Welcome to the first edition of the Family Dinner Newsletter, thanks so much for being here. The newsletter is divided into “courses,” each featuring its own food for thought. The appetizer usually comes in the form of a quote or a poem, something to set the tone. The main will almost always be a short story, the title of which doubles as the newsletter title. The desserts will come as an idea or a question. The to-go box will feature a work of art I stumbled upon in the wild, likely thanks to a friend. Enjoy!

appetizer.

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”

I found this quote from JFK on the inside cover of the first journal I filled when traveling solo at 18, it had been inscribed by one of my high school teachers. It feels equally relevant now.

main.
way of the peaceful warrior, works I love & why.

"Works I Love & Why" was the sparking idea for this newsletter. When I began writing about books I’d enjoyed in the last year, I found that each came with a story, seemingly about everything except the book in question. Through those periphery stories, for the first time in a long time, I could relate to Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith’s quote about producing his daily newspaper columns: “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” The people, places, and conversations that overlap my experience of each artwork are, I find, what makes a work of art significant. It is a joy to get to share those significances in this way.

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Doug and I met on the second floor of Hokona Residence Hall at the University of New Mexico in the dim, occasionally flickering yellow light of the men’s bathroom. It was our first night living on campus as undergraduates. Doug was wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his torso, holding a toothbrush primed with toothpaste, looking deep into the mirror, not quite at his reflection, but through it. When Doug tells the story, he says he was in the midst of an existential crisis, then I walked in. He has become one of the closest friends I have.

‍Of the many gifts Doug has given me over the years, lending me his copy of Way of the Peaceful Warrior ranks among the most meaningful. My favorite quote from the book reads,

“There are no ordinary moments.”

The moments in proximity to Doug lending me the book echo that sentiment.

‍It was May of this year, and within a window of eighteen hours, we’d shared in some of the best experiences of our friendship to date. Standing in my mother’s garden in that eighteenth hour, we were working up to a long-winded goodbye. We knew we’d not see each other again for a few months. My flight to London was two days away, and my plans in Europe were open-ended. He was collecting his things from around the house – a journal left here, some origami cranes made from dollar bills left there – when he picked up his well-worn copy of Peaceful Warrior. I’d seen it before on the bookshelf that had followed him through various living situations over the last 8 years. Channeling the caricature of himself he occasionally becomes – the thespian within resurrecting a childhood spent in local theater – Doug looked at the book, at me, back at the book, and then, holding it out in front of him, he looked back at me.

‍“Read this,” he said. He smiled that soft, knowing smile. It’s the smile worn by those giving a gift that, at one time or another, had been previously given to them, by a loved one or by life, and enriched them irreversibly. The smile says, “I give this gift to you, as it was given to me, and should you accept it, I will be special to you in all the world, the way my gifter is special to me.”

‍‍“I’ve read this book several times,” he continued. “I come back to it often, and I’d like to come back to it again once you’ve finished with it, so keep it safe for me. I think you’re going to find a lot of what we’ve been talking about in these pages,” he told me, his eyes alive with passion. When Doug gives gifts, which is often, he does so with all the gravitas of a quest giver one might find in a fantasy novel, or a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Like a gringo Melquiades the Gypsy from Cien Años de Soledad, I imagine Doug in a past life encountering the curious in traveler’s spaces, placing a trinket of obscure significance in their hands and saying, “Take this, it will be of use in the long, arduous road ahead.” 

‍The things we’d been talking about that day did indeed live in Peaceful Warrior’s pages. Our conversations were perhaps most succinctly echoed in one rambling passage (rambling can be succinct, right?): 

“Wake up! Wake up! Soon the person you believe you are will die - so now, wake up and be content with this knowledge: there is no need to search; achievement leads to nowhere. It makes no difference at all, so just be happy now! Love is the only reality of the world, because it is all ONE, you see. And the only laws are paradox, humor, and change. There is no problem, never was, and never will be. Release your struggle, let go of your mind, throw away your concerns, and relax into the world. No need to resist life; just do your best. Open your eyes and see that you are more than you imagine. You are the world, you are the universe; you are yourself and everyone else too! It's all the marvelous Play of God. Wake up, regain your humor. Don't worry, just be happy. You are already free!”

