Living life fast and slow
E81: Divergent and Convergent years. Meet Leo Ariel.
“There are decades where nothing happens
and there are weeks where decades happen.”
— Lenin
All years are not created equal.
Each year I compress our life’s activities into an open shoe box above my desk. I toss in theatre tickets, receipts from meals that mark special moments, conference tags, commencement booklets, airline and train tickets, thank you letters, champagne corks, and the family photo cards that special friends share as the year ends.
As the year closes, our family gathers around the dinner table with a bottle of wine and a bowl of chips, tip the box over and begin to reminisce on the year just passed. “What is this receipt from, Mum? It says ‘Quay’.” “Remember when we met up on your birthday? Every bar and restaurant from Union down to the lake was at capacity with the early birds meeting up before the Elton John concert. We ended up sitting on a bench at the quay, sharing that bubble tea and croissant, watching the sunset paint the lake and downtown skyline. I just loved that special moment together.” I summarize the highlights, stick a label on the box, and stack it on a shelf.
Most years, the boxes are very much like those of the previous year.
But some years are not created equal. In those years, the box bulges. It feels like we lived a whole lifetime in the space of those months.
Divergent years
2018 was one of those years. My father passed away just before Christmas 2017, and the first item in the box is the memorial booklet from the day of his funeral in London in early January. It was joined by boarding passes from trips across the Atlantic a few months later to grieve with family and to empty my childhood home, preparing it for sale.
This was also the year that our oldest graduated from university, backpacked through South America, and started work as an adult. Our middle did a semester in Europe. Our youngest graduated high school that year. Spring 2018 was a blur of campus tours, shopping for prom suits, and getting stitches from rugby injuries. He started university in the fall.
Life moved fast that year. When we wrapped that year, we had spent a total of 8 nights together as our complete family unit of five, sleeping in our own beds under our own roof. The digital photo folder and the physical contents of the 2018 box tell that story.
Yes. 2018 was a year of activity, change, and divergence. It was also a year of immense growth and private reckoning. I referenced it in my very first edition of this newsletter, an essay titled E1: Mother of Dragons.
Convergent years
Then along came the Covid years. The 2020 shoebox is surprisingly light in comparison. However, our 2020 photo folder is bulging.
Time slowed right down in 2020. And life was fuller. Instead of us chasing moments with each child in different parts of the world, everyone returned home. There are photos of luscious lazy meals, lovingly prepared. Enjoyed on the patio, late into the evening.
It was a moment of reflecting back, dredging memories from our trip that became the first inkling of the Ripples travel book. A time of conversation. And deep discussions. Of baking. And contentious scrabble games. In between five home offices operating concurrently with zoom meetings and exams, we found time to return to our family traditions of watching the entire LOTR (extended edition on BluRay!) in our PJs, running orders of snacks on the side, stopping only for bathroom breaks and sleep.
In this cocoon, time collapsed in on itself. It felt like a moment of convergence. A time to consolidate all the frenetic energy.
It was as if we had all returned to the source, to regroup and re-energize before the centrifugal forces of the world spun us back out into our respective orbits.
Tick. Tock.
Where am I going with this?
Time passes by. Regardless.
We get to decide whether we want to live our life, or whether we want life to live us.
"The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot."
— Michael Altshuler
We have agency.
A window of opportunity
We did an eye-opening but easy 30-year family timeline exercise at the end of 2003. (I talk about it in the Futurecasting chapter of my book.) It forecast the cluster years of high activity.
It exposed a window of opportunity in our collective lives in 2004. We leveraged that idea into a year on the road with our young family. 2004-2005. Two years of intense change while we relocated from the USA to Canada, taking a 9-month, 16-country detour along the way. The photo folders for those years house over 7000 pre-iPhone images. Those memory boxes bulge, stuffed to the gills, spilling over into a separate system of saving the travel memories.
An intense year with all five of us, together, every day. Without the distraction of commuting and jobs and school. We were constantly on the road, living life out of a suitcase. We met with others but also cocooned — doing everything together, and developing family traditions that we still follow.
Living fast and slow
Make the time to evaluate and come to peace with the life you are living, at the speed you are living it. And if you are not happy, seek adjustments. Design moments of quiet into the rhythm of your fast and furious family week.
And remember, we need divergent and convergent years to live a balanced life.
The days are long. But the years are short. ,
— Gretchen Rubin
Some of you are starting out life, straight out of school. Many of you are in your frantic era. You are raising young families. You are sandwiched between parents, children, friends, and work. You are struggling to find some “me” time.
