This voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. As always, it’s unedited so probably features some stutters and re-starts. If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it.
I’ve come to believe that inspiration, ideas, revelations and breakthroughs arrive in waves. Maybe on the heels of a fallow season, maybe when we open ourselves up to different inputs, or maybe they just ebb and flow on the tides of life.
These past months have been thick with inspiration and revelation — not all of it comfortable. But then again, change is rarely comfortable and what is a new idea or way of thinking if not change?
I mentioned last week that Ben and I watched and enjoyed Part 1 of the Steve Martin documentary on Apple TV.
I’m too young (ha!) to have known much about his rise to stand-up fame, only ever appreciating him first as a movie dad and more recently for one of the funniest bits of physical comedy I can remember at the end of Season 1 of Only Murders in the Building.
Last weekend, we watched Part 2. It explores how he went from anxious, lonely and depressed in his thirties, to happy and connected and thriving in his seventies. It looks at his relationship with aging, kindness, openness, confidence, art and his relationships with other people.
He spoke pretty openly (as much as these things can be open) about his decades-long preference to work alone and how a dream made him rethink it. (Forgive me for paraphrasing):
In the dream, he stood over an open grave, looking down at his own grinning skeleton.
He asked the woman he was with if this vision meant it was possible to die happy, to which she told him of course it was possible. There was only one thing he needed.
“What else could I possibly need?”
“Adventure,” she replied.
“So to die happy, I need to climb mountains, travel to far-off places, that kind of adventure?”
“No,” she said. “Adventure is other people.”
SMACK! (That was the sound of a powerful wave of revelation slapping me right in the face.)
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