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Hello! April has ended and summer is all but here! How I love this time of year… I hope you’re feeling it too, wherever in the world these words find you. It has been my recent discovery that these letters reach much farther than I previously thought. At the end of February, I tacked a “P.S.” onto one asking if anyone wanted to join me on the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. While no one took me up on the offer, a friend invited me to stop by Sri Lanka afterward and, more pertinently to this paragraph, I also received an invite to grab a coffee in Kathmandu from someone who reads these words and actually lives there. The internet is a truly global affair. On my second to last night in Nepal, we finally got a chance to meet up for coffee at the Snowman Cafe on Kathmandu’s Freak Street. An interesting little sidebar first: Freak Street is a where hippies once congregated in the 1960s and 1970s drawn by the area’s legal sale of marijuana in government-run shops. Towards the end of the seventies, the United States pressured Nepal to both stop sales and crack down on all the shenanigans. Remnants of Freak Street’s glory days were hard to find during my stay, with the exception of one place: The Snowman Cafe, which has been seemingly in full swing since the sixties (multiple generations of the same family have kept the place alive, which I found equally beautiful, meaningful, and impressive). Stepping into the cafe felt a lot like stepping back in time, and with forty cent coffee and sixty cent slices of the best cakes ever and young locals all smoking and talking and laughing and with writings and drawings all over the walls, I found it a place dope enough to write you this whole little sidebar about. Anyhow, Sonam (that guy I mentioned before the sidebar who reads these letters from Kathmandu and invited me for coffee at the Snowman Cafe) and I had this profound, instant connection. Our discussion was deep and soul-stoking, even challenging at times. He gave me a couple of his favorite books. I gave him the memento mori coin I carry in my pocket. We wandered around and drank tea that night in Durbar Square and visited Pashupatinath Temples my last day in Nepal where they cremate bodies out in the open most days but it was raining so we didn’t see that and it all ended with a scooter ride through what I sense as utter chaos of the traffic that flows not unlike water through Kathmandu. For me, it was human interaction at it’s finest. The thing here is I can’t help but notice this pattern of repeated resonance between me and almost everyone I meet through these letters and this website. This sort of thing with Sonam has happened a handful of times before. With the WONDER WANDER event last fall and meeting some of you driving up the coast in my little home on wheels last April and on a couple of other occasions as well. I’ve developed a theory about this. I think I’m putting a sort of signal out into the world. Not that I’m this great writer or saying something particularly profound or anything, but just that certain things in life just effing move me, affect me deeply, stoke the fires of my very soul… you know what I mean? And I write about those things! And then I put them out there on the internet, this crazy thing the whole of humanity is now connected to. And people, people that don’t just like the same things as me, but have similar values and perspectives and a lot of those underlying, causal things in human beings that when aligned between you and someone else make you both go: HOLY SHIT and you two just click. I think that this website and these letters are like a signal sent out into the world wide web, that people that I would just click with in person pick up on, resonate with, and decide to tune into by reading these letters. This might be the best way in the entire universe that I could find you people, who so often so deeply click with me. This whole writing words on the internet thing is sublime. A very, very cool thing for me. So… let’s hangout sometime! Ey? Moving on, though, I spent the most of this month in Cambodia. I haven’t talked about it too much because it’s personal and a tad embarrassing. But, I believe in openness and learned a worthwhile lesson from it, so on I’ll go. I went there to see someone in the Peace Corps I’d been talking with for a while and things didn’t exactly go how I hoped they might. Five of the thirteen days into the time we had planned to spend together, she sort of left me on Koh Rong Samloem, this gorgeous little tropical island off the southern coast of Cambodia with white sand beaches, bioluminescent plankton, toucans flying about the jungle, nightly stunning sunsets from the hostel we stayed at (pictured above), and a cost of about $13 a day to spend my remaining time there. I was devastated. After a day of moping about, though, I realized something: this is absolute paradise. And here I am feeling sorry for myself because my awareness is all pointed at my bruised ego and hopes lost instead of on the gift of my remarkable surroundings. Despite wanting to mope some more (I don’t think I’m alone in getting an odd sort of satisfaction out of struggle and emotional pain sometimes?) I decided to really try to let go and have a good time. And a good time was indeed had. I’m telling you this because I think there’s really something to letting go. I’ve thought that for a long while actually, it’s just that I finally had a concrete example knock me on the head this month and I had a chance to let go and now have a chance to tell you about it. I think we all carry a lot of heavy baggage from our past we’d have a much better time going about life without. And in that spirit, might I ask, what past occurrence in your life might be worth letting go? I think it’s a great question to ponder from time to time. Lastly, I want to tell you about this crazy new website called Narrative. It just launched on April 2nd with the aim of becoming “the world’s journal.” In time, I think it’s got an actual chance at being the next big thing, largely because 85% of the site’s revenue will be distributed among its users — split between creators, moderators, and “niche” owners — with creators earning 60% of the take for their content. I’m telling you about this because I think it’s a wonderful idea, and also because I own four niches that I hope to build deep, thoughtful, useful community around (Shoestring Travel, Minimalism, Stoicism, and Bodyweight Fitness). I invite you to check it out and to contribute! If you write, Narrative’s a great place to share your words in addition to the places you already do, a place that will hopefully earn you some extra dough on down the line. Anywho, it is now 3am and this feels like a good place to wrap up the first draft of this letter and begin combing as many of my mistakes out as possible before I fall asleep on this desk. This was a long-winded letter, thanks for reading all the way through… And for being my kind of human being. Sending love & stoke your way, Ethan P.S. I’m strongly considering writing a book proposal over the next couple months to offer to an agent and submit to publishers and all that jazz. However, I’m not too sure where in the world to write it. Might you have or know someone who has a particularly good place to write and sleep and perhaps live a little that I could rent, share, or borrow for a couple of months? Just curious and figured I’d throw it out there!
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