Today we are thinking about Monday, typical after a holiday weekend, off schedules, over-eating, and sunlight fasting.  There is always Monday.  We can start over again, and why not on the first day of the week?  Unless you’ve been telling yourself every weekend, there is always Monday.  We also discuss marriage, echo chambers, Gen Z comedy, and why Rocks are important. 

Nick Cave is at it again, and we are writing this story about a story he wrote a few weeks.  We love The Red Hand Files so much that we are considering a separate newsletter called Slapped by the Red Hand Files!  Nick wrote about tattoos today, and we will write about that in future letters.  Today we are focusing on Nick’s note about learning to play music later in life.  Nick relates it to pottery, which he took up late in life.

Nick responds with it being a “fool’s errand” and encourages the questioner to go for it.  Nick talks about deciding to be a ceramicist at the age of 63.  Nick has a natural talent for artistic adventures and a lifetime’s worth of practicing art in one form or another.  Despite the pedigree, Nick talks about being terrible but persistent, which is what we take out of much of his writing. 

Back when some of us were corporate and led teams of people doing various things, we would encourage our teams to make and document mistakes.  Our deal with the groups was if you tried ten ways to solve a problem or grow something, wrote all the steps taken, and did not solve the problem, then and only then would we bring more people in to review.  The team never made it past three in ninety percent of those cases. 

Your first ceramic pot will suck, and practicing guitar for your first year could be painful, writing which, for some, can be a dream come true but only shows itself after days, weeks, and years of trashed ideas and unreadable sentences.  You are the only person who can or can not do the things you wonder if you could do.  Age is just another excuse, and there are more excuses than works of art worldwide.  Make some art, make some noise; if you give it some time and heart, you won’t regret it!

In a piece originally written in 2017, Ada Calhoun writes about marriage and change.  We are unsure how it popped up in one of our various feeds, but we are glad it did.  It’s a good story and gave us several ideas to add to the discussion.  The article is called To Stay Married, Embrace Change.  Calhoun writes about experiencing several divorces coming after twenty-plus years of marriage.  We’ve all heard of the “7-Year Itch”, the divorce after twenty years or after the kids leave the house, that seems to be a new wrinkle. 

Quote from the article:

Ideas that resonate with the longer marriages of people we know, a breakdown of the sub-marriages, can look like this:

Marriage 1 20s, we are on our own!

Marriage 2 30s, with children, and it’s all children for 20 years.

Marriage 3 50s, if it’s good, you take your best friend and return to your 20s with a more lived-in feel.  If it’s terrible, it’s a lonely house filled with resentment and quiet rage.

It’s the third marriage after the kids have gone that we think Calhoun is talking about with the term EMBRACE.  Much pretense is gone, and if you have the maturity, you can be more yourself.  The most interesting comment we got back when this topic was being discussed was this one:

When you set the expectations that your married life will ever return to something that resembles the beginning of your relationship, you are in for a challenge.  Similar to you can’t go home again.  At the same time, if two people have been with each other for a long time and no longer feel they have to try, everything is an obligation; it’s not a marriage, it’s a contract. 

No, you can’t start dating your spouse of 30 years again, but can you talk about how it’s still important to make each other feel like they are important and not just an obligatory bag of meat?  Date nights, communication, therapy, more extended vacations, and drinking are ways to get to the place with less obligation and more generosity.  We will end this insight the same way we end many of these.  The concept is simple; the practice is not easy.

Sahil Bloom expands on a story told several times in various ways.  It’s the story of a professor who walks into a classroom, fills up a jar with rocks to the top, and asks the class if it’s full.  The class responds, “yes, it’s full.”  Next, the professor adds a bag of smaller pebbles that find spots between the big rocks in the jar.  Again the professor asks, is the jar full?  The class responds, “yes, it’s full.”  Finally, the professor adds a bag of sand to the jar and again asks.

After the clever display, the professor goes on to explain:

Finally, the lesson, according to the story and Bloom’s article, is this:  (add numbers)

Bloom asks: “What are your rocks?”

Netflix spliced together a laughter-inducing forty minutes of standup comedy on Youtube.  How do successful standup comedians deal with their children?  If you have children of your own, the answers will resonate; if you are a child – take notes!

Writing for the NYT Magazine, Caity Weaver tells a story of an Anechoic Chamber in Minneapolis, MN.  A story that makes you think, how do I get a job that sends me out across the country checking out cool things?  Here is the link to Weaver’s story; you can read or listen to it.

Words | Music | Art | Unknown

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With A Shout Team