Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you for being here! And thank you, Philipp Kaspar, for the intro music.
Em sat on John’s couch and shed a couple of tears. “Read our plan to Char,” he said.
She read it out.
Getting half my time back
Being able to hire 2-3 people to help me grow the project I love
Automating the shit that I have to do so I can focus on the things that I want to do
She was awestruck by his ability to create a system for her small business that will take care of a lot of the minutia so she can focus on creativity, expansion, and play.
They spent an afternoon workshopping this together and the impact made is hard to measure.
There is little more endearing than watching friends offer their generosity to one another and truly make a difference in each other’s lives with their contributions.
This type of generosity requires patience and dedication to leading a certain type of life. A life in which the end goal is not to dominate but rather to contribute. To show up. To notice. To care.
We are indoctrinated into a system that tells us to be the best, to climb to the top, to aim as high as you possibly can!!!!!
And by no means is it wrong to have aspirations. There is nothing more gratifying in life than setting goals and having the privilege to work towards them. But we often get it wrong by fixating on the mountaintop instead of enjoying the hike up. I wrote and deleted that sentence so many times to try and make it not sound like “the joy is in the journey,” as we’ve all reached semantic satiation with that cliche such that it risks losing its meaning entirely.
But sometimes revisiting cliches at particular moments in life is what allows you to actually get closer to its meaning and to genuinely feel it for yourself.
One night, when I was little, my parents went out and had a babysitter look after us. I cannot remember for the life of me what the cliche was BUT there was a moment on this one particular evening in which this babysitter said the same words that my mom had said for my whole youth and for whatever reason, in hearing said babysitter rearticulate it, I got it for the first time.
I find that same pattern happens in my own self-understanding too. I have certain beliefs and rules to live by and then within the context of new life circumstances, revisiting them provides a whole new layer of meaning.
This happened recently with the concept of a line and a dot. I was reading The Courage to Be Disliked on the train back from “upstate” with John and came across this passage.
“Philosopher: People who think of life as being like climbing a mountain are treating their own existences as lines. As if there is a line that started the instant one came into this world, and that continues in all manner of curves of varying sizes until it arrives at the summit, and then at long last reaches its terminus, which is death. This conception, which treats life as a kind of story, is an idea that links with Freudian etiology (the attributing of causes), and is a way of thinking that makes the great part of life into something that is ‘en route.’
Youth: Well what is your image of life?
Philosopher: Do not treat it as a line. Think of life as a series of dots. If you look through a magnifying glass at a solid line drawn with chalk, you will discover that what you thought was a line is actually a series of small dots. Seemingly linear existence is actually a series of dots; in other words, life is a series of moments.” (246)
The youth is challenged by this and asks the philosopher: how can greatness be achieved if you are not dead set on a direction in life?
The philosopher replies with another cheesy but apropos metaphor about dancing. To paraphrase, some dance the dance of the violin and become professional musicians, some dance the dance of the bar and become lawyers, some dance the dance of writing and become authors, and others dance one type of dance and end up becoming something entirely different.
“But none of these lives came to an end “en route.” It is enough if one finds fulfillment in the here and now one is dancing.”
- Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked, 249
The philosopher goes on to explain that there are two different types of motion that one can live by: kineses or energeia.
Whereas kineses has a start and an endpoint and its efficacy is measured by how quickly a particle is able to move from one place to another, energeia “is a kind of movement in which what is “now forming” is what “has been formed.”“
If your goal in life is to climb a mountain, you can get there kinetically by taking a helicopter to the top. But if your goal is to be the proudest dot on the face of the planet, then you can continue existing in the moment as you are, always dancing the dance. There is no moment of arrival if the day-by-day of what you are working towards a) contains a sense of contribution in itself and b) allows you to live a life in which you are truly present, joyous, and in a place to contribute to those around you.
Such is the case in the example at the top of this newsletter. Em and John are walking the walk. They’ve crafted their lives in such ways that they get to enjoy the heck out of being dots. They can bounce around from one thing to the next because, in their confidence and self-acceptance, they know that just by showing up, they contribute immensely to the world around them.
I recently listened to Ezra Klein and Judith Shulevitk talk about the 1973 “Good Samaritan” experiment, which studied the factors that contribute to whether an individual stops to help a stranger in distress.
They measured for temperament, perception of time, and moral beliefs.
Seminary students were tasked with walking across campus to give a talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan and the main independent variable was how much of a hurry each group was in.
Students were separated out into 3 groups:
One group was told they were late and needed to hurry ("High hurry").
A second group was told they were on time but should head over without dawdling ("Intermediate hurry").
The third group was told they had plenty of time and could move at a leisurely pace ("Low hurry").
What they found was that regardless of personality or religious beliefs, the main determining factor in giving aid to this stranger in distress was one’s perception of time. When living life in a hurry, basic morals and ethics become a luxury.
We all have seasons of our plates being more full than others. We all have different jobs and life circumstances that somewhat dictate our schedules. That is not what this is about. This is a larger conversation about the framing of your life. It’s a 3,000 foot view of the mode from which you are operating.
You can stand at the bottom of a mountain and hold your breath while sprinting to the top. Or you can treat life as a walking meditation, taking a beat to be conscious of each footstep, to observe what it feels like to lift a foot off the ground, bend your knee upwards, extend it back down, strike the floor with your heal, rolling up to the ball of your foot, and beginning the process again.
There is so much more life to be found in a present observation of your ascension.
I read a newsletter the other day titled “Lessons from Conversations with a Billionaire,” and one of my main takeaways was the importance of setting anti-goals. In addition to daydreaming about the places that you want to go by continuing to dance the dance, it’s also good to think about where you definitely do not want to stop along the way.
The author, Ali Abdaal, outlines his worst-case scenario week so he knows what to avoid.
He says, “In my case, if I imagine what a miserable working week would be (within the context of my existing business), it would be Zoom calls all day, no creative work, strict deadlines from sponsors, and the feeling that I’m making videos that I don’t actually think are useful just for the sake of an algorithm or a sponsor. I’m also staying in the house all day, not doing any exercise, eating unhealthy takeaway food, and not seeing any friends.”
Admittedly, anti-goals can slow your business growth or whatever goal you are applying this to. But in exchange, you produce sustainable success. You enjoy the dance of it. You do not forgo ethics and morals for the sake of speed and grandiosity.
It’s easy to fear normalcy when our society is so obsessed with celebrities, geniuses, and tip top achievers. But reading both The Courage to Be Disliked and No Bad Parts has helped me challenge why that fear reigns so true.
“Philosopher: You are probably rejecting normality because you equate being normal with being incapable. Being normal is not being incapable. One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority,” (Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked, 243).
Somewhere along the way, we have mistaken normalcy for failure.
But we are all pretty damn normal in comparison to one another. And also exceptional in our own lives.
Normalcy requires confidence and humility. From there, we can self-actualize. From there, we can actually be of use to the world because we are not getting lost on the way to an arbitrary end goal.
“After Maslow had studied self-actualizing people later in his life, he found that while they may not have maximized their potential in every area of their lives, these people worked at causes that benefited others and were precious to them, such that it didn’t feel like work at all.” (Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, 131).
That’s all for today! Thank you for getting
with me this week! Catch ya here next time.With love,
Char
Xandra’s Curation Corner
Xandra Beverlin is an incredible art curator at Pace Gallery, co-founder of PULSE, and dear friend, who so generously pulls pieces for this newsletter each week. I text her a few short bullets about the main themes of Char’s Web and she replies with the most thoughtful articulations of the artists that come to mind. This is my favorite part of writing my newsletter. Do yourself the favor of reading her curator’s notes!
“It’s 2 and 3 that call to me the sharpest, and specifically bring me back to Abstract Expressionism, specifically to the work of Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. I think so much of what you’re getting at in this newsletter is about slowing down and appreciating the meticulous level of detail that we can see if we truly stop to look - a couple holding hands, a lightbeam across an aging building, a smile from someone you don’t know that well yet...but would like to. Life is then bound by these romantic, minuscule, sometimes awkward and intangible moments in the same way that Martin and Ryman’s paintings are held together by minute details of color and form.
So often AbEx artists are held to a certain disdain after a quick first glance at their work: considered to be elitist or esoteric. I was sooo guilty of this as well, I thought I “didn’t get it” and it took me years of realizing there wasn’t really anything to “get” - I just needed to take the time to actually sit with the piece and appreciate the level of detail - it doesn’t jump off the canvas like so many other figurative works that have such a presence in the market today.
The other thing that these artists seem to be known for is their humility, which struck me so much with “One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority.” They had mastered this technique of subtlety, and became leaders and inspirations for so many artists of our time - but never saw themselves as higher than any other.
Someone once described Martin’s work as something that “lets its peace communicate itself” which I love
Idk, I know this is more of a scholarly jump from some of the work I’ve sent you in the past, but as I’ve gotten older I really do think that these Minimalists were onto something - we appreciate the detail and intricacy if we allow ourselves to slow down. Something I continuously struggle with but worth the effort”
-Xandra Beverlin, May 2024
Char’s Web Song of the Week
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.
#37: what is awe?
#44: tits up!
#49: we have to be orderly on the instant
#56: do it for yourself