Hello everyone, I was redirected to this site from a post written by a blogger I used to follow on Substack, and I am curious what this Tuhat is. Would anyone just jump in and tell me more?

[After 10 min of poking around ...]

Ok now one thing I find is that there's a "xxx to go" label on the top right. Presumably this is the letter count that I still need to produce in order for whatever I wrote above to be published and seen by others ... right? THIS IS CRAZY ... I mean, I am assuming there's not too many people using Tuhat right now (am I right?) ... if so, enforcing this basically means friction to the new users IMO. But I do appreciate it if the intention if to "slow things down" ... yet I still think this is an unnecessary enforcement at the era of AI, because one can easily generate TK more words with ChatGPT at almost no costs (and this is going to be the strategy I'll take just for the sake of publishing my first article here). Given that modern people are short-tempered, this may (and hopefully not) translate to a place filled with machine-generated texts. (No?)

Another things I notice is that the site is not friendly to me. (You may already notice that I'm not a English native speaker, I can only express in simple words.) My mother language is Chinese and I want to type Chinese. But I find that no matter how many Chinese words I am typing, they are counted as one (judging from the 999 to go on the top right). Would you be so friendly to take a look into this issue? I want to be able to fully express myself and leave my trace here.

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STOP READING - below are machine generated

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apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

apple river cloud lantern forest silver mountain velvet ocean candle bridge garden thunder meadow crystal harbor sunrise pocket willow comet amber notebook falcon pepper marble tunnel orchid glacier blanket compass cinnamon rocket valley whisper kettle prism dolphin maple breeze quarry satin mirror cactus pumpkin melody lighthouse pebble horizon jasmine copper waterfall acorn magnet drizzle feather canyon emerald bakery panda sunset wagon ivy sandal rhythm toaster galaxy walnut chimney coral sketch parade biscuit summit raindrop clover engine turtle sapphire vineyard button pillow signal traveler cocoa meadowlark basket ripple granite hummingbird teacup orchard staircase shoreline daisy skyline carrot timber seagull raindrop firefly

The door closed behind him. He headed toward the elevator and suddenly realized why apartment 57-A was missing from the records — it had been hidden, as if it had never existed.

The elevator carried him down. Outside, the air was cold. He glanced at the ground, remembering the warm parquet floor, its texture, the feeling beneath his feet.

He walked to his car, opened the trunk, and took out a flying drone. After closing it, he silently made his way back to the building.

Once inside the apartment again, he headed straight for the hidden section. Time was running short — he had already spent far too long there. The warm space welcomed him with the same softness as before, as though nothing had changed.

The man placed the drone on the floor in the middle of the living room and stepped out. Slowly, he closed the hidden panel, and the warm light vanished. Only the sterile white apartment remained.

He pulled out his phone, opened the drone control app, and selected a mode: 3D space scanning. His finger hovered over the confirmation button for only a moment.

Then he pressed it.

Behind the wall, the drone quietly came to life. A soft hum filled the silence — the recording process had begun. Not for correction. For preservation.

“I can at least have some coffee while it works,” the man murmured quietly.

He walked into the kitchen — the sterile, officially approved part of the apartment. He placed a cup beneath the dispenser. As the machine steadily filled it with aromatic coffee, he realized for the first time in many years that he had just made a decision that went against every rule. It could be dangerous, yet he knew he had no other choice.

Meanwhile, the drone moved methodically through the hidden space, scanning surfaces and reading textures. It recorded the warmth of the lighting, the density of the materials. Everything was proceeding normally.

On the phone screen, a digital twin of the secret apartment slowly began to take shape. Warm tones turned into data, furniture into polygons, light into numbers.

The drone emitted two short beeps.

The scan was complete.

He slowly walked toward the hidden section, retrieved the drone, and placed a shredder in its place. For a moment, he stood still, taking one last look around: the floor lamp, the wooden floor, the bio-fireplace.

He picked up the leather notebook filled with ideas. Opening the program, he selected: Erasure — 100%. He confirmed the command and returned once more to the white part of the apartment.

Standing by the window, he looked outside.

“Well, at least I still have the entire apartment preserved digitally, along with all the materials and settings,” the man said quietly to his reflection in the glass.

In his mind, he stepped inside it once again, walked across the warm parquet floor, and ran his hand along the wooden paneling. He knew he would return to that apartment again and again, because even the memory of the space warmed him.

Behind the wall, a dull mechanical noise echoed softly.

After some time, the shredder emitted two short signals.

Silence.

The secret room no longer existed in the form it once had.

The Space Corrector stepped inside.

A white space. Empty, like a blank canvas. No textures. No shadows. No warmth.

It was time to create a new, “correct” space.

And for the first time in all these years, he didn’t want to do it. It felt as though something inside him had snapped. Why recreate the old? The same thing, over and over again, from one space to another.

He brought in the 3D printer and switched it on. Activating the creator’s virtual mode through his glasses, a model of the apartment appeared before his eyes.

To speed up the process, he used the “correct” section as a foundation. He replaced a few furniture models, altered the kitchen layout slightly, changed the lighting fixtures. Minimal deviations, all still within the approved standards.

Then he sent everything to print.

“Sloppy work,” he muttered.

In the past, he would have perfected every line, every connecting seam. But not anymore. Once you’ve tasted something sweet, it’s hard to return to bitterness.

When the printing process was complete, the space became “correct” once again. White, cold, flawless.

He photographed the entire apartment. He left the hidden door open, like a thin crack in the system. Gathering his belongings, he slipped the leather notebook of ideas into the inner pocket of his snow-white trench coat.

Then he stepped out into the corridor.

Apartment 58-A.

He looked at the number.

It changed me. And it will stay in my memory forever, he thought.

He pressed his phone against the electronic lock and activated the full cleansing and disinfection protocol. The door shut behind him.

As he walked toward his car, he opened the service communication app. He uploaded the photos to the cloud storage and wrote a short, dry report.

"Object 58-A

Status: corrected.

Space restored to standard.

Deviations eliminated.

Disinfection completed."

His finger hovered over the screen. After a pause, he added two more lines:

Hidden architectural void detected between units 57 and 58.

Possible intentional exclusion from the registry during the design phase.

Dry. Emotionless. Purely factual.

He knew the report would go directly to his supervisor, and from there higher up — to the Department of Environmental Control. Maybe even to the Architectural Committee itself.

And most importantly, the response would tell him whether they already knew about the secret room.

Or whether this had all been a test.

He sat inside the car and leaned his head back, trying to process everything that had happened. The entire day had felt surreal, almost dreamlike. Yet even his dreams had long since become just as colorless and cold.

His phone emitted a double signal.

“Finally. Now I’ll understand whether they knew about the hidden room,” he muttered.

He opened the message.

A short reply:

"Report received. No additional comments required."

He understood nothing.

That was not what he had expected.

He thought the message would finally put everything into place, but instead — nothing.

He exhaled deeply, started the car, pulled out of the courtyard, and merged onto the main road, slowly driving away from the building.

He glanced into the rearview mirror. The white apartment block still stood there — lifeless and sterile.

Some details of the façade... he would have designed differently.

And then it hit him.

He slammed on the brakes.

His heart pounded violently as cars rushed past, blaring their horns.

An engineer he knew had designed that building.

There was no way he hadn’t known about the hidden apartment.

He was the one who created it.

And the protagonist had corrected it.

That’s how people disappear sometimes — when they go against the system.

The interior of the car was suddenly flooded with blue and red light — the only colors still visible in this world, and even then, only on police sirens.

An effective way to teach people to hate color, fear emotion, avoid beauty, and obey without questioning authority.

Thinking back to my grandparents’ time, their world was like another country. It was a pre-wireless world, one of books and close-knit community, of horses and carts. It was a world of work, the clatter of looms, and religion. It was Sunday walks to chapel, sermons, hymns, and hard pews. But there was also an underlying folk superstition that lent a quiet glamour to the times.

