Head below the divider for my end of year ‘review’. In this first section: the prompts.

As the afternoons grow dark and the evenings cold (even in the tropics—this monsoon reaches your bones), I offer the Amorati of the world an end-of-year ritual to connect. Connect not only to yourself, or even just to your community, but to what matters most in ever true lover’s life.

Here are the journal instructions, in case you want to play along at home:

First, make a good coffee or pot of tea, or pour a glass of wine somewhere warm. Second, turn off all distractions, open up a notebook, and type these out. You’ll get good Amorati karma (i.e. more sex next year) if you answer each prompt in the form of a story.

Now I designed these prompts so that reflecting on them would be an enjoyable thing to do. Largly, it is. But if it’s not, you might notice where your year has been out of whack, where you’ve short-changed yourself on your values, or where you’ve come askew from your guiding star. Thinking about it more deeply, we all fall short of ourselves at times, so a review might genuinely be challenging—but extremely rewarding. It was for me. Together, we might contemplate how next year can be different.

Share about…

1. The moment this year when you most felt alive.

2. The greatest blindspot you discovered about yourself this year, that’s leading to the greatest transformation.

3. A moment in which you ‘went beyond yourself’ in relation to a woman. In other words, write about a moment of bravery, humility, power, romance, generosity, flow… when you showed up in a way that you never had before, and in which you discovered a greater sense of yourself.

4. The beautiful thing you saw this year that captivated you most deeply. *Could also be the beautiful thing you heard, smelled, read, tasted, or felt…

5. Your leadership in the world. Reflect on a moment this year when you consciously led others towards more trust, ease, freedom, excitement, beauty, ecstasy, hope, [insert sacred virtue here], etc.

Alive.

In my second week in Paris, I went alone to the cinema for a midnight showing. I had low expectations of the film in question, but I’d seen the movie-star’s ass line the boulevards of the town, caramel-toned in a white pleated skirt. And like the bee entranced by its honey, I submitted my twenty euro note to the auto-ticketing booth, took my popcorn, and walked right in. Adelya had gone to bed, and I wanted to do something Parisian.

The movie exceeded expectations, and it was just as well there were only four or five other people in the showing because I cheered and booed and screamed throughout the final act of the film. I literally roared at the screen. Something electrified in me: it was the most life-giving experience I’d ever had at the cinema, and that night became the impulse that began the movie course, a crazy idea in which I’ve far over-extended myself throughout the second half of this year.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had it that you’ve wandered out of a cinema in such astonishment that you didn’t really care what happened to you next. But that night, I traipsed along the Boulevard Montparnasse, and saw coming to greet me those waiters in tuxedos, and those various neon signs appearing out of the dark: La Coupole, La Rotonde, Le Sélect, Le Dôme. If you’ve read early Hemingway, you’ll know: a hundred years prior, every warring artist or writer battled for significance in these art deco bars. This was only a quiet Wednesday, already about two in the morning. But after years locked down in Bali, to walk history, myth, culture—to see these places alive and still serving—did something very peculiar to my bones. Ecstasy! If history still lights up through time, maybe hope for this world is not lost.

Blindspot.

This will go down as the year in which I discovered myself as a broken record. I kept saying it, I’m gonna quit, I’m gonna write, we’re gonna move… and I kept noticing myself not taking any of these actions. It’s not an uncommon thing among people—talking without doing, procrastinating. I just never associated this with me. When you live in the wind it’s hard to repeat oneself: what’s tiring is the endless novelty. But since I bought a comfortable home I’m becoming insufferable, I’m succumbing to entropy. I had a secret arrogance about me: I thought I could outrun the great human failings of the masses, that I could escape gravity. How wrong, how wrong, how wrong.

In Bali, I’m loosely connected to an artistic community and an open-mic space. For three years the girls have beckoned and goaded: Jordan, when are you going to read something out loud for us? Jordan, when are you gonna share your stuff! And their eyes would sparkle and tease. Last open mic I attended I could taste their empathy turn bitter. I am creating, I’d explain. I put all my work into courses and newsletters! Over months I saw their once-excitement turn to sour acceptance that—as with those young guys that talk all day of sex but can’t perform—I was nothing more than another staring punter, sitting back, consuming their culture.

