Fernando Gros's Blog, page 4

Make Every Slope Count

You can imagine a ski resort as a giant park. The paths and trails that go down the mountain are the runs the skiers ski. There are also paths up the mountain, chairlifts and gondolas, which skiers ride to their next run.

The runs have different levels of difficulty. Green runs are the easiest, blue and red runs are harder, black runs harder still, and double-black runs are for experts only. Most skiers pick runs according to their skill level.

But sometimes, to get from one place to another, you have to ski a run you wouldn’t normally take. Today, for example, to get from where I was skiing in the morning, on the back views of Iwatake, to lunch from my favourite Soup Stock outlet, I had to ski two very easy green runs.

Sometimes you see advanced skiers doing this, and they aren’t really trying. I’ve done it as well. Just head straight down the hill, avoiding the beginners, both poles in one hand, like a commuter making their way through a busy train station.

You Don’t Ski The Slopes Every Day

But the thing about skiing is you never really get to do much of it. Most skiers measure their opportunity to ski every year in hours and days.

If you met someone who jogged or went to the gym 15 times a year, you probably wouldn’t think of them as gym junkies or jogging freaks. But someone who manages to ski 15 days a year is certainly a ski bunny. Few skiers make it to 20 days a year.

You get only a few runs a day and a few days a year. That makes each run precious. And yet so many skiers waste runs.

Lately, I’ve taken to watching the really good skiers who don’t waste runs. Sometimes they use the gentler slope to practise their technique. Maybe they make big, wide, carving turns, or short technical turns. It can be harder to maintain momentum skiing slowly on a gentle slope. Or they do one-legged turns, which are great for honing your feel for the skis.

They don’t waste the run.

Making Time To Play

A few years ago, I had a lesson with a French instructor called Alexis. We were working on skiing the kind of bumpy, inconsistent conditions you sometimes get a few days after fresh soft snow has been skied over multiple times. We were on a mountain where the most challenging runs for this were connected by a couple of fairly easy slopes. What Alexi got me to do was ski along the very edge of the those runs, the ridges between the slope and the trees. That area is often a real mix of conditions, a prefect warm-up practice for the kind of thing we were looking to ski. And skiing the ridge also limits your options, narrowing the line, forcing you to deal with whatever comes, and make quick decisions.

But most importantly of all, he encouraged me to ski the ridge playfully, to enjoy the challenge, to treat it like juggling a ball, or playing it a yo-yo, to make it fun.

I did that today between the fast intermediate run I skied I the morning and the black diamond run I was going to ski to take me down to the carpark before heading home. The beginner slopes had untracked powder on either side and were a perfect playground to warm up for more challenging ungroomed run I would end the day with.

I’m Not Saying Hustle And Grind

You can probably guess where we’re going here. Life is short. Sometimes we’re tempted to just phone it in. Get something done. And, in doing so, we might waste the opportunity to challenge our skills or savour the moment.

I get it. Sometimes we just have to assemble a meal even if doesn’t turn out all that special. Or we just have to make it to the bus stop in time and can’t stop to smell the flowers or take in the sunset.

Sometimes we just ski down the run to get to the next place.

I don’t want to set impossible standards. We can hurt ourselves by trying to maximise every experience. Living that way, there’s a lot of pressure and potential for anxiety. For ourselves and those around us.

My yearly theme in 2023 was “savour”. It was a helpful idea to explore. But I couldn’t savour every moment. Some things life throws at us are not tasty. Some experiences we just have to survive.

We all know the tendency in the world of creativity, productivity, and self-help to promote an ideal of maximising life. Creators desperate to feed the content machine push out articles and videos about their hyper-complex morning routines, or their super intricate note-taking systems, or just the way they seem to live every moment of life looking and feeling perfect.

Those aren’t ideals I want to promote.

Make Wise Choices

Thankfully, it’s not an either/or proposition. You can try to make the most of every run while acknowledging that sometimes it might be best to just ski quickly to the next connection.

The key is wisdom and reflection. Giving yourself a moment, and maybe just a moment, to ask the question. Can you make this task deeper? More rewarding or fulfilling? More of a chance to grow? Or do you just get on and do it?

Often, we convince ourselves we can’t pause to consider the question. We’re so busy, or swamped. We’re buried at work, our hands are full, our schedule is packed, or our life is just crazy right now.

This leads us to overlook mundane experiences as gateways to self-improvement. We look at things like chores as having trivial significance. In fact, chores can be training for the kind of focus we need in supposedly more important creative tasks.

Let Simplicity Guide You

For the past 20 years, I’ve been trying to embody simplicity as a core feature of my life. What this journey keeps bringing me back to is the value of being fully present to many of life’s more menial moments. It’s fashionable to ritualise the sensuality of making coffee. But that same kind of experience is available in many routine tasks.

The joy of ink flowing onto a page isn’t available to us just in the flow of creative writing. It’s also there waiting for us when we make a shopping list.

Sometimes, I wonder if the thing that bugs us is the obligation. The having to do something. Maybe that’s what gets those skiers down, when they feel forced to ski the easy run to get to where they want to be.

But we can always remember that we have some choice as to how banal those moments feel. We can choose to seize them as an opportunity to grow, to experience – or simply, as Alexis taught me all those years ago, to play.

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Frequency – Yearly Theme 2024

We often end a year looking back and wishing we’d done more, or maybe less, of the things we did. We wish we’d gone to the gym more, eaten more healthy food, read more books, spent more time with loved ones, or maybe taken more time off work. Or we wish we’d eaten less takeout, or spent less time on the sofa watching TV, attended fewer meetings at work, drank less, or not wasted so much time commuting or writing emails.

This often leads to the lists of resolutions and goals people make at the start of the each year. But resolutions seldom if ever work. Just because the calendar ticked over from one year to the next doesn’t make changing habits any easier. Pretty soon those good intentions yield to the force of well-established patterns of life.

Rather than setting fragile resolutions that get abandoned, listing goals we might never reach or new habits that require brute force willpower, what we need is something simple we can call upon in each moment, to remind us of the kind of decisions we want to make.

That’s what a yearly theme does, and my theme for 2024 is frequency.

The Danger Of Stealth Goals

I spent less time on pilates in 2023 than in previous years. I spent more time on the sofa watching TV. I’m not happy about either trend. They are prime candidates for the type of magical thinking that goes into New Year’s resolutions. The kind of fragile wishfulness I want to avoid.

I’ve been doing yearly themes since 2018. It’s one of the most profound productivity practices I’ve tried. Each theme has taught me a lot about myself and how the world around me works. The theme is a heuristic. It’s never wholly right or wrong. It’s a tool, not a goal.

Lately I’ve noticed more people using yearly themes as a kind of stealth way to talk about goals. Often the tell is in the use of the word “of”. Year of sleep is just another way of saying your goal is more nights of good sleep. Year of the weekend is just a way of saying your goal is to work a little less and relax a little more. Those themes are stealth goals.

A good theme is generative. It opens you up to different ideas as the year unfolds. It’s bigger than a goal and more like a frame of mind. Yearly themes aren’t productivity hacks. They are ways of understanding more deeply your own philosophy of life.

Rather than approaching the theme of frequency as a set of long lists (more of this, less of that), I’m thinking about the why questions. Why do I find it easier to do some things more often, while some things require more effort to be done regularly? How much is enough? How do changes in the frequency of one activity affect the frequency of other activities?

Why Frequency Matters

What I’m also doing is taking something that I understand quite well on a technical level, the science of frequency in sound and light, and seeing how that knowledge can illuminate other areas of life.

Take a guitar string, for example. Each string is tuned to a different frequency. Changing and combining those frequencies creates melody and harmony, which are building blocks of music. The frequency of each string is determined by its length, mass, and tension. Increase the mass and the string vibrates more slowly, creating a lower pitched note frequency. Increase the tension and it oscillates faster, yielding a higher-pitched note. Make the strong longer or shorter and you also change the frequency. Change any of the three variables and you change the frequency.

We often talk about ideas resonating with us. Resonance happens when the frequencies of two sounds match. It’s another way of talking about harmony; the pleasing ways in which things like ideas in a conversation, or ingredients in a dish, can combine.

We dance to the rhythm of music. The frequency with which the music comes at us, the beats per minute, is how fast or slow the music feels. The groove, the difference between the shuffle of a blues tune, or the driving beat of hard rock song, is the way that frequency is distributed, clumped together or evenly spread out.

