Running, coding and full-contact living

#04—what's springing forth this week

🥊 Full-contact living

I have at least 38 versions of a tagline for this Substack. How to package what I’m doing is a minor obsession and the writer in me gets a kick out of trying to articulate it. This week, I’ve updated the tagline to clues and catalysts for full-contact living.

Which begs the question: what is full-contact living? I’ve revamped my About page to explain:

Full-contact living is the invitation to an uncensored experience of living, from the sublime to the shambolic. It is a playful challenge to stop and look life in the eye, without agenda or expectation. It is the possibility of puncturing an inherited myopia and rediscovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Full-contact living is not another thing to do, or a standard to attain. It is to lay down the default deficiency through which we often orient to the world. Neither is it an injunction to just go with the flow, dude. It is a call to come home to ourselves, whatever that looks like, and return to a wholeness that is always, already given.

👉 Read the rest now, please.

🤖 Funniest read this week

To someone, somewhere, this is not satire.

How We Became a Techno-Optimist Family

👨🏼‍💻 Coding… again

This week, I’ve been building out some email sequences that better explain what coaching is and what it is not. I have a lot to say about what it is not. I’ll share all of that here when I become sick of editing.

I also ended up writing a lot of code. I have a Megatron spreadsheet that helps me visualise and categorise my financial plight. After trying to make another painful update, I realised it was time to take it to the next level: get all this data in a database and build the UX I wanted around it. As someone who will have multiple streams of income and other non-standard financial affairs, this kind of visibility will be incredibly useful.

After going through a Tech-flavoured burnout, I didn’t see myself coming back to writing code. But it’s been therapeutic and deeply satisfying to exercise that muscle. I find myself appreciating how long coding has been in life and what a potent means of activating flow it can be. It had not occurred to me that building and selling software might still play a role in my future, but that feels like a direction this could move in.

🏃‍♂️ Running… again

On the topic of old passions re-entering my life, I ran my first Parkrun on the weekend. I’m back to being able to run 2 or 3 times a week without feeling rotten. I don’t have the ambition to run further right now. But I do find myself wanting to go a little faster… so I’ll be doing more of these Parkruns, and eeking towards that 20-minute finish time (I ran 23:19).

📕 The Deepest Acceptance

I listened to The Deepest Acceptance, an audiobook by Jeff Foster. It is more a relaxed set of talks than a book, which suits the topic. The theme of the book is that the deepest acceptance has already happened; that by something being here in your experience, it has already been allowed in; that our usual acceptance and rejection are always too late; and that what you are is not the pain or the joy, but the capacity for both. 8.6/10.

---

I’ve updated my Recommended page with new additions, alongside everything else I’m excited about.

—Dan

Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash