'When My Heart Beats Hardest'

Major thanks to TheAtlantic.com for sharing this video this morning. It comes from photographer Mickey Smith, a meditation on his life and work as a surf photographer. It's also about passion and living yours out.

Highlights:

 "If I am to scrape a livin', at least it's a livin' worth scraping." 

"If there is no future in it, at least this is a present worth remembering." 

"For the fires of happiness, for the waves of gratitude, for everything that brought us to that point on earth, that moment in time, to do something worth remembering, whether a photograph, or a scar. 

"We're genuinely lucky to hand-on-heart say, 'I love doing what I do.'" 

Get more Mickey at theastray.com.

On Music, via Chris Jones's #MusicToWriteTo

What is it about music? How does it move us how it does? How does it get into our souls?

I'm sure there is some way to break it down, all technical, about how certain sounds release certain chemicals in our brains and how that affects the way we feel, and all that junk. But I don't care about all that. 

I care about music's infinite array of possibilities. Some songs play out in a week. Others are timeless. Some make me cry. Some make me feel like I can conquer the world. Some make me laugh. And some make me sleepy. 

Sometimes I write with music; sometimes I write without it. Right now, it's the latter. In an hour, when I decide to go all cliche and write in a coffee shop somewhere—on my Mac, no less—it'll probably be the former. And this is the playlist I'll be using. 

Esquire writer Chris Jones last month posted at his old My Second Empire blog about music he listens to while writing. Then he put out a call out on Twitter for writers to name some of their favorite songs to listen to while they write. He recently published the whole massive list on his new writing blog, Son of Bold Venture—one of my few must-read blogs.  

I love music. My brother Logan and I email each other awesome songs we find. Growing up, I tried to be a singer. (It

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