Reflections for 2024

It’s cliche to lead with Mary Oliver’s oft-cited “instructions for living a life,” but I often think about her words at the end of the year as a barometer of how things are going.

Last year was marked by a lot of change in my life and I thought I’d share a few personal reflections before getting back to the main programming. In the next few weeks, I’ll share more interesting data, tidbits, and stories from last year that are guiding how I think.

(I finally got around to doing the Year Compass and would recommend it if you’re looking for a nice way to kickstart the year.)

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In the poem, “Sometimes,” Oliver writes, “Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.”

Pay attention. It grew harder to slow down my mind this year as I widened my aperture. I’m still getting used to the new cadence of my days, mainly because starting a company has unearthed a growing list of things that I don’t yet know how to do.

I notice a difference between days where time feels like cycling through a list of tasks compared to days that feel more like an exploration or an unfolding. Many moments feel like playing in a league where I don’t know the rules. I find it easy to let my attention fragment across ‘how I built this’ guides or interviews with people seeming to offer a playbook, that is, until I realize that I’m playing a different sport.

I wonder how others wrestle with this—how it feels to balance our attention to the outer world (how things are done) and our inner worlds of curiosity (questioning how things could be). Striking the right balance of these inputs and outputs is key to the creative pursuit of building something new; to pulling the right dose of insight from the world while maintaining a beginner’s mind.

This is alive for me in thinking about fund structures and investment products that might actually build more inclusive wealth. I wonder why those who bear the least risk, wealthy investors, expect the greatest reward. I wonder why we have formulas to calculate risk-adjusted returns (to measure how much risk an asset has vs. a known low-risk investment), but nothing to empirically measure how much impact an asset has compared to a known socially/environmentally-harmful investment. I know the boilerplate answer to these questions, but I wonder if we should accept it.

Be astonished. Spending more time behind a screen this year, at times, shrunk my sense of awe and connection. I think about Annie Murphy Paul’s description of awe in nature, which she calls a “reset button” for our brain that leads us to become “more curious and open-minded.” A friend reminded me recently that a walk in the park or an hour at the piano—whatever it takes to move into this state of reset—are the things that make the work possible.

It’s reminiscent of a line from Andrea Gibson’s poem, A Year of No Grudges, which I heard on a moving episode of Good Life Project. They say, "I think almost everyone tries hard to do good, / and just finds out too late / they should have tried softer.” I’ve wondered if moving away from the work and the goals and the lists, back toward a sense of awe, may be what makes it all possible.

Tell about it. I’ve realized that both writing and being in conversation with others are the best uses of my time, yet they’ve felt harder than usual this year. I realized that trying to write for others instead of for myself was stopping me from putting my ideas out there. In the back of mind was a nagging question: what do you have to say? I felt the fear of getting things wrong or not knowing enough stop me from sending the email I needed to send. But being wrong is a gift, an opportunity to learn. At least that’s what I’ll tell myself this year.

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Rereading Oliver’s poem, another line jumped out at me: “Sometimes / melancholy leaves me breathless.”

Watching the temperature creep up or the devastation or wars unfolding on my tiny screen has been draining. This word, breathless, felt so apt. What to do about it? James Baldwin once shared in a conversation with Margaret Mead, “We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.” A standalone quote risks the reduction of Baldwin’s multi-dimensional wrestling with hope and outrage, but still, those words are a reminder that “together” is our only way out of the mess.

Happy 2024. May we all do the things that feel hard and scary this year.

-Caitlin