Colorado Summer Days and Da Vinci's Notebooks.
A Reunion in the Rockies, a first visit to Boulder, Da Vinci's Notebooks
Hey guys,
I so nearly gave up, this week, on ‘Life Notes’ :)
I missed hitting my Saturday goal last week, Saturday 19th. And, I was increasingly grumpy about this, as Sunday arrived, and Monday and Tuesday.
But I couldn’t.
It’s too important, for some reason. Some reason that doesn’t always make sense in the moment, when time is so precious and writing is so slow. Some reason of ‘essence’ in me. I’ll come back to this word ‘essence’ in weeks to come, since I’ve been continually writing essays in my head about it (in fact, since I first heard it used in a new CEO speech during my years in a Fund of Hedge Funds in London called IAM, in around 2007).
And, as Steve Jobs famously said, and endless others have repeatedly repeated…“real artists ship”.
The point here is not that I’m some kind of ‘real artist’, but that in anything we do we have to just keep showing up and ‘shipping’. Momentum creates momentum, and that is precious.
In this Rumspringa period for me, it’s the one commitment I have, the one drumbeat on time passing by. And perhaps the biggest thing too is that its a psychological game of wrestling ‘writing shyness’ to the ground for once and for all.
Right now, it’s simply sharing a bundle of notes with friends (Dad, Pete, Keara and a brother of another mother Adam Cotterill…who I’ll write about next week perhaps :))…
How hard can it be?
Words are how we connect with other humans. This is why writing, and speaking, are central tenets of leadership, and too the basic tools of life, of schooling and of development throughout our lives. And, words are code. And writing is coding. We can work out this and that about our operating system in the practise.
How hard can it be?
So, sharing below the ‘nearly done’ draft of notes-from-missed-shipment last week….for the record…and to get this ship back on the water.
Onwards…
Kevin
Saturday 19 August 2023
I’m adjusting to the cold summer fog of San Francisco, after six smoking hot days in the Rockies in Colorado.
It’s week 33 of 2023. It was interesting to look up the calendar week of the year, and feel the pace of time. Because that means too that it’s week 9 of ‘Rumpsringa’. Which is scary…
You know, if the ‘Rumpsringa’ Headmaster called me into his office, and sat me down across his musty old headmaster’s desk, and stared deeply into my eyes, and said: “tell me, early middle-aged Kevin, what have you done in this period…?”, my insides would shrink like a walnut. And my eyes would flit around like an amateur criminal in a lie detector test.
But that was the point of this exercise of ‘Blank Canvas’. That was the point.
To switch off, reverse or even slow down the part of us that naturally tries to strive and accomplish, to move along, and even to ‘know’. To get bored, and then to spin up again.
Travel has been a busy indulgence, the journeying from here to there peppering the mind with ideas and reflections.
And travel creates a momentum of change, in itself, that is so healthy. My surfing ‘backhand’ is much improved, and that was a first point of focus. I slashed an admin pile, have four boxes of books to donate to the San Francisco public library, have enjoyed summer visitors with time to give them, had three weekends away on the California coastline, had three weeks traveling in Mexico, and spent a lot of time catching up with overdue friends.
I’m loving this little epoch of not striving, of being slow, of ignoring logic. While too so aware of how time is like sifts of sand, dripping through your hand…
Colorado Days
-pairs well with John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High, which always throws me back to my teenage room in Surrey, having stolen Dad’s double cassette “Best of John Denver”….
Denver airport is beautiful to arrive into, the sky giant and blue and wide, and jagged at the horizon with mountains. The expansive plains on which the airport sits surrounded by logistics warehouses, this city a major western distribution hub for all things boxed.
Picked up at the airport by an old colleague for a ‘reunion’ weekend, I enjoyed downloading an altimeter app. Denver is 5,276 feet or 1,608 meters above sea level on landing, and we watched it tick up as we drove up and up, from plains to mining hills to mountains, arriving to Edwards near Vail, at 7,552 feet.
