Updates: Life on the road, friendships, & other little things
A new behind-the-scenes post every two weeks for paying subscribers
Hey, Nick here! 👋
I wanted to start connecting more directly with you as a paying subscriber to this newsletter so I'm sending you this update. My vague idea is to use these updates to share from the recent week or two:
some behind-the-scenes (e.g. life on the road living in a campervan, interesting discussions I've had with people, unfiltered and intriguing thoughts)
some links to things I've found interesting
I'll try and send these out at least once every two weeks for now on top of the regular post. (I'd love to hear your feedback! Just reply privately or leave a Substack comment.)
A quick note: this update (and maybe a few of the firsts) will also be visible to free subscribers in full - an attempt on my part to give a preview to those who are considering joining us as a paying subscriber. So if you're a free subscriber and you're seeing this in your email, hello, and hint hint :)
Alright - on to the updates!
Updates of life on the road
The biggest update is that we've collected our campervan and have started travelling in it! I'm actually writing this update from the table behind the driver's seat at 8:10 am on a Tuesday, parked 100m from the beach near a town called Zingst on the northern coast of Germany.
As you can imagine, I've been accumulating a lot of thoughts on what life is like on the road. I'm sure you would too if you suddenly had the means to travel anywhere you want (albeit with our enthusiasm dampened by 100 euros 3/4 tank diesel refills)!
Here are some of the thoughts that are vibrating the most in my mind --
Babies can be remarkably adaptable. The first night that Charlotte slept in the upper bed she cried for a while. Second night onwards she has had no problems falling asleep up there. Fearing that she wouldn't adapt to life on the road with us was one of my biggest worries. That fear is now put to rest. (We still have worries relating to her safety - will she fall through the safety net from the top deck? - that we need to work out but her ability to fall asleep in the van was the most important to us!)
Traveling by campervan is more tiring than I thought. We're constantly cleaning, rationing and refilling water, emptying the wastewater tank and chemical toilet, worrying about whether the interior temperature is conducive for Charlotte to sleep through the night, and debating whether to spend time at X or start moving to Y to find a suitable spot to camp and so on. The general upsides so far still outweigh the down, though!
I blurted out to Charlane (my wife) that from now on we should always own a car (maybe an electric next) because it "feels right." On introspection, I think what I meant was that for a while, it felt like something was missing in our lives. A good life, by my definition, seems to require oscillating periods of being mobile (unstable but colourful) and being stationary (stable but monotonous), and a car (or van!) lets us alternate between these two states instantly.
In case you're wondering about my "workstation" on the road - this is what it looks like when I write in the van, whenever I'm lucky to find myself in one of those unpredictable pockets of time:
Updates on friendships
A bit over a month ago when I first started this Substack version of my newsletter, I wrote in my first post:
Looking back on my life, one thing has become increasingly clear: I never had very close friends.
Since then, I'm happy to report that an old friend and I rekindled our friendship! I must admit, all credit goes to him because he wrote me a message after he read that post and said,
I have about 596 questions about the last bit about friendship but to not be too probey or nosey, I'll just leave you with a podcast I enjoyed recently: https://the-art-of-manliness.simplecast.com/episodes/how-long-does-it-take-to-make-friends-and-how-does-that-process-work-anyway
I read the article and had some thoughts. This started a correspondence in email and then WhatsApp and then before I knew it, we scheduled an hour-long video call to catch up. Since then, we've chatted with each other 3 times in 6 weeks, the most regularly I've talked to a friend in a very long time.
To that friend (who receives these emails), thank you for rekindling our friendship and helping me learn that adult friendships take time to nurture. I'm finding it very much worth the while!
I still wonder about many things on the broader topic of friendships in adulthood, though. How many friendships, realistically? Will this one last? When will I get hurt and will I/should I retreat?
Little things I've started to love
Sarah Millers's Can We Read? newsletter. I recently found Sarah's newsletter through one of her comments on another Substack newsletter and I've since become a regular reader. Sarah writes summaries of children's books that I use to inform myself on what books to get for Charlotte. So far I've bought 4 books on her recommendation.
The Road Not Taken, a poem by Robert Frost. Said friend above shared this poem with me as we started talking a lot about our careers over our video calls. I never did know how to appreciate poems (is "appreciate" even an appropriate word to use here?), so this one initially landed cold to me too. But I found myself coming back to it over a few days, perhaps because I've been on the road, and I can say that I sort of understand what the poet is conveying now. Good thing that said friend happens to be an English teacher!
And then there's this little trick that I invented for marking Post-It notes as "done" when in a pinch (i.e. without a pen or a bin nearby):
In case it's not self-evident, I rotated the note so that it's upside down and illegible for an upright-standing person to read, thereby signalling that the note is no longer relevant! I'll then peel them off and throw them in the recycling bin when I'm free. Simple solutions are the best, no?
Thanks for reading!
With ❤️, Nick