Dear friend,

This summer we did not ride across the Alps.

For nine summers, my friends from Ravensburg, the town I grew up in, and I have crossed them together. This should have been the tenth. Several days on the bike, one pass after another. This year it did not happen, and there was no reason. Nobody decided against it. It simply never made it onto the calendar.

I thought we would hardly notice. Summer was full anyway. Then, somewhere in August, it came up, and it turned out every one of us missed it. The thin air, the slow climbs, the conversations that only happen after hours in the saddle, when there is nothing left to perform.

Here is the strange part. In the years we did the ride, I valued it. I just never knew how much. It was simply what we did. It took its absence for all of us to see what it had been giving us all along.

Something similar happened with this letter. The NEXTletter went quiet this summer, and so did my geodesic dome, where I usually write these letters and record the podcast. I used the quiet to ask myself two questions: what gives me energy, and what contribution do I want to make? The answer kept returning to the same place: helping people with their futures.

And then you started asking. Some of you in person, some by message. Where is the NEXTletter? When is the podcast back? Every one of those questions moved me. Each carried the same lesson as the Alps: we begin to value something when we miss it.

So this is where we begin again.

And since today happens to be my birthday, I would love to begin by giving you something. You will find it at the end of this letter, with some news about the podcast on the way.

Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation: whatever is reliably good in our lives slowly becomes invisible to us.

In 2008, Minkyung Koo and her colleagues asked people to pick something good in their life, a friendship, say, or a job. One group wrote about how it had come into their life. The other group imagined their life without it, as if they had never met that friend or found that job. The second group came away noticeably more grateful for what they had. The researchers named it mental subtraction.

Counting your blessings helps.
Imagining them gone helps more.

Two thousand years earlier, Seneca practiced the same move. He would picture losing what he loved, his home, his friends, his health, and then return to his day and find all of it still there.

It sounds dark. In practice it is the opposite.

The tenth crossing is on the calendar for next summer. This time I will know what I am riding for.

Thank you for missing this. It is good to be back.