Under every aspect of our lives is some division of time and experience. There’s a frequency conducting everything we do. Whether more, or less, the frequency determines the experiences we have. Christmas, Diwali, Mid-Autumn festival feel special because we celebrate them only once a year. We look forward to weekends because the demands of work require us to take regular breaks, and we want to regularly use the time we might be spending at work in other ways.

Finding the right frequency for each activity is integral to the crafting of a harmonious life.

Creativity and Living Well

Right now I’m in the Japanese countryside. There’s a bell-like tune that plays through the emergency speaker system here every day, at 10am, noon, 3pm and 6pm. It’s not hard to sense how the rhythm of life, the opening and closing of shops, the start and end of school, attunes to that rhythm. It reminds me of the church bells that chime in Catholic countries, calling parishioners to prayers like matins or vespers. Thinking more about the liturgical calendar, there are daily prayers, weekly prayers, seasons like Lent or Advent, and holy days like Easter or Christmas.

It’s popular to think of creativity as some sort of genius, something a few people always have available. Or as some kind of mystical lightning bolt that hits us out of the blue. I find both of these ideas kind of stressful and unhelpful.

The idea that creativity happens a bit like the liturgical calendar, mostly through daily habits and rituals, with occasional bigger moments and a few crescendos over the course of the year, feels more liveable and inviting to me. It’s somehow less heroic and more like the way the patterns of life in nature reveal themselves.

By recognising the ebb and flow of our imaginative energies, we can optimise our efforts, ensuring that our most inspired moments are not fleeting but woven into the very fabric of our endeavours.

Productivity and Technology

How often do you check your email inbox? Or your calendar? Or your messages? We often think about these kinds of activities as being on a continuum between too much and not enough. Of course there’s potentially a right amount. But there’s also a right way.

When musicians play a note on their instruments, they try to get the pitch right and play the note for the right duration. That’s the frequency of the note and the frequency of notes. But they also articulate the note. Softer or louder. Sometimes musicians want a note to feel gentle. Sometimes heavy. Wagner’s music sounds different to that of Brahms, even though it’s the same possible notes played on the same instruments.

In 2024 I want to use the idea of frequency to think about how often I do things, but also how I approach doing them; how I express and articulate my tasks.

There are a lot of different spectrums here that reflect different aspects of the energy we bring to our activity: anxious versus calm, intense versus relaxed, focused versus expansive, narrow versus generative, robust versus gentle. They all have their place in the repertoire of work, but they all lead to different ways of working.

The idea of nested time, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly cycles of repeating rhythms, is part of the orchestration of work, the harmony of synchronised actions that helps us transcend the chaos of life.

Health and Simplicity

Your heart beats at a given frequency, faster when you exercise, slower when you rest. One of the most important measures of health is heart rate variability, which measures the variation in that frequency. This measure can highlight your cardiovascular health, and even if your fight-or-flight mode is working properly.

The idea of frequency pops up in every aspect of healthy living. From establishing and maintaining positive habits to the importance of consistency in every core health practice: getting enough sleep and exercise, eating nutritiously, staying hydrated, breathing and meditating, managing our sun exposure and taking care of our skin, and feeding our mind and soul well with the culture we consume and people with whom we surround ourselves.

Simple living also has an inherent rhythm built upon consistency and repetition. We unravel the complexities of life through our daily routines.

The simplest life is one in which every day is much the same, focused on a few well-chosen tasks and commitments that add the most meaning and joy to your existence. Through embracing the regularity of the most important habits and rituals, we discover a source of stability amidst the tumultuous currents of life.

Conclusion

Let’s return to that guitar string. We saw how three variables, the length of the string, its mass, and the tension it is under, determine the frequency or pitch of the string. But most guitarists don’t think about it that way. They tune the string by turning a tuning knob: turn it one way to move the pitch up, another to move it down. They think only in terms of one variable, the tension, determined by that tuning knob.

But then change strings, maybe trying another brand, or a differently gauged set, and everything goes haywire. You can’t make the guitar play in tune by simply adjusting the tuning knob. More work will be required, as will screwdrivers and other tools. Sometimes, changes in the weather or season of the year will drive a guitar out of tune. Humidity can affect the wood of the guitar, making all sorts of changes to how in tune it plays.

Finding the right frequencies requires adjustments big and small. Your adjustments can be perfect but over time they must still be tweaked and reset.

Looking Back On Previous Themes

My yearly theme for 2023 was Savour. I was hoping to slow down and enjoy life a little more. This theme helped me make all sorts of decisions that adding meaning and delight to life. It showed why a theme, which is adaptable to life’s uncertainties, is so much more powerful and useful than a set of resolutions or goals which you might be forced to drop once circumstances change.

You can learn more about choosing your own yearly theme or read below for the themes I’ve used since 2108.

2023 – Savour
2022 – Tensegrity
2021 – Imagination
2020 – Momentum
2019 – Conviction
2018 – Simple

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2023 Review – The Year Of Savour

Every essay I post on this site is accompanied by an image. I take a photo from my library, then edit and resize it to fit the dimensions required for this layout.

Sometimes I forget those dimensions, and so I have to find the small digital style guide that has all the important information about how this site is formatted. Looking for that recently, I stumbled on something I wrote in February: my Social Media Strategy for 2023.

I created this 11-page document to help me pitch a new book idea to agents and publishers. It outlined the way I used different kinds of social media, my goals for being online, and how I thought strategically about all that in relation to my personal sense of purpose, my character strengths, existing public image, and the changing social media landscape.

It’s an earnest statement that feels so dated now it could’ve been written 10 years ago. So much has changed so quickly. Twitter? Does it even exist anymore?

What was also interesting about the Social Media Strategy for 2023 was how many times I managed to include my yearly theme for 2023: Savour. It was on every page.

Clearly, I was enthusiastic about this theme. So was it useful? Did I manage to savour 2023?

Savouring 2023

A yearly theme is different from a new year’s resolution. It’s not a goal. It’s not a test you pass or fail. A good theme is something more poetic. A hope you can keep returning to. A simple tool you can use to guide every decision you make, big or small.

When I wrote about choosing savour as a theme, I said 2022 had been a “a sad, exhausting year” and that “I felt rushed, stressed, focused on what could go wrong”. Savour was a way to slow down, enjoy each moment, be more thankful for the good things in life and appreciate the joys of pursuing good taste.

Yesterday, I was skiing. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, so I stopped to have a coffee and look out over the valley before making my way back down to the car. Stopping to buy some groceries on the way home, I took a moment to just enjoy the colours of all the fresh things in the produce aisle. It was a beautiful sunset later on the way home, so I stopped by the side of the road to take a photo.

2023 was full of moments like that. No great epiphanies. No major transformative changes in life. Just a slower, easier, and more delightful way of moving through the world.

Savouring People

2023 gave me the chance to catch up with friends. I chose ways of meeting that maximised the chance to savour that time together. Walks instead of events. Quiet locations instead of fashionable or crowded ones.

I attended three excellent online workshops this year: Writing What Refuses to be Written, with Sabrina Orah Mark; Granta Writing Memoir, with Dr Midge Gillies; and Japanese Sensibility in Photographic Practice, with George Nobechi. They were all great learning experiences. They also introduced me to amazing creative people. Savour as a theme reminded me to take a little longer to get to know people and appreciate what their work had to teach me.

During 2023, I continued to “choose people” wherever possible. Taking the cashier aisle instead of self-checkout, for example. It’s so easy to assume we’re too busy to make small talk, thank our barista, or ask the taxi driver how their day is going. But every conversation is another window into understanding the world.

Popular Culture

2023 was the year of Taylor Swift. I’m cool with that, having long believed she is the biggest pop star in the world and a generational songwriting talent. You have to admire someone who, at her age, has enough top shelf material to fill a three-hour concert and is willing to sing the whole setlist on a treadmill for months to build up the stamina to perform.

I attended my first concerts since the start of the pandemic: Mamamoo in Baltimore, and IVE in Yokohama. Both were great and the fan culture of K-pop is so vibrant. K-pop is the global pop music genre at the moment. The fandom spreads around the world. The music is inventive and rich, and draws from so many genres. It’s a magnet for many of the best young songwriters and producers. The production values are so high. And the album packaging is another level.

I probably watched too much TV in 2023. But in my defence, there is a vast pool of very watchable streaming shows at the moment. My picks for the best three I saw are The Bear; Yosi, the Regretful Spy; and Nothing (Nada). The latter felt particularly pertinent to the theme of savouring: an aging food writer, a pedantic gourmand, who has to adapt to a changing world while still holding onto what makes him interesting and likeable.