A big, cozy cabin-style home perched on an empty hillside where elk and bear and chipmunks and mountain lions are cozy at home too. From a distance one morning, across the valley on the hillside opposite, it was a real treat to see three black bear gathered in a meadow.
And a horse ride, continuing to ‘take head on’ a mild fear of horses from a childhood adventure holiday experience with a jumpy pony….
The interesting thing was that the trip was to spend time with an old boss and an old team mate of a team I was in for nine years, which was nostalgic, of course.
The visit had me thinking about the tightest teams you’ve been on…three coming to mind. The Edinburgh University 1st XV in my second year there (1995-6), the London Irish 1st XV (“Wild Geese”) in London of 2001-2 and the Equilibrium Investor Network team of 2013-22.
No, four!…
In some way, I think of me, my brother and sister as a tight-knit crew, spaghetti’ing our way through interesting lives littered around the Pacific Rim. (On that, sis’ Keara shared this brilliant TED talk by Jeffrey Kluger on the bond of siblings).
A P.S. on Denver: there is a fantastic mix of musueums (see this Trip Advisor Museums List), and I enjoyed dropping into the Molly Brown House, a museum that froze in time the elegant home of a Titanic survivor and female Denver leader in a pivotal time for the economy (the Colorado Silver boom of the 1880s) and suffrage.
A First Visit to Boulder, Colorado
I scribbled…
“Bowl shops, bike lanes, manicured parks and athletic-looking 50-somethings (and why not!?). Surrounded by the ‘Flat Iron’ rock formation jutting out of hillsides and blazing into a beautiful sundowner red as daylight fades. Dry hot air. Plenty of well-dressed, friendly looking police - and how that feels different, for America. An uber driveress, who grew up in Boulder and told me: “we’re long into a boom. The words vibe and energy are all the rage here…I’m just waiting for ‘groovy’ to come back”. On the flipside, three lyft and uber cancels one afternoon: as the profit from driving is squeezed and squeezed: less and less drivers are showing up and the glory days of the ride-share era being loved by all seem long in the past. I kept asking how it would be in five years time, and had no optimistic answer (I suspect brutally hard-working immigrants, putting up with much lesser square feet of roof to live in, are the most probable answer). Beautiful manicured suburbs, but the word “affordable” stopped applying in the last year or two, they say.
Da Vinci’s Notebooks
I started to flick back through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Da Vinci, on my Kindle, and it was fascinating to get an insight into Da Vinci’s mucky writing and noting. He was prolific, and messy, with an estimated 28,000 pages of notebooks. And, as Isaacson commented, Da Vinci too was rarely a finisher. I smiled at that.
Had To Share…
The documentary Trip of Compassion will teach you how psychedelics are now being usefully applied in helping people recover from being stuck in the past of a certain trauma. The viewer has the privilege of seeing the process of three supervised “trips”, of three Israelis that were living in years long doom loops of depression following their traumas (a parental sexual abuse, being a paramedic first responder to a horrific bus bombing, and a backpacker kidnapping while traveling in Peru).
I heard Sam Bankman-Fried being referred to as a genius this week, in conversation with a friend. I had to reframe his comment with the fact that it’s a wonderful human leveler to be aware of where ‘genius’ and ‘IQ’ teeters on being dissolved to nothing by the human frailties of ego. Bankman-Friend’s brazen breach of bail suggests a ‘god complex’, that he’ll now be reflecting on ruefully in his brown overalls from a pretty challenging detention center in Brooklyn: “Sam Bankman-Fried Was the Most Annoying Defendant of All Time”
I finally took an old Evernote note (where my life is compiled!) and wrote it up on my blog: A Running List of Favorite Documentaries. I this week enjoyed ‘Hold Your Breath: The Ice Dive’, in thinking ahead to starting a short course on free diving in two weeks time.
And, in the category of well-said simple truths that resonated this week…for some reason, for some reason….
“It can be way worse to win the wrong game than to lose one that you actually enjoy playing.” - game designer Justin Gary