A Full Life

Top of the morning, y’all! I fully planned on sending this newsletter on schedule, but here I am two weeks late. Please allow me to explain.

I wrote 75% of this edition, then went to Texas for 10 days with plans of putting the final touches on it at a coffee shop in Austin (so groovy, I know). Once I got there, unplugging felt like the obvious and necessary move.

So please forgive my tardiness. After the time off, I’m taking things in a bit of a different direction today for no reason other than it just felt right.

To set the stage, I’m sitting at my desk listening to the latest Grateful Dead live album dropped on Spotify, surrounded by plants, natural sunlight, and books — and I’m just feeling very, very, very overwhelmingly lucky to live this life. What better to do than write about it?

Backcountry Chronicles

A few weeks ago at my job, we all watched a MasterClass about creativity. In it, one of the speakers said early on in his career when he was a junior copywriter his CEO asked him how often he writes. He said 8-10 hours, confused if this was a trick question; to which the CEO replied that you should write, at maximum, two hours a day and spend the rest of your day noticing and observing things to write about. “Not only will it make you a better writer, but it’s just a better way to live life, too.”

Whenever you let life become inspiration for writing, it has a knack for slowing down and reminding you how special it all is. I’m sure most of us have read books where the way someone describes the way the breeze hits your neck when you look up at the sky stops us dead in our tracks. So, really, I just want to talk about slowing down and letting yourself notice and feel the beauty of it all.

In late 2022, one of my best friends from college, Wyatt, passed away unexpectedly. A week after he passed, I picked up two of my best friends at DIA so we could drive together to the funeral. As soon as we started driving, we got talking about favorite Grateful Dead songs. My friend said his was Althea, so I put on the studio album that Althea is a part of and we listened to that album on repeat for the entire drive to Aspen.

We reminisced on our favorite college memories, all the hilarious memories where Wyatt was, of course, the main character, and just began to unpack the millions of reasons we already missed him terribly. Once we pulled into our destination, a friend’s house in Aspen, I went to pause the music that had been the backtrack to our conversation all drive and realized the name of the album was Go To Heaven.

Even amidst the treacherous sadness there’s always, somehow, beauty.

I could go on forever about how devastating and profound that weekend was — crying with my best friends and re-realizing how lucky we all are to have found each other so many years ago. That weekend changed my life in so many ways, but I think it can all be boiled down to one word: ephemerality.

Life feels so ephemeral since that experience and the feeling is two-pronged.

On one hand, Colorado feels drenched in this existential nag of ephemerality now. There hasn’t been a single roadtrip I’ve done in Colorado since then where I haven’t wondered if Wyatt did that same drive. I’ll drive on 285 to Fairplay, head over to Buena Vista and cut over Monarch Pass to get to Crested Butte and wonder the whole time if he ever saw these views. It’s like he’s just out of reach; that I somehow just missed him.

The other side of that ephemerality is reinforcing how short life is and how much aging is a privilege.

I could write an entire essay about how much I hate the “anti-aging” marketing shtick (and I will, trust me). Life is painful. Life is beautiful. Life is hard. Life is full of contradictions and conundrums. More than anything: life is short. Sometimes it’s so easy to forget how lucky it is to live 20, 30, 40 — heck, even maybe 80! — years on this planet. Let yourself feel deeply.

Grieving deeply expands your capacity to feel joy — if you let it. You can’t have the 10’s without the 1’s.

Take, for example, the aforementioned weekend in Aspen for Wyatt’s funeral. That weekend, I felt some of the deepest sadness I’ve ever felt in my life. At the same time, the night after the funeral, none of us could sleep and we all sauntered out into the living room of the house we were staying at around 1AM. We watched movies together until the sun came up and laughed the hardest we had in years.

The happiness felt so much deeper and richer after a period of deep sadness. Just a few hours prior, I felt such a “1” that I thought I’d never feel a “10” again. Aging includes experiences like that. We should all be proud to wear our wisdom.

Accepting that, along with the fact that nothing is permanent, is one of the most impactful things you can do for yourself. The next time you feel a “10”, you’ll know it’s only temporary and let yourself enjoy it for what it is. And the next time you feel trapped in a “1”, know that feeling is fleeting, too.

By and large, this reflection was inspired by a recent edition of TOGS that Kellyn Wilson dedicated to her aunt, and this absolutely beautiful description of her aunt:

And because, of course, life has a funny way of always giving you little winks: as I finished writing this, I realized it was the 2 year anniversary of Wyatt’s passing. So here’s a little dedication to the funniest, most quick-witted, and loyal friend I had the absolute privilege of knowing for 9 years.

Artiste Break

I was going to share an update on my latest drawing of some gloves, but I want to keep it private for just a leeeeettle longer and enjoy drawing without expectations. Here’s a screenshot I saw online and loved dearly + bonus recs for the last two books I read this month: The Push and The Fall of Roe.

To Go Snacks

✨ “The truth is, life is energy. Life cannot be created nor destroyed. There is this experience of me, but this experience of me was going on before this body came into existence.” — just a few of the many, many words I loved in this Soul Boom article about confronting that you will die one day.

⛰️ I honestly have no idea how I’d never seen it before, but I finally got around to watching Free Solo two weeks ago. The funniest part is my rationale was “Oh, I just went climbing for the first time. Now that I know how some of it works, like belaying, I should check it out.” And then, of course, Alex Honnold doesn’t use a single rope.

📔 If you also watched Free Solo and thought to yourself “man, his girlfriend seems a little in over her head” I highly, highly recommend checking out this essay she wrote for Outside Magazine. It’s a completely different POV from the one we all saw in the documentary.

🧗‍♂️ One more climbing documentary! After I finished Tommy Caldwell’s book, The Push, and immediately had to watch The Dawn Wall after. It’s equal parts astonishing and inspiring; give it a rip.

🗳️ No more links, just a friendly reminder to vote.

It’s officially shoulder season, which means the fun in-between from hiking and skiing. In other words, you can expect me to wax poetic for the next couple of editions. You’ve been warned.

- McCall 🌻

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