Category: Newsletter (Page 23 of 23)

Last weekend, Bill and I attended the wedding celebration of one of our law school classmates. It was the largest gathering I have attended since lockdowns were first implemented and it was great to be with people in real life instead of through a screen. I am thankful for all that zoom has provided over the last year and change, but nuanced communication is much easier in person.

During the weekend, I had lunch with the groom and another classmate who was celebrating his COVID independence day. It was the first time he had had lunch in a restaurant in over a year. I am no social media maven, but COVID independence day is a movement that we should all be able to get behind.

When we discussed the idea of his COVID independence day after we left the restaurant, I realized that I could not remember my own COVID independence day because I had already reintegrated going to restaurants into my life. The realization came with a tinge of disappointment that I had let this moment of gratitude pass me by. So this week, I ask that you take a few moments to reflect on your own COVID independence day (whether it has already taken place or is still yet to come) and to be grateful for those little things that we once took for granted but were made impossible during the lockdown period.

A painting came up during a podcast episode I heard this week and I wish to share it with you. The piece is titled “The Listener” and it was painted by James Christensen. If you want to see the paining for yourself, you can click HERE. This is not the sort of painting I would put on my wall—the composition is far too jumbled. And that is precisely the point. It is filled with figures representing the distractions we face at every hour of every day. Unusually for a painting, the artist himself provided a written interpretation of the piece:

“Since a painting has no soundtrack, the title character at the center of ‘The Listener’ has found the best way to shut off all the noise in the visual cacophony around him by closing his eyes. Listening to his still, small, inner voice, he remains centered without being overcome. We can all find peace in this busy world, but sometimes need to be reminded that we are in charge of our destiny and each of us has the ability to focus without being pushed and pulled as victims.

“The characters found in the colorful ‘noise’ around the listener in this painting take many forms including politicians, mothers-in-law, musicians, and famous artists . . . can you find Picasso? Through it all, our listener ignores the noise in favor of his own personal tranquility.”

The painting’s protagonist is sitting eyes-closed in a meditative pose. There can be a place for meditation, but this week I ask you to take a smaller step to eliminate some of the noise of life. Try this experiment: Don’t read, watch, or listen to the news. Out of a small sample size, a week is how long it takes for the anxiety of checking your phone to begin to ease, but you can try it for three days and see how you feel. I have curtailed my own news input to basically nothing for over a year now and have no intention of returning to following the vicissitudes of the daily news. This is not a new idea. It is said that Napoleon did not read his mail for two weeks as most matters will have sorted themselves by the time he read about them, allowing him to focus his energy on the matters that truly required his attention.

If anyone takes up this challenge, I want to hear about how it impacts you. Feel free to reach out at jamesdavid@barlowwilliams.law.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have received a great deal of attention in the media over the past few months given the eye-watering sums being paid for some of these new assets. As a result, I see NFTs as a great place to start a portion of the newsletter to compile resources on new, exciting topics (audience feedback will impact how regularly this section appears in the newsletter, so let us know what you think). We are already working with clients who are active in the space and the underlying cryptography will expand into other uses in the near future.

If you want to read a quick primer on NFTs, consider this article from the Wall Street Journal or this article from the New York Times. For those of you who prefer audio, an excellent explanation was provided by Katie Haun (now a general partner at Venture Capital firm Andressen Horowitz–if you want to go deep on the subject there are a series of videos published by the VC firm here) in a podcast interview with Tim Ferriss. The whole conversation is fascinating, but the NFT discussion begins at 61:16. Links: Spotify or iTunes. If a YouTube video is more to your liking, two of the better ones are here and here.