Little Pieces
Mystery Update, Life Update, & Recs
Mystery Update
The Mystery of Brocante continues to unfold. I put up a flyer and an old school neighbor got me in touch with the store owner! He doesn’t live in New York anymore, but he happens to be coming into town. We’re meeting for coffee next week and he promises to tell me the whole story!
Two Profiles Worth Reading
Martin Scorsese “I have to figure out who the hell I am” [GQ]
“All these people you’ve known and loved—“they suffered and struggled so much, and then life is over,” Scorsese said. “You get to the point of saying, ‘Well, what does it all mean?’ It doesn’t matter what it means. You have to live it. And if you choose not to live it, you choose not to live it, that’s up to you. But you are existing and you live with that existence. And so I think that has changed. And I don’t want to necessarily move the camera if I don’t want to anymore. I don’t. I don’t care. I just don’t care about that anymore.””
Sam Altman is the Oppenheimer of our Age [Ny Mag] [Link for non-subscribers]
“He really sees himself as this world-bestriding Übermensch, as a superhuman in a really Nietzschean kind of way,” Sadowski said. “He will at once create the thing that destroys us and save us from it.”
Getting little pieces back
The biggest trap when hosting a thing is forgetting to take something for yourself from the thing.
This weekend, I co-facilitated a retreat for 40 members from the Caveday community from around the world. It's the first time we've done anything in-person since the pandemic. And I forgot how much it takes.
Somewhere during that fallow time-- I'm not quite sure when-- I lost my hosting mojo. And perhaps even my in-person relating mojo. It's been a slow reclamation process, but I still feel a little off my game (Being a new parent certainly doesn't help!)
Coming into Friday night, I was a ball of nerves. I worried we didn't have enough time or resources to pull it off. I kept speaking about the chance that unexpected things would happen and how our margin of error was too small. My partners acknowledged my concerns and asked me what I exactly I was worried would happen. I couldn't really give a clear answer. I had to admit that maybe I was over-cranking on pessimism.
...and then something even worse than I could imagine happened. An unprecedented flood hit New York closing most subways. My apartment flooded. Twice. Most events cancelled. We had people flying in and a few of them willing to find their way there. On the fly, we decided to keep hosting in-person and also created a separate remote cohort. It was wild. We barely had a handle on one event. There was no time to think. We just ... DID! And it was beautiful. All the scar tissue got scraped away and we were just doing the thing.
In remembering that real-time situations bring things out of me that I can't always see ahead of time, I got another piece back.
In remembering that I never know what the gift of an experience will be, I got a little piece of wonder back. Someone came to the retreat who turned out to be the daughter of my grandparents' best friends. Her mother convinced my parents to get married and planned their wedding. I didn't even know she existed!
Life is all well and convenient in our Zoom boxes, but I don't know how to be my full self without the feedback loop of being in the muck, figuring things out in the real world. How do I keep myself in shape? How are you keeping yourself in shape?
Can't believe it was the old-school flyer that led to the big break! But also...that feels right.