Anyoung! Welcome to this week's digest. This week is a very special "Reflection" edition, because with the closing of 2018 and the concurrent time off (for most of us), there appears a rare opportunity to openly reflect on our lives and outline how we want to be in the new year.

This week's topics include annual letters, embracing silence, unleashing creativity, alcohol as ritual and theory, and Christmas hip-hop. Enjoy!

• TOPIC OF INTEREST - 2018 ANNUAL LETTER (My 2018 letter)
   
• EXPERIMENT OF THE WEEK -  SILENCE (PART 1)
   
• BOOK - Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert (My full Kindle notes) - We can all unleash our creativity if we get over our fears and diligently do authentic work.
   
• BLOG POST - Medium: The Unifying Theory of Alcohol by Dan Kieran - All of our consumption choices, regardless of rituals and social norms, can add positively to our lives with thoughtful experimentation and re-framing.
   
• MUSIC - Christmas in Hollis by Run-D.M.C. - Christmas makes me long for quality 80's hip-hop juxtaposed with egregiously dorky video production.

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1. It sets a 'relationship floor' - the worst case scenario is that each person receives a meaningful update from me once a year (and hopefully I get one from them in return :D).
    
2. It forces me to take time to reflect on the year, creating a valuable memento to revisit in the future. I can more clearly see the evolution of my ways of being, mental models, and general take on life.
    
3. It creates random serendipitous re-connections. ~10-20 people will 'come out of the woodwork' after years of no-contact and we will meaningfully re-engage because of something random from the letter that resonates with them.

• Most of all, though, he asked his students to be brave. Without bravery, he instructed, they would never be able to realize the vaulting scope of their own capacities. Without bravery, they would never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, their lives would remain small—far smaller than they probably wanted their lives to be.
   
• Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome. Your fear—programmed by evolution to be hypervigilant and insanely overprotective—will always assume that any uncertain outcome is destined to end in a bloody, horrible death... [I]f you can’t learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you’ll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.
   
• When you say no, nothing happens at all. Mostly, people say no. Most of their lives, most people just walk around, day after day, saying no, no, no, no, no. Then again, someday you just might say yes.
   
• ...[T]he older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. Just say what you want to say, then, and say it with all your heart. Share whatever you are driven to share. If it’s authentic enough, believe me—it will feel original.
   
• The rewards had to come from the joy of puzzling out the work itself, and from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it.
   
• The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust—and those elements are universally accessible.
   
• I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear... Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, “I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.”
   
• ...you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow... While it may seem lonely and horrible at first to imagine that you aren’t anyone else’s first order of business, there is also a great release to be found in this idea. You are free, because everyone is too busy fussing over themselves to worry all that much about you.

• ...having a good time with my friends and alcohol were the same thing. And it wasn’t just my teenage friends and me. This method of avoiding stress was evident among my family and the families of my friends who relied on it in exactly the same way. Any kind of gathering involved drink of some kind. Not excessively, but ritually.
   
• This is how booze felt to me. It was part of who I am and where I came from. An unspoken agreement that it was a good thing. It’s not something I’ve ever considered as a choice. Whether it was drinks after work or drinks to celebrate something or drinks to cope with a crisis or drinks because you’re bored or drinks because, well you can’t remember why actually. Drink and fun have always been synonyms.
   
• Giving up booze turned out to be incredibly easy once I thought of it not as denying myself something but as deciding not to regularly ingest a depressant.
   
• You also have more money. You lose weight. There is a kind of lightness to living when you are not regularly ingesting a depressant. I know how obvious this sounds but I had never thought of it in this way. Who knew? While enjoying this new frame of mind the thought of having a drink begins to feel a bit silly. Pointless even. Absolutely not worth the hassle.
   
• Not drinking entirely feels like a kind of betrayal. And not in a flimsy way. In the sense that to stop means a betrayal of a huge part of my identity. An unspoken criticism of those I love around me and of the life I have lived so far. ‘Not drinking’ is a kind of shroud that those around me are discomforted by. Not in an overt way, but you can see the disappointment in the faces of those you meet when you tell them you are not drinking.
   
• Now I’ve set the assumption the other way around. I work on the assumption that I don’t drink, but occasionally I do...  My other shift in perspective is about why I drink alcohol... I’ve realised that booze can be great fun, but it’s useless as a weight bearing exercise. By that I mean it can’t cope with carrying a burden. So if you’re drinking as a compensation or as a reward it collapses under the weight of this expectation and makes you feel shit.
   
• Just remember that if I’m out drinking orange juice in a pub with you then I must really want to be there and hang out with you. I must actually want to talk to you. Because you’ll know I’m not there for the booze.

• The rhymes you hear are the rhymes of Darryl's | But each and every year we bust Christmas carols
   
• It's Christmas time in Hollis Queens | Mom's cooking chicken and collard greens

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