In 2023, I enjoyed exhibitions again. It was great to take in the Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year, at the South Australian Museum; Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image; and the Pierre Bonnard retrospective designed by India Mahdavi at the National Gallery of Victoria, both in Melbourne. There was Stefan Sagmeister’s Now is Better, at the Ginza Graphic Gallery in Tokyo. And most moving of all was Robert Houle: Red Is Beautiful, at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

And in cinema, there was one big question – and the answer was that Barbie was a much better film than Oppenheimer. Past Lives was better than both.

Vibe Shift

In early 2022, Allison P. Davis wrote A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It? in New York Magazine. The idea was that as we emerged from enforced pandemic isolation, we’d be confronted with a different cultural landscape that might be hard to navigate.

Popular culture in 2023 certainly feels very different from how it did in 2018.

The reasons for this might have less to do with the pandemic and more to do with the natural shift from one generation to another. Grunge seemed to come out of nowhere in the ʼ90s, but really it was the culmination of changes that had been developing for some time. Same with the hipster movement in the early 2000s.

A lot is being made of Gen Z humour at the moment. Savanah Moss’s skits, and thekittyandrea’s cat morphing meme are great examples of “anything can be anything” absurdity. It’s like digital Dadaism, sure. But consider this video about buying fish. It’s not all that funny until you start reading the comments (I bet you can’t scroll to the end of them).

We’ve reached the apogee of humour made for and shaped by social media.

All this at a time when there is a crisis in the creator economy. YouTube is no longer the stable source of revenue it once was for many creators. Creator funds made to support original work on many platforms have been discontinued. Spotify continues to be a terrible deal for most musicians. And Twitter’s final demise is leading to increased fragmentation of audiences and conversations.

Savour While You Can

I turned 55 this year. Most days I don’t feel old. But I’m reminded constantly that society sees me as old. If you live in Australia or the UK, it’s pretty easy to feel like once you’ve turned 40 you are worthless unless you’re wealthy or famous.

I sometimes wonder what this means for us, especially as politics and cultural discourse become more fraught. A lot of the things that make our society richer – agriculture, art, craft, design, ecology, film, literature, music – rely on experience and wisdom, the passing on of shared knowledge and understanding. A healthy culture has a vibrant dialogue between the new and the old.

That said, one thing no one tells you about being in your fifties is that, if you do it right, you seem to naturally become happier. Apparently it’s common. Most people’s happiness goes down in mid-adulthood. Perhaps that’s not surprising given those years are marked by the struggle to accumulate wealth and a place in the world, the responsibility of building a family and making a long-term relationship work and the battle to make some kind of mark on your chosen profession.

But for a lot of people, once they get into their mid-fifties their happiness goes up. Maybe their kids enter adulthood. Or they have found contentment with their place in the working world. They’ve probably decided on the kind of people they want (and don’t want) in their social world. And they make peace with the body they have and the fact that younger generations now make the popular culture they inhabit. For many, their happiness stays high well into their seventies.

I think about that a lot. This window of time I find myself in, where life consists mostly of enjoying what I already have and passing on what I’ve learnt. This isn’t the time to accumulate. It’s the time to share.

And to savour.

Savour as a yearly theme helped me course-correct my mid-fifties back towards enjoying what this stage of life has to offer. It still felt like I had too many chores and too much travel. But there was a lot more laughter and joy, a lot of enjoying the salt of meeting people and delighting in close relationships, and many moments of just appreciating the fine details of a work of art, a great piece of design, a wonderful solo in a jazz tune, or a beautiful flower that will radiate its colourful glory for only a few days before fading forever.

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State Of The Apps 2023

By far my favourite app is Flighty. It’s a beautifully designed piece of software that does one thing very elegantly – track all the flights you take. Every year it gives you a nice end-of-year summary, like Spotify Wrapped, but for air travel. You see the miles you flew, countries you visited, airports you took off from and touched down at, even how many days you spent in the air!

Looking at my 2023 summary, I see that I’ve travelled quite a lot. Not as much as in 2022. But more than in 2019 and of course 2020, when travel ground to halt after a few months.

But something else also stands out. While I’ve covered a lot of distance I haven’t visited as many countries or airports as in previous years. A lot of flights. Not much variety.

In a way that’s a metaphor for the whole of 2023. Something that’s shaped how I have used apps and tools this year.

A lot of work. Not much variety.

But this isn’t a full review of 2023 and everything that happened. I’ll save most of that for next week’s year in review. For now, let’s look at the apps and tools I used in 2023, which ones changed, and what I’m carrying into 2024.

The Focus of 2023

Professionally, my goal for 2023 was pretty simple. I wanted to diversify the kind of writing I did and where it was published. In recent years my focus has been on writing a lot of blogposts, essays about creativity and technology, here on this site.

I wanted to explore other modes of writing; memoir, creative non-fiction, lyric essay, even flash fiction. And I wanted to try and get published in other places, such as literary journals. Finally, I wanted to see if there was any interest from agents and publishers in a book proposal I’d developed.

The results were, well, let’s call them mixed. I had one essay published in the wonderful Wilde Magazine. A lot of rejections. Many with helpful advice and feedback. All of which means I have a varied body of work to keep submitting in 2024.

But in terms of apps, it’s meant very little change in what I use and very little need to experiment. This wasn’t a year of trying new things. In fact the number of apps I use regularly is down, compared to last year.

Writing, Notes, and Research

What didn’t change in 2023 was the core group of apps (Obsidian, Readwise, and Scrivener) that I use in my daily reading, thinking, research, and writing. You can read about how I use those in The Journey of a Note and Compostable Knowledge.

I also continued to make journal entries in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook, both for personal reflections and for the kind of experimental writing I mentioned above. There’s something free and loose about the way I write when using a fountain pen. I end up with longer sentences and more vivid imagery. A lot of my more experimental writing, and increasingly the introductions to these essays, first take shape there.

The biggest change in 2023 is that I’ve almost stopped using Notion. There isn’t anything wrong with Notion. But writing fewer blogposts means I need the editorial calendar. I also don’t need the collaborative features I was using a few years ago. And Notion wants you to be online all the time, so I was increasingly finding that things like personal databases and collections of information worked just as well as spreadsheets in Numbers, or text in Apple Notes.

Yes, Numbers and Notes.

This year I rediscovered how useful spreadsheets can be. I’ve always wanted to have an offline database of all my blogposts, going back to 2004. Something I can use to quickly track the topics I’ve covered. I built it in Notion but it always felt a bit flakey. Turns out it works great in Numbers, with a page for each year and a solid interface. And I can refer to it offline whenever I want.

Another big change: I’ve started using Apple Notes instead of Bear for incidental notes. Bear is so cute, so functional. But also disruptively quirky at times. Bear did odd things to the formatting of text that I cut and pasted frequently, such as queries and submissions to agents. Notes is faster and cleaner.

Increasingly, this is what I want from every app I use in this space – fast and clean.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Word is on the list. Journals mostly want submissions in Word. Same for agents and publishers. And participants on writing workshops, readers from services like Pencilhouse, and many editors, offer their suggestions and comments in Word.

I hate Word. Word gives me a kind of creative PTSD. I started out on WordPerfect, which was a great writing tool, given what computers were capable of back in the 90s. But Word became the default, at least in the academic circles I was in at the time. It was clunky and unreliable, prone to crash all the time, but especially at 5am after you had been working all night to finish an assignment and meet a deadline. All my old folders from those days were full of multiple copies of the same document, saved over and over again, in case a crash wiped everything out.

Word crashes less these days. But it still has an ugly and confusing interface, and is still full of distractions. Everything seems to be harder than it need be.

For 2024 I’m looking for a way around this Word impasse. In particular I want to be able to format work for submission without having to pass it though Word. I’d also like to be able to handle Track Changes, when they come through, without using Word. Basically, I want to be Word-less.

Everything else can stay the same. As I’ve written before, there’s a reason pros tend not to switch apps all the time. Why Pros Don’t Always Upgrade.

Personal Productivity

I still plan my life digitally and live my days in analogue. I use Fantastical to schedule my commitments with the world: appointments, classes, flights, and entertainments. Omnifocus helps me manage my commitments to myself and the projects I undertake. Mindnode helps me create a graphical representation of the areas of my life and the priorities in each of them.

But at the start of every week, and during the course of the day, the things I do and the order in which I do them follow the notes and reminders I make on paper. I love the feeling of ink on paper; the commitment that comes with writing tasks down and the satisfaction of drawing a thick line through them upon completion.

In 2023 I continued my Don Quixote quest to limit the number of ways in which people can communicate with me. Each week finds me gently reminding people to use e-mail and messages, and not the thousands of other in-boxes that appear on every platform. The prevailing communication promiscuity is a madness which I will not indulge.

