Welcome to The Weekend Edit, a Saturday ritual from The Good Trade featuring our top 10 reads of the week and a note from one of our editors.

Happy Weekend!

I’m pleased to reintroduce Grace Abbott who is curating today’s edition of The Weekend Edit.

Grace serves a vital role on our team with growth strategy, creative reviews, and essay writing. She’s also the founder of How To Go Freelance, the widely read Substack where she’s built a meaningful following around independent work.

When I spend any amount of time with Grace I am aware of how she radiates abundance and lightness, and I always walk away from our interactions with more belief in myself. It’s always a joy to learn from her, and I hope you’ll delight in her reflections and recommendations below, from wherever you’re reading this Saturday morning.

Warmly,
Kate

Happy Weekend,

I’m writing you from my dining table in Los Angeles, jetlag finally worn off, after an epic trip to Africa. I stayed at Sarara Camp in Kenya – a safari camp on 850,000 acres of wilderness within the Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy. The local Samburu people have been pioneering this place as a conservation success for the last 30 years, and now it’s home to Kenya’s second-largest elephant herd, endangered reticulated giraffes, Grévy’s zebras – and beyond!

When I was preparing for the trip, I was obviously most excited to see the animals. The Lion King soundtrack (broadway version – “he lives in you!”) on repeat for weeks before I arrived. My wardrobe is now entirely khaki and olive. But when I reflected on the trip – the elephants were definitely amazing – it was the Samburu people who actually stuck with me.

There was a group of guides who took care of us: prepared us meals, took us on game drives, walked us to our tents after dark, joked with us in the common space, and even woke us up with tea and cookie delivery every morning. Robert, the head of Sarara, is actually featured in Groundswell, a new documentary about regenerative agriculture, so you can get a sense of the vibe! They all grew up in the traditional Samburu way – pastoral nomads for thousands of years, building their culture around herding livestock, moving seasonally, measuring time by the land and moon cycles instead of calendars.

And beyond the guides working at camp, there were thousands of Samburu people living this way – even less connected to the Western world. The guides had some exposure to tourists, technology, and outside culture by working there and getting to know visitors. But the broader community was living in a completely different reality than ours.

We asked a few of them how old they were. “We don’t know. Maybe early 30s?” We were surprised to find out they didn’t record age. They simply aren’t marking the passage of time the way we do. And that got me thinking about the thing we’re all wrestling with in the Western world: presence versus striving.

Pure presence

The Samburu aren’t thinking about things that stress us out. Most of them don’t have phones or use the internet. Money isn’t driving them like it does us – in fact, their net worth is represented by the number of cows they have. There’s no corporate ladder. No fitness influencers making them feel like they should lose 5lbs. No Oura rings tracking their sleep cycles. No stress of keeping up with the Jones. The problems, goals, and urgencies that consume us – they might not even know those things exist. And it's a sharp reminder of how small our glimpse of reality truly is...