who drew it said “He bites the people” when they finished.

…I would have been told to stop wasting paper and I may have said the same thing to this kid if I wasn’t really paying attention to how this drawing came about. It reminds me of an archer— there is no wasting of arrows when you’re learning to shoot.

Lynda really got me to internalize this idea with my kids — there was no such thing as wasting paper or markers. We encouraged them to use up as many materials as they had.

As I mentioned in another letter, there were days that Jules filled so many pages that we’d sweep them up at the end of the day with a broom:

One of the things I’ve been playing with in my head is: What if we treated ourselves with the tenderness (and yes, the discipline) that we show our children?

For years, I wanted to write a book about how much I learned from watching my kids work, but what I’m starting to realize is that what I’ve really learned is how to set up the conditions for creativity to happen. If you can do it for a four-year-old, maybe you can do it for yourself…

And one of the great lessons is: Believe that there is no such thing as waste. Creative work is the residue of time “wasted.” Of materials “wasted.”

At the same time, the whole reason I made the collage is so I could “save” that drawing from the wastebasket! And Lynda, too, in that post, is saving those drawings, repurposing the “waste” into something worth saving…

So maybe one has to make without regard to waste, without fear, and save and share what you can’t stand to see wasted…