For 2024 I’d like to tame e-mail further. Despite using rules and unsubscribing voraciously, I still receive hundreds of unwanted e-mails every week.

And I’d like to find ways to make my personal productivity more sharable. I’m not sure if the solution is an app or an approach to how I discuss my planning with the people around me.

Travel

Apps played less of a role in travel in 2023. While I still used Verifly to do all the entry requirements to the US, there are no required apps for travel to Australia any more. It’s still an old-fashioned paper system. Japan now has a super-efficient digital system for immigration and customs, but it is browser-based and there’s no app.

I used the Qantas App on every flight. The JAL app doesn’t really work properly, but I do use JAL’s excellent lounge app to book a shower in the lounge or order freshly rolled sushi to be delivered to my quiet spot in some corner.

I still use Uber, at least when in the US. But sometimes you want a car that’s a bit nicer, driven by someone who isn’t in a hurry, and who will wait for you. That’s where Blacklane comes in handy.

And my favourite travel app is the aforementioned Flighty. This really is an essential download if you fly regularly, keeping you up to date with all delays, changes to gate and flight details, history, even the age of your plane!

For 2024 I hope to create some focus modes specifically for travel. Focus modes feel perfectly suited to the kind of hard app and communication switching that goes well with travel.

Social Media

I’ve already written at length about what happened in social media in 2023 (Everything About Twitter Right Now, and A Post-Twitter World).

Social media just doesn’t feel urgent to me right now. There’s a mix of chaos, uncertainty, and confusion that makes it hard to justify investing much time and effort. Especially since no platform works well in bringing readers like yourself here.

Currently I have Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads on my iPhone. I don’t use apps for any of them on my iPad. I still check Twitter occasionally, but only through a Mac browser.

I still enjoy YouTube but I would guess my consumption of videos is way down compared to last year. A lot of YouTube creators I follow have slowed down the number of videos they put out. And after relentlessly trying new recipes during the worst of the pandemic, I’ve stopped watching so many cooking videos.

For 2024 I’m looking for someone like Hootsuite to support both Threads and Bluesky. Right now it seems you must post the same content to multiple platforms at the same time to try and find a scattered audience. In the future that will consolidate.

Other Honourable Mentions

2023 found me making more music and photos than 2022, but nowhere near as prolifically as pre-2019. I still use Logic Pro, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop. I’m mostly using the FujiFilm X Pro 2 for photos, with the Fujinon 90 and 35 as my favourite lenses. But my studio is still in boxes after my last move.

I’m not using any notation software at the moment. Or editing video. Although I did pick up a DJI Osmo Pro 3 recently. So watch this space.

My listening cluster of apps is all Apple: Apple Classical Music, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts. I don’t have much interest in arguing whether these are all best-in-class. I use them because they work across all my devices. I can easily start listening to a podcast on one device and continue on another.

Eventually I will stop using Google Maps and switch to Apple Maps. Every time I try Apple Maps it feels like a better design, less clogged with distractions and errors. But after years of travel and exploration, I have so many places saved on Google Maps. If there were an easy way to import all those into Apple Maps, I would do it. But I haven’t found that yet.

For 2024 I just want to make more music and create more photos.

The Value of A Tech Audit

This year I’ve tried go beyond commenting on the tech I used, and to look forward to the way I might use that tech in 2024. This kind of exercise is useful because it encourages consideration of where our commitments and attention are going, whether there are better apps available, and how we want our lives to intersect with the technology that is available.

If you have some kind of public outlet, such as a blog, newsletter, or podcast, then it might be interesting to share your State of the Apps. I always find the exercise foments worthwhile conversations with my readers. Or you could just share some lists of the apps you used, and maybe the ones you recently switched, via social media or any message groups you participate in.

If you’re wondering how to choose the right tech for you, then I suggest reading How to Think about New Technology, where I set out some mental models for how to choose the kind of tech that will work for you.

Whatever 2024 brings, it feels like a good time to reflect on the tech we use, how reliable and trustworthy it is, and the amount of time we want to dedicate to choosing, using, and maintaining it.

The post State Of The Apps 2023 appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Hazardous Attitudes

Normally I’m good at getting some sleep on long overnight flights. I’ve done a lot of them and have a routine that usually works.

My last flight from Tokyo to Melbourne wasn’t like that.

We hit turbulence several times during the night. Each bout came right as I was dozing off. It wasn’t bad turbulence. Nothing to complain about. Nothing truly scary. But enough for my body to switch gears and keep me awake.

I landed on a Sunday. With no commitments, I could spend a day just napping, recovering, and relaxing. That afternoon I fell down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos. There was something soothing about watching people fly restored old planes.

As always happens, the more I watched, the darker the viewing recommendations became. Pretty soon, YouTube was serving up plane crash videos. Those crazy algorithms.

The Five Hazardous Attitudes

I did watch one video. A very passionate flight instructor talked about how two people, a student pilot and his instructor, had flown into a bad storm and crashed. What made it worse is the flight instructor was posting videos of the pre-flight check, and the flight, to his Snapchat account. He was mocking the student. And then they both died.

The maker of the video, Josh Flowers, read from a prepared statement because he didn’t want his emotions to overtake him as he discussed what went wrong. He mentioned something called the “5 Hazardous Attitudes in Aviation”, which he listed as:

1. Anti-authority: “Don’t tell me how to…”
2. Impulsivity: “Do it quickly.”
3. Invulnerability: “It won’t happen to me.”
4. Macho: “I can do it.”
5. Resignation: “What’s the use?”

These five hazardous attitudes were defined by the US FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) and cited in many articles and on the websites of flight schools. A paper entitled The Five Hazardous Attitudes: A Subset of Complacency by Peter S. Neff in the International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace explains the attitudes in depth, with lots of examples of flight incidents and disasters caused by them.

Why This Matters

I’m not training to be a pilot, and I’m no expert on aviation. So why did these attitudes catch my attention, and why am I asking you to think about them?

First, because we encounter them often. They are programmed into our DNA. It’s pretty hard to go through a day without hearing (or at least overhearing) them. If they’re hazardous, then it pays to consider the role they play in our lives.

Second, because we can often find ourselves coaching or advising people who express these attitudes. Parents will be particularly familiar with them because kids, especially teenagers, typically express these attitudes as they try to navigate their path to independence and an understanding of their abilities.

Third, these attitudes don’t just lead to dangerous and risky behaviour; they also have implications for our ability to learn, work with others, and be creative.

Let’s look at them in more detail.

Anti-Authority

Being rebellious can feel cool. It certainly does when you’re a teenager. That’s because you’re trying to discover your identity, assert yourself, and figure out which social norms really matter.

Building your adult identity around rejecting authority can be problematic, however, especially if you have to operate in a shared environment where the risks are high and the safety of others is paramount.

Someone who is being anti-authoritarian can engage in risky behavior as a way to prove their non-conformity. They can feel uncomfortable with rules that keep everyone safe, or restrictions that ask them to limit their behavior for the safety of others.

They can reject rules or fail to comply when that would be the safest and best course of action. But rules usually exist for a reason, and processes make hazardous tasks safer. Not everything needs to be disrupted.

For creative souls, anti-authoritarianism casts a beguiling spell. We want to break free from constraints. But we risk cutting ourselves off from others, be they potential teachers, mentors, or collaborators. We might miss out on learning from the experience of others, from accumulated knowledge, from timeless ideas, or from the historical context that can inform our work.

Pushed too far, being anti-authority becomes being anti-wisdom.

Impulsivity

It’s easy to see how impulsivity can lead to dangerous behavior. An impulsive person is unlikely to take their time over important decisions, consider all important factors, or reflect on the possible consequences of their actions.

Impulsivity messes with our relationship to time, making it hard to delay gratification in the face of important challenges that require deep concentration. Being impulsive locks us in the present moment, which means we never fully learn from our experiences or achieve our potential in the future.

Trusting your gut, or making quick decisions, might work sometimes. But in complex situations, the risks are not always immediately obvious. Same with people. Their qualities don’t always shine or ring alarm bells on first meeting.

Managing risk also means managing your emotions. Impulsive behavior is often driven by an inability to regulate strong emotions and avoid discomfort. Impulsive people want to shortcut the uncertainty, ambiguity, or other feelings that accompany decision making. It can also make people prone to substance abuse as a way to regulate emotions, or simply chase short-term pleasure.

