Walking 90km to work, needles in a haystack, Axel Vervoordt, and more

Seven links to worthwhile thin(g/k)s

Hello dear reader,

This past week, the tense nature of lockdown continued to ease a tad. I got to spend a slow morning with a friend from law school in a charming portion of Brentwood near San Vicente. Over coffee and tea, and in anticipation of a few droplets of afternoon rain, we discussed, among other things, aesthetics and design. It got me thinking about how we design our lives, sometimes subconsciously, from the most mundane of things (Where in the kitchen and in what container do we store our spices?) to the more consequential (choices that carve out our schools and careers, marriage, family planning, and so on). Life is a beautiful thing, and even more so in that we hold the agency to design our lives on the vision-board of our decisions.

And so, without further ado, here are seven links to bits of the world I have been exploring this week, shared with the hope that you will find them to be an inspiring springboard for deeper thinking.

1. My visual sustenance this weekend: When I posted a short video on IG stories earlier today featuring the open tabs on my YouTube channel (courtesy of my lovely friend Kylee kindly curating a list sparked by the above San Vicente conversation and meet), many of the people on Instagram reached out asking for details. I thought I’d feature the tabs here in case you’d like to explore alongside me this weekend:

   • Interior designer (a) Alex Vervoordt; (b) Dickens v. Tolstoy, (c) words that changed the world, (d) Seth Godin and Marie Forleo in conversation, (e) Ilse Crawford discussing design and wellbeing, (f) Biomimicry; and (g) why beauty matters.

2. Art search engine: I spent way too much time sifting through public domain images collected from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the New York Public Library Digital Collection. Type something into the search engine, and voila, you get access to what amounts to a nicely-curated virtual museum experience. My search term was, naturally, ‘books.’

3. In a Q&A format, 75 artists explore their triumphs and travails a year into the pandemic.

4. Earth, wind, and (solar) fire: What else do we think we are prepared for, but aren’t? I suggest pairing this read with the auditory experience of Earth, Wind & Fire’s Fantasy to ease into the realization that there is little in reality we are prepared for. PS — this song was my mom’s party groove when she was a tomboy kid growing up in the Soviet Union, and it always ends up reminding me of how ‘time-travel’ in a sense is possible through music.

5. The Commute: Walking 90km to work with no food, water or shelter.

6. A heartfelt reminder from Rilke: “[D]o not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different, he could never have found the words that he did.”

7. Information overload: Needle in a haystack or, as the critic Nicholas Carr observes, "haystack-sized piles of needles?”  I have been operating under an endless stream of information and books I want to get to (say, for instance, the infinite and infamous to-be-read [#TBR] hashtag phenomenon in the bookish world on Instagram). They aren’t books/articles/podcasts I don’t care about; rather, they are what I actually want to read. This makes me overwhelmed, which quickly can turn into feeling paralyzed because the list of interesting information does not seem to be shrinking (meanwhile, our time on Earth is). Perhaps, our job in ameliorating this stifling feeling is to treat our TBR books as libraries, where we get to come and go, pick up books that interest us, drop ones that don’t, and in the meantime, refuse to be worried about the one-step forward two-steps backward approach of ticking off and adding to the list of things we feel the urgency to get to. As The Imperfectionist writes, “treating your ‘to read’ pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).” That’s a worthwhile goal, no?

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Readers’ Circle

If you’d like your response to be shared anonymously in upcoming newsletters, in the spirit of connectivity in this digital landscape and to recover from pandemic blues, drop a line (or a few!) via email to anielizaveta@gmail.com sharing where you are from or how you would introduce yourself.

This week’s selection:

Dear Ani,

I was born near the ocean and continue to live next door to the Pacific. It offers me an escape from the city-side hustle and i value the sun kissed salty breeze on my morning runs. Even way before the pandemic it taught me to take each stage of life with dignity. And every day of the pandemic these months, I’d go right up to where water meets land and to dip my feet into the cold. I wonder how many of us have turned off churning brains enough to feel something other than the steps of grit on the soles of our feet. Water, sand, grass, anything from the earth. Thank you for your thoughtful work here.

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Until next Friday!

With love,
Ani