Roots – No.19
A year in review, with a word that carried us through inflection points.
By the time you read this, Happy New Year. 2024.
I hope you’re carrying a proper holiday hangover—not too strong to dim the ambition, but weighty enough to make you think twice about overdoing it again any time soon.
In our home, Donna has the sugar hangover of baking a week’s worth of Kitchen-Aided cookies and breads. I’ve been watching footy and hoops with pals over bottles of wine. Physically, we’ve looked better. Psychologically, our cups are full. We stayed in Oakland for the holidays, welcomed some visitors, and celebrated with friendly folks—a welcome twist on the norm to close 2023.
Since I was ~16, I’ve spent the end of each year with my best pal. Now that he’s raising a family in the northern tundra and I live in western paradise, we have to resort to FaceTime. All good. Technology creates the space for the conversations we love to have. There’s one question in particular that we always ask each other to wrap.
What word represents your year?
This year, I wavered on that a few times.
Like anything that’s formed a routine, I’ve grown to anticipate this question, writing a few thoughts in advance of the conversation. Even last night as I spoke about my word, a feeling of incompleteness hung in the air. Yeah, it was accurate, but was it encompassing?
Obviously not.
So it wasn’t until Donna spoke that I actually knew what my word was this year.
Roots.
That was Donna’s response. Of course it was.
For months during the year, I focused pretty solely on this core theme. In July, I had to give a speech officiate a wedding, and roots were at the center of the lovely ceremony in the Traverse City, Michigan woods.
That speech, as I jokingly call it, took a large part of my focus this year. In January, my friends called me with the invite. I smiled in loving awe, accepted without panic, and immediately wrote a note that wasn’t far from the final words shared at their ceremony six months later. But between then, my brain spent countless hours thinking about what I’d say.
The idea of giving a talk at a wedding is funnier to me than it should be. The entire focus of officiating a wedding is on, in order: 1) the bride and groom, 2) their families, 3) the rest of the people present, and somewhere infinitely down the list) yourself and your pride.
But as anyone who has been in that position knows, it is a real moment. It’s gotta be good. The words you share are symbols.
All words are, of course. These words just embed deeply into the foundation of the relationship. They stick with you. They can be called back upon as reference to the exact moment in time they were first heard, and they can be projected into future moments to mean something people immediately understand. They're something of supersymbols.
This signals to the importance of inflection points—moments in time that carry much more meaning than normal. They leave a mark.
What you do in those moments can last, and the words and actions that follow act as supersymbols. Done properly, they can be so memorable that they solidify an idea into your worldview.
And this year, the supersymbol that embedded in me was roots.
Root systems lay the foundation for most everything we see and love about our world. They are the foundation.
In a forest, the root system can signal when a tree is ailing, allowing their neighbors to send nutrients to revive them.
In an individual, the root system – their DNA, their upbringing, their surrounding community – makes up the foundation of how someone shows up in the world.
In a family, the root system – the nuclear family, the wider connected family, their friends, their community – is in place to help grow the family, through thick and thin. “It takes a village…”
The two families that came together in the trees of Traverse City that July day intertwined their roots. That’s the incredible power of two people coming together in marriage. The impact goes far beyond just the two of them.
Outside of the standard hurry-up-and-wait, the wedding itself was a blur. Beyond forgetting to tell people take a seat, I was in flow. While the speech is never perfect in the ear of the speaker, the core idea seemed to resonate in the minds of those present. Afterwards, I was inundated with kind words and appreciation from strangers. One favorite note following was, “Defining. You hit all the right notes.”
I’ll take that.
Beyond the wedding, roots were omnipresent in our life. All around Oakland – whether on the street signs, the sidewalks, or the team logos – are trees and roots.
The act of moving across the country meant that, for awhile this year, we were alone.
I’ve spoken about this ad nauseum, but I’ve yet to put this sentiment of solo life into shared written word.
For someone who lived their entire life within a short drive of their family and friends, suddenly being unable to reach them without an airplane had cascading effects. Add the shifted time zone to the mix, and you could almost see the different energy waves we were living in. We were not entirely comfortable, which in hindsight was 1) immensely needed and 2) patently obvious.
At one point this year, Donna and I remarked many times how many roles we were playing for each other.
