Personal essays
Giving the present a moment to mature.
Looking backwards and forwards
When we’re young we learn that January is named for the Roman god Janus.
The pictures show a figure with two faces - one looking ahead and one looking back - to represent the gateway, the transition, the doorway to the future.
For most of us, however, Janus is a better symbol for December.
We’re inundated with looks back. Here are the important moments from the year in <fill in whatever it is we’re noting>. Could be Sports, Politics, music, … what were the highlights and lowlights.
We don’t even wait for the year to be over to award the best
And every service we subscribe to wants to wrap up our year and tell us how we used their platform. Here’s the music you listened to, the shows you watched, the places you visited, …
And as we look back at the year that hasn’t yet ended, we look forward to the year that hasn’t yet begun.
We make resolutions, set goals, and make plans.
My tradition for a decade or so has been to choose three words that I will use to guide me. I picked up this practice from Chris Brogan and I should probably look back and collect my three words from past years somewhere.
Unlike Chris and others, I don’t pick my three words until the new year begins and I can take a good look back at the year before. Actually, I don’t commit to my three words until then. I think about them a fair amount.
So, for me, December, which has no official god, has become the home of Janus. January is not about walking through doorways and facing forward and back. January is about opening a fresh notebook and getting down to work.
The writing process
I’ve been listening to “The Autonomous Creative Podcast”. Jessica talks to various creatives about the business of being a creative as well as the work they produce.
I had to pause the interview Jessica Abel did with Austin Kleon because he was saying a lot of things I wanted to remember and I was on a walk to and from a bookstore to pick up some last minute holiday gifts.
Kleon was talking about what he learned from reading about Thoreau and then reading Thoreau’s journal.
Kleon said that the takeaway is, “go for a walk every day and look at the world and then come back and write about it.”
There’s a lot more there than go out in the woods and avoid other people.
But there was also more to it than that. Kleon said that, like Thoreau, David Sedaris also writes in a diary or journal every day. But Sedaris has a pocket notebook that he carries with him all day and makes notes in.
If I had had one of those I wouldn’t have had to pause the podcast.
Each morning he sits and writes about yesterday.
It turns out, Thoreau did much the same.
So Kleon carries a notebook. Each morning he writes in his journal about yesterday. After writing these pages by hand, he blogs.
Hearing this was one of those “I should do that” moments.
Let it sit
There are so many things we know that validates this approach.
Why is hindsight 20 20? We have the distance and context to see the important bits and separate them from the noise and the trivia.
Why does soup taste better the next day? The components have had a chance to meet each other and exchange ideas.
Ok - that’s not the reason. But soup does taste better the next day.
As of today, I can look back on three hundred newsletter essays that I’ve written over the past four years and nine months.
One of the coolest things for me is that I have this podcast where I record the essay from roughly three years earlier. At this point I’ve recorded one hundred forty three of them.
My favorite part is that it’s the soup of yesterday. I get to reexamine what I was thinking three years ago. And that thought was my look back at what was swirling around in my head - you know, like the soup - from the week before.
I believe in yesterday.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 300. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe