Just last week, I finished reading Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, a book I received as a birthday gift earlier this year. I had heard an interview with McKeown on the Art of Manliness podcast last year, and the idea of “essentialism” had hit a chord with me right at the time I was considering dumbing down my phone and simplifying life. The book also came on the heels of the first read-through of Deep Work by Cal Newport, and it seemed like a good follow-on, albeit with some repetition.

I’ve been listening to podcasts for a few years now, and only recently switched podcast apps on my phone. I started with Overcast as the first podcast app, primarily leveraging the “Smart Speed” feature to trim silences so I could get in more listening. But back in my Overcast days, I was a more casual listener. More recently, I’ve switched to Castro due to a few super-handy features.

Over the past two months, I’ve successfully completed a challenge I set out to try: posting on my blog every day. I didn’t set an end date for this, but just kept at it every day. Once I had a visible streak, I felt like I couldn’t stop. In fact, I still have a continuous streak… I don’t have to stop.

This week was the first time I started to feel the change in the seasons. We had a much cooler day earlier in the week, combined with bright sunshine, that gave a distinct feeling of the start of a new school year. I took a shorter walk over lunch that day, and while taking in the exquisite elements of the weather, wrote down a whole flood of memories that this kind of season change brings:

Out for a date night with the wifey tonight, took this photo while sitting on a park bench after a nice walk.

There are some musical pieces that carry a personal story of discovery, either the first time you heard an artist or a specific song; how it made you feel. Due to the ubiquitous music-discovery features built into services like Spotify and Apple Music today, that experience is unfortunately becoming a thing of the past.