Fly Away, Home

Five things to share from the week

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot

Friends,

Here are five things I’ve been doing/exploring/thinking about this week:

1. I don’t like to fly. Alastair Humphreys loved travel and flew all over the world, but when he settled down with family he began to wonder: “what if this bog-standard corner of England was actually full of surprises if only I bothered to go out and look? Maybe the things I’ve chased from India to Iceland — adventure, nature, wildness, surprises, silence, perspective — were here too?” And so he set out to explore it.

2. I love Hasui Kawase. I discovered him from Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki movies, because it turns out his art is the main inspiration for how Ghibli movies look.

3. I’m a Charles Bukowski fan, and everytime I run across an anecdote about his life, it’s always incredible.

4. As I grow older, I think a lot about health and general fitness, and the myths thereof. One myth I love busting is the one that says growing old = frailty, when most of what we think of as ‘inevitable’ with aging is simply infirmity due to lack of maintenance. This 93-year-old is a perfect example of what I mean.

5. I often buy used books from Thriftbooks, but they don’t always have what I want. Then I discovered Bookfinder, which allows you search for books everywhere—eBay, Thriftbooks, you name it, over 100,000 booksellers around the world. Incredible.