Being impulsive might seem central to the “eureka” moment or “lightning-in-a-bottle” idea of creativity. Sometimes it is. But it can also make it hard to focus long enough to complete big creative projects. It can encourage cutting corners and short-term decision making, producing inconsistent results. It can blind you to helpful feedback and make it hard to be a reliable collaborator. And it can encourage burnout as you engage in magpie-like pursuit of every shiny creative idea.

Invulnerabilty

Some people believe they are immune to danger. The risks, they think, are always greater for others. Things just work out for them. Their optimistic bias leads to dangerous overconfidence.

Teenagers most clearly display a belief they are invulnerable. They have rapidly increasing abilities and strength. But their world is also still regulated and safe. And they haven’t fully developed the ability to engage in long-term thinking and risk assessment. They feel invincible. So they engage in risky behaviour.

Cultivating a sense of invulnerability can seem appealing as a way to combat emotions. For some people, this seems like strength. But emotions play an important role in decision making. Fear, for example, isn’t something to be suppressed. Fear can motivate us to act, sharpen our focus, even improve our memory and cognitive processes.

It can be hard to work with people while maintaining an air of invulnerability. Being emotionally shut off makes you hard to relate to. It leads to an unwillingness to hear new ideas or bad news.

Great art comes from vulnerability. Think of that song lyric that captures exactly how you feel, that painting that always moves you, the poem you can still remember after all those years. These all come from an artist getting in touch with their own fragility, which is another way of saying their deepest humanity, and allowing that vulnerability to speak.

Invulnerability – or, more accurately, a sense of invulnerability – feels like a superpower, but really, it’s the opposite.

Macho

Blockbuster films flood us with the idea that hyper-masculinity is the solution for every dangerous predicament. What you need in a crisis is rippling muscles and a limited vocabulary. But being macho can’t fix everything.

Being macho is a social game, one fixated on control, dominance, and status. That means in a difficult situation the person trying to be macho is focussed more on how they look while handling the situation than on the situation itself.

For this person, solving a problem is not enough. They have to solve the problem in ways that demonstrate their bravery, fearlessness, and strength. This will often mean choosing a riskier option simply to give them more space to be macho.

This mindset also makes collaboration and conflict resolution difficult. Every relationship becomes a competition for dominance. Winning the argument becomes more important than reaching the right decision.

Hyper-masculinity can limit our creativity because it shuts us off from having full emotional experiences and embracing our vulnerability. This limited emotional intelligence makes it hard to feel the weight of new ideas, relate to collaborators, or understand what audiences feel when they experience our work.

Being macho also limits creativity because it is a very conformist way of being. Hyper-masculinity is all about imitating existing stereotypes and rejecting diverse ways of thinking and new ideas.

Hyper-masculinity is a fear-based response to the world. And this fear is enough to stifle creative expression because the person gripped by macho isn’t judging their work based on how creative, innovative, or artistic it is, but rather, whether or not it fits some external ideal of manliness.

Resignation

Giving up when facing a tough situation is an obvious gateway to hazardous outcomes. If we lose the will for self-preservation or would rather numb ourselves than save ourselves, something is clearly wrong.

Resignation can be caused by many things, from loss of purpose, feelings of hopelessness, self-destructive behavior, or deeper mental health issues.

Resignation might feel like a different attitude to the other four behaviours. But like the others, it’s a limiting mindset, to borrow the language of Caroline Dweck. While the others create a comfort zone by assuming things will go your way, this one creates a comfort zone by assuming things won’t work out and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Resignation hits our creativity hard because it finds us losing touch with self-efficacy and our ability to do things. It disconnects us from others. We become unable to access our emotions fully. Or find meaning in life and the work we do.

The Risk Of Complacency

In his article, Neff links all five hazardous attitudes to an underlying tendency towards complacency. This isn’t the “not caring” kind of complacency but rather a specific kind of complacency that comes from “overconfidence gained through the repetitive performance of a task”.

Neff mentions a fatal plane accident where the flight crew didn’t work through their preflight checklists thoroughly and were distracted by conversation while performing their checks. Alarmingly, that crew had failed to perform the tests properly on “98% of their previous 175 flights.”

This kind of complacency can afflict anyone who becomes good at what they do. Talent and success can blind us to the need to keep paying attention to the small details or keep working on the simple things. We can be seduced by our own ability to just turn up and make things work.

This is risky and hazardous – for ourselves, and for anyone who relies on us. Over time, complacency will hurt our performance, erode our skills, and diminish our enthusiasm for what we do.

The best way to avoid complacency is to stay curious and open minded. Explore new ideas and fresh perspectives. Don’t just stick to the classics or the familiar great ideas and masters in our field. Be familiar with new work and emerging talent.

Notice where we feel resistant to change and ask why that is. What do we fear? What makes us uncomfortable, and why? Make time also to think about our assumptions. Where we have become rigid. What stories we tell ourselves to avoid the discomfort of evolving.

Finally, keep working on the basics. You’re never too good to not benefit from time spent on the simple skills you use over and over again. Finding ways to bring focus and joy to the routine is often at the core of elite performance. Often the biggest and most complex tasks are made up of many small routine actions that have been performed countless times before.

And, next time I take an overnight flight I’ll be checking my own pre-flight habits. Maybe I’m forgetting something in my routine. Maybe I’m blaming turbulence when I had too many cups of coffee that day or didn’t relax and mediate in the lounge before boarding? I might not be piloting the plane but I am the captain of my own night’s sleep.

The post Hazardous Attitudes appeared first on Fernando Gros.

The Slow Goodbye

After nearly three days of travel across the Pacific, via Melbourne, Tokyo, and Seattle, I arrived in Washington DC on a cold and icy December night. It was a few days before Christmas, and for the first time my daughter was going to host the family Christmas dinner. I only ever hosted Christmas dinner for my parents twice. I remember how special an honour it was the first time. I was full of hope this experience would be a great one for my daughter and wanted to be fully present for her.

After checking in to the hotel and dropping off my bags, I made my way to her apartment through the wintry winds that were wrapping themselves around the city. Once there, after all the hugs and greetings, I sat down on the sofa and did a customary check of my email and social media accounts.

Something was wrong. I had hundreds of emails from my website store. I also had some social media messages from people asking for refunds on things they hadn’t bought.

Turns out my site had been hacked because of an outdated plug-in. Thousands of fake orders had been placed using stolen credit card numbers. I frantically emailed my contact from the agency that developed the site, catching her just before she started her own holidays, and we did everything we could to shut down the store, update the plug-ins, limit the problems, and issue refunds.

It took most of the next day, and several hours on the following days, to remedy the problem. Everyone got refunded. I lost a little money. But far more importantly, I lost the first three days of my family holiday.

#1

Nineteen years ago, in the sparse studio of my Delhi home, I created this site. WordPress had barely any instructions back then. You had to build everything yourself, and it took me a couple of weeks to get the site working.

But, and this is important, you could build it yourself. For years, I tweaked and designed the site’s various layouts. It was time consuming, but I loved the experience. Nothing was out of my control.

Then, in 2012, I decided to hire someone to build a custom design. They came up with the logo I still use today, and the site looked better. But it was very slow, and they also messed up a lot of things, from SEO to featured images on old pages. I still find myself cleaning up problematic pages.

In 2014, I had this current site built. In many ways, I love it. But I can’t maintain it myself. Plug-in updates sometimes break parts of the site. It’s hard to update and full of out-of-date things, like the giant smash ads for the book I self-published back in 2015.

The Christmas crisis just highlighted the problem.

I’d love to update the site again. Change the store to something more secure. But building a new site would cost thousands of dollars that I can’t hope to make back at the moment. And even if I wanted to spend the money, finding someone interested in taking on a tiny project is frustratingly hard.

#2

There was a time when the writing I shared on this site (and on social media) brought in paid work. That’s part of why I never booked ads or endorsements, or took any guest posts. I didn’t need to. Other kinds of opportunities would come in and I’d get paid for them, leaving the blog as a gift to the creative community.

But that hasn’t been true for a long time. I pay for good-quality hosting. I pay to maintain the mailing list for subscribers. And I pay to have every article professionally edited.

But I don’t get any business in return anymore. Okay, I haven’t added any new products in a while, and I could make some money there. But I haven’t garnered many new readers either.

Mostly, I just keep going.

And increasingly, I’m not content with that.

There’s a game we creatives are meant to play where we say that the size of our audience doesn’t matter, as if we should be grateful for any attention. I don’t subscribe to that idea. I discourage other creatives from doing so.

Toiling away in obscurity is vastly over-rated. It’s bad for your well-being.

