”Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Hola mis amigos,

Happy New Lap Around the Sun! I’m writing you tonight from the airports of Mexico City, Guadalajara, and the air in between, as I red-eye-fly my way home into a new year.

If this fall was for me about 17 Ideas That Changed My Life, this December has been about questions that might do the same. In turn-of-the-year fashion, I’m in a reflective phase of zooming out, asking questions of myself and the places my energy goes, and how best to reallocate, redistribute, and recenter.

I feel myself at a juncture. From 18-22, I was an avid biochemistry student. From 22-27, a world-traveling, seasonal-job-working, book-crushing reality explorer. From 27-33, a flight school student grounded by a pandemic who accidentally built a real estate photography business, and now with a few pennies put away and a few months into a four-day workweek with that business, I find myself with more bandwidth and energy to allocate than I have in the six years previous. Having put 17 Ideas That Changed My Life out in the world, I’m feeling “caught up” on the creative front, and thus, the big question: what’s next?

As with all times of transition, there’s some uncertainty and indecision, and a natural dredging up of the biggest questions in life. It’s tremendously exciting at times, and also an uncomfortable place to be. As an avid traveler and one who lives by finding instead of seeking, I’ve been through a lot of uncertainty, and I’m pretty comfortable with being uncomfortable. I’ve got two metric tons of stoke for what lies ahead — but getting there also comes with a some of false starts, second guesses, and worried thoughts as I ponder making changes to good things already going. Ultimately, the aim is not to avoid the wrong step, but to take the resonant and right one.

With all this big picture thinking, instead of heading south for December (as I have the past four years when real estate photography slows this time of year), I decided to stay home with the family for the holidays and put my energy into redesigning the website as I introspect the creative efforts and my life itself.

The family shared many great meals, long walks at night digging Christmas lights, tea atop a mountain at sunset, and our Christmas Day was the most wholesome I’ve had in years. I also attended my fifteen-year high school reunion (a sort of last-minute redemption as our tenth was cancelled in 2020, a month into the pandemic) where I reconnected with one of my best friends from elementary school and plan to hang with him and his kids soon (crazy!) — so staying home for the holidays turned out totally grand and wholesome.

But yes: I’m in return from Mexico as I write tonight… So what’s up with that?

Well, three weeks ago, an invite from one of the most interesting, intelligent, and creative women I’ve yet to meet (who actually checked me into a hostel last year on January 1st, the night I wrote about riding a motorcycle to a volcano island in Nicaragua) to meet somewhere in Mexico for the New Year… and I just couldn’t say no. So I flew to Mexico City on the 27th, rented a (vespa-esc) scooter, and followed her out of the city to this epic mountain town on a lake where boats sail, people wakeboard, and paragliders rain from the mountains all day long. The place had this incredible adventurous dynamism mixed with a tight European cobblestone street feel. As moved by sunsets as I am, she picked out an Airbnb with this incredulous balcony overlooking town, lake, and mountains, and I just couldn’t believe the wondrous rabbit hole I’d fallen into:

And yet, in tune with the rest of my December, it was neither a romantic nor sunshine-and-rainbows-blissed-out rendezvous, but a deep, heavy, spiritual, philosophical, psychological exploration with a fellow sending-it-soul wrestling with questions far larger, deeper, and more fundamental than my current own.

It was one of the most poetic weeks of my life. Mixed with all these layers and feels and ups and downs and scooter rides and mountain climbs and just incredible conversations and frustration and wonder and moments of fantastic clarity and moments of fantastic doubt and it challenged me and it affirmed me as on and on the kaleidoscope of the week spun.

All this to say, I’ve had a heaping helping of living the questions with the turn of the year. Not arriving at all the answers, but sitting and wrestling and being with them.

Tim Ferriss recently sang super high praise for this Mark Manson article that wisely and essentially asks “what bad feelings are you willing and able to sustain to get the good feelings?”

Tonight, I think one of my strongest answers is “uncertainty.”

With love and stoke at 3:39am in the Guadalajara airport,

Ethan

P.S. A few weeks ago, I recorded Sitting with 17 Ideas That Changed My Life, where I flip through my little philosophical coffee table book and just chat a couple of minutes about each idea. Play like a podcast sometime! I think it’s pretty curious — particularly the last few ideas.

Things I Created This Month:

Sitting with 17 Ideas That Changed My Life

An unscripted reflection on "17 Ideas That Changed My Life," a sort of philosophical coffee table book I released a few months ago.

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