This is the first newsletter I’ve written in midair. I’m flying back from a long weekend trip to Sedona with Anne and some close friends, watching the little plane on my screen tick slowly east under the glare of an overhead light. Airplanes are a great place for uninterrupted writing.
I had hoped that an idea for this week’s issue would come before Thursday, when my flight was set to take off. Sometimes that is the case, and on those occasions my weekend passes more freely. Nothing to do but hit send.
But that didn’t happen this time around, and in an effort to enjoy my time in a beautiful place with people I care about, I pushed the newsletter to a far corner in my mind. “Something will come,” I told myself.
Well, Thursday to Sunday passed as all great long weekends do: In a blur of happy memories. On Thursday afternoon I was inhaling two Double Doubles in an In-N-Out parking lot, and on Friday we were eating pizzas and talking about ghosts, spirits and signs from God. During the days we hiked dusty, cactus-lined trails and made conversation single-file. Walking, talking and eating, as all days should be spent.
One selfish benefit of a long weekend like this one: Prolonged periods of time to read. And read I did – on Thursday’s flight I tore through Alexis Ohanian’s Without Their Permission, about the founding of Reddit, then spent early mornings and spare moments the next few days on Billion Dollar Whale, the story of Jho Low’s massive 1MDB fraud.
Then on Saturday afternoon we happened past a Goodwill, and for $3.29 I picked up a hardcover version of When Breath Becomes Air, a neuroscientist’s memoir I’d been meaning to read about being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. I couldn’t believe my luck.
And so I read Paul Kalanithi’s story on the ride to the airport, waiting to board the flight to New York, and in the air over New Mexico, knowing that somehow the words on the page would inspire my writing here. “Listen to Paul,” the foreword demands. “In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back.”
That’s largely what I did. The book is about confronting death, about accepting it, but as I read I couldn’t stop thinking about the other book I had just finished, about a cast of characters involved in the theft of billions of dollars of Malaysian state funds. I’d felt slightly ill reading Billion Dollar Whale, with the sheer scale of its gluttony and waste, but bookended by Paul’s story I just felt sad. How could so many people have wasted their lives on such useless pursuits? One phone call transcript, between the wife of a jailed conspirator and an accomplice who helped sell out her husband, said it all:
Laura: For you, it’s a matter of money. But for us, it’s a question of our lives, our family, everything.
Mahoney: It’s not just a matter of money, Laura. it’s a matter of my future, my life. I won’t ever be able to do deals anywhere because of all this, okay!
Laura: But that’s just work, money, I’m sure you have enough of that, so what’s the problem?
Nothing sounds more desperate than last-ditch attempts to cover up financial crimes, right? It’s comical until you realize that these are people with everything – like Paul the neurosurgeon, they went to top schools, received top grades, were “whip-smart” and ambitious. And yet they choose to commit crimes, and Paul, in his final years of life, chooses to write this:
“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”
There’s no one single way to live a life. Can I make a concrete statement like that as an overly-optimistic 27 year-old? Maybe not. But it seems clear that there are many ways to live a good life, and for anyone to claim that one way or the other is the right way seems foolish.
But it’s clear to me – and to everyone, right? – that breaking the law in order to spend life partying on $300 million super yachts does not make for a good life. At one point it is probably also quite clear for those who go on to perpetrate such crimes. But somewhere along the way they lose sight of what’s important.
When Breath Becomes Air. I’d heard the title but never thought about its meaning. Spend a minute on it, and like the larger book, listen to what it says and what you have to say back. It’s a pretty profound phrase, I think, and a reminder of what I see as the book’s main message, captured well in my favorite passage:
“Struggle towards capital-T Truth, but recognize that the task is impossible – or that if a correct answer is possible, verification certainly is impossible.
In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them.”
That such great books exist is obvious. What is less obvious is the value of us all picking them up and reading them. That the central characters in both stories are roughly 35 years old, to borrow from my conversations this weekend about spiritual signs, seems more like fate than coincidence. The cost of one set of lessons is a man’s life; the other a country’s fortunes.
The $3.29 and handful of hours they cost me seems like a fair trade.
Otherwise
This has been a week full of friends. My friend Jake and I ran a marathon last weekend, which I wrote about on my site (linked below), and my sister and I spent a great few days with each other before my trip out west. Anne and I are back together after a few weeks apart and I was able to catch up with two friends I haven’t seen much of in the last eight months. Things are feeling really good.
It’s hard to reconcile that with the reality our country is facing right now, with a worsening pandemic and the specter of a lonelier holiday season on the horizon. It feels more important than ever to spend time being grateful.
Recent Posts:
Race Report: South Brooklyn Slog (26.09) – Recap of Jake and my “race” from 11/8
What I’m Reading:
Five Steps Toward a More Meaningful Holiday Season – The Minimalists
“Step One: Avoid holiday doorbuster sales. Step Two: Gift your time. Step Three: Gift experiences, not stuff. Step Four: Ask for better Christmas gifts. Step Five: Soup Kitchen Christmas.”
No More Clown Shit – Mike Solana, Pirate Wires, 2020
“The last four years of hysteria might be close to over, as our nation tracks toward a calmer period. But this is only possible because, systemically speaking, nothing in our country has changed. There was no revolution, or fascist rise to power. There was no resistance. There were just elections, among neighbors, and results.”
What I’m Listening To:
The Science of Intermittent Fasting with Jason Fung – The School of Greatness Podcast