👋 Farewell to the known world

Letter 154

Apr 17, 2023

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Aloha fellow learn-it-all 👋

Greetings from the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport airport in Honolulu, Hawaii ✈️

I’m about to go and leave on a trip of a lifetime.

Keeping this letter brief since my plane boards in 27 minutes.

Now, let’s dive into letter 154 from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!

❓Question to think about

What have been three wins in my life recently?

🌟 Wins

Successfully packing, affording, and coordinating my first-ever three-week trip to Southeast Asia in my life. (tweet)
I am so jittery and excited!! I’ll be sleeping in Seoul, South Korea tomorrow night, then in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia the following night. I’ll also be going to Indonesia for a week and a half. This will be the first time I go to a non-westernized country so I’ll be swimming in a sea of ignorance and embracing lots of unknowns. My intention is to expand my worldview and have quality time traveling with my childhood friend living out in KL.
The inaugural cohort of the poetry class that I co-lead with Ellen Fishbein called Rhythm, Rhyme, Repeat ended!

I'm filled with gratitude for how much joy this project brought to my life! It wouldn't have been the same without all these poets joining in for the ride. Learning with friends is much more fun!
I learned so much more about the spoken word and poetry being the primordial genre of writing. It is a memorable verbalization of concepts—under the creative constraints of rhythm, rhyme & repetition. I am excited about the poems I have ahead of me to write.

Ellen is a rock star and you can check out the course notes here.
Going shopping at Kahala mall. You might be thinking hmmm how is this a win? Well, I don’t go shopping much at all because I find it exhausting and did not enjoy how shopping was a main hobby for folks where I used to live in Chicago, Illinois. But I needed some more conservative lightweight clothes for this Southeast Asian adventure. I had a breakthrough about why shopping so depleting:
1. The constant stripping of clothes. Usually, I change twice in a day but while shopping it’s usually 20+ times.
2. Sensory overload. I didn’t shop in Hollister (thank goodness) so no overload of perfume scent throughout my experience, but typically there’s always music, a visual overload of new colors, and many different textures to touch.
3. The neverending judgment calls. Since there are so many options of malls, stores, and types of items in those stores, it’s a plethora of decisions. It has to be impulsive to be done before the store closes. That’s exhausting.
4. The constant sales pitching. I don’t like rejecting people so it’s draining to need to listen to someone pitch something I’m not interested in but that’s their job the second I step foot into a store.

🌟 Quote to inspire

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” -Robin Williams as John Keating in Dead Poets Society

📸 Photos of the week

Here’s the first of many first times ahead for me! Fun fact: you get two free checked bags on Korean Air and they have a cool laminated picture of the plane that they show you before you board the plane to visualize where you’re going.

🙏 Shoutouts

To my friend Matt Yao writer of
Game of One
who I got to reconnect with yesterday. This marks our one-year anniversary at Honolulu Coffee Company of being Internet and IRL friends. He inspires me to adventure and be more curious. A year flies by!

I appreciate you reading this!

If ideas resonated, I’d love you to leave a comment, reply to this email, or send me a message on Twitter @JenVermet. If you forgot who I am, I welcome you to my online home.

Never stop learning 😁

Mahalo 🌺

Jen

PS - if you missed last week’s Issue 153: 🥁 Six Memorable Moments from March

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