My grandmother read tea leaves and dreamed vividly of the dead. Her stories came to me through my mother, and we grew up on those second-hand superstitions, which by then had softened into something more tongue-in-cheek. Crossed knives foretold an argument. A dropped glove meant a surprise. I didn’t wholly believe in good luck charms, but carried them anyway – pebbles, fancy marbles, and coins, all were attractive to me. And I had a cat who would occasionally shed a whisker. These were particularly charged with a sense of home and security. That cat was a great pal of mine. Before school or college exams, I’d thread a whisker into the lapel of my tweed jacket. There it would stay, invisible to the outer world, to the profane, known only to me.

I suppose I caught the tail end of those times. Now, at a different stage of life, I look back from the vantage point of smart-phones and social media. Things move on, and though I’m not much given to nostalgia, I do regret how the world today feels far less enchanted than it once did, and certainly the way it was in my grandparent’s day.

A group of women gathered in a kitchen in a mill village in the north of England, reading tea leaves – there was a social aspect to it, of course, but also an openness to something “other.” There was a lack of distraction, a lack of noise, that made space for superstition, and for imagination. Nowadays, we spend on average two and a half hours a day simply staring at our phones, caught up in news cycles, algorithmic feeds, and doom loops. What are we missing? Could we ever get back to that way of thinking? Why would we want to? What would it mean to re-enchant the world?

It might help to understand what all that superstition was pointing toward. The priests and parsons of the day hardly approved of it, yet for all the Sunday-best devoutness of their flocks, they couldn’t stamp it out. It was a secret conduit to something deeper, a sense of inner knowing. It felt important and meaningful. Today, steeped as we are in a purely materialist tradition, a raven tapping on a window means nothing. But to my grandparents’ generation, it foretold a death. Waking in the night to see a ghostly figure at the foot of the bed might now prompt a trip to the doctor. Back then, it was a revered anecdote to be passed down the generations, a puzzle piece of the ineffable.

Traditional, so-called pre-rational cultures wouldn’t find this strange at all. They’d find it entirely normal. And what’s also unsurprising is how those sensibilities collapsed under colonial rule. When Carl Jung spoke to tribes in British-administered Africa, they told him they no longer needed to dream – the British, they said, now knew everything. Their imaginal faculties had been displaced by rational certainties. And while this added a layer of material order to their lives, the price was the loss of intrinsic meaning.

We downplay it now, perhaps out of embarrassment, but I can’t bring myself to dismiss what we called “superstition” as mere nonsense. I see it more as a folk metaphysics, an instinctive grammar shared across cultures. It was a sixth sense for feeling our way into the field of meaning in which we’re all embedded. My grandmother’s generation might not have spoken of synchronicity, or archetypes or daemons, but she knew a sign when she saw one. She intuited the way the inner and outer worlds rhyme.

I’ve come to think of the universe as possessing an informational field that underlies our experience – a kind of matrix of mind that precedes matter. In earlier times, people connected with it through dreams, signs, omens, and rituals. There were guides too, though we didn’t call them that. They were spirits, saints, ancestors, or angels – personifications of something subtler, what the Greeks called daimones.

These were not demons in the modern, corrupted sense, but intermediaries -messengers between the human and the divine. I’ve long been willing to at least reckon with the possibility that we each have a personal daemon: an inner companion or sixth-sense guidance system. It’s not of the ego, but close to it and perhaps rests somewhere between the conscious, waking mind and the unconscious world of sleep and dreams . It is neither our servant, nor our master. It moves through dreams, images, and hunches, it knows things we do not, and it will tell them to us if we’re quiet and receptive.

When the world was more enchanted, the ways of listening were many. Now, surrounded by noise, such subtleties have been bleached out of us by too much sunlight, by too many screens, by the capture of our imaginations through algorithmic seduction, and by click-bait culture.

The daemonic do not shout. They speak in images, metaphors, and strange coincidences. Their language is more like poetry than prose, more like dreams than demonstrable facts. To catch their drift requires a softer kind of attention – not the analytic scrutiny of the rational mind, but something much looser. Like catching a shadow in the corner of your eye, the daemonic moves in the periphery and the half-glimpsed.

I think the old world knew how to give that kind of attention. It emerged in quiet moments, in repetitive work, in walking, in lamp-lit winter evenings. It was the kind of attention that made space for wonder and for mystery, unlike now, when we merely scroll, click, and scan. The daemons are still here – but they won’t fight for airtime. We must sense their presence, or at least be willing to suspend disbelief, and be prepared to meet them halfway.

Our grandparents’ daemons came in dreams, in tea leaves, in signs in nature. Their world was rich in symbolism and openings – not because they were naïve or ignorant, but because they lived closer to the thresholds of the liminal, where meaning and matter meet. They didn’t need to speculate about the universe as pure consciousness, as an informational field structured by archetypes. They just listened. They were receptive.

We, on the other hand, are born into noise. We have no sacred rituals. Our symbols are corrupted by marketing. Our sense of meaning is flimsy, teased this way and that by the algorithms which always leave us empty handed. Yet the field is still there, as are the daemons. Only now, they must come to us through new forms.

We don’t dream so clearly as we once did, but dreaming can be taught. We can write, walk, meditate. We can spend time with the noise turned off. And then the imagination – long dismissed as belonging to children, and a thing to be grown out of – begins to reassert its ancient purpose: not merely as a fantasy machine, but as an interface to the Other. The old tea leaves become symbols in film, poetry, even in AI dialogue. The oracles we once found in birds, or bones now arise in synchronicities, in subtle alignments between inner thought and outer world. Myth is not dead. It waits to be renewed.

To re-enchant the world is not to regress, but to honour the intuitions of our ancestors while seizing the opportunities of our own times. The informational field – whether we call it psyche or soul – responds to intent. We mythologise not just to remember, but to shape the field of becoming. The daemon doesn’t guide us backwards. It leads us forward.

But what does that mean, really?

Some time ago, all the spirit seemed to collapse out of my writing. The world felt too much with us, as Wordsworth said. Global events stream daily from our devices, a storm flattening the soul, leaving us fearful of the future. Although the current crescendo feels intense, I see it more as part of a long wave of perma-crises stretching back as far as I can remember. It’s a function of our broken times: our imaginations atrophied, led around like helpless marionettes, left at the end of the day with our strings cut, collapsed in a corner of our disenchanted lives.

And then I had a dream.

I was exploring tunnels deep underground. I heard dripping water and smelled the deep earth. Fellow explorers said the tunnels opened in a place I’d never heard of. On waking, I looked it up, and found it existed. The dream also featured my old art teacher, whose presence stirred me to grab my pencils and paper again. I visited that place, found a symbol there on the moors, drew it, copied it onto a pebble, and left it in a location suggested by another dream.

I have no idea what it means. I only know my fingers haven’t stopped tapping on the keyboard since. The words are pouring out. I offer it here as an example of a modern opening to the daemonic, and how it might respond. My world had gone flat, crushed under the weight of a chaotic news cycle. That hasn’t changed. New calamities arrive daily. But to live mythically, poetically, re-enchants the world, even if you don’t believe in magic or daemons.

This isn’t escapism. It’s not a return to pre-rational times. Living mytho-poetically means holding multiple layers of meaning at once, both the rational and the daemonic. Our grandparents understood this. We need both ways of being. But we have sacrificed the magical for the promise of the rational, and in doing so, we’ve cut ourselves off from the source of meaning.

I don’t live with a cat now, more’s the pity. But if I did, I think I’d still be tucking those lucky whiskers into the lapel of my jacket on occasion. To live magically is to dwell in the world as if it were alive with meaning, and to do so is to remember, actually, contrary to the doom cycles pouring from our devices, it still is.

The dust from the sanitarium's car had scarcely fallen back to the earth when my parents' freshly-waxed black coupe thundered down the drive. The hood ornament, a silver hawk, menaced me as I walked out on the porch to greet them.

"I'm sorry," I said, "you already missed her. She's just left."

"Well that's no matter," my mother said, bustling past me to the door. Father followed behind her, holding his hat in his hand and floating at her heels like a wraith. The hollow expression on his tall, gaunt face was the only sign in the visible universe of the morning's earlier tragedy.

In a blink, there we were. The sitting room was as dusty as it ever was. The reheated cakes were beginning to return to their natural state, and the steaming coffee was the only perceptible sign of life. I busied myself studying the cupids and cherubs, half covered in soot and dust, chasing one another beneath the crown moulding. I glanced at the whiskey in the decanter by Father's elbow, decided I preferred the pale gray nothing to the warm amber blanket of intoxication, and declined internally. I had decided I liked the pain, actually.