As soon as I finish… I’m gonna start… The blindspot beneath the blindspot is the still-immature belief that I can do anything in this life, that I can achieve all my dreams—and better: that I can achieve them alone. In naïve pursuit of throwing myself at all the wild ideas that ignite me, I over-extend myself such that I don’t get the most meaningful, most scary, things done. Next year will be about focus, and choice.

Woman.

David Deida once said that no matter how glittering your success, the feminine will always find ways to highlight your imperfection. I seemed to wear a golden halo for three or four years with Adelya. Come year six or seven, that projection has worn off. Even in my most self-satisfied moments these days, there’s more I coulda shoulda done. It has not been an easy year with woman: barbed stings the naked flesh of shame.

It has me reflect: what’s better? To cast a spell so seductively enduring that she never takes off the rose-tinted glasses, or that your woman sees you through eyes so unnerving and adult that they sear right through to the flesh? I mean, choose your game. Play easy God somewhere with a disempowered woman. At least, for now, I’m opening to this wave of my partner’s critique—there’s something to be gained from the masochism.

How did I go beyond myself? Well, criticism doesn’t fall too far from blame, and when all I want is a night of rest or loving affirmation, and what I get is the electric fence, a lesser man might go on the counter-attack. That ‘lesser man’, many times, has been me—fighting back, spitting through grated teeth, defending my ‘good intent’. Yet I’ve found it strangely more productive to get intimate with the sting of failure, of smallness, without a note to explain, cover up, justify, or say sorry; to roast in the grand number of ways I don’t quite measure up. It’s not pretty, but not defending any shortcomings with justification or counter-blame leads to a horrendous feeling that later transmutes to something else. Suffice to say, while the smaller parts of me want to turn over the room and scream about this treatment by the hand of women, I also have zero doubt in my spirit right now that, over the course of the next few years, I won’t dramatically upsize the quality and influence of my life.

How do you take feminine feedback? This is not an easy practice, and I’m wary of it edging into henpecking. But overall, and for now, let’s say we are living a challenging chapter of mutually-raising standards.

Beauty.

Since a few things have not been easy, I have depended on beauty to get through the year. I am tempted to talk about another movie here, and I could, but since art is just a representation—a step away from the life really lived—I would rather talk of the real thing. So to share with you my year’s great moment of aesthetic arrest, I should talk of a birthday gift I belatedly gave myself: my first-ever trip to Japan.

I simply landed one Monday in Osaka and booked into a little businessman’s hotel, with no idea of how things worked nor of where I’d go. I simply needed a break. A couple of days in I found myself on a bullet-train to Hiroshima, then on a boat to the island of Miyajima, and I wandered past the port and past the quaint little shopping street, quaintly lined with quaint-eyed deer, and I walked past the famous floating shinto shrine whose photograph at sunset is known throughout the world. And I walked past the foodstands and the crowds all posing for photos, and up the village hill to where real life seemed to happen, kids playing ball in the street; the elderly gazing out toward sea, and I walked until the hill gave over to mist, and found myself, late in the day, in the complex of a Buddhist temple, breathing in its rarefied air. And I was wandering the terrace of the main temple with no intention whatsoever when an older lady came behind me and whispered in my ear with something of an Irish accent that I should go down the stairs, it’s interesting. And I looked over at the stairs and saw no clue of what they were for, and I decided I would just do that—I would go down them—and I wandered, step by step, down these creaking slants of wood, and entered beyond a blackened curtain and into the vast pitch dark.

