Writing, creating, living
Peace.
Most mornings, at least during the week, I do my Morning Pages. As stream of consciousness that covers three pages of a notebook using one of my prized fountain pens. The one I really want is far outside my budget (for now). The Montblanc Great Characters Miles Davis Limited Edition 1926 Fountain Pen. For the Morning Pages, I just write, whatever pops into my mind, in the moment. Sometimes, I even forget what I was writing halfway through writing a sentence because I wondered off elsewhere right after the thought popped into my mind.
I love being able to freeform write. To put pen to page without expectation, without a plan, without concern for what readers will think because there are no readers. Perhaps, when I am gone from the physical, my children will find my old journals in a box somewhere and spend time going through it. A part of me wishes my journals were those that could be published posthumously but there is more about what I need to do that day, what I need to buy, the issues with ink cartridges, random word associations, etc than anything else.
I guess one can get a sense of the things that I’m thinking about, the things that are bothering me and the hopes that I have if one read the journals I have written in over a year or two. Sometimes, to me at least, it feels like I am just repeating myself. Perhaps, one of these days, I will get them out of the box in storage and read from beginning to end. There are probably some half decent ideas/thoughts languishing somewhere between the lines.
My podcast Listen To Your Footsteps was recently selected to be part of a Spotify Africa programme, detailed in Spotify Launches Cutting Edge Studio in Johannesburg. Over the last three years, since I started the podcast, I have wanted to also shoot video but was grappling with the mechanics and logistics. In 2025, we do video and go from an episode every fortnight to weekly. It is both daunting and exciting.
I am grateful to the Podhouse for serving as the home of the podcast for the last two years. I will definitely be back there in the future. And we still have a couple more episodes to do before the end of the year. We’ll be taking a two/three week break at the end of the year.
We have been busy since the last newsletter and had conversations with Hakeem Anderson-Lesolang, Munyaradzi Chanetsa, Bianca Sibiya, and Michelle Atagana.
For all the writing I have done over the years, I am still filled with doubt every time I sit down to write. I read a lot of books about writing to try to curb these feelings of doubt. In 2022, I read Allison Fallon’s The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life. It is full of gems (and reminders) that I try to go back to whenever I am struggling.
“What Writing Can Help Us Do: Name our experience so we can more fully understand it. Give language to the future we want to create so it stops feeling vague and begins to seem achievable. Build a bridge (neural pathways) between the now we’re experiencing and the future we’d like to create. Heal and engineer our own resilience from past experience. Find perspective for life’s challenges, large and small. Invent brand-new solutions for age-old problems. Build our confidence. Increase our working memory and overall cognitive power. Cultivate more gratitude and contentment. Provide clarity for our decisions. Increase satisfaction in our romantic partnerships. Level up our immune system, help us sleep better, etc. Combat and curb anxiety, stress, and depression. Tune out the well-meaning and critical voices around us so we can finally understand what we think.”
Telling stories are part of the human experience. I sincerely believe this. I have built a career of sorts around telling stories and working with others to tell their stories, including companies, brands, etc. And spend a lot of time learning how to I am in the middle of reading Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks which is giving me greater perspectives on how to craft stories.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the greatness that is Quincy Jones transitioned from the physical. On reflection, I realised how he has been part of my life, through music, since I was born. I still have my father’s copy of The Dude on vinyl. I loved the Quincy documentary that came out on Netflix (he reminded me of my father in some of his mannerisms and the way he spoke) and devoured his book 12 Notes: On Life and Creativity.
I still have the Back On The Block album on CD in a box somewhere and used to have VIBE Magazine (which he founded) delivered to CNA in Maseru when I still lived at home. Former editor of VIBE, Danyel Smith had a dope post on Quincy Jones and VIBE.
Lately, I have been experimenting with Perplexity AI, prompted by Kevin Rose’s post The AI Search Tool I Can’t Stop Using. It is a “free AI-powered search engine that uses natural language processing and machine learning to provide answers to user queries.”
What I like about it is that it shows sources for every search query with links so that one can go into those. At the same time, there is some drama around the search engine, eg. Google’s Latest Rival: What is Perplexity AI and why is it causing so much controversy?
The Media Copilot has also written quite a bit about Perplexity. You do have to have a subscription to read the fuller posts.
My podcast listening is erratic. At times it seems as if I only get to listen to podcasts when I am driving or on the exercise bicycle at the gym. I work from home which means I don’t drive a lot. And gym is, at most, twice a week which isn’t enough time to catch up on the growing list. I did recently listen to Killer Mike on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin.
I turned 12 in 1984, when Band Aid song Do They Know It’s Christmas? was released to raise funds for people devastated by famine in Ethiopia. In both 2004 and 2014, versions of the song were released and there is a mix of the three songs slated for release soon.
British-Ghanaian musician Fuse ODG has spoken out against this, saying “My objection to the project goes beyond the offensive lyrics. Like many others, I am sick of the whole concept of Africa – a resource-rich continent with unbridled potential – always being seen as diseased, infested and poverty-stricken."
He had previously declined to participate in the 2014 recording and Africa No Filter has put out a petition to stop the BBC from releasing a documentary celebrating Band Aid.
The older I become, the more I realise how the framing of the narrative around us, as Africans, seeps into perspectives, including our own, about ourselves.
That’s it for today. Please share, subscribe and/or comment. I’ll be back. Soon(ish).
Easy
Kojo