Best friend. Lover. Partner. Sous-chef. Those are par for the course.
Bar buddy. Golf caddie. Concert goer. Those pushed us to a touch of strain. Relying on one person for everything isn’t healthy.
The discomfort pushed us outward—to find those folks, those spots, those moments where the root system of our new community could bring us up.
Happily, I can say those roots are forming here in Oakland. More than a year on, we’ve passed through our own inflection point, and we know the supersymbol to point us in the right direction.
If I’m being honest with myself, the approach of defining your year in a word is reductive and a bit silly. We can't sum everything in just one word, but the act of trying helps hone your own understanding of the time that passed. That’s what shorthand is for.
Inherently, the question helps focus you on the coming year, as well. After describing 2023, go ahead and try to frame what you want out of your 2024. It's a blend of hopeful thinking and mantra forming.
This year, I’m a thief, and that’s just fine, because Donna nailed it.
2023 was for roots.
On to our favorites of the year. Rule of 3 in effect to preserve sanity of all parties.
Album
Mondays at Enfield Tennis Academy - Jeff Parker. The best jazz jamming I heard all year. Released late 2022, but including this in the 2023 list, as I couldn’t get my hands on this until January.
My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross - ANONHI. Hard to explain in one sentence, but…beautiful vocals, ranging rhythms, strong pulls on the heartstrings; lovely and likely to make you ambitious and sad.
Maps - billy woods + Kenny Segal. I love lyrical hip-hop, and this one felt more like a book of poetry someone would write on the road. Clairvoyant and hilarious.
Track
Knockin - MJ Lenderman. My favorite rocker of the year’s track on Bob Dylan’s famed track, covered by John Daly. Levels to this one.
SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS - Killer Mike, Andre 3000, Future, Eryn Allen Kane. I’m a sucker for Andre verses, Future flow, and Killer Mike’s ferocity. This had it all. Really enjoyed this album, overall.
Vampire Empire - Big Thief. The year I came to understand why the world loves Big Thief. My favorite band of the year. Both the studio and live versions are 10/10.
Concert
Jai Paul @The Regency Ballroom - Like anyone who has ever seen them live, I waited 10 years to see them perform, and they exceeded any possible expectation.
Wilco @The Greek Theatre - My first time seeing a show up in the clouds of the Berkeley hills. Fitting that it was for a group of Chicago gentlemen.
Club Night/Half Stack @Thee Stork Club - An all-Oakland show featuring two of my favorite local acts kicking ass. I can’t even tell you how much I love Club Night, but Spotify tells me I listened to this album 30+ times since October.
Moments
Looking up at the Rickey Henderson Field sign at The Coliseum before the A’s reverse boycott. Waterworks thinking about what this team means for this place. It’s not over yet.
My first trip back to Chicago, taking in the Cubbies at Wrigley. Special to walk around my old home, feeling like it was my old home.
The hour after officiating the Regal wedding. A lightness in my body not felt since…I can’t even recall when.
Book
Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen. Extremely practical for my world of networked tools and humans.
How Music Works - David Byrne. Insightful throughout, and the chapter on how to build a scene was formative.
(re-read) Death’s End - Cixin Liu. Re-reading the Three Body Problem trilogy was my highlight, after Donna and I took in the 30-episode Tencent series. The depth in describing dimensional differences and constant human progression through time is admirable.
Project I worked on
The Blackwing Recorder - No progress since these announcements, but a fair amount of play with the tool, itself. Taking notes on your experience testing your own product is quite a treat that I should have expected.
Thing I wrote
This 7-word tweet, which is immense for the future of busy, distributed society.
Thing I tried getting good at
Making pizza, still. We’ve stopped the smoke alarms, and found our go-to dough. Progress.
Place
A Hawaiian home in the highlands overlooking Maui with no running water.
Surprise
Tottenham Hotspur are fun again. I have placed my belief in Big Ange Postecoglu and his neverending attack.
Lesson/Reminder
Giving people props in real life is the most important thing you can do for their belief and ambition.
In 2024, spread the love.
Happy new year, friends,
Bren
Happy New Year, my friend. May there be more roots and more uprooting ahead. Here's to the great adventure.