Select All. Delete.

There's always the version history...

Note: Even accounting for Observed Independence Day, this is a day late for reasons about to be clear.

I wrote a post about Independence to go out today. Or maybe about Freedom. Or maybe about Patriotism or about the lessons to be learned about maintaining faith in my country through some of its darker days. Or maybe it wasn’t really about anything and it was some pointless meandering thoughts haphazardly strewn together. I think it was the last one, and while I know it wasn’t, I still think it was.

And so as I gave it a pre-send read I decided I hated it and deleted the whole thing. I tried to make some edits to sharpen it up and that made it worse so deleting seemed the only remaining course of action. I’ll never know if it was any good, and on some level I shouldn’t have cared. I don’t want to put garbage into my friends’ inboxes, but in the pursuit of authenticity I think the right move is to put myself out there and look for what resonates and what doesn’t.

I read two email newsletters every week - they hit my inbox Fridays around noon and I usually stop everything to take them in. Jeremy reads them both too and we often text each other passages from each with comments on how their resonance and continuous Baader-Meinhofness apply to some conversation we’ve had or some question we’ve been pondering.

That feels like the goal of any kind of content creation. Putting enough of one-self out there to make your audience feel compelled to re-share your work in hopes it elicits a similar reaction. I imagine aiming for it too much though is the way you end up deleting a whole post when the reality is you’ve got a long while to go before people are texting your finest work around.

It’s a low grade imposter syndrome of sorts, one built of the comparison dangers discussed in a previous post here. I’d likely have been better off hitting send and accepting that something a bit off my finest work still served the purpose (it also would have meant I didn’t miss the publish date). And so what am I to do - considering this post my Select All, Delete? Continue to create seems to be the right answer.

That and share what I can remember from the since deleted post. I'll end with a conversation about America that I had with a Turkish friend, Bashir, who owned the cafe I used to work from when I first moved to NYC. Bashir had moved here in order to open the cafe - expressly - which blew my mind until he explained it.

“You know what makes this place, America, so wonderful to me?” Bashir asked me - pushing a Turkish coffee across the bar.

“I’ve always wanted to open a cafe - tried many times for many years in Turkey. I was told I didn’t know the right people to do it and so that was that. I opened this cafe, here in New York City, six months after I moved here - all it took was some paperwork and a little money. No connections, no bribes. You don’t understand what America is to me my friend, no Americans do. The streets in America are still paved with gold, you just have to look at them the right way.”

B

As we aim to foster a sense of community we’re doing stuff here at Project Kathekon.

Every month we pick an exercise and aim for 10,001 reps. We’d love you to do it with us.

We read books sometimes, and then we give them away. Want one?