In a recent Washington Post newsletter, he (Ron Charles) marveled at the actress Judi Dench’s astonishing ability to recite most of the lines from her long-ago parts in Shakespeare plays. He wrote:
“Such memorization is a lost art, and much substance was lost with it. In high school and college, I used to memorize hours of stage dialogue and long passages from the Bible, which were a great comfort to me in times of stress. These days, only the stress remains. Most nights, staring at the ceiling for hours, my mind is a tangle of bits of string, and all I can come up with is something like: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff?’”
For those of you not fluent in Fleetwood Mac, that last sentence is a lyric from the song “Second Hand News.”
The only difference between a lake with waves and a lake without waves is the wind. A lake would be calm except for the wind. We would be calm if not for our thinking. We can tell how much of a turbulent effect the wind has on the lake by the size and strength of the waves. We can tell how much effect our thinking is having on us by the size and strength of our feelings. The wind is invisible. We can only feel the effects of it. Most of the thinking that affects us is also invisible. Our feelings are the only thing that tells us something is amiss.
Video: DK. April 22, 2024 @ 5:30 am at Cove Island Park.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Inspired by: “It is exhausting, dizzying. It is good to feel all sorts of things, even the bad things that scare you, because they, too, push you in the direction of your convictions. — Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 6, 2024)
Also inspired by: “When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.” —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove Press in 2012)
“Grammy-winning rapper and producer Swizz Beatz has spent millions of dollars on camels since setting out in 2020 to become the first American to own a racing team in Saudi Arabia. Now, he’s hoping the bet will pay off as he takes the Saudi Bronx, as his herd is called, to one of the world’s richest camel races in pursuit of a $21 million prize pot. Having worked with artists like DMX, Jay-Z, Kanye West and his wife, Alicia Keys, Beatz has been engaging with a different crowd in recent years: desert Bedouins, who domesticated camels thousands of years ago. As for the races, he says “it’s a very good investment if your teams are winning.”
DK’s first photo of a Bald Eagle. 10:50 am. April 30 2024. Stamford, CT. With tremendous gratitude to Susan and Wally, who spotted the magnificent creature and asked it to hold position until I could drive to meet them. More pictures of the eagle here.
In 1990, I was among the most unremarkable, underachieving, unimpressive 19-year-olds you could have stumbled across. Stoned more often than studying, I drank copious amounts of beer, smoked Camels, delivered pizza. My workouts consisted of dragging my ass out of bed and sprinting to class—usually late and unprepared.My high-school guidance counselor had had good reason to tell my deflated parents that there was no way I was college-bound: I graduated in the bottom third of my 100-person class at Lourdes Academy in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I had to attend the Menasha extension of the University of Wisconsin, a two-year school, just to smuggle myself into the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, a four-year school in my hometown. A year into that, I was staring at a 1.491 GPA and making the guidance counselor’s case daily, unambiguously, emphatically. I was one more wasted—literally and figuratively—semester away from getting the boot. […]
Thirty years later, I am running Axios, and fanatical about health and self-discipline. My marriage is strong. My kids and family seem to like me. I still enjoy beer, and tequila, and gin, and bourbon. But I feel that I have my act together more often than not—at least enough to write what I wish someone had written for me 30 years ago, a straightforward guide to tackling the challenges of life.
It is nonsense that to shine, you need to go to a fancy school, bootlick bosses, or pay your dues at soul-sucking jobs working for bad people. You do not need to get 1500 on your SAT or to have a sky-high IQ or family connections. You don’t even need sparkling talents. You simply need to want to construct goodness with whatever life throws at you. This starts by grounding yourself with unbreakable core values and then watching, learning, and copying those who do it—and get it—right. But it also includes watching and studying those who screw it up. You need to find your own passions, not have them imposed by others. Then outwork everyone in pursuit of shaping your destiny—your own personal greatness—on your terms, by your measures, at your pace.
My own life is littered with mistakes. But I learned something from every dumb move and used it to try to get the big things right. Five decades in, that is what matters most to me: cutting myself slack on my daily sins or stumbles so I can focus on the good stuff.
For me, that list includes pursuing deep, meaningful, unconditional relationships with my kids; a healthy, resilient marriage; strong, loving relationship with my parents and siblings; a few deep and durable friendships; faith and connection beyond myself; and doing consequential work with people I enjoy and admire.
I’ve often fallen short of these goals, and so I’ve learned the value of grace. We’re all deeply flawed, wounded, selfish, clueless, and mean at different times. It does not make us bad. It makes us normal. That’s why we need to extend grace to others, and to ourselves.
I have blown many months beating myself up for being a selfish husband or an inattentive son or a harsh leader or an absent friend. And all of those things were often true. But life is not measured by a moment. In the end, I want to be able to say what we should all be able to say about ourselves: I learned a little every day, tried to do the next right thing, and got the big things right.
We’re living in what they call the “Information Age,” but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of “boundaries,” failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own. The machine is malfunctioning, and we’re trying to think our way out of it. In 1961, Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” Our mission, it seems, has to do with the mind.
Post Inspired by: “Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird… Why does it all bother me? Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up. Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.” — Peggy Noonan, “The Uglification of Everything Artistic culture has taken a repulsive turn. It speaks of a society that hates itself, and hates life.” (Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2024)
In a recent Washington Post newsletter, he (Ron Charles) marveled at the actress Judi Dench’s astonishing ability to recite most of the lines from her long-ago parts in Shakespeare plays. He wrote: 