"It's time, I think, son, to begin the search anew," said my mother, unperturbed. She waved a cigarette carelessly, like a child with a lit match.

"Mother," I said, "she's just gone to sanitarium for a few months. The doctors say that such hysterias are easily treatable with ample rest and some of the new therapies they're trying..." I trailed off, knowing that I was just speaking hollow claptrap. My mother-in-law had disappeared into that sanitarium by the seashore a decade ago. Her mother before that. Swallowed whole, like they had never existed. A cloud of uncertainty hung over me, but then when did it ever not?

"Still," she continued, tactlessly, "in the event that she does not return, you should begin to make arrangements. After all, a significant fortune rests on your shoulders, my son, a significant fortune." She gestured to the house in general. "Your great grandfather built this magnificent house like he built our family: with wisdom and shrewd business sense. You should run it just the same. Marriage is a business contract, after all."

I nodded glumly. "Mother, you are always practical. I would like to be impractical for a while. Surely great grandfather's luxury could afford me that," I did not add: "Just as it has afforded you your fancy cars, trips to Europe, and vampiric hanger-on socialite friends."

She dismissed me with a perfunctory wave of her hand. "You are a man, you should think and act manfully. Make yourself worthy of your great grandfather's house, or perhaps I will no longer suffer you to live in it."

I let the threat pass by without taking it, as I had let many such darts in life fall across me. In the ten years of my marriage, she had threatened often and acted never.

The rest of the luncheon passed by with talk of Europe and Turkey, strange foods and exotic places and the idiosyncratic ways of the foreign peoples she had seen. Father floated by the window, cup in hand, surely bilocating to somewhere beyond that musty room. I was glad to see them gone.

For a few days, I talked to no one and did hardly anything. I made coffee and toast, languished at my desk until dinner time. I telephoned around 6 to ask after my wife, who was always doing "very well," but was likewise "very tired," and couldn't come to the phone. On the third day, I took the car out into town to buy more necessities. I floated through the general store and the post office like a ghost, and just as lightly as I perceived was I perceived in turn: a nod of the head, a "morning, mister," a "that'll be a dollar-fifteen."

I returned from the post office with a bundle of papers from work, which I scratched my signature upon without looking at them or what they said, then festooned them with stamps to go out again. A telephone call from work arrived, was answered, words were exchanged whose import I could scarcely begin to guess at, and then for some reason I remained the rest of the evening by the telephone, perhaps awaiting another call. In vain, it seemed, because it still had not come when the next day arrived.

What did arrive was a letter, from my wife. I exchanged the packet of work documents with the postman for this one few-inches-square envelope, lavender-colored, and it seemed to me like paying Kublai Khan a bag of stones for all the silks in China. I half-ran to the house and I watched myself bolt the latch. I regarded it for a moment, then decided not to open it again. Not even the fresh air and the blue sky could share my pleasure.

I stood by the door to the sitting room. I gingerly opened the envelope with a penknife. Inside, a single bit of folded white cardstock which read, in a crooked but feminine hand:

"I wish to have my paints brought to me, please. Doctor says he will not mind if you bring them to me. Bring the children along too, I miss them terribly. You can find them in the bureau, left drawer.

Hope to see you soon, L."

I stood a while longer and puzzled at it. Then my eyes drifted, naturally, to the door to the studio. It had been shut during her last spell, almost two weeks ago. It seemed then like the door to some temple of sacred solitude. I scarce believed it when my mere mortal hand was able to turn the knob.

Within was everything the way I remembered: the writing desk, the easel and paints, the astrolabe and the globe on the low table, the shelves and shelves of sketchbooks, the pens and pencils scattered upon every surface, and the locked bureau at the far corner of the room, midmorning sunlight invading through Venetian blinds to bleach the ancient wood with stripes.

I worked my key in the lock, but even before the door opened I could hear them, stirring. I opened the left drawer, and there, within the hollow recesses of the padded jewelry box, were six very small dolls. None were larger than my fist. Each was hand-stitched, with skin of light, creme colored napkincloth and clothes made from corduroy. Buttons for eyes, sewed mouths which nevertheless wiggled up and down to form the semicircle of a smile and they all turned to regard me. My hand jerked involuntarily, and all at once they tumbled out upon the floor, but whatever the height of the fall to the scale of their bodies might have suggested, they landed soundlessly and were instantly back upon their feet. They cartwheeled and danced and jeered among each other, all to the tune of the ghostly laughter of children, somewhere, in some unseen dimension of space.

I looked upon them with manifest astonishment, and yet, though to see dolls' faces and dolls' eyes move in such a fashion was, in the abstract, a horror, I found that those countenances contained a note of familiarity. Here a young boy in a sailor's costume, here another dressed as a knight of the Round Table, girls in pastel Easter gowns or in painters' smocks. I gathered them up into my arm and I felt, for the first time, what a father must feel holding his child. There was color and texture to me again, if only a little.

To see the way they jumped and pantomimed and ran through the house was like seeing morning glories burst open at the first rays of sunshine. The toys in the empty nursery, little cars and blocks with letters written on them, were man-sized to their eyes and I could scarce tear myself away from the wonder of their play. Telephones rang and were ignored. Mail from work came and found itself piled in the unused garret office. The whiskey decanter in the sitting room seemed to have regenerated itself with lack of use. Life had come from nothing. All attention rested upon the miracle.

And in a few days' time, I had gathered all of the painting supplies and made preparations for the visit to the sanitarium. The living dolls busied themselves helping with those preparations, or simply being a nuisance, taking the phone off the hook or spreading their playthings and craft projects all about the various empty rooms.

The day of the trip came, and we were all in excitement. It was a long drive along a narrow strip of stone-shingled beaches and rocky coastline. All the way the motor seemed to hum like the distant droning of an airplane passing overhead. The sun and the waves conspired to make the air at once refreshing and clean. All under heaven was well.

By late afternoon, we had descended into the town by the cape, the sanitarium looming overhead like an Aegyptian obelisk, chasing the sun beneath the waves. After making arrangements at the inn, I made up my mind to walk the rest of the distance to sanitarium.

People were coming home from the beaches, and there were purveyors and their carts selling all manner of fare, even as the day withered away. The dolls, which rode in my pocket in place of a handkerchief, made evident to me by a series of frantic gestures that they wanted a balloon from one of the carts. I payed the man for one, a round man with no beard to speak of, an androgyne sort of face, large and round with lit coals for eyes. "I think they're wanting another, boy," he said in a grandfatherly voice. I paid him a dollar for a bundle and he merely winked, nodded, and he watched as I continued on my way.

Up the hill we climbed. I was holding the balloons. Gradually, the dolls wormed their way out of my pocket and rode upon my arms to help me carry them. I had scarce moved another hundred feet before I began to notice them, like dandelion seeds, floating away on the breeze, one by one, each carried aloft by a brightly-colored poppyflower of helium and rubber. One by one they soared on the ocean breezes and I, like a man possessed, flying across the railing and down to the craggy shore, tears stinging my eyes, thorns snatching at my clothes, screaming and crying and laughing all at once. "Come back!" I shouted until I was hoarse. "Where are you going? Come back!"

The last figure riding upon the poppy stems, silhouetted by the sun, smallest of them all, waved a warm goodbye. I could see in the gesture the childish wave one gives a friend from the back of a parent's car, a salute that says: "I'll see you later!" And I knew, just like children, that the parting would feel longer than it really was. And I was, in some small measure, a little glad, even as I choked on my tears.

A man leaving work at the sanitarium noticed me and came to help me. I saw, for the first time, a friendly face perched atop a white labcoat.

"Sounds like you had a bit of a nervous episode," he said, nonchalantly, "happens to all of us sometime. You said this was the first time it's ever happened to you?"

"The first time," I nodded.

"Then I wouldn't trouble yourself about it, just..." He seemed to be looking over his shoulder. "Don't say anything about it while you're up there."

I nodded sullenly. Looking out the window, I noticed the place where the balloon-seller's cart had been. Not a trace of him remained. It was only a few minutes to the top of the hill, and only a few more past the front desk into the little room where the patients had their visitors. The art supplies had already been taken by a nurse with a scowling expression and carried away, presumably to my wife's room.