There was nothing to see in here, nothing. It was a room with no sight, no sound, no taste, no smell. All I could feel was the floorboard appear beneath me each time I dared take a foot forward, and the feeling of wood to the left of me along which my hand could graze. A feeling of surprise and terror took over me—a terror I took a sort of perverse pleasure in—and as I took another footstep forward, to the left of me appeared, illuminated, somewhat in the style of the stained-glass paintings of the churches of my youth, images of Buddhas and Boddhisatvas, graceful etchings of figures sublime. With another footstep, another image, which made me laugh, which made me relax into a budding sense of joy. Traipsing astonishedly through the dark, figures illuminating as if by surprise. Before I knew it, the pitch-black path turned right, and again to the right, then to the left: some thirty of these Buddha-images lining the way. I couldn’t help but to feel utter delight, even ecstasy, as I walked this secret passage, and then: the images stopped. Another curtain. Black. I passed through it, and followed the darkness to a step, which I blindly climbed to then emerge on the other side of the temple: the forest and the mist and the cold air re-appearing. Whoa… it was like I’d survived a water-ride, a mushroom trip, a blindfold dare, a glory-hole, and I was elated to have made it to the other side of this secret. An initiate. Then, near to the edge of the ascending stairwell, I found a plaque: walk this secret corridor with your hand touching the left, and you’ll clear your entire karma before reincarnating in the next. I bowed at the little stairwell, then seeing that none of the other temple visitors were anywhere near it, I walked back towards the descending wooden stair, and did the whole ride again.

Do you know what it’s like when bliss swells in your heart for no ‘apparent’ reason? I used to think temples were something to tick off in the guidebook, too. The tourists all lining up, getting their red stamps pressed into their little Japan-trip books. How freaky, those wild monks, who chose to build beneath the temple this little mystic surprise. Now that I was on the good karma ride, I must have approached about six other people, whispering behind them in their ears—in Italian, in Spanish; in whatever I heard was their language—scendi le scale, è interessante!

Leadership…

… is the area of my life in which I carry the most shame, in which I call to myself the least support, hold the vaguest barometer of success, and in which I need to make some hasty apologies and get one or two things back in-line. The slushpile of unanswered emails grows by the day, and the truth is, for the first time in my life, I’m in well over my head with my task-list, and I need a clone or two just to get by. I took on an assistant earlier this year—beautiful girl: a Ferrari in the driveway. We only worked together two months. I found it too hard to organise myself enough to properly delegate; I secretly feared she’d drive us too fast to success. Journalling here, I see immediately what I need to change. My limitations have created my own suffering. But rather than spiral here into self-deprecation, the prompt asks us what worked well?!

Perhaps the most touching moment of what you might call ‘leadership’ this year was going for dinner with Justin and Stan—because they asked—and sitting for four or five hours flipping over everything they threw my way, as we flipped through plates of Georgian meats and Georgian wine. If you don’t know them, Justin and Stan are two guys in their twenties, new to the Ars Amorata team, and they’re developing all sorts of schemes in our community and in our business, and building, from scratch, a profile for themselves.

It turns out that, in leadership, I’m not exactly the ease and delight guy. If Zan brings a message of optimism to the world, I tend to invite all those around me to look at bitter reality with a kind of medic’s humour, and pressing the urgent need for more love. I wondered how to keep our young guys motivated without walking them up the garden path—making them think that this would be easy—but steeling them for the fight ahead. And it is a fight to build your real work in the world on your own terms, and not according to another man’s ladder. I told the guys if they are to create anything great in this world, it will not be because of their individual talent, but because of the depth of the friendship between them and anyone else that comes into their team. What moves culture and creates meaning for others is the field, so to speak—the magical third entity that forms around a dedicated band of leaders—in which honesty ousts power dynamics, compassion abounds, and we drop whatever attempts to manipulate face. Even the hermit writer thanks his editor, his publisher, his manager—every great thing he does is dedicated to someone else. I kept failing, during that Georgian dinner, to produce some rosy pictures for the guys. But in the name of truth we drew ones that were real. In this life we suffer, but have the choice to not suffer alone. Dividends will tell me if this form of leadership builds trust.