I made peace a long time ago with this blog existing somewhere in the middle. It never managed to become the kind of blog that people tell people about. I was invited on a couple of podcasts and had a few articles written about the blog, but mostly I wrote for a relatively small and wonderfully loyal band of readers.

But something that doesn’t grow eventually becomes hard to maintain.

#3

For a few years, I posted around once a week. During the worst months of the pandemic, it felt important to keep that up. To stay connected with the world. To hold space for some kind of hope. I’d prop my iPad up on the dining table and use words to burrow a portal into the wider world.

During that time, I also invested in improving my own craft as a writer. I attended a lot of writing workshops. I wrote thousands of words of memoir, fiction, even a proposal for another book.

These words are different to the words I’ve written for the web over the years. They don’t conform to the rules of what performs well on blogs and social media.

And really, this is the crux of the matter. I feel tired of writing for the web.

I’m not tired of you, dear reader. I’m tired of the game of trying to lure more readers to like, to play the search engine game, to write thrilling short paragraphs in SEO-approved 300-word blocks with a clear pay-off, life lesson, or simple idea you can put into practice.

#4

Next October will be the twentieth anniversary of this blog. For a while now, I’ve been wondering how to celebrate that. Not a lot of blogs have been running for 20 years.

Okay. There aren’t a lot of blogs left at all.

There certainly aren’t a lot of blogs left operating the way this one does, free of ads, written from one person’s perspective, speaking to a broad range of topics, charting the shape of a life engaging with the world in specific ways.

Sometimes I wonder if the best way I can honour that anniversary is by drawing the whole project to a close.

Should the twentieth anniversary post be the last?

#5

At the current tempo, that would mean writing maybe 25 more posts. Perhaps a few more. But it’s a limited number.

That settles my mind. Even when I wrote 50 posts a year, I still always had more than that number sitting in drafts. Every year I could write more. But I don’t know what to focus on. Which makes me anxious about the whole thing.

Sometimes, I look at the successful newsletters that attract thousands of readers. Newsletters are simply the new blogs by a different name. (Many would disagree with me about that.)

Anyway, I sometimes envy those successful newsletter writers. Not because large numbers of readers are a prize. But because there’s a clarity that comes with having a bigger audience. A sharper sense of where to focus your attention and energy.

Back when I worked on the Society For Film’s podcast, it was fascinating to observe audience behaviour. Whenever we reviewed a blockbuster like whatever the latest Marvel film was, we’d get a huge spike in numbers. But that would drop off quickly. However, some films – European arthouse films, Asian films, the kind of things you only see at film festivals and that don’t get reviewed on a lot of bigger review sites – would keep drawing in small but steady numbers for years and years.

Audiences can misguide you and pull your attention towards fads. But they can also clarify your thinking and remind you of what you do well.

Thinking of a list of final posts would force me to really think about what matters.

If we only had a few more chances to share this online space together, then what should we think about and feel in those remaining moments?

#6

When Twitter got rid of its validation system, it was fashionable to pretend it was no big deal. Some high-profile users said things like “I’m glad it’s gone” and “It was more trouble than it was worth.”

But others, closer to my station in things, were more apprehensive. Being verified was never as powerful as some imagined it to be. It didn’t make you more popular or grow your audience. But it did help you get noticed by people who used Twitter seriously. In as far as Twitter was a tool for professional networking in the arts and media, it was helpful.

Most of us who do creative work survive because we live in an ecosystem.

When that ecosystem gets threatened or destroyed, the strongest survive. The tallest trees with the deepest roots do better in a bushfire than the saplings and smaller plants.

This blog predates the emergence of social media by several years. But for a long time, its fate was intertwined with the way social media evolved.

Now that social media is broken and fragmented, there is a whole new set of issues to consider.

#7

I was in my mid-twenties the last time I walked off a football pitch. I remember looking down at the muddy ground, feeling my boot studs sink into the earth. Brushing the sweat off my brow with my forearm.

It’s not that I hated the game. But it was time to quit. I’d been kind of good in my teens, but never good enough to make the best youth teams. I had a hard few years with injuries and illness. Much of the years between 18 and 21 were wasted for me.

Then I worked hard, lost some weight and got fit again. But I was playing in a team I didn’t like and a kind of football I wasn’t suited for.

The thing is, I don’t miss it. Never have. Some guys pine for their youth. Never give up thinking of themselves as “athletes”. But that never appealed.

I was a footballer. Then I wasn’t.

#8

In a way, all of this is about much more than the blog. Back in that Delhi studio, I made a major change of direction in my life. I quit a PhD and started a journey as something of a social creative.

It was a life built on the promise of being online. I dreamt of a studio where I could collaborate with people anywhere in the world. I doubled down on every opportunity that allowed me to connect with people through the internet. Blogging was one part of that. Social media, another.

I had great experiences and made many friends.

Now it feels like something is ending. Maybe this blog only lives until its twentieth anniversary. Maybe it goes on. Okay, probably it goes on. But something needs to change.

I don’t have an answer yet. Like this essay, I only have braids that seem to intertwine, pieces that want to fit together somehow.

What I know is that it’s time to look to the future again. To be brave. And creative.

The post The Slow Goodbye appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Advent And Rethinking Christmas

When do we put up the Christmas decorations?

This question comes up every year. The Christmas decorations seem to go on sale earlier and earlier. Stores try harder and harder to commercialize every aspect of the season. And in more and more aspects of life, we find ourselves perplexed by what doing the “right thing” might be and what the “correct answer” is to the question.

For years, my suggestion has been the same. The decorations go up on Advent Sunday – four Sundays before Christmas.

This year Advent Sunday is 3 December. Last year it was 27 November.

But wait, I can hear you saying, don’t Advent calendars have 25 slots? Surely Advent starts on December 1st? Well, yes, it will be like that in 2024. But generally, no, Advent doesn’t start on the beginning of December.

The Season of Advent

Advent is one of the main seasons of the Christian liturgical calendar, alongside Easter and Lent. Advent is about preparing for Christmas. It is a season to be quiet, to reflect, to not be weighed down by the concerns of the world and instead focus on hope and the promise of good things the future might hold.

Ever heard of giving up something for Lent? Well, Lent is a season of preparation, of self-sacrifice, before the festival of Easter. Advent began the same way. It’s unclear when the season began, but its origins date back to at least the fifth century.

Advent is four Sundays of anticipation before Christmas. The season is about light breaking into darkness. A lot of things we associate with Christmas – candles, carols – were actually part of Advent. The last days of Advent involve singing the great “O Antiphons”, the most famous of them being “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”. The modern version of this song comes from the eighteenth century, but its origins trace back to ninth-century monasteries.

Advent Calendars

As for our Advent Calendars, they originated in Germany. There was a practice of counting down the days to Christmas by lighting candles or marking walls or doorways with chalk. Then in the nineteenth century, the first Advent calendars appeared. They were wooden hanging boxes, where the faithful could place a little devotional image or object every day.

In the early twentieth century, the first printed advent calendars appeared. Gerhard Lang added small moving doors to them and created the kind of Advent calendars we know today. Lang’s business closed in the lead up to World War II. After the war, the Sellmar-Verlag company revived the business, and the popularity of Advent calendars spread throughout the US and across the world. The same company still makes them today.

Since the start date and duration of Advent change every year, it wasn’t practical to make a calendar that changes all the time. A calendar that starts on the same day, 1 December, is easier to design, make, and market.

By the 1950s, Advent calendars had become hugely popular. President Eisenhower was photographed opening one. In the early 1970s, Cadbury introduced the first Advent calendars with chocolates. Nowadays, every company, from Lego to Tiffany, seems to sell an Advent calendar.

The Season of Christmas

Christmas isn’t just a day but also a season. Heard of the 12 days of Christmas? Well, they aren’t a countdown to Christmas, but a season that starts with Christmas and runs through to 6 January, otherwise known as Epiphany, which is the day that commemorates the arrival of the Three Wise Men to visit the holy baby. In some countries, Epiphany is actually when gifts are given.

So to expand our answer, the decorations go up on Advent Sunday, stay in place for about six weeks, and come down on 6 January.

I didn’t grow up with any of this. My family was notionally Catholic, like most Latin Americans. We had a short Christmas season, focused entirely on a big celebration on Christmas Eve. It was fun – but also rushed and stressful, and frequently the cause of many conflicts.

It was when I moved to London, and particularly when I was at King’s College London, that I came to appreciate and love Advent and see Christmas in a different light.

Every year, King’s had a special Advent service in their historic and ornate chapel. Tickets were hard to come by. The space was warmed by hundreds of candles and resonated with the sound of modern chorale music and poetry. The atmosphere was an intoxicating mix of high culture and spiritual devotion.

