Pursuit-Worthy Elements
August 14, 2024
3-Item Status
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: The Struggle for Taiwan by Sulmaan Wasif Khan
Listening: run! by WILLOW
Quick Notes
Book Reviews: One quick ask today—if you’ve read and enjoyed one of my books (including older ones!), consider taking a minute to leave a review on Amazon. Reviews help indie authors a lot (as we don’t have Big Publisher Credibility to lean on), and I’m perennially bad at asking for this sort of thing, which has left several of my titles under-reviewed. Thanks very much in advance, I appreciate you taking the time :)
Poll: For this week’s poll, I ask about your international travel experiences (so far).
(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status and/or Quick Notes about what’s happening in your life.)
Pursuit-Worthy Elements
One way to figure out which challenges (of all possible challenges) are worth pursuing is to gauge how difficult they are to perform, how desirable they are in terms of outcome, and how satisfying the process of attempting them might be.
I like to imagine each potential pursuit as a three-endpoint spectrum with those aforementioned attributes as labels.
This allows me to mentally plot something like learning to pilot a ship as significantly difficult, not terribly desirable (for me), and moderately satisfying (as the idea of knowing how to do this, even if I probably wouldn’t do it often, is decently appealing).
This can serve as a heuristic for how I invest my time, energy, and resources on activities—which I find helpful because while it can be relatively simple to weigh the benefits and downsides of buying a new possession (especially once you get good at pausing and assessing what a new potential acquisition will actually do for you and where your desire for it originates), it’s sometimes trickier to compare and contrast activity-oriented options, including those that would involve a significant amount of effort and attention.
I recently started taking CrossFit and ballet classes, and I decided on both (as opposed to all the other things on which I could be spending my time and money) because they each seemed to offer me the right kind of challenge for where I’m at and where I’d like to be going.
Both classes are difficult in the sense that they offer substantial physical challenges and unfamiliar techniques.
Both offer outcomes I’d like to accomplish: better mobility and flexibility, greater (and more balanced) strength, and different sorts of physicality-related disciplines.
And both are satisfying as practices; it’s not always enjoyable suffering through a million reps of something strainful or repeating a gawky movement until it’s reflexively graceful, but the process of facing such difficulties and slowly improving oneself until they’re no longer so daunting is immensely and consistently gratifying.
The raw difficulty of these challenges wouldn’t, unto themselves, be enough to keep me interested and invested, nor would simply wanting what’s on the other side of the requisite labors.
The periodic moments of gratification lining the path between where I am and where I hope to be would likewise prove insufficient (in isolation) to keep me happily coming back to face the frequent confusion, embarrassment, and soreness inherent in these sorts of pursuits.
In my experience, undertakings that combine all three elements most consistently lead me in a direction I want to go, along a path I’ll enjoy traversing for its own sake.
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Interesting Links
Finalists from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Contest
“This aurora panorama, which looks like a big dragon over the rock pyramids, was the result of a geomagnetic storm (level G2) generated by a coronal mass ejection earlier that day,” explains Chilean photographer Carina Letelier Baeza. “The result was intense red-greenish aurorae throughout the whole night. The location of the photo is the Arctic Henge, which has a rich cultural meaning for Icelanders, and was the only place in Iceland with clear skies that night.”
Why Do Tennis Balls Come in Airtight Containers?
Like a lot of packaged goods, it comes down to shelf life. Tennis balls have a felt-covered surface with a hollow rubber core that’s filled with either air or gas and pressurized to around 27 pounds per square inch (PSI), or around 12 PSI more than normal air pressure at sea level. If the balls were sold “loose,” meaning they came either in standard packaging or sold out of bins, they would quickly lose their internal pressure. Putting them in a sealed can forces the ball to retain its internal PSI: As a result, the balls are as pressurized and bouncy upon opening as they were at the time of manufacturing.
The 27 Most Beautiful Bridges in the World
The idea of “beautiful bridges” might be unexpected. In the world of architecture, perhaps nothing is more utilitarian than a bridge. Indeed, not only do these spanning structures allow us to safely pass over a gap, but unlike some skyscrapers and homes, everyone has access to a bridge. And just because they are functional it does not mean they have to be ordinary in design. In fact, it’s in bridges that some of the world’s biggest architects show what their creative minds are capable of.
(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)
Poll
According to last week’s poll, most of ya’ll are feeling decently good or pretty dang good about how things are going with life, which is wonderful to hear!
(If things aren’t going so well at the moment and you want to share / vent / receive an encouraging word from a stranger from the internet, please shoot me an email—I’m around, would love to hear from you, and I respond to every message I receive.)
This week, I’m curious to know a little about your international travel experiences—more specifically, how many countries beyond your home country you’ve visited (this has been on my mind, of late, as while I’ve been focusing most of my travel energy here in the States, of late, I’m mulling some potential cross-border jaunts next year):
Outro
I’m booking a flight for Seattle today, as I’ll be headed back to visit family and help with my baby nephew’s physical therapy in less than a month.
It’s been interesting bouncing back and forth between Washington and Wisconsin so regularly this past year, as it’s given me the chance to see little James’ progress (and there’s been a LOT of progress—he’s a tough little guy with a great support system) while also giving me a sort of external chronological yardstick for tracking my own rhythms and cadences.
These things have happened since my last visit, this has changed, this has been held consistent, I feel this one way now but I felt this other (completely different) way last time I was booking these flights.
A week spent away from my normal routines and processes is just enough time for a reset, too, which serves as a latent opportunity to check in with myself and to tweak some knobs, before returning to my normal life with some new ideas and (hopefully) better calibrated settings.
Any travel (of any kind, destination, or duration) in your near-future? What have you been working on, of late? Drop me a message and tell me what’s been going on, and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)