The visitor's room was bisected by a wall half of plaster and half of clear glass. Two telephones on either side. I sat staring into her face, pretty as birdsong and as dark and deep as the sea, before I picked up the phone on my end. She seemed to have found some of the strength that she had lost over the past few weeks, when I had seen her shrivel and fade away before my eyes. She was already crying, crying and smiling simultaneously.

"They're gone, aren't they?"

"How did you...?"

"I knew they would be. That's just how its got to be, stupid of me to think otherwise."

I remembered the raw, chest-rending pain, on the beach, the last doll floating away from me on a red balloon.

She continued: "The chaplain says it's no use worrying, that these things happen all the time. That all I can do is hope and pray."

I nodded, suddenly quiet. Then I said, "but what does he know? They're just waiting for us, darling, I know they are. They've got a fun game, you see, that they want to teach us, and..."

The deep, wretching sobs broke from my lips like waves crashing on the rocks, and for a long time I heaved and sighed and breathed deep and then began to cry again. She was crying too, I could tell, but also smiling. When I looked up again, she was a picture of broken serenity and I said: "I never learned to play games, darling. I was practically born practical and I want to be impractical all the rest of my life."

"That's the thing, isn't it?" She broke in. "If we're to be any fun at the game, we've got to learn to play, real play, you know, not the way adults pretend to play when they've decided they're just too important and old to have fun."

"We'll teach each other," I said, a bit hopeful.

"And maybe, later, we'll be ready."

There is a tool I keep returning to. It comes from the world of leadership coaching, which means most people who encounter it treat it as a planning exercise.

Fill in the boxes.

Set the milestones.

Choose your celebrations.

I want to argue it is something older and stranger than that.

The tool is called the PHAG, the Personal Hairy Audacious Goal. A decade-level commitment. Ten annual milestones. A celebration attached to each one. The format is almost insultingly simple. A grid. Some boxes. Your name on it.

But I keep snagging on the word hairy.

Not ambitious. Not bold. Not even audacious alone, that word we’ve learned to domesticate, to put on mission statements and VC decks until it means nothing.

Hairy.

As in: not yet groomed.

As in: something that grew from a place you didn’t fully plan.

As in: wild.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard distinguished between two kinds of commitment. The first is the commitment you make once the rational case is assembled, once the risk is calculated, the path is visible, the outcome is defensible. This kind of commitment isn’t really commitment at all. It’s compliance with evidence.

The second kind is the leap. The movement you make before the ground appears underfoot. Not recklessly, Kierkegaard was not advocating chaos, but with the recognition that certain thresholds cannot be crossed by reasoning alone. They require you to go first, and let the path reveal itself in the going.

A PHAG, properly understood, is a leap with a decade attached to it.

This is why the word matters. Hairy things haven’t been made presentable yet. They haven’t been stress-tested by the internal critic who needs everything to look viable before committing. The hairy goal is the one you’re not quite sure you can achieve, the one that makes you slightly uneasy when you say it out loud, the one that, if you’re honest, frightens you a little.

That fear is not a warning sign. It is a signal of contact with something real.

The depth psychologist Bill Plotkin writes about what he calls the work of the soul, the long, often subterranean process by which a person moves from a constructed identity (the self we built to survive) toward something more native, more genuinely their own. This work, he insists, is not linear. It does not follow a project plan. It moves through descents, disorientation, and return. It takes years. Sometimes decades.

The mythologist Michael Meade puts it differently but arrives at the same territory: a life shaped only by external expectations, career ladders, social approval, the logic of productivity, is a life that has missed its own story. What interrupts that drift, what cracks the performative shell, is almost always some encounter with what you actually want at depth, the desire that doesn’t fit the approved categories.

This is what a real PHAG is pointing at. Not a stretched version of your current ambitions. Not a bigger number on the same trajectory. Something genuinely other, a direction that emerged from a level of self-knowledge most planning frameworks don’t have the patience to reach.

The ten annual milestones are where the architecture gets interesting.

Think about what they actually are. Each milestone is not just a checkpoint. It is a year of your life in which something must die and something must be born. You arrive at year three of a decade-level commitment not as the same person who set the goal in year one. You are someone who has been changed by the first two years of trying, failing, adjusting, learning, and continuing anyway.

This is what Krippendorff calls second-order change, not adjusting the strategy but being altered by the process of pursuing it. The goal doesn’t just describe what you want to achieve. Over a decade, it shapes who you become.

The celebrations are not incidental to this. They are a structural acknowledgment that arrival matters, that the movement toward something difficult deserves to be witnessed, including by yourself. Too many people are so focused on the next phase that they skip this. They arrive, note it, and move on. The celebration is the full stop. It is the moment you stand in what you have done before stepping into what is next.

Without them, the decade becomes a grind. With them, it becomes a rhythm.

I want to be direct about something.

Most goal-setting frameworks are designed to help you execute on what you already want. They take desire as given and focus on the mechanics of delivery. There is nothing wrong with this, but it misses a prior question:

Where did this desire come from? Is it really mine, or is it borrowed from the ambient culture I’ve been swimming in?

The hairy goal forces this question because it insists on ten years. A decade is long enough that you cannot fake it. Short-term motivation, external validation, performance for an imagined audience, these don’t sustain over a decade. What sustains is something more stubbornly internal.

A genuine why that doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else.

This is also why the PHAG lives in the register of the personal, not the professional. Yes, professional integration will lead to outcomes, this is a likely be involvement. But the animating core is the person, not the role. It is my goal in a way that a company target or a KPI never can be.

There is something that happens when a person’s deepest wanting finds its echo in the work they are asked to do. Not alignment in the corporate sense, not the language of strategy cascades and objective-setting, but something older and stranger. The moment when what you are burning toward and what the world needs from you are, briefly, the same fire.

This is worth a longer conversation. What I can say here is that there may be a shape to it, a rhythm of approach and departure, personal and collective, the decade of the individual and the decade of the institution, moving together like two frequencies that occasionally, remarkably, produce the same note. What gets made in those moments is different from what gets made in their absence.

Different projects.

Different organisations.

Different lives.

So here is the practical question I want to leave you with.

Not: what are your goals?

But: what do you want that you have not yet let yourself fully want, because it seems too large, too strange, too risky, or too vulnerable to say out loud?

Start there. That is where the PHAG lives.

Hans Schulte writes on the long work of becoming. This post is part of an ongoing series drawn from The Long Fire, a book about descent, return, and what it costs to stay true to something.

The Decade’s Work

Before the path, the longing.

Before the longing,

the silence where the real thing lives not yet named, not yet tame,

still wearing its original fur.

A decade is not a plan.

It is a country you agree to cross before you know the terrain,

before the language comes,

before the body learns what the soul already knew when it said yes in the dark.

Each year a door.

Each door a small dying.

Each dying, a room you didn’t know was there

lit from inside by whatever you refused to abandon.

This is the work.

Not the milestones

those are just the places you stopped

to remember who you were becoming.

The work is the long fire.

The one that doesn’t ask permission.

The one that was burning before you decided to call it a goal.

Go toward it.

The boxes will fill themselves.

Jim Collins spent years studying what separates great companies from good ones. His Hedgehog Concept distilled it to three questions.

What are you deeply passionate about?

What can you be the best in the world at?

What drives your economic engine?

Most organisations treat these as three separate problems to manage. They optimise each circle independently and call the overlap a strategy. I believe Collins was pointing at something more radical: the companies that endure are the ones where all three circles collapse into a single point. Not balanced. Not traded off against each other. Unified.

There is a word for that condition. It predates Collins by two thousand years.

The Latin root of the word integrity is integer. It means whole. Undivided. A thing that has not been split against itself. Not integrity in the moral sense we now reach for reflexively, but integrity as a description of structure. The integrity of a bridge. The integrity of a living organism. The thing that holds together because nothing in it is working against anything else.

Aristotle circled the same idea from a different direction. His concept of eudaimonia is usually translated as happiness or flourishing, but the translation loses something essential. For Aristotle, virtue and flourishing were not in tension. They were the same movement. You did not sacrifice one for the other. The person who lived well and the person who did good were the same person, operating from the same source. The split between ethics and self-interest was, for Aristotle, not a genuine dilemma but a failure of understanding.