Almost as impressive was the service to mark Epiphany, which tended to coincide with the end of the Christmas break and the return to classes.

Ending Your Year Well

Spacing the start of the season weeks away from the peak of the season permitted a different tone. Christmas didn’t feel rushed. It stopped being a stressful thing that grew ominous. Instead, it was something to be anticipated and enjoyed with delight when it finally arrived.

And having the actual 12 days of Christmas took the pressure off one day and one meal fulfilling all the expectations of the season. It also felt easier to include other people, especially friends, in the season.

There was time to enjoy everything.

The start of Advent also became a great buffer for ending the year with grace. I would use that date as a cut-off point for accepting new commitments. Anything that wasn’t an emergency would be deferred until after Epiphany (6 January).

Advent became the season for ending the year’s commitments and making sure nothing no longer relevant or important got carried into the coming year. The season’s contemplative nature and focus on looking forward with hope was a natural companion to end-of-year reflecting and expectation setting for the coming year.

Living With Advent

To be honest, I care less and less every year how people choose to celebrate Christmas or don’t. When people put up their Christmas decorations doesn’t really matter. Put them up the night before Christmas. Leave them up all year round. That’s your choice.

Also, it doesn’t really matter if you choose to start Advent on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, or on the first day of December.

What matters is avoiding the stress we might feel and the pressure we put ourselves and others under, trying to craft one perfect day. It’s easier to get a season right than a single event.

The post Advent And Rethinking Christmas appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Losing My Religion

Pretty soon, this blog will celebrate its nineteenth anniversary. Given how quickly time seems to pass, the twentieth anniversary will roll around before we know it.

That’s a long time to commit to one project.

This blog is a bit like a garden. A lot can change in 20 years. Small saplings mature into trees. Some plants die or are pulled out. Weeds come and go. Nothing stays exactly the same.

The first posts on this blog were often about everyday life in Delhi, where I was living at the time. But I long ago stopped writing about “expat life”. I wrote a fair bit about golf, though I haven’t swung a club in more than 15 years.

And you’d find a lot of religion.

That’s no longer the case. At some point, far closer to 2004 than 2023, my focus, priorities, and way of life changed.

I never really explained why I stopped writing about religion – or Christianity, to be more precise. To cover it in detail would take more of a memoir than a blogpost. However, thinking about the future direction of my writing feels like a good moment to paint the story of how I “lost my religion” even if it’s only in the broadest of brushstrokes.

Religion

During the 1990s, I was living in Sydney. Over a few years, I went from being curious about Christianity to attending weekly services at a Baptist church, regularly playing music during at least one church service a week, sometimes preaching, later getting a degree in theology, teaching at a theological college, and eventually packing my bags to get a PhD in London, researching in the Centre for Theology, Religion, and Culture at King’s College London.

Towards the end of that time in Sydney, I worked in a small church and preached regularly. The minister was an older man, a former academic and a fountain of wisdom. There was also a popular youth minister who had been there for a few years.

I was contracted to be there for two years, working about 20 hours a week while also lecturing at the theological college and doing post-grad research.

In my second year there, the senior minister left. During my last months, the church was in the process of appointing a new senior minister. He was younger, and beset with a fragile ego and a tragically limited ability to hold an audience when he preached.

Even though I’d already advised the church I was leaving to study in London, some deacons felt I should go early. However, the church wanted me to stay and see out my term.

Behind the scenes, I was told the new young minister wouldn’t have a “strong arm” if I hung around. Same for the very popular youth minster. Only a “clean slate” would ensure the new minister’s success.

This drama, Shakespeare in miniature, wasn’t important.

What mattered was I left for London with no “home” church supporting me. Normally, people going on the kind of journey I was starting on do so with a supportive community backing them.

A few years earlier, I’d known a minister from Zambia who was in Australia getting a master’s in psychology. The support from his church in Harare, where he’d worked, meant a great deal to him when he faced challenges and homesickness.

I didn’t have that.

Work

During those last years in Sydney, I spoke to the head of the denomination about ordination. I wanted to know about the process and also what the future might be if I stayed on the academic track. He wasn’t interested in talking about any of that. His main concern was what he saw as the inevitable failure of my marriage. “I’ve seen what happens when a man marries a woman who has a career. The marriage never lasts,” he told me, leaning back in his high-backed office chair, arms clasped behind his head.

He was wrong. More than 25 years later, he is still wrong.

Of course, winning that argument doesn’t mean much.

What I found was that churches, in both Sydney and London, welcomed the idea because it meant they didn’t have to pay me. There were guidelines for that sort of thing. But I was always greeted with a “Well, you know” or “It’s not like you need it,” when it came time to remunerate me.

I didn’t need the money. But I also didn’t need the ambiguity that comes with being chronically underpaid.

As a musician, I avoid playing for free because it’s so easy to walk away from those kinds of gigs feeling exploited. Same with doing photos or writing.

If you believe in something, you might decide to donate your time to it. That’s your choice. When people hire you then refuse to pay, or expect you to be happy with not getting paid like your peers are, then it breeds suspicion.

I was starting to become suspicious.

Wilderness

The crisis that became a hinge point in my life came about a year before this blog started, during my first year in India.

I’ve written before about quitting my PhD. The decision was painful. I felt like a shameful failure for a long, long time. The year I quit I felt lost. It was the one time in my life when there seemed to be no reason for getting out of bed in the morning. I wrote many emails asking friends and family to come and visit me, but no one came.

And particularly, it felt like, no one from the churches where I’d worked or attended, from the church “friends” I’d made, seemed to care.

There was no supportive community, no circle of “eternal love”, nothing. Was anyone “praying” for me? It felt like there was just the heat and dust and solitude of living with a paralysing decision and an uncertain future.

The journey I’d been on for a decade came to an end, and I had to find a new path.

Emerging

Back in the early 2000s, a lot of people started sharing their experiences of church through blogs. There were stories of frustration and exploitation far worse than mine.

During the early years of this blog, I was interested in something called the “emerging church”. This felt like something new, a movement of people who wanted to hold the beliefs of Christian faith away from the harmful structures of the established church.

However, many of the people who became associated with that movement, its “leaders”, were still in mainstream denominations and got publishing contracts with the same houses that put out books by establishment church leaders just a few years before.

I felt duped.

Maybe I’d always had it wrong. I’d found myself in a Baptist church and fell in love with the history of a radical Christian group, a loose cousin of the Amish and Mennonites, groups known for questioning the role of consumerism and violence in society.

But the actual Baptist church I experienced was largely a club for middle-class people with once-a-week religious inclinations. There was nothing radical about it.

I started to wonder what I had been conforming to. Over those years, was I changing to meet some eternal moral code or something more contemporary and enculturated? So much of what I’d felt pressured to change about myself in those church years coincided exactly with the parts of myself that were most ethnic and culturally different. Did God really care that much about my curly hair and colourful clothes, for example?

This was highlighted by attending expat churches in Delhi and Hong Kong. Like germs in a Petri dish, you could see people competing to try to replicate the flavour of “church back home” that felt comforting to them.

Not Quite A Conclusion

Church takes up a lot of time. Not going to church made time for other things to speak to me again. Nature, music and art held me when I was younger, and they started to shape me again. I had more time to understand the places where I was living and the people who made those places vibrant and unique.

And I had less noise in my head. Fewer voices of judgement. The simplicity felt more spiritual than the busyness of church life.

Since then, I’ve continued to orient my life towards wisdom. We need more hope and less violence. My life beyond the walls of the church hasn’t been one of fear, loneliness, nihilism, or any of the things preachers suggested it might be. The world is full of beauty, kindness, and moral lessons. How could it be any different?

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Compostable Knowledge

During my years in India I lived in a farmhouse on three tree-lined acres. One of the stipulations of the lease was that I had to employ, at my own expense, the three gardeners who maintained the property. Every morning they would tend the gardens, mow lawns, and rake fallen leaves.

This produced a lot of garden waste. So every week they set alight a huge, aggressively smoky bonfire. That was pretty hard to live with. We’d have to retreat inside with closed windows every time it was lit.

After some weeks of this I had a chat with them. Could they compost the waste instead of burning it? They were reticent. I explained the idea in detail, helped them dig a pit in a vacant corner of the land, and showed them how to lay down the garden waste.

Pretty soon one pit became two, then three. They seemed to be happy using the compost and we didn’t have to run inside and close the windows any more.