I promise, the ramble is earned in the literature, and when you arrive at this diatribe, it strikes you with all the weight of life-affirming truth.

‍The book was Doug’s second gift of the day. An hour or two before the book, he gave me a necklace he unscrewed from around his own neck and put it around mine. The necklace was a copper chain link, beaded with four sections of small turquoise beads, and pearls sitting in the center of each turquoise section. The pendant it bore was a small copper letter B. As is not too surprising knowing Doug, the two gifts – given with little to no apparent forethought – would reinforce one another's messages like echoes in a canyon. 

‍In Doug’s words, the necklace that he’d given me signified exactly what is spelled with the letter B. As in to be. As in just be. As in, to quote Peaceful Warrior, “Where are you? Here. What time is it? Now. What are you? This moment.” 

‍The night before, we’d gone to see Peter Cat Recording Co. at The Basement East. For anyone not recognizing that name, I encourage you to spend the next couple of hours listening to the genre-blurring brilliance of the ragtag band from New Delhi. Among the 7 of us at the concert together, we agreed it was one of the best live shows we had ever seen. Doug and I had danced so enthusiastically that we’d opened a small pit in the crowd for just the two of us. Doug is also 6ft4in or so, and when he gets going, as he certainly did in the presence of music that was at once ballroom waltz and space disco, those long limbs move like the ocean. I was keeping up well enough, or at least I sweat enough to suggest I did. Nothing and nowhere else existed when we danced. We were living there and then, entirely in the here and now, and I felt alive.

‍The following morning we’d wake up at sparrows, hoping to catch sunrise from the hill atop the Narrows of the Harpeth, a place well worthy of its Tolkien-esque name. It’s a unique piece of topography along the Harpeth River that winds through the hills west of Nashville’s city limits. An oxbow in the river wraps around a towering outcrop of rock which falls away sharply on either side. There’s a short, steep trail to the summit. There are not many hilltops in Nashville’s immediate proximity offering a view through the trees that extend beyond the closest hill, and none of the others sit atop a 100-yard tunnel through the rock below. It was carved by slave labor a couple of centuries ago to power an iron refining mill, and the scar is still there today, offering a view clean through the rock, from one side of the river to the other.

‍Tennessee spring mornings start off cool, so the Narrows are usually blanketed in thick fog emanating from the Harpeth River. That morning was especially foggy. The sun gradually climbed above the mist, visible at first as an apparent hole-punch in the sky. Doug and I took turns singing I’ll Fly Away (known to my ears by virtue of arguably the best soundtrack of all time, O Brother Where Art Thou). We wrote poems and spoke about presence, and about the community building he and some friends were doing, turning his house into a concert venue once a month. With the sun burning the sea of mist off little by little as it rose, a beautiful green swath of river valley was revealed before us. Farmland, cattle, and trees emerged from their hidden homes below the ghosts' breath. After my travels in Europe, we would return for another sunrise with my mom and godmother, and Doug described the mist before dawn as “where the ghosts grow.” It’s a beautiful one-liner. We watched as the sun came to harvest those ghosts. 

‍By the time my plane touched down at Heathrow Airport a couple of days later, I had finished the book. I’d also spent much of the flight discussing its contents with my neighbor. We sat in the last two seats at the very back of the plane, him at the window and I at the aisle. He was from Bhutan, but half of his family was Tibetan. “Tashi delek,” I said when he shared his history, greeting him in Tibetan. Conversation followed. 

‍We chatted about the Tibetan Buddhist monastery in northern India where I learned what little Tibetan I remember, and I shared another of my favorite quotes from the book:

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.”

‍My partner in cheap-airline-seats nodded and pointed to the obvious draws from Buddhist philosophy being quoted. I agreed. Way of the Peaceful Warrior doesn’t say much I hadn’t already encountered in my travels, in books like The Alchemist or Siddhartha, or even in a Yoga with Adrienne YouTube video titled “20-minute Yoga for Mindfulness”. Yet, this book ranks for me among those formative pieces in a way that the others don’t; The Alchemist is no pretender to the throne of books that awaken awareness and the self in the average Western reader, but it is pretty unapologetic in its proselytizing. Peaceful Warrior’s source of wisdom, Socrates, is equally unapologetic in his sharing of wisdom and parable, but he does so through laughter. He laughs at the narrator, he laughs at himself, and he laughs at you, the reader. Before you know it, you’re laughing with him, at yourself!