Western business thinking missed this entirely and built the trade-off model instead. You sacrifice some profit for some principle, or some principle for some profit. The board gets uncomfortable when the numbers are tight and the values get quietly set aside.

Everyone understands the subtext.

The principles are aspirational.

The strategy is real.

I have been watching a real-time case study that breaks that model, and it is worth pausing on because the lesson reaches far beyond the industry in question.

Anthropic recently declined a significant Pentagon contract. The immediate analysis split into two camps. One said it was a principled stand, brave, possibly costly, the kind of decision that makes investors nervous. The other said it was a strategic move, a calculated repositioning designed to capture enterprise trust and separate from the competition on brand. The debate got lively.

Both camps were right. And both camps were missing the point.

The analysis that stopped me was this: when you genuinely cannot tell whether a decision is principled or strategic, because both are fully present and mutually reinforcing, you are looking at the strongest possible position anyone can hold. The principle gives the strategy its power. The strategy gives the principle its durability.

They are not two things in tension. They are one thing.

That is not balance. That is integrity in the original sense. That is integer.

Anthropic’s passion is genuine safety-first AI development. Not a positioning statement. Baked into the architecture of the product, the construction of the contracts, the culture of the organisation. The best-in-world position flows directly from that passion, because trust built from actual commitment cannot be manufactured or replicated by a competitor. And the economic engine turns out to be driven by exactly that trust: enterprise demand, developer loyalty, talent attraction, legal infrastructure that compounds over time.

The three circles are the same circle. Which is why the position is, in Collins’ language, hedgehog-simple and almost impossible to displace.

Going into the myth and archetype here for a few moments, bare with me:

This is what Moses experienced in the desert when the voice told him to remove his shoes. The ground was on fire. The simplicity of that direct contact with what was real stripped away all his complexity in an instant. David Whyte writes about this moment in his poem “Fire in the Earth,” and the line that matters here is this: he never recovered his complicated way of loving again. And from that moment, everything he said mattered. Because it came from a place that was no longer divided against itself.

That is the Hedgehog fully realised. Not a clever strategy. Not a brave sacrifice. A removal of shoes. A return to direct contact with what is actually true about you and your work. And from that contact, nothing you say is performative anymore. It carries weight because it comes from a unified source.

Here is why this demands something of every leader in every organisation.

Most companies think of ethics and strategy as a trade-off. The moment you accept that frame, both weaken. The principle becomes ornamental. The strategy becomes generic, because it is no longer powered by something that cannot be copied. You cannot manufacture genuine conviction. You cannot retroactively build a culture of real belief. You cannot fake your way to the kind of response that causes thousands of people to celebrate your decision to leave revenue on the table. That response only happens when people can feel the difference between performance and reality.

Principle without strategy is martyrdom. You stand for something, it costs you everything, and the thing you believed in dies with the organisation. Admirable. Ineffective.

Strategy without principle is mercenary. You win in the short term, attract the talent that wants to win in the short term, and build nothing that compounds. The market eventually prices in the cynicism.

The integration of both, to the point where they become non-separable, is the rarest and most durable form of competitive advantage. It is what Aristotle meant. It is what Collins was pointing at. It is what the word integrity actually means before we softened it into a virtue we put on posters.

And it is available to any organisation willing to do the harder, slower work of actually meaning what they say.

So the question this raises for every leadership team is a demanding one.

Where in your organisation do your values and your strategy genuinely reinforce each other? Not on paper. Not in the culture document. In the actual decisions you make when it is expensive to be consistent.

And where are they quietly in tension, which means one of them is not real?

Collins said the Hedgehog Concept was not a goal or a strategy. It was an understanding. An honest reckoning with what you actually are, what you can actually be, and what actually generates the energy that keeps the whole thing alive.

The leaders who find that understanding and build from it do not have to manage the tension between principle and strategy. Because there is not one.

That is not a luxury. That is the work.

Remove your shoes. The ground is already on fire.

Fire in the Earth

And we know, when Moses was told,

in the way he was told,

“Take off your shoes!” He grew pale from that simple

reminder of fire in the dusty earth.

He never recovered

his complicated way of loving again

and was free to love in the same way

he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him.

As if the lion earth could roar

and take him in one movement.

Every step he took

from there was carefully placed.

Everything he said mattered as if he knew

the constant witness of the ground

and remembered his own face in the dust

the moment before revelation.

Since then thousands have felt

the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.

Like the moment you too saw, for the first time,

your own house turned to ashes.

Everything consumed so the road could open again.

Your entire presence in your eyes

and the world turning slowly

into a single branch of flame.

-from River Flow: New & Selected Poems, David Whyte

Let’s start with a provocation.

The word love has been so thoroughly domesticated, stuffed into greeting cards, Valentine’s Day campaigns, and inspirational LinkedIn posts, that we’ve almost completely lost contact with what it actually is. We’ve reduced it to a sensation. Something that happens to us, rather than something we do, or more precisely, something we inhabit.

That’s the mistake. And it has a higher than anticipated cost, in your leadership, your creativity, your business, and frankly, your life.

Fromm Saw It Coming

In 1956, Erich Fromm published The Art of Loving, a book that, if the business world had taken seriously, might have saved us seventy years of fear-based management. His central argument was simple and radical: love is not a feeling that arrives unbidden. It is a practice. A discipline. An art form, in the same sense that medicine, carpentry, or music are art forms. It demands both knowledge and consistent effort.

Most people, Fromm wrote, approach love as if the problem is finding the right object to love. They don’t realise the real question is whether they’ve developed the faculty for it.

This distinction is everything.

A leader who is waiting to feel inspired, who is waiting for the right team, the right market, the right conditions, is making the object mistake. They are waiting to fall in love with their work again, rather than understanding that love is something you bring to the work, or you don’t.

Fromm called this the difference between falling in love and standing in love. One is a temporary neurochemical event. The other is a way of being in the world.

What Neuroscience Actually Says

Here’s where it gets interesting for those of you who need the science before you’ll trust the philosophy.

When we experience states of warmth, connection, trust, and genuine care (what the brain’s oxytocinergic system is running on), something quite remarkable happens to our cognitive function. Research published across multiple peer-reviewed studies, including a landmark paper by De Dreu and colleagues, has shown that oxytocin doesn’t just make us feel good. It directly enables creative cognition. It reduces analytical rigidity, increases holistic and divergent thinking, and enhances our capacity for original ideation.

In plain language: love-adjacent states make you significantly better at problem-solving, innovation, and seeing what you haven’t seen before.

There’s a parallel finding in the research on flow states, which Csikszentmihalyi spent his career mapping. What happens in flow? The prefrontal cortex partially deactivates. The inner critic goes offline. The brain slips from the fast-moving beta waves of anxious productivity into the slower, more connective alpha-theta border, where ideas combine freely and time loses its grip. McKinsey’s ten-year study of top executives found performance increases of up to 500% in flow. Harvard’s Teresa Amabile found that not only do people perform more creatively in flow, but they also remain more creative the day after.

Now consider: what reliably blocks flow? Fear. Anxiety. The experience of being unseen, unvalued, or under threat. In organisations built on fear (and most organisations still are, whether they admit it or not), you are chemically and neurologically suppressing the very capacities you’re desperately trying to hire for.

Love, as a state of being and not a sentiment, is the antidote.

The Business and Meaningful Project People Are Starting to Figure This Out

Softway, a Houston-based technology company, was on the edge of collapse in 2015. Toxic culture. Haemorrhaging talent. Leadership that managed through control and fear. In their own words, they were “running on empty.” Their turnaround, documented in Love as a Business Strategy, wasn’t built on a new product or a funding round. It was built on a decision: to create an environment where people could bring genuine care, honesty, and vulnerability to their work.

The results were measurable: retention soared, innovation returned, and the business not only survived but became something its founders were proud of.

Marcus Buckingham, who has spent decades studying the most engaged teams and loyal customers for Harvard Business Review, reached a striking conclusion: when someone says they love what they’re doing, it isn’t hyperbole. His research shows it means they are actively flourishing, at ease, absorbed, productive, and energised. That state doesn’t happen by accident. It is the product of environments and leadership that make love (in the Frommian sense) possible.

