Lattes & Loitering, Episode 52: A New Book (with a twist)

It started, as these things often do, with a book.

Not a new book, exactly—just new to me. One of those titles that practically taps you on the shoulder from across the digital aisle:

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.

Catchy, right?

Enough to make me hover over the “Buy Now” button for a moment.

But then I pictured it—the sorting facility, the barcode scanner, the box making its journey across three states and four highways just so I could sit in a café and feel slightly more emotionally fortified. And I thought: maybe not.

So I let the AI do the lifting.

In a few minutes, I had a clean, thoughtful summary. A clickable mind map. A podcast voiced by two eerily calm digital humans, swapping insights over a topic they technically can’t feel.

And honestly?

It was enough.

I didn’t burn any fuel. I didn’t wait three days. I didn’t add another object to the great domestic archive of unread personal development literature.

I got what I came for. And then I lingered.

Because sometimes strength isn’t about doing more.

Sometimes it’s about knowing when not to.

And loitering with a latte, apparently, still makes the cut.

Here's some clickable stuff:

• PDF summary 

• Simulated podcast

Mind map of '13 Things'

Oh, and speaking of loitering:

Another book down. The Quants.

 I just finished this one.

Really fascinating story well written.

Recent Books I've Read

Michael Finkel, Author

"It's the ending, I believe, that Knight planned. He wasn't going to leave behind a single recorded thought, not a photo, not an idea. No person would know of his experience. Nothing would ever be written about him. He would simply vanish, and no one on this teeming planet would notice. His end wouldn't create so much as a ripple on North Pond. It would have been an existence, a life, of utter perfection."

"All women are she," Mykonos once told me. "Treat each woman as the Goddess, because she is. Women are built to reveal openness--they are nature's mechanism of surrender--and they wait for a man they could trust with their utterly surrendered heart. Few women ever meet such a man, so most women suffer terribly, longing their entire lives."

"All this research proved the cancer microbe is a reality. The cell wall deficient cancer microbe is always present in cancer and its forms are varied: cocci, rods, large globoid and yeast-like forms, acid-fast granules, fungus-like forms, and giant "large body" forms. Because most physicians are taught little about cell wall deficient bacteria, the cancer microbe remains the hidden killer in cancer."

Beauty. The Invisible Embrace.

Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life. Lest this be construed as a plea for decadence or a self-indulgence that is blind to the horrors of the world, we should remember that beauty does not restrict its visitations only to those whom fortune or circumstances favour. Indeed, it is often the whispers and glimpses of beauty which enable people to endure on desperate frontiers.

This book by John O'Donohue, with the above title, has become my bible. This man has said everything in this one book that I couldn't express in a lifetime.

In Greek the word for 'the beautiful' is to kalon. It is related to the word kalein which includes the notion of 'call'. When we experience beauty, we feel called. The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life. The call of beauty is not a cold call into the dark or the unknown; in some instinctive way we know that beauty is no stranger. We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness. Plato said: 'Beauty was ours in all its brightness ... Whole were we who celebrated that festival' (Phaedrus).