In the Know #65: Letting Go of Shame, Dreaming of Dune & Breaking Up With My AirPods
Hi friends,
Very short one this week, as Ava has been waking up super early which has both reduced our sleep and eliminated the only reliable time K and I had to ourselves each day. We’re managing the regression as best we can, but something had to give this week. Just glad to keep the ball rolling.
Jamie
🎾 Great thread on Andre Agassi, and his liberation from letting go of shame — by Billy Oppenheimer
This thread summarizes the shame Agassi was dealing with when he began losing his hair, and the liberation he felt when he was able to let go of it. The key takeaways being that the more you try to hide something, the more ashamed you will be, and at the end of the day no one cares about what you’re ashamed of as much as you (think they do). It’s a great (short) story, so check out the link for the full thread.
PS — I actually owned the same tennis outfit worn by Agassi in this photo, which was memorialized in a particularly striking series of family photos that my friends were always sure to point out whenever they visited 😂.
🎧 A Habit I’m Trying to Break — Using My AirPods at Home
I’ll often find myself alone in the kitchen cooking or doing dishes, and my practice has been to put in an AirPod and listen to a podcast to pass the time. But lately I’ve noticed that it started to bleed into times when I wasn't just alone. Maybe K was in the other room with Ava, and I wouldn’t be able to hear them laughing (or crying). Or maybe I would keep listening when I left the kitchen and walked into another room to set the table, not fully present as I interacted with them. Over the past few days I’ve been more aware of how often I see other people wearing them, and they’re truly ubiquitous. It seems that even during those precious times we’re not looking at a screen, the desire for distraction and entertainment is so irresistible we just can’t help ourselves. So with that in mind I’ll try to embrace the mundanity of household tasks as my first step towards enlightenment. We’ll see how it goes!
🏜️ Movie I’m Super Excited About — Dune: Part Two (Trailer)
I loved the book and the first movie (Dune: Part 1), and have been eagerly anticipating this sequel to be released for the past 2+ years. I haven’t read any of the reviews yet, but based on a quick google search for the trailer it looks like it currently has a rating of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and every headline seems to be glowing. I can’t wait to check it out in a few weeks when they hype dies down and we can get a pair of IMAX tickets and a babysitter.
❝ Quote of the Week — “A longstanding dream of mine is to adapt 'Dune,' but it's a long process to get the rights, and I don't think I will succeed.” ~Denis Villeneuve (director of Dune)
Thx for sharing the Andre Agassi story, never knew that was a hairpiece, story is gold.
I had a major epiphany about shame one time. My own, I mean. We likely all carry some, & for the craziest of reasons sometimes! Brene Brown is pretty brilliant on the topic - worth looking up a YouTube with her talking about it. As for 'Dune," I once harvested this (long) quotation that you might find interesting: “Above all else, the mentat [advisor] must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about that at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.”
The generalist must understand that anything that we can identify as our universe is merely part of a larger phenomenon. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop.
It is to the characteristics of change that the generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?” – ‘The Mentat Handbook’ quoted as “The Wisdom of Dune,” by Frank Herbert