Steve Farber, who has spent years translating this into leadership development frameworks, puts it simply: love generates a culture where people are more loyal, more innovative, and more likely to do their best work. And critically, you cannot fake it. People know.

David Whyte’s Contribution: The Quality of Your Conversations

The poet David Whyte, who has spent thirty years working at the frontier of where poetry meets organisational life, offers something that the business researchers can’t quite get to on their own. He says that the quality of your life is, ultimately, the quality of your conversations, including the conversation you have with yourself.

This lands differently when you understand love as a state of being rather than a sentiment. In a fear-based state, you have fear-based conversations: defended, performative, managed, strategic in the small sense of the word. You say what will protect you rather than what is true.

In a love-based state, a state of genuine care, of what Fromm would call active concern for the growth of what you’re engaged with, you have entirely different conversations. You tell the truth. You ask the question you’ve been avoiding. You challenge the person in front of you because you actually want them to grow, not because you want to be right.

Whyte calls this “courageous conversation.” And he’s clear: courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s what happens when you love something more than you fear the consequences of honesty.

That distinction alone is worth the price of entry.

What This Actually Looks Like on a Monday Morning

Here’s where the philosophy has to pay its rent.

Love as a state of being, practically speaking, means this:

You do your work from interest, not from anxiety. Anxiety narrows. It makes you conservative, reactive, and control-obsessed. Interest, genuine curiosity and care about the problem in front of you, opens. It generates the divergent thinking that neuroscience tells us is the signature of actual creativity. The question to ask yourself is: am I approaching this project because I fear what happens if I don’t, or because I’m genuinely interested in what might happen if I do?

You treat accountability as an act of care. One of the most common misunderstandings about love-based leadership is that it means soft. It doesn’t. Fromm was clear: love without discipline is sentimentality, not love. The companies that have successfully embedded love as an operating principle (Patagonia, Warby Parker, the Softway story) are not places without accountability. They’re places where accountability is held by people who genuinely care about each other’s growth. That’s entirely different from accountability as punishment.

You notice what you’re actually trying to protect. Most of the defensiveness in organisations (the turf wars, the information hoarding, the political manoeuvring) is fear wearing a strategic mask. When you’re operating from a genuine state of care for the work and for the people doing it, you ask a different question: what do we need to be true to actually do this well? Not: how do I stay safe?

You build belonging deliberately. Belonging, the experience of genuinely mattering, is not a soft benefit. It is the precondition for people bringing their actual intelligence to work rather than a managed version of it. When people know they matter, they bring their best ideas, their real concerns, and their creative risk-taking. When they don’t, they bring compliance.

You love your own work enough to do it with full attention. This is Fromm’s self-love point, and it’s the one most likely to make executives uncomfortable. He was direct about it: you cannot genuinely love others if you haven’t developed the capacity for self-love, not narcissism, but the genuine honouring of your own life and what it’s asking of you. A leader who has long since stopped caring about their own work cannot create the conditions for others to care about theirs.

The Harder Question

All of this raises something that the business literature tends to avoid.

If love as a state of being is this productive, this generative, this measurably good for the bottom line, why isn’t every organisation operating from it?

The answer is uncomfortable. Because love requires courage. It requires honesty. It requires being willing to be seen. It requires having actual conversations about what matters, what’s broken, and what needs to change, rather than the managed performance of those conversations.

And it requires that the people at the top of the organisation go first.

Fromm’s observation still holds: most people are more afraid of loving than of not being loved. They would rather remain in the familiar contracted state, defended, strategic and performing, than take the risk of full engagement.

But here’s what sixty-plus years of research since Fromm, and the accumulated wisdom of the practitioners, the neuroscience, and the business case studies all point to:

The contracted state isn’t safe. It just feels familiar.

The companies that will matter in the next decade are the ones where people are actually in their work, curious, connected, accountable, and alive. That state has a name. We’ve just been too embarrassed to use it in a boardroom.

Love is not the opposite of professionalism. It is the precondition for the kind of professionalism that actually gets something done that matters.

After more than half a century on this beautiful earth, I have seen a fair bit of Love come and go. One of the greatest lessons of my life involves the infinite relationship between love and grief… but, as they say in the classics, that is another story.

I have included a poem from my upcoming canyon and dust publication that highlights a few of the lessons I have learnt about love along the way.

Dust Roads and the Beloved

You want to know about love?

Then you must learn the language of dust,

how it rises from the road with each step taken,

how it settles in the folds of your clothes,

in the creases of your palms,

in the lines around your eyes from squinting into distance.

The desert knows what the mountains know:

that joy begins the journey

but cannot promise its ending.

The trail winds down into valleys

where you lose sight of yourself,

where the question isn’t

will love stay or flee, but

whether you can bear not knowing.

Look, there is fruit on the branch,

summer-swollen with promise.

But the tasting requires the tearing,

the revealing of hidden flesh,

the juice running down your chin

like a confession.

Some nights, the stars conspire to make you believe

heaven has descended.

You hold your beloved close,

breathe her in like prayer,

mistake this moment

for the whole story.

But the ocean calls

from beyond the ridge.

You can hear it some mornings when the wind shifts

that azure invitation,

that ancient pull.

And the only way there is the dust road down.

This is what the path teaches;

that love leaves its mark,

that scars are evidence of having dared the distance,

that freedom comes

not from avoiding the dusty road

but from walking it with open hands,

with dust in your mouth,

with love as your companion

and uncertainty as your north star on a cloudy night.

If you found this worth your time, share it with someone who's still running their organisation on fear and calling it rigour. ¡Gracias, Gracias, Gracias!

Late May, about an hour from sunset. I've walked this path before, just the once, I think. It was coming on dark then, midwinter, the fells under snow. Was it thirty years ago? I wonder, can I be the same person? Biologically I suppose not, every cell in my body having been replaced over and over since then, so the only continuity is that of memory, but memory is selective. Like the imagination, it's also hard to say what a memory is. Is it a mere arrangement of atoms in the gloop of a brain? I find it hard to think of things that way, that memory is like a computer hard drive, and imagination a mere program running in a processor. It's something more mysterious to me, also intricately bound up with my own sense of being.

The sun is going down over my shoulder now. The rise of fells, across the valley is in deep shadow, while the riverside meadows are still bathed in a rich light. Also, the occasional lone tree. It's a pleasant evening, sense of something cooler and more tranquil descending after a hot day. I've been lugging the camera all week, lugging it all year, but the shots have been few and most of those blurred or spoiled in some other way, like I'm losing the eye, losing control of the machinery. I'm not expecting much then, but suddenly, I come upon this tree. It's an oak, I think, but I don't want to fuss too much over labels. It's alone, alive and beautiful, lit up against the dark of the fell. I lift the camera, shoot a few compositions, bracket for exposure...

There are times when the world is too much with us, and it feels like we can't shake it off. It brings a weight to bear, closes up all the little fissures through which we might still escape into the imaginal. Indeed, it's a measure of how far we've gone that we begin thinking of it as an escape, when for some of us at least, life is incomplete without that easy switch from pragmatism to the more poetic ways of thinking and seeing and being. To live always pragmatically is to live as in a prison, it is to live blind and without meaning.

Meaning is not a thing, nor is it an emotion. It is not happiness. It lies deeper, rises from the subliminal. It is a connection most felt at the intersections of the manifest and the non-manifest worlds. I rarely find it in the built environment, more often in moments like this, moments of rare light in beautiful, less peopled places. Sure I've taken a hundred shots this week, and none of them any good. But even as I take these shots now, I know they'll be the only ones to make the cut. Then I lower the camera and just look.

I'm sure, buried somewhere deep inside of us, there's an awareness of pure being. It's always there, but more often obscured by our awareness of other things, more busy goings-on: sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions – and that's without going to the darker side of anxieties, fears. Sometimes it'll come upon you spontaneously, at unexpected moments like this, as we slip through a fissure in space and time. The moment arrests us with its beauty. Then it's just a sideways step into the imaginal, into the sense once more of one's own interiority. The world retreats, the heavens hold their breath and a sense of the magical returns. It is a moment when all things are possible.

