“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

- Jack Gilbert, A Brief For The Defense

Hey,

You know what time it is? It’s time to send it again.

If your pandemic experience was anything like mine, you might periodically notice ways in which you’re still a bit messed up from the experience. “We are the sum of our experiences” after all. Month after month of isolation, outrage, fear, masks, and riding it out in the same space day after day — it inevitably factored a bit into the sum of each of us.

While we each had our own unique experience of the pandemic, one factor that particularly affected me (and I suspect just about everyone else) was a severe lack of sending it. We have gone through a long period of restraint, of waiting for the day to come when we can once again [fill in the blank], of judging others for their actions and fretting about how others will judge ours. The cultural messaging of the past two years has been clear: the move has been not to make one.

I don’t mean to be critical here, but to point out that a situation and spell of passivity has fallen upon the land. Since March of 2019, our abilities to send it have collectively atrophied with a lack of opportunity to put those abilities to use. For instance, in place of my more sending it activities (learning to fly airplanes, nights out drinking and dancing at bars, trying to work up the courage to talk to a cute girl at the coffee shop etc.), I had to stumble my way into doubling-down on more passive, slow-burning means of goodness: books, long walks, drinking absurd volumes of hot tea, time in nature, digging my sensations in the present moment etc. All great things, but over a long time, I seem to have gotten stuck in low gear.

Last weekend, though, things changed.

I drove out to Joshua Tree to meet up with a true legend and one of my best friends, a dude I’ve long referred to as The Yesman (a nickname earned from a summer-long experiment in saying “yes” while we WWOOFed on the Big Island of Hawaii back in 2015). While the pandemic unfortunately ended the Yesman’s wild attempt at group hiking the 6,875 mile Great Western Loop, he had fortunately just finished building out a big, beautiful winterized camper van and spent the pandemic social distancing all over the USA by remaining in the great outdoors — bagging peaks, climbing rocks, and in the winter, split-boarding and taking ice axes to frozen waterfalls.

Whether passivity could never grip the Yesman or he never stopped exercising his absurd ability to send it can’t be said for sure. But what can be said is that sending it with him last weekend gave me back another gear.

A generous and committed guide, the Yesman taught me how to trad climb, crack climb, repel down cliffs, and expertly pack out my “wag bag” in Joshua Tree National Park on Friday. Then, after a nice little eight-mile run Saturday morning, we drove to San Bernardino to attend Beyond Wonderland, my first-ever EDM (electronic dance music) Festival, where the dude masterfully navigated us through and to the throbbing heart of the largest crowd I have ever seen in my entire life (perhaps 150,000 people if I had to guess). We danced our asses off for like six hours, rocking sweet matching yellow-tinted women’s sunglasses, and didn’t make it back to our motel until 5am.

It was a full send.

It shocked me out of passivity, out of being stuck in my lowest gear. I’ve been having all these spontaneous desires to do crazy things this week, like climb up on the roof to eat dinner and to write this letter, explore random downtown parking garages and jump road barricades on runs, and blast music with all the windows down grooving behind the wheel on the freeway. I feel more alive, vibrant, and primed to send it in ways larger than I have since the start of the pandemic.

I write you tonight in an attempt to disrupt the spell. To point out the passivity and spread the stoke. Because we are here and now, living and breathing, and folks, it is time again to live.

And if there is one simple, unfailing formula for living it is this: send it.

With love & stoke,

Ethan

P.S. The Yesman writes his own newsletter aptly dubbed A Sip of Stoke. It is photo-heavy, honest and deep, and is without fail the most exciting thing to regularly grace in my inbox.

The Newest Addition to the Bookshelf: The Denial of Death

Following the “red pill or blue pill” metaphor of The Matrix, The Denial of Death is the most “red pill” book I have ever read.

Ernest Becker takes us on a philosophical journey through the perspectives of some of history’s greatest minds — Kierkegaard, Maslow, Freud, Rank, and others — on the human situation and “why” of human existence, exposing some of our most fundamental illusions. As we grow up, our perceptions narrow and we adopt a few vital lies to shield ourselves from the awesome mystery and terror of being a temporary, living, breathing, eating, pooping creature.

Dig It >

Spiritually Expansive

As my last Late Night Letter had an oversized image and unfortunately caught the spam filter of most people’s inboxes, I thought to include this one again!

It’s the rough transcript of a phone conversation I had walking around Phoenix one night this February with good friend and fellow wonderwanderer, Dan, about casting our awareness wider and cultivating “spiritual expansiveness.”

It’s a sort of guest post on danscreativeoutlet. As Dan is one of the more sage-like people I have ever interacted with in person, I’m honored that our conversation became a post on his site!

Read On >