CxD #155 2001(2021) Roaring Twenties, Year Two Edition

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Jan 03, 2021

1. Everyone enjoyed last week’s 45 minutes of quiet time? If you were too busy to sit there and breathe for 45 minutes––with or without Scotch in hand––you ought to strongly consider just sitting there for 1.5hrs so that your “too busy” story has time to properly deflate.

Have you ever experienced just being? No? What are you afraid you would find? Maybe some questions?

2. Here are some varieties you might find. But aren’t questions so much more fun than answers?

3. Only a few hours into the New Year, I’m going to make you cry. You’re welcome. To begin the release of these tears of empathic Joy and Tenderness and marvel of what Generosity of Spirit can look like––how playful and fun and earnest, watch this:

Books are still the most advanced technology I know of to explore, with depth and subtlety and precision, worlds unknown and ideas previously disguised and concealed. With time being our most precious resource, there are fewer ways I prefer to spend it than in the profound company of books.

Here’s your go-to list for the Best Books of the Year, which examined all the Best Books of the Year Lists, and compiled the data, so you can see which of the books got the most mentions across all the media channels.

https://lithub.com/the-ultimate-best-books-of-2020-list/

In 2020, I wanted to read a lot more than usual. And but COVID kinda got me like it did a lot of people, where for a good while I was reading about 3-4hrs a day, and then for a few months I just didn’t wanna. Nonetheless, despite starting 41 books, I managed to finish 24 of them, about a book every two weeks pace. 🐌

Here’s what I read:

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics ~ Carlo Rovelli
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time ~ Sean Carroll
Internal Family Systems Therapy ~ Richard Schwartz
Sex, Sin, and Zen ~ Brad Warner
The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age ~ Leo Damrosch
Reality is Not What You Think ~ Carlo Rovelli
Mad Men Carousel ~ Matt Zoller Seitz
Buddhism: What Everyone Needs to Know ~ Dale Wright
The Order of Time: Carlo Rovelli
The Big Picture: On the Origins of life, Meaning and the Universe Itself ~ Sean Carroll
Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe ~ Brian Greene
Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality ~ Brian Greene
Department of Speculation ~ Jenny Offill
The Hour of the Star ~ Clarice Lispector
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory ~ Brian Greene
The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos ~ Brian Greene
The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, And Win ~ Maria Konnikova
Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic ~ Esther Perel
Ultra Learning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competion, And Accelerate Your Career ~ Scott Young
Math of Poker ~ Alton Hardin
Craft Cocktails at Home ~ Kevin Liu
The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity ~ Esther Perel
Discovering the True Self ~ Kodo Sawaki
What do these say about CxD’s character? What were some of your favorite reads of 2020? Do you even read books anymore? If not, why not?
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Your New Year’s Resolutions won’t work. Do this instead. Thanks to my Zen Teacher Peg Syverson for this excellent tool.

https://yearcompass.com/

6. Happy New Year, Friends. We have a lot of Character Design to do. May you be blessed with kindness, warmth, and deep connections to yourself and to other creatures.

New Year's ~ Dana Gioia

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.

Eternity has festivals enough.

This is the feast of our mortality,

The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,

Pretending that we live the present moment.

But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,

This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now

Be our true habitat? The present is

The leaky palm of water that we skim