One Hour to Reset
Two Quiet Discoveries for the New Year
Happy New Year from Austin, Texas.
It is New Year’s Eve and I am home with my family. They are asleep. This flu going around has hit them hard, so we are home tonight and Cindy and Peter are in bed early. Right now I find myself sitting here during that funny little local news break that is required by law, the one that happens each year mid-evening, interrupting the show from Times Square, neighborhood fireworks breaking through the quiet.
We have spent the past few days at home recovering, and during that time I stumbled across two works of creativity that stood out and reminded me how curious and inspiring the world can be. They both take about an hour to experience — and in that time, they floored me.
And so I thought I’d share them here with you, in case you come across this email on New Year’s Day and are looking to reset your brain a bit, or just take a break from your phone and all the normal stuff you scroll through.
Chapter One of The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Overstory is a novel published a few years ago. When I heard it told stories of people, families, and interesting lives, somehow interspersed with the majestic nature of trees in all their varied wonders — oaks, chestnuts, maples, and more — I was intrigued.
I grew up on Tall Oaks Road. In the woods. In Western Maryland, East Coast, USA.
As soon as I could walk and reach my hands up to a branch, I remember the urge to grab it and pull against gravity, step by step, hug and kiss its limbs until I reached the top — arms scraped up from bark, muscles sore, tall, a child reaching for blue sky.
And so when I came across this Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, somehow about the human condition and also trees, I picked it up immediately. Now, if you’ve read these other newsletters, you’ll know that I starved myself of books for years — tired and distracted by the activities that paid me to divert my time toward them. And so the book sat on my shelf, like a fallen limb across a trail, hoping that someone would come and pick it up.
And so, in these quiet post-Christmas days, our bodies all distracted and tired, and me somehow not falling to the flu but not quite able to leave the house either, I wandered my four walls like a monk in his monastery who had forgotten why he was there, left with an empty schedule to fill — and The Overstory finally winked at me, and I picked it up.
I sat in my chair almost drooling as the story of Chapter One unfolded, from text on the page to scenes alive in my thoughts. And I thought — there are whole worlds like this, in great books, just waiting to be discovered. I read it in one sitting.
Chapter One in this book will take you less than an hour, and you won’t regret it.
The Making of If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle and Sebastian
A Pitchfork Documentary
Have you ever sat down and made a little list of three albums that really mean something to you? If not, take some time to do it, and then go out and see if anyone has made a documentary about the making of one of those albums.
If You’re Feeling Sinister came along in those days when I was beginning to understand a wider range of emotions as I graduated from my early teenage years — full of strong feelings, black and white — into my late teens and 20s, with all sorts of in-between ideas, gray areas everywhere, open to interpretation.
I was no longer a teenager driving through Maryland roads, windows down, screaming along to the radio. Now I was sometimes looking for music that captured quieter days: walking through town with my headphones on, wondering who that girl was that just biked past me, or who that older man was that I always saw alone on the bench. And thinking: why did sad songs make me feel happy?
This album defined a certain period of time in my life, and yet it was made a world away by a mysterious group of Scots who refused to pose for pictures or do interviews.
They sang about kids after church sinning with one another and college kids daydreaming — lost in books, eyes affixed out the library window, sun shining on their cheeks.
This documentary tells the story of a group of outcasts, including their ringleader Stuart Murdoch, getting together to make the definitive indie-pop album of the ’90s almost by mistake — fate accidentally pushing them together in the days after Stuart finally recovered from a multi-year bout of chronic fatigue. Words and chords rushing out of him, filling notebooks, so many stories to tell, and surprisingly a whole world outside of their grey, rainy corner of Glasgow eager to hear them.
I can’t say if you’ll enjoy this documentary if you don’t love the album. It’s all so ordinary but ornate, mythological even.
But if you’re like me, and you do know this album and this band, and haven’t seen this documentary, you are in for an absolute treat.
I hope you’re able to decide what you really want in 2026 and find a peaceful path toward it. For now, here’s to a quiet hour, time to clear the cache in your brain, and maybe finding something new to inspire you.
-Pete
Thanks for reading After the Rush, a weekly series about slowing down, sparking creativity, and finding inspiration beyond work.
I read the Overstory when I started my job at the reforestation startup I joined a couple years ago, such great inspiration. Looking forward to reading Playground.