Candace Rose Rardon Is Exploring Stillness
Welcome to a world of yurt.
Hi again!
Thanks to Brendan Leonard’s very kind mention in his most recent Friday Inspiration roundup, it’s my pleasure to welcome a new bunch of you to Everything Is Amazing. Hello!
I hope you know what you’re in for, or we’re both in huge trouble.
Just in case you don’t, here’s an explanation of how this newsletter works - even though it actually doesn’t apply to this week. Because of a glut of non-newsletter work shenanigans, I’m currently running a bit behind. (Forgive me.)
So, no time to waste. Let’s crack onwards, as there is a remarkable lady I’d like you to meet.
Since this week I’ve been learning how to keep a listening journal, I figured it was a good time to share this chat from the middle of last year, for reasons that should become clear in a moment.
Candace Rose Rardon has the most ridiculously impressive portfolio these days, both in depth and width. She’s written for National Geographic, BBC Travel and Longreads. She has painted murals for the offices of Google. Her photography is gorgeous. Her sketchwork essays are stunning. She wrote two episodes of the recent HBO Max series A World of Calm - and for Calm’s incredibly popular meditation app, she has written and performed some of their famous Sleep Stories (alongside the likes of Harry Styles, Matthew McConaughey, Idris Elba, Laura Dern, Kate Winslet and Lucy Liu.) She has also written a book on tea, and has another on coffee coming out very soon…
And right now, she’s the author of a Substack newsletter, Here And Now, which you can subscribe to by clicking here.
Creatively speaking, Candace is an astonishingly versatile all-rounder - a Swiss Army Knife in human form, seemingly able to tackle absolutely anything. (I’ve given up trying to understand how she does all this. Haven’t a clue. It’s just a Candace thing.)
So when my short-term career plans fell apart last year because of the pandemic, leaving me confused about how to pick up all the pieces, I knew I had to ask her for some advice.
In May of 2020, across three half-hour(ish) chats on three separate days, and with truly heroic patience, Candace allowed me to question her and chuck around ideas on the topic of finding stillness: a state of living where you can actually hear yourself think for a change.
From a loose semi-interview on day 1, we leapt into a back-and-forth about the science of noise on day 2 - and hunted for practical, usable advice on day 3.
It was a lot of fun to do. And the discussion only went completely off the rails a few dozen times, which shows heaps of progress in our decade-long friendship.
(And after my phone went off in the middle of recording the second episode, exactly when I was talking about how unwanted noise is a menace, I finally learned what that Mute setting on smartphones is for. That kind of lesson can’t be taught, friend. At least not to me, anyway.)
I hope you enjoy having a listen, by clicking on the embedded audio links below.
NOTE: If you’re reading this as an email, clicking the audio buttons might send you through to the Web version of this article, where the audio will be playable. Below the Soundcloud player for each episode, I’ve also included a few links to books and articles we mention.
Episode One (28 minutes)
“The Magic Of Yurts” - Candace Rose Rardon, Calm blog; “The Power Of (Not) Unplugging” - Candace Rardon, National Geographic
“The Signature Of All Things” - Elizabeth Gilbert
Episode Two (38 minutes)
“One Square Inch Of Silence: One Man’s Quest To Preserve Quiet” by Gordon Hempton
“The Science Of Working In A Coffee Shop” - Fevered Mutterings
“WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson” - RSA Animates
“‘It’s positively alpine!’ - Disbelief in big cities as air pollution falls” - The Guardian.
Further reading:
“Sounding The Alarm: How Noise Hurts The Heart” - Cypress Hansen, Knowable Magazine (found via Curious About Everything #4 from Jodi Ettenberg).
Episode Three (31 minutes)
“The Art Of Stillness” by Pico Iyer
“The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People” by Dr. Stevey Covey
“Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor Frankl
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.” - “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard
For more from Candace, sign up to her free newsletter here - and check out more of her work here.
Images: Candace Rose Rardon.