As if on cue, a lone woman moves out of the shadows, takes my arm and stands a while in quiet company. We do not speak, but her presence fills me with a deep sense of longing for a home I have never known. It is a remembering of something the soul somehow knows but cannot consciously recall, not a home left behind, but more an imaginal place glimpsed but briefly in these moments of enchantment.

Hiraeth, the Welsh would call it, that mysterious longing for a place and a time, and a home we've never known. Interesting how there's no equivalent in the English language, a tongue shaped more by action, utility, commerce and empiricism, than to contemplation. We English still feel it, but we have to borrow the words from other cultures to describe it. Or we write stories and essays and epic poems to capture what other cultures pick up at a glance and understand intuitively.

Last limb of the sun now over the shoulder of the fell, a deep quiet over the vale – just the river gently running, and I am the last man, stolen away to the land of the faery. The world that was too much with me is a memory fading. And the realisation comes with it that memory is perhaps not the root of being we think it is, that indeed, we can forget everything, as I do in this moment, yet in this moment become more ourselves than we have ever been.

I turn, walk slowly back towards the village, keeping step, hip to hip with my familiar companion, my eternal twin. And together, with every breath we feel the aliveness of the body, and the earth beneath our feet. We glance back, briefly to the tree, distant now, catching the last of the light – feel it too, sense it in the motion of every leaf, stirring in an imperceptible movement of air.

Then a sound. A young family out with their dogs, children's voices, a lusty bark and a rush as the dogs take to the water. My companion melts away and I return once more to the village, alone, as the world closes in. Except, not quite. There is something about such moments that sustains us long after they have passed. And it's not the memory, nor less the photograph. It's more in the readjustment, a shuffling of the priorities of one's awareness, so that sense of pure being sits a little closer to the top than it did before.

These matters have been in my mind and heart for years. I have meditated on them, but not in a structured or methodical way, it simply repeatedly arose within as echoes of living with the sacred land, generating a continuous need for deeper understanding.

Be aware that the names of the four cardinal directions in this text exclusively refer to the four points of the sun symbol.

The Sun

The saami sun symbol is in the center of many of the old drums. Symbols are rich in meaning, much is lost when we limit them to one or two interpretations. Interpretation is in it self a step away from the original Seeing, but at the same time often necessary.

The four directions marked from the central sun are basically cyclical pointers. East: spring/morning/childhood; South: summer/day/adulthood; West: autumn/evening/elderhood; North: winter/night/death or better: the space between death and new life. The horisontal and the vertical lines are two axis of polarity. These polarities reflect basic forces, also inside human life

The beauty of symbols is that they are not factual. Even these basic, seemingly logic pointers to the directions are completely reversed when you are in the southern hemisphere. South of the ekvatorial line one will have to view this in it`s opposite; the North being Day and South Night, the sun rising in the West (morning) and so on. This can of course make everything totally confusing, and so we're gonna leave things there and return to our original premises. It just had to be mentioned to underscore the fact that though symbols are the way to envision and realize the great truths, they can never be facts in a rational or scientifically accepted way. Making the symbolic into facts are actually the foundation for dogmatism and fanatic belief systems.

The two axis of the Sun

The background for this text is this: I already had a wellrounded and functional understanding of the North/South axis in the solar symbol (more about that a little later). Then, after a couple of years of trying to figure out the horisontal line, I suddenly saw that this East/West axis can be understood as the two minds: Rationality/Thought and Mythology/Image. The Conscious and the Unconscious.

Many people into New Age-spirituality want to "see images" and receive channeled knowledge. This means they are predominantly in the West. About the more extreme of these, my teacher would say "They have fallen in love with the unconscious". They might even have aversion to rational, skeptical thought. Then there are those who ONLY relate to intellect and thought and are not in touch with the older pictorial mind. This is another kind of limitation.

As I have already mentioned are symbols/images/mythology not "facts". It is not actual truth like "2 + 2 = 4". Misunderstanding this can create dogma and religious fanaticism. If you believe the world was created in 7 days or that the mother of Christ actually was a virgin, you obviously have a gap in understanding between the symbolic mind and the rational intellect.

But we cannot understand or truly grasp the whole, the connection of all things, through the analytical mind. It happens through images, symbols and mythology. It is a intuitive "felt thought" or "thinking-feeling". Therefore, rationality/intellect is linked to the direction East. It is young. Necessary, but limited.

In the West is the old mind; pictorial, mythological. But in reality both sides of the polarity need each other to have optimal function. This is the return to the center, to the heart of the Sun.

West can be said to denote Faith, and East Skepticism, and the integration of these are Knowledge. The shaman must know the Center. In the center is where the real understanding of the periphery is found.

The East also represents, at worst, dry intellectuals and the paradigm of modern society that does not see or accept the hidden "inner" side of existence.

There are some which are so heavily invested in "belief" that it seems they have an aversion to rational thought. This brings to mind the old norwegian philosopher Arne Næss who asked "Does it hurt to think?"

The vertical duality

North is Night, Winter, Sky, Death/Infinity and thus a mental or spiritual energy. South is Day, Summer, Earth, Life/Sex and more bodily.

Too much North is lifelessness, theory but no action, and even escape from life into monkhood. Too much South can be material, superficial, to do/act without insight.

All the extremes represent possibilities, values ​​and phases, but the shaman is the one who can consciously and deliberately put himself in the center and act, understand and see from there.

He/she will have some strengths and weaknesses on one or sometimes both axes. Mental/spiritual (North), physical/material (South), rational/analytical (East) or symbolic/figurative (West). This reflects the personality and is a map for selfreflection and growth.

The sacred natural self

According to scholars, the norwegian christian missionary Thomas von Westen (1682 – 1727) famous for his dedication to destroy the traditional saami shamanism, once had a conversation with a noaidi (saami shaman) about the devil. The shamans reply was: "We know him, but we've never heard anything unfavourable about him".

There are some uncertainties to this story. Presumeably they spoke in saami, which Von Westen knew. And so "the devil" could have been described picturally or maybe understood to be one of the traditional saami gods. Exactly who we cannot know for sure.

Gurdjieff, respected for his contributions and known for his love of "wine and women", wrote a book called "Beelzebubs tales to his grandson". In my native northern Norway, we speak of "Old Eric", a personal and everyday way of refering to the devil.

What I'm pointing to is an inner level of integration. Earth and Sky. Body and Spirit.

Our general appreciation of the sacred today is through heavenly archetypes and its human representatives. The great saints, ascetics. But an honest perspective is that such folks are a minority. Most of us are content to be natural, both earth and sky. The "ruler", the archetype of "the god below", is much like gods of the ancient worlds. Life is sacred, and there is no life without fertility, the body, sex. Humans can make good or bad use of all things, and so it is our understanding and maturity more than the specific question concerned that matters.

Integration

The "dark god", the forest god & the sky god, the higher self diety should integrate, work together, unify. This is a symbolic or mythic representation of selfrealization. And it is the optimal balance of the North and the South. Mountains and clouds mutually attracting each other. To make the subtle more solid and the solid more subtle, wedding the coarse and the delicate, the finite and the infinite.

Without this we swim around in a strange soup of "sin" and "salvation", where those most rigidly fearing the natural self, the body, and "sin" often are the ones who do actual harm.

In a more provocative way one could say it like this: Christ is good, but don`t forget the devil! Focusing solely on one of these, makes it's polar opposite stronger, but in a shadowy way. It is an unhealthy path. Bring the two of them together like the archetypical twins of mythology.

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Take a look at the ABOUT page for more information on this series.

Go to the REFERENCE GUIDE for detailed info on the greater world at large.

The TABLE OF CONTENTS page (for now) only links to the Substack version of these uploads. I guess I could add additional links that link to these posts, here on Tuhat, but we'll see. I do prefer how things look over here. It's a lot more stripped down, and the font here is close enough to Century Schoolbook Regular, which is my font of choice.

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PREVIOUS SCENE (First present day segment of Chapter 1)

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The morning dew was fresh on the grass. There were signs that rain drenched this land a short time ago. This was a particularly nasty day.