Here’s something I shared at the last Amorati Conference: I once signed up for a leadership coach—this was about a decade or so ago now. One of the first things he told me was that we’re always failing! We’re always behind! And I said, that’s not the kind of message I signed up to receive from a motivational coach! I didn’t mention this to anyone at the time (I don’t remember sharing this with him either), but I felt like a loser right throughout our coaching time together. Everything we spoke of was so groundshaking that it took, and I realised this as I saw the insights ingrain themselves into my actions and in my decisions, roughly four years, for all the ‘deep work’ we did to truly manifest into my life. We’re always failing! We’re always behind! A decade on, this cheery message comes back to me: failure is the enduring feature—and a leader better get used to finding a wry sort of bliss in failure. If, over the course of a year, that perpetual feeling of not measuring up gets punctured by a few sharp rays of aesthetic light—be those rays the neon sort of Montparnasse, or the final sunset sparkles upon the sea at Miyajima, or the belting, happy greens of the garden amidst these endless monsoons, or the belly laughs of my beloved in the midst of a below-the-belt fight—then, well, if his enduring burden of failure gets sufficiently punctured by light, it might just give a man food to carry on.

Process, Gratitude.

Let’s not hide it: these are the musings of a brutal year, one in which I was neither young and free, nor was I the next thing: fully-formed, supreme in some worldly standing, or glowing from atop some illustrious feat. I’m swimming in the midst of the muddling years, when everything happens incrementally, when even the fireworks are damp, and you wonder if anything progresses at all.

Having cut my teeth here writing of explosive personal experiences, it is strange to come to terms with the smallness, the interiority, of the moments of the year that most moved me. Some of these moments were affirming, others humiliating, and no medal was given in my honour. I imagine life becomes more this way over time.

I can only hope that, if you’ve been wading through swamplands this year as have I, you can grace yourself by stepping back over the coming days. That you look at your behaviour throughout the year, your hinged and unhinged commitments, and see how you must be in the midst of some deep crystallisation, where even if little light enters your cave, that a diamond of utter density will emerge from it soon. While my year, when I look at it honestly, is not always flattering, this process of reflection that I share with you here is an assimilation of grit—a readying myself for the next one—in which neither do I expect, despite all the thoughtful planning, that things will all go my bohemian way.

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Looking up, I would like to thank all the women and all the men around me, those paying with their lives to keep my own life going, interconnected, plugging away, though we’ve yet to glimpse the land to which we’re sailing, with doubts we’ll ever arrive creeping in. I’d like to thank everyone that contributes to keeping our house in Bali standing; I’d like to thank, in Romania, Sorin, for his tireless oaring; for Zan’s secret teaching—the iceberg theory—that ninety percent of leadership will forever remain unseen; and I thank every one of you who came to conferences or joined us for masterclasses, or simply read this newsletter at home, and really believed in this all. One could easily give up at times knowing that, in a nihilistic universe, all of this is pointless. And yet, for some strange motivation we’re yet to properly conjure in words, one carries on.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Blind-drunken Solstice, in which all your prayers to your idols come true. Here’s to an even better ’25!

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Epilogue.

For a moment, you are wandering without intention, taking in the thousand scattered shards of light, the forest mist, and the setting sun. I come quietly behind you, and I whisper, that in this temple of 2024 there is a secret stairwell. You should go down it, I say, it’s very interesting. It is black behind the curtain, and it should scare you, and secretly thrill you, and in the very depths of this corridor, as you wander, you notice, there is a gun. And as you press into the golden chamber of that gun there is a bullet for every truth you haven’t spoken—every urgent thing that creates pressure in your heart, your loin, and in your mind.

There are ten days left to go of this year. That’s enough time to blow everything you’ve just reflected upon up, or to call every single thing that you yearn for, in. I’m putting this image onto you, as a sort of meditation. But really, this corridor, this chamber, this gun, is for me. If I aimed right now for everything left unsaid, for every target left untouched, then everything, everything, would change.

It is time, right here, to throw away the record.

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