Sipping from the Fire Hose

I'm convinced that half of my fairly rugged immune system is the result of traveling to many different climates and biomes, and the other half is the consequence of drinking from the hose in our backyard when I was a kid.

How many aphids did I swallow? How many tardigrades did I quaff?

How many gallons of water, over the course of those years, did I gleefully guzzle?

A fire hose is no standard hose. It's reinforced to sustain amplified pressure, averaging around 100 to 300 psi (pound-force per square inch). For reference, 100 psi is enough force to send a fire hose wriggling around like an anaconda, and sufficient strength to throw firemen struggling to get it under control around like a bucking bronco.

Fire hoses are used to send vast quantities of water arching over distant fires, and the pressure required to make that happen is impressive.

When I consume media — tweets, books, podcasts, movies, TV shows, music — it can sometimes feel like I'm wrestling with a fire hose.

There's just so much out there, all of it streaming at me 24/7, and the focus and stamina it can take just to wrangle that serpentine tube into a position where I can get my bearings, and make comprehendible some portion of what flows forth from its cavernous belly, can be exhausting.

It's not easy to simply sip from such a flow of information and entertainment. It's easy to get pulled in — pulled under! — to the point where extracting yourself is nearly impossible. You grow gills to survive the flood, and eventually find life on land too difficult to tolerate. Without that torrent blasting you from all sides at all times, there's less pressure, less intensity.

Life at 14.7 psi, at standard sea-level atmospheric pressure, can be intolerable once you've adjusted to a lifestyle in which you're constantly bombarded by sensory information, by pressure on all sides. Normal existence without a continuous barrage of inputs can seem...empty.

This fire hose we've created is truly one of the wonders of the modern world, because of the vast reach it provides us. More people are capable of not just producing, but projecting more information (data, experiences, visuals, sounds) out across the vast expanses of the planet than ever before.

Each and every one of us have a voice that is booming and god-like. That we can listen to and experience context from others around the globe is equally impressive.

But like children who don't know their own strength, we too need to take care in how we use these powers. We need to filter and constrain, utilizing our full might only when circumstance calls for it.

I don't mean to suggest that we need to turn the music down to a whisper, but it is important to recognize that when everything is amped up to 11, all we perceive is noise. To get the most out of our newly acquired abilities, we need to use them intentionally, in both production and consumption.

Sipping from a fire hose isn't easy, but it's possible.

It requires that we, first, recognize our own ability to wrangle this giant dino-snake that instinctually wriggles and tail-whips people into submission. We're not often told that we have the capacity to suppress it, to modulate its cascade, but we can. We just have to want to, and then actually do so.

It also requires that we realize the necessity to filter, curate, and share intentionally.

Rather than deciding we all need to stand underneath this waterfall at all times if we want to know what's going on, we can instead listen to people who have become expert at sorting out relevant cup-fulls of information and music and TV and everything else from the larger tsunami, granting many of the same benefits, without the possibility of drowning.

Much better to sip from a cup than to drink directly from the nozzle. The days of safe, slow-flow backyard hoses are over, but that doesn't mean we have to choose between drowning or going thirsty.

Some Things

These last two weeks have been interesting.

I'm making a few changes to the podcast, which should make the whole enterprise more sustainable and increase the overall output (hopefully without reducing quality), and I'm prepping for a few upcoming jaunts and undertakings that will disrupt the flow I've established here in Kansas over the past two months.

1. Travel & Talks

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, next week I'll be talking storytelling and branding at a travel/tourism conference in Kansas City.

I'm at the point where I can't wait to get up there and present, which is a good sign. I'm also looking forward to the excuse to go on a mini-roadtrip, even if it'll be much shorter in duration than the type I tend to prefer.

I'm still on the lookout for speaking representation, by the way, if anyone out there knows of an agent or agency for whom I'd be a good fit.

Shortly after the talk in KC, I'll be going to New York for a sponsored trip; it'll have me in the city for less than a week, but I'm looking forward to checking out the museums and catching up with a few people. If you want to follow along with that, I'll be Snapchatting and Instagramming up a storm while on the road.

Then, I'll spend the first two weeks of November back in New Zealand (which was the second country outside the US that I called home, back when I first started traveling all those years ago). I can't wait to see what's happened in the area since I last visited — I've heard they've got a lot going on, and that the country is just as beautiful as the last time I saw it.

2. Stockpiling

In the lead-up to these jaunts, I'm prepping as much content as I can. That means stockpiling episodes of Consider This and Let's Know Things, and ensuring that wherever I am, I can still pull the trigger and publish them on schedule.

This will be interesting: a big part of why I never committed to regular publishing schedules until recently, with any of my projects, was that I knew I couldn't be certain what kind of infrastructure (electricity, WiFi) I'd have access to while traveling, and I didn't want to set a timetable I couldn't maintain.

These days, I'm a bit more confident in this regard: in part because global infrastructure has changed dramatically over the years, and in part because I've become better at assessing the amount of time it takes me to complete projects and what I'll actually need to do in the moment to push them out to the world.

We'll see how all this plays out when the rubber hits the road in the coming weeks, but there shouldn't (if all goes well) be any discernible break in my publishing schedule.

Outro

I've got new tires on the car, and though the A/C is still borked (it'll cost me something like 3-times what I paid for the car to replace the refrigerant system, apparently), I'm looking forward to putting some more miles on the little guy.

How're things in your neck of the woods? Shoot me an email and tell me a bit about yourself, where you're from, and what you're up to, if you have a spare couple of minutes.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope, and essentially everywhere else you might think to look.

Happy Wednesday from the US Heartland!