Would you like to live a captivating life? To feel alive and engaged in the ways you spend your days? Interest is the unsung key.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about interest the past year and believe it to be the missing vital value and navigational compass for the modern day. Interest is the fountain of youth we don’t know we’re after, not in the sense of everlasting life, but of life ever-engaging. When rooted in your interests, you don’t need all the tips and tricks to be present, happy, and engaged — living in alignment with the delights and drives of your deeper self, you simply need a lot less soothing.

While the effort to discover your deepest interests is far from straightforward, the process is remarkably simple. So simple, in fact, it can be written out in the most standardized and trite form in the world: a three-step formula.

October 13th - 18th, a dozen rad readers of this blog came together at an old bed and breakfast near the tiny town of Arivaca, AZ (a dozen miles north of the USA/Mexico border) for WONDER WANDER 2022.

What happens when thirteen humans arrive in a remote pocket of time and space, each prepared to lead the talk, activity, or experience they most want to share with others, and everyone is invited into the collaborative effort of kindness, trust, and the creation of a temporarily-constructed culture to inhabit together for the next six days is surreal... it was unconditional love, depth, philosophy, connectedness to nature, utter zaniness, mindfulness training, and days on end of contentedness unlike I have experienced in any other format.

A highlight reel of WONDER WANDER 2022, by Paul Shelton.

From October 13th to 18th, I hosted WONDER WANDER 2022 — my blog's annual gathering and experiment in co-created community, this year among the high desert surrounding Arivaca, AZ.

This article offers a means to a more expansive perspective of reality by pointing to the size of the universe — a cosmic view of the vast reality in which our lives are taking place.

I find this perspective of immeasurable value and encourage you: take your time, watch the videos, dig the links.

Back in 2019, while walking the Annapurna Circuit through the Himalayas of Nepal, I spent a lot of time looking up. While all that looking up was prompted by those incredible mountains, my awareness kept catching on the daytime moon.

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.” - Terence McKenna

Last fall, I was struck by understanding in an old, crowded diner in Nevada City, California. I was seated in a booth across from Ed Buryn, author of the 1971 travel classic Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa. It was an important moment in which golden wisdom was grasped.

I want to tell you about it, but first some backstory.

Released today! I sat down with my good buddy Milan Smets, for an interview on his In Full Effect Podcast. Originally from Belgium and currently residing in Vietnam, Milan is a videographer who’s led quite the international life. We met back in 2017 in New Zealand, both tramping about the country on working holiday visas.

We delve into personal perspectives of travel, creativity, interest, money, time, and a bunch of other subjects at deeper fathoms. Twas a good time, deep exploration, and real honor.

With the turn of each year, I find great benefit and orientation in reflecting on the year past and envisioning the one to come.

While a new year is just an arbitrarily chosen point in Earth’s lap around the sun, it is also a regular reminder of transition. And as transitions tend to cause us to pause and reflect, a new year seems a sweet, cosmically-tuned reminder to pause, ”pull our heads out of the water,” and look around.

I don’t believe in resolutions or fixating on specific goals. Rather, I liken the process to “stopping for a few minutes to study the map, check that we’re heading in the right direction, and boldly continue with the journey of life.” Goals can help us achieve what they’re aimed at, but also become blinders to other opportunities that arise in the present. I attempt to walk a middle path, aiming my awareness at certain things, but not fixating upon them.

There is speculation that John Frusciante — the guitarist most renowned for face-melting licks with the Red Hot Chili Peppers — is a modern day Jesus Christ. While this speculation is largely fueled by a few photographs of John floating around the web dressed as Jesus, I’d like to add to the internet that the similarities go deep than appearance.

While I am half-joking, I am also half-serious.

One of the greatest gifts of writing online about things that matter to you (that rank in Google searches) is that others interested in those things find you.

Sometimes they send you heartfelt notes out of the blue that make your day. Other times, you get to meet them and go on hikes or hang out in view of city skylines as you mutually discover deep connection and conversational depth that lifts your spirit for weeks. The best of times — if you can work up the courage to do something like invite a bunch of them to hang at a cabin in the middle of the desert — you can pull together a collective of individuals with resonance unlike you've ever experienced and find yourself amid the most fun, fruitful idea/experience/philosophy swap of your life to date.

This is what happened at WONDER WANDER 2021.

Because language cleaves
difference that matters
Inuit people in the Arctic had
more than fifty words for “snow.”

In a modern world of abundance
where strife has become
more mental than physical
let us cleave “enjoy” and “have fun.”
…

I am currently reading a book entitled The Denial of Death by Ernest Beckett. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. As I’ve been quite into contemplating death for the clarity it brings to life for over a decade, I was surprised I had gone so long without knowing of the book before hearing its mention on a podcast a few weeks ago.

