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Hey, This is a particularly interesting letter to write to you tonight because I read the entire five years worth of monthly correspondence this project has amassed so far this weekend. My inbox was running out of storage space and I didn’t want to lose any of the first sent “newsletters,” so I read as I went along saving sixty-some-odd letters to my laptop as PDF documents. I found it fascinating, glancing across the written arc of the last five years of my life. Of course, it is my own life, so that probably makes it a tad more interesting to me than it is to you. But, like clockwork, these once-a-month messages filled with the thoughts and stories I was living at the time were captivating to read back through. My progress as a writer was striking. I am yet no master wordsmith, but I set the bar so low when I began that I can say with great confidence that I have come a long way since my first forays into writing. Surprisingly, though, what I found most moving was that first year of not-so-well-written letters, for they were littered with prolific action and courageous leaps. In a matter of a year, I went from WWOOFing on a farm on the Big Island of Hawaii to bussing tables at a brewery in Phoenix to attempting my own online startup company hiring college students write guides to what their college is really like while living in Playa del Carmen, Mexico to running low on money and moving to a Yellowstone National Park gate town to re-open an old log-cabin lodge and bar that had been closed the previous ten years. That year, I also read a couple dozen books, wrote over fifty articles, and published GO. A Ridiculously Useful Guide to Cheap, Unconventional Travel. I thirsted for experience and novelty and learning and was drinking life through a firehouse. I worked a ton, but I loved the work, and lived a great deal between the work too. As months turn to years in the letters, my pace slows down. Productivity decreases, but quality increases. There are less articles attached to letters, but the articles and letters become better and more interesting. The words dive deeper, wriggling below the surface into the more causal innards and underbellies of things. Surely this is a worthwhile trade-off. It’s the trade-off I set out hoping to make — youthful exuberance spent wandering in exchange for some wisdom. But in the inertia of life during the coronavirus these days, I found something so intoxicating in the unyielding embodiment of that “throw off the bowlines” and “sail away from the safe harbor” energy I set out with. I suspect that “explore, dream, discover” energy is one of the main reasons why you read these letters. And I got to thinking… where did that energy come from? What allowed me those initial fearless steps and repeated swan-dives into the unknown? I’ve gotten a little turned around during this pandemic and could use a little more of that energy myself these days. The answer came quickly: it was death. It was my proximity to the edge of life at sixteen years old. It was electrifying awareness that one day I was really going to die. When you know you are going to die — when you live life through the lens that you are a sandman building sandcastles on the beach of time — you can appear awfully courageous from the outside, but the inside truth is that you are operating from a different perspective than everyone else. This temporariness perspective was my superpower. Like the radioactive spider that bit Spiderman, giving him spider-powers, a mosquito carrying a rare virus bit me, giving me a firsthand experience with death during my most formative years. Knowing death, that was the key to the fearlessness. It largely still is, I think. But thirteen years have passed between that mosquito bite and this moment, and that knowing isn’t as fresh and vivid as it used to be. I’ve also been questioning “I” and “death” a lot throughout these years, and identity is a lot less cut and dry to me than it used to seem — some urgent umph exchanged for wondrous mysticism, reducing the inspiration to action death’s perspective used to bring. I thought I’d use this letter to try and give you the key to the best feeling I got from reading five years of these letters this weekend. That freedom came, and largely still comes, from an acute awareness of the temporariness of me and you and this very situation. Nobody wants to think about death because it’s the scariest thing. But if you get comfortable enough with the scariest thing, you can harness and use it to free yourself from less scary things. Paradoxically, like the brightest lantern, you can hold death up to the darkness of just about any other unknown and see through it because it just doesn’t matter all that much in the light of the temporariness of it all. So, grab your lantern, go forth, and send it this month! With love & stoke, Ethan P.S. Three more things: I have no articles to share with you this month and I apologize! It has been a busy one. My buddy Cole and I plan to launch a second branch of our real estate photography company in Denver next week and I have been hard at work on yet another website. However, there is much writing in the works and to come.
The number of Needlestacks on the internet doubled from two to four this month! Huge thanks to Jessica Mathews and Runaway Photographer for joining this 90’s style internet movement to make the internet browsable by best.
If you’re into this idea of freedom found through remembering death, the best way to remember is to tie the idea to a symbol you will constantly encounter. This is the purpose of the memento mori coin. I carry mine every day in my left pocket, and I would love to send you one too.
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