Four Thousand Weeks, Becoming Articulate, and Black Sun
A few stories that I ran into in the last few weeks:
I don’t remember how I stumbled across Oliver Burkeman’s book titled Four Thousand Weeks, which promised to teach us the science of ‘time and how to use it’. I had never heard of Burkeman earlier, not read any of his previous work, and found the cover of the book, frankly, uninspiring. However, I am glad that I read the book, for it turned out to be not a collection of productivity enhancement tools. Rather, it captured the finitude of our lives and how the concept of keeping time and becoming ever more productive has robbed us of enjoying the moments. Every hour counts, we are told. But why? The concept of time keeping is a recent invention, and seems like we have fallen victim to our own inventions (just like the way we do to smartphones these days). Instead of using time, we are letting time use us. We seek busyness to escape our real predicament that each one of us has finite time on this planet. Keeping busy makes us feel we are using our time well. But is that really so, or are we simply running away for facing our finitude? Burkeman writes that since we don’t really know what to do with our finite time, we choose to: busy ourselves so completely that we don’t have to decide about how to really use that moment. Or, we carry on with what has already been laid down for us by others, i.e., marry and have kids, hold a regular job. This book nudged me to consider an alternative to a project driven live that I have lived so far. Reading it led to a deeper reflection than I had considered while picking up the book, and it’ll most likely turn out to be my most gifted book to others.
How to become articulate? Ask this question and you’ll tons of advice on the internet. However, what stood out for me was this short video response from Jordan Peterson when he was asked this question. “Read extensively” he recommends, for you would want to know ten times more than what you’ll end us distilling and speaking. And, take out time to write daily. Reading exposes us to the world of vast knowledge, and if you have to speak well, then digging into that well of deep knowledge that you’ve collected while reading will help. Not all you read will be remembered, and that’s where the idea of distilling the key points by writing them down is an essential aid. Taking out as little as fifteen minutes every day to write could turn out to be hugely beneficial. Finding those fifteen minutes daily may be a challenge for some of us, and that’s why I am a big supporter of chunking writing exercises over the weekends. For instance, this newsletter is my way of capturing and sharing the knowledge that I have read/heard, and I hope it helps me become a better communicator as well.
Finally, I discovered Soren Solkaer’s work via this story that he wrote in NyTimes. I was perhaps living under a rock, for I didn’t know who Solkaer is before reading this story on “Black Sun”. Black Sun, loosely translated is a phenomenon that happens each spring and autumn in southern Denmark when the skies “come to life with the swirling displays of hundreds of thousands of starlings”. Solkaer writes about this phenomenon and what it takes for him to capture these remarkable scenes in pictures and videos. Why do these starlings gather and fly around in these intricate patterns? “There is no single definitive explanation for why starlings murmurate, though most scientists theorize that the behavior helps protect the birds from predators," Solkaer writes. Reading this story made me look up to the sky, something that I had forgotten to do in a long time.
A quote that I came across:
I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.
— Lin Yutang
