A Learning a Day

A good friend recently lost her father, and she shared a beautiful, poignant account of his final weeks.

He’d gone in for a checkup after some discomfort. The doctors found stage four cancer, already in the bone. A few days, maybe a few weeks if he was lucky. He asked one question: how sure are you?

Very sure, they said. In that case, he told them, no treatment. His daughter had some good bottles of wine. He’d rather spend his time enjoying those.

Then the doctors mentioned one option that might buy him a few extra weeks or months. He asked if he’d still be able to travel, to make it back to his hometown unassisted. Possibly, they said. He said he’d try it.

A couple of days in, he called his kids together and told them it wasn’t working. And instead of dwelling on that, he spent the time helping them sort out the logistics that would carry them through the months after he was gone.

Next, he said his goodbyes to them the next day. To his nineteen-year-old grandson, he said that when he looked back on his life, what he remembered most fondly were his adventures, the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t. He told him to make it a priority to have as many as he could.

Then he went to sleep, and his organs shut down one by one. As he loved science, my friend read to him about the miracle of engineering that is the human body. As she read to him, she saw it slowly diverting all energy from failing organ to the brain and finally the heart.

He passed the next day.

His grandson said it reminded him of the ending of the tale of the three brothers in the Harry Potter books.

And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life.” — The Tale of the Three Brothers

The youngest brother, after a long and full life, finally takes off his cloak of invisibility, passes it to his son, and greets Death as an old friend, going with him gladly, as an equal.

Indeed.

It’s tempting, when you’re surrounded by people who all seem to be running the same race, to compare where you are against where they are.

But you don’t know their starting point.

You also don’t know where their finish line actually is.

And you have no idea if their path is a sprint, a marathon, or a cross-country run.

Some days you’re the pigeon. Some days you’re the statue.

I remembered this one at the end of a recent statue day. As I’ve learned over and over, the best thing to do on those days is head to bed.

And try again tomorrow.

Bill Perkins, in his book Die with Zero, has a different take on the ant and the grasshopper.

In the original tale, the ant spends all summer storing food for winter while the grasshopper plays. When winter comes, the grasshopper has to crawl back to the ant, who takes him in. The lesson is usually about the importance of frugality and foresight.

Perkins pushes back on that. We overemphasize saving and forget that the entire point of saving is to eventually enjoy what you saved. The ant had a point. But so did the grasshopper.

The answer isn’t either extreme. It’s finding the middle, where you save enough and still spend it on being alive while you’re alive.

“Good times become good memories, but bad times become good lessons.” | Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender

The simplicity of this one made me smile.

One lesson I keep coming back to: a light dinner, something closer to 60% full than 80%, with fewer carbs where I can manage it, followed by a mile or mile-and-a-half walk, wrapped up at least two hours before bed.

It just feels so much better than any alternative.

One downside of AI being everywhere is the sheer volume of AI-generated crap now flooding feeds and workplaces alike.

I don’t spend much time on social feeds, but I hear about the challenges of keeping AI slop out. But I definitely have seen it in the workplace.

And here’s the thing: past a certain point, it’s easy to spot. There are patterns. Even at their best, models lack judgment and context.

The lesson for me is that AI is a power tool, and like any power tool, it takes skill to use well. You cannot outsource your thinking to it, and you cannot expect it to have good judgment when you’re solving intricate problems (at least not yet).

Where it shines: getting you past the blank page with a rough first draft, acting as a thought partner when you give it real context, brainstorming, analyzing data quickly, and editing through iterations of your own work.

Where it fails you: the moment you think you can hand something off and skip the thinking yourself.

Don’t outsource your thinking to AI.

“The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end, that’s all there is.”
— Mr. Carson, Downton Abbey

I’ve never watched the show, but I thought this was beautiful.

Strip away everything else we chase, careers, money, recognition, and what’s actually left at the end is what we remember and who we remember it with.

Maybe that’s the only scoreboard worth keeping.

(H/T: Die with Zero by Bill Perkins)

In February 2020, a vet and wildlife conservationist named Sean McCormack met Elliot Newton, co-founder of Citizen Zoo, at a talk on beaver reintroduction.

Beavers had been extinct in Britain for roughly four hundred years. Over the next three years, McCormack, Newton, and a coalition of wildlife groups worked to bring five of them back to Paradise Fields, an old golf course in Ealing, West London, right next to a tube station that flooded every time it rained hard. The Ealing Beaver Project was born.

In October 2023, the beavers arrived, relocated from a wild population in Scotland.

Two and a half years later, Greenford station hasn’t flooded once. The beavers’ dams have turned the site into a wetland that now supports insects, fish, and birds that weren’t there before.

Nobody engineered a drainage solution. They released five rodents and let them do what beavers have always done.

Sometimes the best fix isn’t a new system. It’s restoring the one that used to work before we removed the part that was doing the job. That’s often the case with nature at the very least.

(H/T: The Daily Difference newsletter)

“Sometimes life is like this dark tunnel. You can’t always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if you just keep moving… you will come to a better place.” | Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender

I’ve found this to be so true in my experience. It is easy to say there is light at the end of the tunnel. And there is.

But it isn’t always easy to see it.