‍Doug’s copy of Peaceful Warrior bears the iconic original cover art depicting a transparent version of the book’s narrator standing outside the old-fashioned gas station which serves as the setting through much of the book. Its cover also bears a subtitle: “The book that changes lives.” 

‍That really put me off. Any such claim tends to be hyperbolic marketing, or so I’ve learned to assume. But being fresh off of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and having taken part in some of those mind-changing activities that same day – a day preempted by a euphoric musical experience, and marked by our mountain top sunrise before meditating among the flowers of my mothers garden – who was I to judge? 

‍Turns out, that claim of a subtitle is true, at least I found it to be true. Way of the Peaceful Warrior changed my life. It reacquainted me with many lessons I’d learned before; lessons forgotten, neglected, or never truly understood. More profoundly, it reminded me to laugh, mostly at myself, and to lead with how little I know. 

There’s been a lot of times when I thought I knew better than those around me, or held them in contempt while putting myself on a comparative pedestal (what reason or want I had for doing so, I can’t recall). Doug’s familiar with that strange exercise of mine, more so than most I’d say. Yet, here I am, eight years into our friendship, learning from him at every turn. And thankfully, here he is, patient as ever, quick to laughter, joyfully inhabiting the here and now, walking the way of the peaceful warrior.

dessert.

Consistency of choice compounds. It creates our future selves.

This was one of the notes I wrote down while listening to the audiobook of James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I appreciated his framing of daily decisions, “Each decision is a vote for the person we want to be.”

He encourages the reader to frame themself in the form of an aspiration: “I am the type of person who ____,” and to fill in the blank.

My framings over the last few months have been combinations of “I am someone who exercises every day,” “I am the type of person that reads and journals daily,” and so on.

With those in mind, I make small choices each day, each choice a step toward that aspiration.

I am discovering a I love of running. A week from now I’ll run my first half-marathon.

I am rediscovering my love of writing. I created this newsletter to be a tool for sharing what I write, and to motivate future writing.

Now, when I make choices that lead me away from those aspirational statements, I feel less like myself. After a couple of months of those choices compounding, I feel like I am the person in those statements. Missing a workout or a journal entry is a day killer. But when I begin a day with a run and writing a couple of pages, I already am the person I aspire to be that day, and everything else is a bonus.

Maybe all of this sounds a bit silly, obvious, self-congratulatory, or just useless. Maybe it sounds like it's worth a try. Either way, I say give it a go.

What future self would you like to create? What small choice could you make each day to lead you there? Write out your aspirational statement, and make a choice that pulls you closer to it each day. Where will it lead? Only one way to find out.

the to-go box.

The Eight Mountains. I’ve recommended this film to almost everyone with whom I’ve shared a conversation since my brother and I watched it together. The subtitled English translation of the narrator’s Italian reads like poetry. The patient storytelling spans lifetimes, pulling at every thread of human experience found in family; both blood and chosen. The cinematography and the location are worth the watch alone. Putting aside the films I love for sentimental reasons, it may be my all time favorite.

If google is to be trusted, it is available on The Criterion Collection, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, or Vudu.

Alright, that’s it for the first edition of the Family Dinner Newsletter. That said, the best part of a shared meal (besides the food) is the conversation. I would love to hear any thoughts, feedback, or recommendations any course of the newsletter may have brought to mind. You can share those by replying to the newsletter email. If you haven't subscribed yet, do so below, and feel free to respond to the welcome email with any thoughts!

If you want more to sink your teeth into, check out edition "0" of the newsletter, Why “Family Dinner”.  And if you’re looking for a soundtrack to pair with this newsletter, check out my in rotation playlist where, every two weeks or so, I aggregate all the music I’ve been listening to lately.

Thank you again for pulling up a chair and being a part of this digital dinner, I hope it’s only a matter of time before we’re gathering around a table in person.

with gratitude, Josh Lane.

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