Over the past four months, I’ve been asked a lot about why I’m so happy at work. While I certainly don’t feel like I’m that happy at work per se, I know that the reason they ask is because I’m usually thinking of some funny or heart-bendingly precious thing my son has been doing.
Exhibit 371:
Early morning visit with Poppa/Santa Claus/Paul Bunyan
Everyone needs a favorite chair.
Finished reading: Shield the Joyous by Chad Holley 📚
I loved this little book so much! Brief thoughts here.
I’m hijacking this line from Mary Harrington: “Your strategy should be ordered not to making it pay, but to making it possible.” Perfectly pairs with Martin Bucer.
Finished reading: Ingrained by Callum Robinson 📚
Excellent.
Because to my great shame, the coasting was something I had drifted into not merely in my working life but in my consumer life as well. With more and more choice out there at the touch of a button—same-day delivery, landfill-black-Friday-buy-it-online, and a hundred other kinds of commercial awful—it has been all too easy to forget that independent local businesses, the kind of hardworking businesses that are right here on my doorstep, may be waiting in the silence for someone like me to swish through the door. That no matter how original or full of charm and quality they may be, many will not be able to survive without our support. And that they aren’t really businesses anyway; in towns and villages up and down the country, they are the lifeblood, the culture and the character of communities. They are somebody’s hopes and dreams.
If it’s okay to say, I really like the banner that I made for my Buttondown newsletter. The photo comes from a little-known, middle-of-nowhere bog in western Maine. It’s an otherwise inconspicuous, unremarkable, commonplace sunrise spot that I have passed a hundred times, usually on the way to a hike in the White Mountains or a weekend of mountain biking in Vermont. It is emblematic of just about everything I mean when I say “commonplace,” or “the small things are the best things.”
Last night, I created a page for my (neglected) Buttondown newsletter, mostly because I wanted a place for the banner to live and Buttondown does not include it in the archived newsletters… or so I thought. I went back, read some emails on an address I never check, and found that I had simply missed the memo about updates and just needed to copy, paste, and click a slidy button.
Still, I like the new page so for now I’m leaving the link in the navigation above. If I can stay the course this year, I hope to move most of any writing that I do back in that direction.
Callum Robinson, on the look of a shocked customer who, holding the price tag of a hand-crafted table, “fixed me with an expression of such disbelief, such towering contempt, that it takes my breath away”:
What I want to say is this: forget for a moment the weeks it took to handcraft this fine solid elm table, forget the years of experience brought to bear by the maker, the thousands of hours of training and practice, the costly mistakes, the electricity, insurance and overheads, the ream of arborists who brought down the tree, the sawyer who milled and dried the boards, the man in front of you, rooted to the spot, who painstakingly selected each one before handing over many hundreds of pounds for the privilege, and think on this—this table might last a hundred years, it might last four hundred. Your children’s children might still be sitting around it when you are but a memory. A vaguely amphibian headshot gathering dust on the mantel. All this and more I want to say, but of course I don’t. I probably couldn’t. My jaw is clenched so tightly that it might as well be wired shut.