I immediately ordered a copy. By the time I was done with the introduction, I understood why I’d never heard its mention: the book is an unsettling, veil-lifting deconstruction of the psychological constructs that create us.

Yesterday, I encountered a passage on awe that struck me like lightning. I must have read it four times over and its implications have been echoing around my head ever since:

November 4th to 8th 2021, I'm hosting WONDER WANDER 2021 — a five day, four night gathering of curious, creative, and adventurous people to collectively wonder and wander among one of the most surreal, philosophical landscapes on Planet Earth.

We'll be staying in a big ole’ cabin among the red rocks just outside of Kanab, Utah, but a drive away from nine US National Parks.

It's only $300 to attend.

And it's going to be legendary.

Join us!

Books did not just change my life, they saved it. Not in an “I would have died without them” way, but in a way even more important to a temporary, living, breathing being: I can honestly say I have lived because of books.

Below are the fifteen books that have most changed my life thus far. They are listed in the order of when I read them because, in my experience, reading is akin to waking up. These books were stepping stones on my way to doing so. Looking over the list, I realize every one of them was not just a profound read, but helped to solve a problem or question I was wrestling with at the time. In a way, they plot my growth and direction across time, which says much about their power, effect, and influence.

Yes or no — which is best? It’s a question that appears to need more context, but actually doesn’t.

Rather, the question of yes or no is about our unconscious tendency to lean towards saying “yes” or “no” when opportunity presents itself in life.

If you really think about it, even a slight preference towards saying “yes” or “no” to the unfathomable amount of potentials we encounter throughout a lifetime is probably hard to overstate. For this reason, many have argued for conscious consideration of our often unconscious answer.

The kicker is everyone seems to advocate for a different answer.

Some are all about saying “yes.” Others are all about saying “no.” There are books and movies about the power of saying “yes” and writers who say “no” to everything except writing books and movies. A third school of thought also exists in the space between yes and no, interestingly, without the inertia of maybe.

The further you get into it, the more complicated and complex the question of yes or no becomes. It is, however, worth a dive into the complexity because the yes or no we unconsciously lean towards has tremendous influence on the decisions that shape our lives.

In life, there are rare things that are both easy and good. One of those things is reading while you poop — a practice often less literally referred to as “bathroom reading.”

Bathroom reading rocks because it is such an easy practice to develop. You don’t have to rearrange your priorities or work to make it a habit or anything. All you have to do is place a book within sitting reach of the toilet.

You see, you are a human being, and as long as your innards continue to function, you are regularly going to have to poop. When that special feeling arises, you make your way to your toilet, sit down — and hey — there’s that book you left here to read when this happens! You crack the book open and read while your autonomic functions take care of business.

This January, I launched my version of the Needlestack, a new type of page for the internet.

The idea of the Needlestack is simple: if everyone with a blog or website had a dedicated page of links to what they personally consider the best pages on the entire internet, and we had a directory linking those pages together, we could separate “the needles from the haystack” of the internet and make the internet browsable by best.

The challenge for the Needlestack now is to find its audacious first adopters willing to make their own without much social proof. If my Needlestack is the flint, those first to make their own Needlestack are the sparks needed for this new idea to catch and spread (shout out to CEDAR for being the first to make the leap!).

Fortunately, the Needlestack has compelling incentives built into the idea to get and keep it growing. Rather than leave them to intuition, I will briefly outline each below.

With the turn of each year, I find great benefit and long-term orientation in reflecting on the one past and envisioning the one to come.

While a new year is an arbitrarily chosen point in Earth’s lap around the sun, it is a regular mark of transition. And as transitions tend to cause us to pause and reflect, a new year seems an ideal reminder to zoom out of the day to day and look at the big picture of our lives.

That said, I don’t believe in resolutions or overly focusing on specific future targets. Rather, I liken the process to “stopping for a few minutes to study the map, check that we’re heading in the right direction, and boldly continue with the journey of life.”

The year is 2021 and we are more than two decades into mass adoption of the world wide web. We have devised brilliant ways to surf the hundreds of billions of pages that compose the internet by keyword, category, and recentness. Have you ever wondered, though, why are we unable to browse by best?

No search engine or social media site has yet to truly solve the problem of prioritizing quality. Not Google, not Facebook, not Tumblr, not Pinterest, not any other site.

1. If you think about eternity and the time of your life within it you can find freedom in sensing how little what you do actually matters.

2. If you envision time as sand passing through your hands you can relish in the texture and touch of this moment.

3. If you seek novel experiences you can lengthen your experience of time. Novelty creates memory. The more memories you have across a period of time, the longer that time will feel.

I was interviewed last week on the CEDAR Weekly Podcast by musician and artist-lifting host JJ Shafe. Our wide ranging discussion included subjects from death and long walks to the sense of wonder and the supreme value of commonplace books. It was a grand time.