A break from the noise
A curated reading list for the exhausted majority — and those seeking calmness and connection.
Today, I’m trying something new.
My kids are only two days into summer, and I’m already exhausted. With all of their end-of-the-school-year activities and now their living-room fort building and tattletaling and noises of some kind, I just can’t. Write that is.
I know I’m not the only one.
We’re all in varying but constant states of exhaustion, I feel like. Worn out by the news, the tattletaling, the reputation building and tearing down, the mindless barrage of content and information. The noise.
So, knowing that most people are rightfully about to head out for a long weekend, knowing that might involve long roadtrips or plane rides or time lounging by pools or in bed, I’ve curated a reading list for the exhausted majority and those thirsting for calm and connection. It includes what I’ve been reading as of late, some of my all-time favorite stories, and the latest from Spirit & Sword.
Who knows, maybe this will even become a monthly thing (unless the metrics tell me otherwise).
Let’s start with …
What I’ve been reading
On how stories teach us about human nature and offer a guide for how to live in the present:
The Library and the Pond
On borrowing lives and learning how to live one’s own.
On how to find and enjoy those small, unhurried moments of connection with ourselves and others:
If You Want to Build Community, You Have to “Waste Time” with People
And a handful of ways to find “unproductive” time
By Dr. Vivek Murthy
Some of my all-time favorites
The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy
Swissair Flight 111 crashed on September 2, 1998 with 229 souls aboard. No one would ever put it all back together again.
By Michael Paterniti
I discovered this gem in my graduate school course Creative Nonfiction (shoutout to Professor Miles Harvey). I still have the hardcopy version he handed out to us in class, with underlined passages and notes scribbled in the margins, which I pull out to reread from time to time. In it, Paterniti captures the epic and tragic tale of the crash of Swissair Flight 111 in breathtaking detail. (Don’t be surprised if you cry.)
Like lovers who haven’t yet met or one-day neighbors living now in different countries, tracing their route to one another, each of them moved toward the others without knowing it, in these cities and towns, grasping Airline tickets. Some, like the Swiss tennis pro, would miss the flight, and others, without tickets, would be bumped from other flights onto this one at the last minute, feeling lucky to have made it, feeling chosen.
Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
I first read Siddhartha decades ago, and it remains one the most consequential books I’ve ever read. Set in India, the novel follows a young Brahmin who leaves his life of privilege to embark on a spiritual journey of self-discovery.
The sun and the moon had always shone; the rivers had always flowed and the bees had hummed, but in previous times all this had been nothing to Siddhartha but a fleeting and illusive veil before his eyes, regarded with distrust, condemned to be disregarded and ostracized from the thoughts because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other side of the visible. But now his eyes lingered on this side; he saw and recognized the visible and he sought his place in the world. He did not seek reality; his goal was not on any other side. The world was beautiful when looked at this way — without any seeking, so simple, so childlike. The moon and the stars were beautiful, the brook, the shore, the forest and rock, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and butterfly were beautiful. It was beautiful and pleasant to go through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned with the immediate, without any distrust.
… All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.
The latest from Spirit & Sword
Most of us can agree on the beauty of the natural world. A mountainous landscape, a sunset, the ocean.
But our tendency to assign purpose to everything is causing a shift in the world of art and architecture. A trend of not creating beauty for beauty’s sake but for whatever utility it might serve.
But as late philosopher and writer Sir Roger Scruton said:
“Beauty is an ultimate value — something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”
When we can no longer agree on what’s beautiful, let alone take time to notice and appreciate it, how else then will we experience awe and the pull to something greater?
I explore this enigma and how natural beauty may be the link to the unity we lack in my latest story:
