Something I’m Thinking About
At times it seems like the days, weeks and months are just melting into one another.
I’ve often wondered why when we are kids it seems to last forever but as we get older years seem to slip by. If you are willing to accept that time is constant and not speeding up, there must be an explanation as to why we all feel this.
I believe this has something to do with our brains and the way we fundamentally process information.
When we’re younger, every experience is a new one and we’re constantly amazed by our world. I think of Arabelle, my newborn, and the look on her face when she feels the sensation of my beard in her hand — it’s pure awe.
As we get older these experiences become mundane and life just starts to become “normal” and “boring”.
Despite this monotony, there are always going to be moments where this cycle is disrupted and we are presented with new experiences, both happy and tragic.
In these moment we have an opportunity to reconnect with ourselves and experience an element of life with fresh eyes and open hearts.
While external factors such as sickness, sudden change in employment, or having a child will almost certainly throw us into one of these moments, I often wonder how I can create them more predictably.
Where can I constructively disrupt some of my own internal patterns and create extreme moments on my own?
I have some thoughts but I’ll save that for future musing and for now, I’d like to just leave this open ended.
Something I Recently Read
I recently read “How to Be Perfect” — a great primer on moral philosophy by Michael Schur, a long time writer for Saturday Night Live, The Office, Parks & Recreation, The Good Place and more.
It was a quick and clever read and was probably the first book on this subject to help break down the answer to questions such as “Should I Put the Shopping Cart Back in the Rack” through the eyes of Aristotle, Kant, and others.
I wish this book had been available to me when I was taking my “Great Books & Ideas” requirement freshman year in college - it might have opened my eyes a bit more to some of these philosophers sooner.
Something I’m Excited About
In February, my partners and I closed on 9 standalone bungalows in Bradley Beach, a beach town nestled between Asbury Park & Belmar here at the “Jersey Shore”.
The first 3 units are vacant and we’re in the process of renovating them to use as vacation rentals for this summer and we have more coming online later this year.
We’ve been were help up waiting for permits from the municipality and they started to come through last week. Stay tuned for more, but I’m really excited to kick things off and turn this run down property into something incredible.
We haven’t been very active on social media yet but you can follow the journey at https://www.bradleysurfvillage.com or on Instagram at @bradleysurfvillage.
Food for thought
Where can you create some intentionality in your life and take things off auto-pilot?
I’d love to hear — drop me a note in the comments.
Is Time Speeding Up?
Congratulations on closing on your bungalows! Sounds like an awesome treasure land all of you are creating! I hope they have that book on Kindle. I will give it a read. I feel the same way when reading books that would have been benefitted me earlier in my life. Thing is many of the books I've read and make me feel that way were written by psychiatrists after and as a result of "what we all went through" at the time. So much for a career in Information Technology, LOL! A good book I just finished is "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself", by Dr. Joe Dispenza, which combines principles of Neuroscience with meditation techniques. Learning and applying principles from that book combined with a can of Red Bull or some espresso is working wonders, especially after being cooped up all pandemic.