Reframe Your Inbox (‘Becoming’ Edition)

Hey everyone—happy Sunday, and Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers out there!

Here are three things for the week: 1) a reflection inspired by Michelle Obama’s Becoming documentary; 2) some updates about Reframe the Day; and 3) a few meaningful lines from a few unexpected sources.

FIRST THING

I’ve read and written a lot about the challenges millennials have faced in our 24-39(ish) years so far. (For more on these challenges, see this from Anne Helen Petersen in BuzzFeed News, or this from HuffPost’s Michael Hobbes, or the introduction to Reframe the Day.) In plenty of ways, though, millennials were enormously fortunate to come of age when we did. We’ve enjoyed many of the benefits of smartphones and the internet, for instance, while also being old enough to remember an era without constant connectivity and social media (and, in turn, we understand that it’s possible—even desirable—to spend time offline).

Another privilege of growing up a millennial—in my experience, at least—is the fact that many of us came of age in the era of Barack and Michelle Obama. As a millennial who was/is liberal and interested in politics, I was particularly lucky here. I was a senior in high school when then-Senator Obama gave his 2004 DNC speech. I was a senior in college when he was elected president. I ended up on Capitol Hill in time to see the Affordable Care Act pass the House. Obama’s was the first presidency I followed closely from start to finish. And by the time my first First Family left the White House, I’d experienced some of the most significant moments in my life, personally and professionally, and had begun to really understand who I was and what mattered to me.

I can’t calculate the precise impact of living most of my twenties alongside the Obama presidency, but it’s not insignificant. Among the takeaways from the Obama era was that you can engage in politics in good faith and without succumbing to cynicism. You can get in the trenches and fight the good fight and celebrate little wins here and there, and you can do all of that without sacrificing your values, your idealism, or your integrity. Politicians can be a force for good. Politics itself can be a force for good. It can make a difference. It can matter.

To learn these lessons while working my way through the transformation of early adulthood was, well, transformational. To develop these core convictions while I was going through some of life’s most complicated and uncertain years was life-altering and life-affirming. I feel fortunate to have experienced all of that personal transformation and growth with the backdrop of the Obamas in the White House. Not just because I shared their politics and supported their public policy priorities, but because I looked up to them. I admired them. I was, and remain, inspired by them.

My fellow millennial progressives and I will never experience another presidency like the Obama presidency. I say this not because America can’t elect another president with the same integrity and decency as Barack Obama. Despite what our current circumstances might suggest, I believe we can. I say this because we will never see the same type of charismatic and empathetic leadership while we’re at the same place in our lives. We can (and, I hope, will) continue learning and growing for the rest of our lives. But we only really come of age once. We only enter the working world for the first time once. We got to experience those chapters in parallel to the Obama presidency. And that’s pretty special.

I’ve been reflecting on some version of this since Erin and I watched the new Netflix documentary Becoming, which follows Michelle Obama along her 34-city book tour. I also thought about it while I listened to her amazing memoir. I think about it whenever I get sucked into YouTube archives of old Obama rallies and speeches. Becoming reminds me how lucky we were to do a lot of our own becoming during such a hopeful and inspiring chapter in U.S. history.

Even if it’s just for a 90-minute documentary, we can put aside some of the pain and anger about the present and fears about the future. We can put aside the shortcomings of Obama and his team, and we can put aside the obstacles and obstruction that his administration faced. We can put aside everything that’s happened since January 20th, 2017, and in the months and years leading up to that date. We can even put aside political differences and policy debates as a whole. We can put all of that aside for a few minutes and simply appreciate having leaders like Michelle and Barack Obama in public life.

SECOND THING

A few book-related updates:

  • The word on the street (and on my phone) is that books are finally arriving. Even though Reframe the Day urges readers to build more fulfilling days by spending less time on social media, I hope everyone will celebrate receiving the book by… posting about it on social media! The hashtag is #ReframeTheDay.

  • Please consider reviewing Reframe the Day on Amazon! Those reviews are so, so important for getting the word out about the book. It can be brief—even just a sentence or two. THANK YOU.

  • This coming Friday, May 15th, at 9 am ET/2 pm UK, I’m joining bookstagrammer @bookmattic for an Instagram Live Q&A. Follow me at @browithacat to tune in!

  • On Thursday, May 21st, I’ll be sitting down (virtually) with Scott Perry, host of the podcast Creative on Purpose, for a live taping of his show. We’ll be streaming at 12 pm ET/5 pm UK. More details to follow on this and a few other upcoming events.

In case you missed it, you can read the new foreword to Reframe the Day here: Reflections on Launching a Self-Help Book in the Middle of a Global Pandemic.

THIRD THING(S)

“Sometimes I worry that there is little left in a person these days save the desire to participate in a mighty strange collective fever dream of fakery and grand-scale mischief.” What an amazing sentence from Rye Curtis’s Kingdomtide. (See this review from NPR, and Curtis’s “letter to booksellers,” for more about the book.)

“What writing is: Telepathy, of course. … All the arts depend on telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation.” That’s from Stephen King’s (yes, that Stephen King) On Writing. Writing is kinda like telepathy, if you think about it, which is pretty cool.

“It’s amazing how cats can so perfectly encapsulate Zen meditation. One need only watch a cat for a few moments to understand this. Cats do one thing at a time, and deliberately and utterly live in the moment. They pause. They observe. They respond.” That’s from Zen Litter Box Gardening, a tiny booklet that accompanies the equally tiny Zen Garden Litter Box, which my brother gave me for my birthday a few months ago, and which we have also just gifted to our mom. (Happy Mother’s Day!)

That’s all for this week. As always, thanks for reading.

—Adam

PS—as a show of gratitude for that Zen Garden Litter Box, here’s a throwback for my brother Chris.