We get to choose the intentionality and the intensity of each year. Frenzied activity or quiet reflection. Quiet moments - and even quiet years - can be restorative. They can be exactly what our minds and bodies crave to counter the high energy in the world.
My takeaway: The concepts of divergence and convergence first struck me while I was researching homeschooling for our year on the road. Young students are exposed to new math concepts such as addition and subtraction in one year (divergence). They work hard to expand their world vision. The following year, the curriculum works on consolidating and familiarizing that foundation of knowledge (convergence), so that it is secure and steady enough to accept the next mind-blowing concept like multiplication and division. You can’t build a high rise on shaky foundations.
Seems like life happens the same way too. Memories may be made in the fast Divergent moments. But they consolidate in the slow Convergent time.
This essay pairs well with: E80: Containers. Curation. Cleaving. Continue?
Meet a member: Leo Ariel, Entrepreneur, World Traveller, Writer (and more)
“How can I help you?” It is the first thing Leo will ask if you reach out to him. He values the personal 1:1 relationships in the world. If he can help you, he will. Or he will seek out another option for you.
We have a rich diversity within our Tribe Tilt. I have been following Leo’s journey with much interest. He is Generation Z — the same age as my children — facing the same decisions and challenges. His rationale and our discussions now give me a different perspective and language when engaging with my own kids.
From him, I’m realizing that the hard divide so evident in our generation between STEM and Arts is melting away. Many in his generation are ‘creative’ — crafting a piece of sophisticated code, designing a 3D part for a bicycle, AND writing lyrics for song.
He is a writer. Leo and I crossed paths about a year ago, when he was a Write of Passage student. It was clear from the start that he has an incisive eye for editing. He can cull a rambling 2000-word essay down to its 200-word essence. In a world swimming in information bytes, I noticed that his GenZ “attention span” was actually a honed curation system, parsing the proliferation of social media platforms at speed, seeking out only the information worth investing his focus.
He was also struggling with some major life choices - what do I do after graduating. In a world of abundance, he graduated with a Computer Science degree, had a(n enviable) job offer in place. But life felt flat. He was seeking agency, after doing what he “should do” for so many years. For anyone interacting with those born 1995-2005, this seems a familiar conversation.
In an echo of living a divergent year, his solution was innovative. (Read his essay below).
He is a traveller. Leo is currently eight countries deep into his “Year of Travel” having just landed in Japan. Each month in a different country.
He is an entrepreneur. The biggest of his many projects is building an intuitive platform Peers where creatives can create community with their fans, share exclusive content and special projects. My interpretation - like Patreon meets Reddit with a twist.
I have this theory that our life journey follows the fingerprint of our essential interests. I use the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) as a proxy to understand the problems that need solutions. These are three that Leo picked:
Now that I have introduced you to Leo, I am sure you want to discover more about him. He is sharing his journey — the travel experiences, and the entrepreneurial one — via his newsletter, on Instagram and Twitter. Follow him via his weekly postcards.
Who would you like to meet next?
Click here for previous profiles of Tilt members Chaplain Christin Chong E77, Edupreneur David Dvorkin E39, soil agronomist Sam Knowlton E37, solopreneur Terri Lonier Entrepreneur E48, wildlife photographer Kathy Karn E36, Future of Work strategist (me) Karena de Souza E35.
Make. Take. Talk.
Did one idea stand out from this essay? What solutions have worked for you? Please share in our comments section. Or email/DM me back directly.
This week we welcome new members into our Tribe Tilt from Canada, Ireland, USA, Japan and Romania. They include Paul Millerd, Author of Pathless Path and
and one of my favourite thinkers Vicky Zhao who writes .You are each what makes this space special. There is so much engagement between our members in the comments section, in breakout room discussions, on Twitter, LinkedIn and WhatsApp.
This is a community that believes in the best of humanity - connecting people, sharing ideas, exploring thoughts respectfully. And we believe we can make a difference to the people and places that are precious to us.
The best idea can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time. You have permission.
See you next week. Stay healthy. From there all else becomes possible.
Karena
Thanks for the feature, Karena!
“”” “How can I help you?” It is the first thing Leo will ask if you reach out to him. He values the personal 1:1 relationships in the world. If he can help you, he will. Or he will seek out another option for you. “””
Yes, it’s true! I extend this offer to any member of Tribe Tilt 🐲
Karen, I love this scrapbook in a shoebox retrospective that you curate each year. Emptying the contents that have captured the gems - and heart-wrenching moments - of the year.
Your invitation to design moments of quiet into the rhythm of our fast and furious family week, is a moment to remember the agency in our life. We can choose to have balance.
What I'm intrigued by is what the difference is between Tilt the Future, and Tribe Tilt.