Welcome to 2021’s last 5BF: my weekly article where I share
the contents of my learnings from the past week in my life.
1 – what I read
Wintering by Katherine May – NYTime’s bestselling self-help book
about the necessity and power of rest and retreat in difficult times, where author
Katherine May writes her own memoir of one winter in her life as well the
wisdom she arrived at through wintering. One of the timeliest books I’ve ever
read, this book helped me accept my current situation of uncertainty, anxiety,
worklessness, and calmed me down by showing that it’s a natural process to
retreat.
2 – this week’s articles
A history of disruption (revolution) @aeon – starting from
Lenin’s ‘Russian Revolution’ and pointing out the grounds for a revolution or disruption
to take place, this article then goes into the world changing events based on
these three ingredients: loss of faith in central institutions, use of fringe ideas
for political ideology, and a coherent government to accord to it for change. One
of the best articles you could about world history with a strong message about
the present world.
The tyranny of time @nomegmag – the measurement of time as
we know it in days, months, years, doesn’t really represent time, this article
explains. The clock is an invention of capitalism to control labor, and in its
tyranny, we’re so irreversibly confined that we cannot even imagine to live
with this artificial measurement. Here one gets a glimpse of how time might
exist outside of it – liberating and essential.
Elon Musk and all that was wrong with 2021 @aljazeera – this
article takes a jab at Time’s announcement of Elon Musk as the ‘Person of the
year’, explaining how Musk has been, at multiple times, far from the ideals
that would define a moral and good person. Yet our fascination with the man shows
how lost we ourselves are.
Escaping efficiency @themarginalian – talking about Burkeman’s
book ‘Four thousand weeks’, Popova explains how we have only a finite time to
do a finite number of things. There’s no hack to a fulfilling life where we get
to do everything we ever wanted; we need to kill the idea of possibility. Adjusting
and insightful.
Stoicism as a political force @aeon – a history of how some
Stoic thinkers actually, against how their philosophy is considered to be,
participated politically in the urgent matters of their time; suggesting that
we could also have an active agency in making our world more livable.
What Joan Didion saw @newyorker – at look at the recently
deceased author and her body of work and the extracts of what her book talked
about. An author I’m anticipative to read soon.
3 – what I watched
Don’t Look Up (2021) – Adam McKay’s apocalyptic movie where a
comet is about to hit the Earth and kill it, yet everyone from the President to
people in general, are non-serious and aloof about this scientific fact. How this
star-packed movie clearly conveys the failing reality of our modern world, as a
movie, it doesn’t just work.
Ecanto (2021) – as per standard of Pixar, this is one of the
best animations of the year. A story of a family where everyone has a magic
gift, but our protagonist doesn’t; yet how she prevails to be savior of all in
the time of crisis, sends a strong message about believing in what you are.
The Real Charlie Chaplin (2021) – a successfully nuanced,
true, and poignant biography of the two men, merged into one: the actor Chaplin
and his iconic character The Tramp. This biography really touched me deep by
showing how surprising, dynamic, and complicated even the most of lives can be.
4 – Proust Questionnaire and reviewing 2021 as the year ends
In a recent nightly gathering, where almost all of close
friends were in town and had gathered, we ran through and answered Proust testing
Questionnaire about character identification and introspection into who we are
by what we admire and resent, follow and discard. A fun and probing night.
As my last journal of 2021, I decided to review 2021 but in
months; going for more concrete evidences from the photos I saved to the 5BFs
that I wrote throughout the year. The idea was to get a truer to reality
picture of what I considered to be an awful, awful year. What it taught was that,
as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and surprised and gladdened
me that there were some really winning moment therein as well.
5 – this week’s quote
Be a good animal, true to your instincts. (a note for 2022)
D H Lawrence.