The Mixed Bag, 0924

Elton John, Deborah Harkness, Andy Miller, and our relationship with time

The Mixed Bag is a curated list of stuff I’ve enjoyed this month: books, podcasts, talks, the occasional movie or TV show, and more. We’ll be back to regular programming in the next issue.

🐾 in case you missed it

• Counting how many Mondays we’ve got left leads to living an astonishingly alive life.

• I ignored the warning bells. Look what happened.

• Makes You Think is a collection of time-related passages I found that made me think.

• Contrary to what our world seems to value most, not everything has to be fast.

• Profile of the month: Johanna Walker

🔗 finds

• Lani V. Cox
  and this beautiful contemplation of her relationship with time inspired my own reflections.

• If you’re a fan of the 10% Happier podcast, you’ll have likely heard about the recent career earthquake Dan Harris revealed. I appreciated his lessons learned.

• Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Ness Labs shares a protocol for getting out of a slump mode.

• Cathy Jacob
  talks about the telltale signs of drift and the way back from it.

• Sophie S.
  writes about why and how they ended up living a life off-the-grid

• In Praise of the Quiet Life by The School of Life

• Maria Popova over at The Marginalian on escaping the trap of efficiency and Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks

• This older piece by Erin Loechner: How to Slow Your Life

📚 reading

• The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller. Hilarious account of how reading 50 great books (and two not-so-great ones) saved his life.

• Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness. The second book in the All Souls series. This one’s mostly set in the 16th century.

💬 last word

This song’s been on my mind as I close out my birthday month. 😂

Here’s to “still standing” for a few more years, decades even!

Cool Beans,
Lou Blaser