Nathanael Yellis

Earlier this week, my friend Alex asked me if I was a reader. I said “not really,” and he laughed: behind my head in Zoom videos are twenty or so books in a stack. I read two books of them this week. They’re the ones linked below. I found them at a book swap in Salem. I figured that I needed to give the “Benedict Option” a fairer shake, and while I wouldn’t support its author and doubt its wisdom, I couldn’t say no to a free book. Then, I saw the best book title:

Don’t just do something, sit there.

The place where my parenting has been the most publicly coached is a small stream on the side of Sugarloaf Mt, in western Maine. The stream is one of those joyful mountain brooks that’s mostly rocks and sand, but with a lot of tributaries, it never dries up in the Summer and surges with snowmelt in the late Spring. Our kids love it: in the winter they test all areas to see if the ice will hold and in the rest of the year they get as cold and wet and muddy as possible. From the time they can stand, throwing rocks into its deepest pools has been their mountain pastime. A couple of years ago, I led the older kids on a hike up the stream. No trail, just hopping rocks and scrambling up. They’re begging to do it again.

f you know me, then you know that I’m a Christian. My faith’s bloody history might suggest that people like me wouldn’t want mosques. But both my Dad and I had the same reaction to the piece linked below: we need more mosques.

After taking a few years off, I got back to badge-earning by finishing HubSpot Academy's Revenue Operations certification on September 16th. This course was almost as wide-ranging as my HubSpot consulting role: it covered everything from strong sales process definition to the Lean SixSigma definition of waste to accounting basics to hiring. Any role in operations, whether you're a team of one or dozens, is similarly wide-ranging.

It’s easy to call progressive culture a religion. They have their holy days and seasons of repentance, their prophets and pastors, and their sins, confessions, and penances. It’s an obvious point to argue, I’ll admit to doing so at least a few times in past iterations of this email, but I don’t think it brings much in the way of insight.

A few weeks ago, we went to a cabin in Maine.

Our fictions hold the ideas and dreams we know but don’t often say. The best ones give us an experience of something new yet known, resounding to our souls. I wonder how authors do it: describe an experience wholly or partly made up and have it resonate with the rest of us. There’s an alchemy there.

Yesterday, I went to HubSpot’s Portsmouth, NH office to spend the workday out of the basement, closer to the sun. The drive from Beverly to Portsmouth is a drive towards my past. After a childhood in southern Maine, just over the bridge, really, I spent my first married year in Portsmouth. That was long enough ago that many of the streetscapes have changed. But our pizza place, the Breadbox, is still there, as is the drafty old church on the square, where we spent most Sunday afternoons.

Last night I ventured to Fenway Park. The trip fit my frugality well: there’s free street parking, if you know where to look, I had a free ticket, thanks to a raffle win at work, and the beer and peanuts only set me back $18.75(!). It didn’t quite fit my lingering fear of crowds. I don’t tend to like being where a lot of people are; and, if loads of people are doing something, I tend to shy away. When I see a line, my first thought isn’t: “there must be something good there”, it’s more like: “those people are all making a terrible mistake.” Thankfully, the modern Fenway has a lot of concourse walkways and it manages to hold thirty-odd thousand souls a lot better than it used to.