Weekly Wednesday Wisdom #9

Reflection, anticipation, and process.

Hello friends and fellow lovers of wisdom,

Welcome to another issue of Wednesday Weekly Wisdom where I curate and share what I hope are useful resources for the cultivation of your own wisdom. 

Let’s begin…

What I’m reading…

The Daily Stoic. I'm reading this for the third consecutive year as part of a Stoic practice. March’s theme is about awareness. These daily reminders to remember and meditate on what is and what is not within our control, what is and what is not important, are as perennial as watching the breath and investigating what we are.

What I’m listening to..

Ramy Romany and Jordan Harbinger. Ramy is an Egyptologist and Emmy-award winning documentarian who has some wild stories around his childhood exploring tombs with his dad, how he met his wife, and escaping the country during the Arab Spring. I’m planning to go on a trip to Egypt at the end of this year so this was some fuel for building anticipation. Of particular interest was his project of connecting ancient Egyptian history with religious history from his perspective as a Coptic Christian.

David Kadavy - Digital Zettelkasten, The Heart to Start, How To Write A Book, and Mind Management, Not Time Management.

Thanks to the Scribd algorithm, I stumbled upon David Kadavy’s work. I started with Digital Zettelkasten, which is not dissimilar from Building A Second Brain. It was a short listen, about a half hour. From there, another short read on How To Write A Book detailed his challenging experience writing his first book after consistently blogging for several years, and how he overhauled his creative process. The Heart To Start was slightly longer, and now I’m working my way through Mind Management, Not Time Management, both of which are slightly meatier on creativity and productivity. All in all, a pleasant discovery given my recent reorientation to book writing.

One talk I neglected to mention last week was a conversation between Sam Harris and Swami Sarvipriyananda entitled The Ultimate Nature Of Things, with the caveat that it is behind a paywall (albeit optional). I am curious enough to delve further into his widely available teachings. It was quite insightful to hear the nuances among differing spiritual paths like Advaita Vedanta and the differing schools of Buddhism even if it got into the weeds. I'm at the point in my spiritual journey that the idea of going direct to the source (as far back as that is feasible) has appeal. One takeaway is his formulation of how schools of spirituality differ – devotional paths describe awakening as a matter of faith, yogic paths as a matter of experience, and the jnana path as a matter of knowledge.

What I’m watching…

My breath, thoughts, and heartbeat as they appear in consciousness when I remember to.

What I’m thinking about…

I’m giving myself some time to plan and two important considerations are finding a balance between a book I really want to write that both myself and other people would really want to read.

Some initial topics include spirituality, music and my love for learning. As for the second point of writing a book people want to read, I’ve considered the idea of pre-selling a book. However, that presupposes an engaged audience.

I will also need to sit with why I would write a book. It is a combination of regret minimization and desire for self-expression and contribution.

I previously mentioned Charlotte Grysolle’s presentation on a year of living creatively where she undertook and documented twelve creative experiments for one month each. There’s something to this format that deeply appeals to my love of learning and the spontaneity of following my curiosity. Another inspiration that strikes is around the Choose Your Own Adventure books and the nonlinear format of Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Body, a personally profoundly influential book.

On the topic of music, it would involve something around articulating my learning and teaching framework approach to music – perhaps from the lens of what it takes to participate in a jam session. Learning to jam and improvise has been one of my life’s greatest delights and I would love to share that in an easily digestible way. Some of my experiences are documented here.

Last, on the topic of spirituality, my affinity for this topic comes from the pangs of existential angst I felt most deeply as a young man and wrote about in my piece Planting Crops Of Meaning, as well as this piece here on the Paradox Of Spirituality. For whatever constellation of personal idiosyncrasies, I consistently return to these ultimate questions around living well, purpose and meaning. Even my first piece on Substack was entitled Who Are You?, an ode to self-inquiry, Ramana Maharshi, and interrogating social conventions of speech and identity.

What I’m working on…

Two projects are operationalizing my priorities for March and the aforementioned ideation on book topics and which framework to follow.

That’s all for this week, my dear readers.

Have a creative week,

Tai