Meditations Of An Aching Chest, Vol. 1
A compilation of musings, ramblings and reflections from the last two weeks
1.
It’s remarkable just how accessible and friendly the world reveals itself to be once you actually begin to explore it.
Mar 5
2.
Amazing how many things we worry and stress about merely because we have the luxury to. A few days of backpack camping through the wilderness will take you right to the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: food, water and shelter, baby.
Mar 11
3.
For some reason I’m always viewing the present from the perspective of what could be lost. I was taking in the lush scenery of Catalina the other day during my camping trip when I imagined some poor kid in the dystopian AI future, looking at pictures of nature on a screen, and longing beyond words to view with his own eyes what I was at that very moment perceiving so freely.
If it can be taken away from you, then it is a gift.
Mar 16
4.
Once an experience becomes memory, is it really possible to differentiate between what actually happened and what your brain projects after the fact? And whether you can or cannot, does it even matter?
Mar 20
5.
One of my favorite things about writing is the way it forces you to think, and think coherently.
So often I’ll have a seemingly brilliant idea floating around in my head, but when I set pen to paper and am forced to actually flesh it out, I realize that a) it’s riddled with inconsistencies, or b) it’s actually not all that profound.
Writing is, of course, just a form of communication—but it’s not subject to the flow of time the same way the spoken word is. The writer pieces together the whole of their message and then presents it all at once in a permanent medium, and it can then be analyzed again and again with no loss of clarity or fading of memory.
This makes incoherence and lack of substance in writing stick out like a sore thumb—and I think it’s beautiful.
Mar 21
6.
The hard question every Substack author must ask is “Why should someone read me instead of Dostoevsky?”
So many remarkable, time-tested novels have been written that the average reader cannot hope to get through all of them in a single lifetime—and that’s not even to mention all the informative non-fiction books out there. So why should these people spend their precious time on your publication instead?
It’s true that the best writing usually gains popularity with time, making renown a good judge of quality—but this isn’t always the case. So from one unsuccessful Substack author to another: Make it your goal to be the exception—the one undiscovered author who gives your readers a perspective and a narrative that’s never been crafted in quite that way before—and you just might find a group of people who, bewilderingly, decide to pass on Crime & Punishment so they can read what you have to say instead.
Mar 23
7.
Thinking about starting a new Notes series called “Out of Context Journal Entries.” Installment 1:
“Once I got to Leaf Guest House, I spent hours talking to the owner about America. He used to live in Texas and Princeton, and knew tons about the country and had a lot of crazy stories of his store getting robbed, cowboys with cars full of guns, etc. I never thought I’d be exchanging conspiracy theories about 9/11 and JFK with a Sri Lankan guy, in Sri Lanka.”
2/28/23
Mar 24
8.
The older I get, the more I realize just how many of my complaints about life are lose-lose.
I was looking for parking the other day in a super busy area of my neighborhood, totally fed up with how ridiculously hard it was to find a spot. But then I realized, if it was the other way around and the streets were empty with parking spaces in abundance, I’d be muttering under my breath about what an awful place this is to live, and how I should really move somewhere else where things are actually happening, gosh darn it.
We live in a world with trade-offs: improving something in one department might worsen something in another. Whenever I feel like complaining about something, I try to recognize if it falls into this category—and if it does, I contemplate the other side before voicing my complaint.
Mar 25
9.
“If you could time travel, what’s the first thing you would do?”
Immediately go back to 480 BC to die with the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.
Men, can we agree on this?
Mar 26
10.
Does anyone else ever feel overwhelmed by how many potential lives you could live?
I want to backpack through Asia again. But then I hear a folk song, and suddenly I want to buy land in Wyoming and become a rancher. I also want to get a studio apartment in NYC and walk to work, go back to college to get another degree, move to Alaska and become a fishing guide, and a thousand other things.
Sometimes it feels like I’m going to die living only a fraction of the lives I could have.
Mar 29
“From one unsuccessful author to another” will be how I sign all my emails now
Loving this post format, and the compiled ramblings. "If it can be taken away from you, then it is a gift." So true.