After several months they came to speak with me. They were a bit shy and I wondered what was wrong. Maybe the composting was too much work and they were hoping to go back to burning the waste?

Thankfully, they loved the compost. It worked well in the garden and also in their own vegetable patch. The problem was they had too much. So they wondered if they could sell it. Apparently the compost was the talk of the village. Of course I said they could. They could keep whatever profits they made from the excess compost. This made them very happy.

Notes As Compostable Knowledge

I started this blog during those days living in India. Since 2004 I’ve posted 2,243 articles. In recent years I wrote about 50 articles a year, although last year was slower, and only 31 articles appeared.

But I start many, many more articles each year. Right now there are 47 incomplete articles in need of my attention.

Of course, most of these won’t get finished, or posted. What to do with the waste?

The answer is to compost it.

I’ve written before about notes, using Obsidian, and second brains. Composting is an essential part of this workflow. Recycling ideas from my own work is every bit as important as getting new ideas from reading and experiencing the world.

Every half-finished draft, even the ones that never formed into a clear idea, still have something of value in them. Maybe it’s an example or story. It could be a concept or idea I was wrestling with. Sometimes it’s an article I’d read that merited comment or criticism.

So, rather than deleting these files, or letting them drift into an eternal digital silence, I break them down. I turn each interesting piece of information into a note that can live on, as compostable knowledge.

And of course, finished work must also be composted.

Smaller Chunks Compost Faster

How many old documents do you have that you saved but have never opened again?

I’ve got a pretty vast archive. Not just old articles but also hundreds of film reviews, as well as all sorts of assignments, essays, and reports. But I’m unlikely to open anything dating back to my college days just for fun, such as essays on 10th century BCE poetry, or the Politics of the Roman Empire.

Over time, large chunks of information become indigestible.

This is especially true for purposeful writing, things we write out of obligation, or to meet deadlines. Old scratchings in a journal might be fascinating years later. Things we banged out in a caffeine-induced haze the night before they were due never are.

But everything we write contains small ideas that are worth holding on to. The art is in breaking the work down into small enough chunks that they’re easy to add to the compost pile. A thousand words could become three 40-word chunks.

This process, creating small chunks, simple notes, doesn’t require heroic levels of effort. That’s what makes it sustainable.

Composting Takes Time

The thing about composting is that most of the time you’re not doing anything. The stuff just sits there, breaking down, becoming ready to fertilise something new.

When you write, you create and combine ideas. You hold them in a certain way. But when you break those ideas down into notes, you allow them to let go of the way you held them. They’re free to settle into the background knowledge that lives in a library of notes. Ready to be recombined in fresh ways.

The power of using a tool like Obsidian is that when we search our notes we can harvest new combinations of ideas. Something you read last week could combine with something heard on a podcast last year, or a piece of an unfinished article from several years ago.

Composting plants honours the organic cycle of life. Sun and rain and nutrients from the soil combine to produce plant life which yields flowers and leaves. They in turn wither and die, and through composting become nutrients for another life cycle.

Compostable knowledge honours the value of your own life and the thoughts and insights you have. Every article, assignment, introduction, note, or other piece of writing contains within it seeds for future writing and self-expression.

You mind is your own garden.

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Introductions

We all know the awkward moment, at the start of a class, meeting, workshop, or some other kind of group event, when we’re asked to go around the room, or along a row of boxes on a screen, and introduce ourselves.

It feels forced, uncomfortable, and odd. We grit our teeth, accept our fate, and muscle through, improvising just enough words to sound like we’ve treated the exercise with respect, but not so much as to seem like we’re enjoying the limelight.

But what if this embarrassing and fraught experience was actually something useful? What if it was a gift that could advance your creative career and help you be more interesting?

Introducing Yourself And Your Story

In his masterclass on writing, David Sedaris talks about the importance of reading your work aloud. Sedaris is a hugely popular author. He’s also a much loved speaker who sells out concert halls around the world. People come to see Sedaris stand at a lectern and read his frequently amusing and often poignant short stories.

Some of these stories are published works from his books or essays he’s had published in journals like the New Yorker. Others are works in progress, things he’s still writing, that aren’t ready for publication.

For Sedaris, reading these works in public is part of the writing process. As he reads he makes notes – of where audiences laugh, where they seem to lose interest – and he uses these observations as prompts when he rewrites his pieces.

This is what comedians do when they test out jokes and new material in front of small club audiences before going on tour, recording a comedy special, or hosting a big event.

In Writer’s Digest, Jess Safaris describes going to New York’s Gotham Comedy Club one night when Jerry Seinfeld took the stage. After a blisteringly funny set, Seinfeld hung around and gave a Q&A where he even offered insight into how he comes up with new material.

Obviously, you have to come up with ideas and jokes and figure out how to tell them. But the crucial final step is to test the material, typically in small club settings, or as Safaris puts it, “try out jokes among a low-stakes crowd to see how they do before trying them at a larger venue”.

And is there any lower-stakes venue than the round of introductions before a meeting?

Why Good Introductions Help

Here’s an uncomfortable fact: You will have to introduce yourself thousands of times over the course of your life.

Some of these introductions will be instantly forgettable. Others could change your life. In some relationships, like when you’re a parent or a child, you’ll have to reintroduce yourself over and over. In others, like romantic connections or job interviews, the quality of your introduction could determine whether there is any relationship at all.

Then there’s all the other kinds of introductions, like the “About” section on your LinkedIn profile, or any of the social media platforms you use. If you write a book, or release some music or art, you’ll need to come up with other kinds of introduction.

And if you are ever interviewed, be it for a podcast or a TV show, then how you introduce yourself takes on an even deeper existential quality.

So, given the number of introductions you will need to make in your life and how important they could be, wouldn’t you want to practise doing them, in some kind of “low-stakes” environment, whenever the chance presented itself?

5 steps to improving your introductions

I used to find introducing myself anxiety inducing. Back in 2015, when I had my panic attacks, one of the things I talked to my therapist about was how difficult I found introducing myself.

Slowly, I was able to regain my confidence. Along the way, I learnt to break down the process of getting better at introductions into 5 steps.

1. Get Comfortable Introducing Your Name

Does the pronunciation of your name matter to you? Do you prefer certain pronouns? Or do you like people to use a nickname when addressing you?

Help people get these things right. Also, notice the questions they ask, like where your nickname came from, what the origin is of your family name, or any special meaning your name has. These questions don’t always come up, but when they do, it can be an insight into obvious things that make you special.

2. Choose Your Box

People inevitably want to label and categorise us. If you’re going to be put in a box, then why not make it a box of your own choosing?

Does your job title matter, or would you rather be known for what you create? Are you more concerned for people to know your track record and where you come from, or the impact you have now and where you’re going?

The best opportunities open up when you help people see you clearly. You attract like-minded individuals – especially people working towards the same kind of change or results you’re committed to.

3. Introduce Your Intention And Vibe

What are you hoping to get from the situation you’re in? Are you here to learn, to have fun, to be better informed?

Being clear about your intentions makes it easier for people to open up and connect with you. Your vibe also helps people see what your boundaries are, what’s acceptable to you, and the positive contribution you can make.

4. Practice The Pace Of Your Introduction

Great speakers often have an innate sense of time. They can “speak to the clock”. Give them 3 minutes, and they know how many words to speak and how to use pauses to make them fit.

This matters when writing introductions for yourself as well. Often you’ll be asked to fit your bio to a word count. Having a sense for what to include – whether you’re given 25, 75, 100, or 250 words – can be the difference between giving a clear impression and simply spraying vague words on a page.

When we struggle with the pace (or spacing) of an introduction, often it’s because we’re fighting our own feelings. Speakers who are good with time are managing their emotions so they don’t rush and start talking faster.

Introducing yourself on your next Zoom call might take only 20 seconds. But learning to fill that space well could teach you how to hold space for your story.

5. Mix Up Your Introductions

It might be tempting to find one introduction that works and stick to it. But remember, this is your chance to try out different ways of talking about who you are and what you do.

Plus, if your introduction becomes a script, then it will be hard to sound authentic.

Much like a comedian trying out jokes, or David Sedaris looking for the moments when an audience reacts to his stories, use the way people respond to your introduction to note which bits of your biography and identity resonate with people.

This adaptability also makes it easier for you to fine tune your interactions and self-descriptions to suit each audience while also being true to yourself and consistent with the image you present in other situations.

Being good at introducing yourself isn’t some gift the muses impart on a select few people. It’s a skill. You can become better at introductions. You can practise them. And what you learn in a low-stakes setting like your next meeting can help you become better at the more important introductions you will have to make eventually.

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