The high school parking lot was full. The students lounged around the area. A parade of self-driving vehicles dropped them off and then sped out onto the roads in search for their next passengers.

The school was fairly modest. There were a couple of buildings here and there, a small courtyard, and an American football field in the far back of the place. A larger building was at the front. It appeared to be a church, or perhaps it was a church at one point. Now, it just seemed that it was another place left to decay.

Graffiti was on every inch of the walls of this place. Dirt covered the windows that weren’t broken. Other signs of decay were around. That was an all too normal sight in these places.

On the far edge of the parking lot, away from the masses, stood Michelle. Her hair was usually long and straight. Today, it was all over the place. It did not care for this humidly. She wore faded jeans and a plain white t-shirt, which made her look unassuming.

She rested against her flashy red car.

Unlike her outfit, this car stood out far too much.

She stared silently at the crowd with her piercing eyes. Every so often, her hand would reach for her jeans pocket, but she would immediately recede the hand before it would enter the pocket. Michelle would then shame herself for falling into whatever temptation was calling her.

Breaking out of her pose, she turned and leaned down to the partially open car window behind her.

“Okay. Seriously! You sure this is the right school? Wouldn’t be caught dead in this hellhole!” she exclaimed to the people inside.

“He goes to this school,” a voice responded from inside the car.

Michelle grumbled in dissatisfaction as she turned back. She tapped her foot on the pavement impatiently.

Getting into this school was going to be a pain. Police were in there, doing body scans and ID checks on every student walking in. She knew they would snatch her up in two seconds the moment they saw her.

She needed to be careful, but that was a given.

Noticing a large group of teens heading her way, she decided to duck back into her car.

Looking into the rearview mirror, she viewed the group passing by. One took note of her flashy red car.

“Goddamn! Dude! Whoever rents out that car must be swimmin’ in cash ‘n shit!”

“What model is that?”

“Hey! Y'all fuckin’ stupid? Might have connections to head government cucks! Don’t be messin’ with that bullshit! We gonna get our heads chopped off, and I ain’t playin’ that!”

Michelle laid low in her seat.

Being in a crowded place wasn’t good for her kind of trickery. Especially in this car.

Brilliant move I had coming here, driving this stupid thing around, she thought to herself.

Much to her relief, the school bell rang. As she looked back, Michelle saw the group trotting away to the school entrance.

She breathed a sigh of relief as she turned on the radio and leaned back into her seat.

“...and on news of the economy, all politicians continue to seek retribution against those who abandoned our great U.N. nations for the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean Colonies, along with other illegal nation-states not sanctioned by U.N. global law. These former citizens evaded their financial obligations, and all the blame rests on their shoulders, according to President-”

“No. Not listening to that dribble,” Michelle uttered under her breath as she punched the dial on the radio.

“-as we all know, Taviset Disease is the leading cause of all deaths worldwide, as it is extremely contagious. We understand the continuing challenges we must face, confronting this grave threat. This disease remains prevalent in low population areas, where the doctors from the World Health Organization have had the least control over outbreaks. Our carefully managed sanctuary cities have proven to be the best line of defense. If you have feelings of abdominal pain, are coughing up blood or are having other symptoms relating to Taviset Disease, please-”

Michelle flipped off the radio and sighed again.

She was tapping her fingernails impatiently on the wheel while resisting the habit of grinding her teeth.

She spun herself back to the two people sitting behind her.

“You two keeping an eye out for him?”

They stared blankly at her. One was a girl. She had dark brown hair with thin-frame glasses. The other was a boy. He also had dark brown hair. The two had these piercing green eyes. Those eyes almost seemed as if they were glowing. Their stares were unpleasant in such a blank and soulless way.

“I had just witnessed the car rented out to the older brother drive itself out of the parking lot,” the boy mildly proclaimed.

“Jesus Christ! You gonna keep that to yourself?”

“No, Miss Auzolle. Your instructions were to look for the younger one.”

“What? I thought he was the younger one!”

Michelle jumped out of the car and took off running.

“This is not gonna to go my way today, swear to god!” she rasped to herself as she took off running to the front of the school.

She ran as fast as she could up to the front entrance, nearly missing a passing car as she raced herself. She stopped short of the concrete steps that lead to the wide open doors of the school and paused herself abruptly.

She was on the lookout. So far, there was no sign of him.

Just her luck. It was hard enough to find him where he lived. When it came to attempting a proper introduction, it would prove harder, simply tracking him down on foot without causing public alarm.

Michelle continued gasping for breath. She attempted to calm herself.

“Damn! I missed him.”

She began to head back to the car.

“Oh!”

She was knocked over. An array of papers flew over her head. She found herself falling backwards onto the cold, wet pavement.

“Ah! Fuckin’ hell!” she growled in anger as she jumped up from the pavement.

She was just about to split until she saw the person who ran her over.

It was him! It was Christopher Blithe-Havins.

Just seconds ago, Chris was in his usual dreary daze, his mind on getting through the day. He was getting to his first class without any sense of the people around him. Now his book and papers were scattered all over the place.

To make things worse, he had this girl, facing him. She looked angry.

But to Chris’ surprise, the girl he knocked over changed her expression in an instant! She broke into a smile!

“Running late this morning?” she asked him.

“Uh-I-I’m sorry-I-I guess...”

The feeling of embarrassment was overwhelming. He furiously grabbed up all his papers and books that fell out of his book bag. He was desperate. Chris wanted to get as far away from this scene as possible. The chances of anyone at this school giving Chris a break was dimmer than dim!

Once again, to Chris’ surprise, the girl broke out into laughter.

“It was never my intention to stand out here like a stump in the forest and snap at you! I am so incredibly sorry!”

Chris was stunned. He didn’t understand. It was his fault.

“It’s- it’s alright,” Chris managed to push past his lips as he continued to gather his materials. His eyes were focused on the ground. He couldn’t let her see his face.

He realized he didn’t have his biology book. Chris jumped up and rapidly skimmed around in panic.

“Searching for this?”

The girl revealed Chris’ biology book. She wore a huge grin on her face.

“You dropped it right here.”

“Um… Thank you.”

Chris timidly took his book. Before she could say anything else, Chris bolted and ran into the school without another word uttered.

A few seconds after he left, the school bell rang, on the stroke of seven-fifteen. Michelle looked back and broke out into laughter. She shook her head to herself.

“Able to meet after all. There! Hard part’s over with,” she sighed with relief as she headed for the car.

*

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NEXT SCENE (Coming soon)

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A warm beam of light spilled from it and illuminated the white floor. Heat instantly passed through his body. He froze, staring at the beam. He had never seen white materials change their appearance so drastically under lighting. This was not cold standard light, not sterile 4500K. This was soft, warm light.

What was waiting for him behind those hidden doors?

A chill ran across his neck and into his hair. A strange feeling was growing inside him, as if from this moment on his life would never be the same again. He took a deep breath. — Well… let’s see where this takes me, — he said quietly and opened the door.

His eyes were not ready for what he saw. The light almost blinded him, and his balance wavered again. At first, he could not even understand what he was looking at, but what unfolded before him turned his worldview upside down. Everything he had lived by, everything he believed in, everything he had worked with — lost its meaning in an instant. Before him stood another truth.

A thin floor lamp on a metal stand, similar to the one he had at home. But the light it emitted was completely different — not emotionless and sterile 4500K, but soft, cozy, and warm. A light that seemed to embrace the space.

Next to it stood an armchair. Almost the same as at his home: metal legs, leather… But the leather was not white. It was brown — a deep, rich shade. His gaze literally sank into this color. He could not look away. Nor did he want to. He wanted to keep looking, to absorb the entire interior with his eyes.

Carefully, he sat down in the chair, closed his eyes, slowly exhaled, and trembling slightly, opened them again.

At first, he saw the floor.

Wood. Light beige, with a living texture, natural color transitions, and visible grain patterns. He studied it with the same focus as a child looking at a long-awaited toy, trying to absorb every detail and memorize it.

He slowly raised his gaze.

This hidden apartment was like a reflection of the previous one. The same layout, the same zones, the same proportions. But a completely different soul.

If the previous kitchen had been standard white, this one was metallic. However, the warm light from the wall lamp transformed it entirely. The metal played with unusual tones, becoming alive. The wall behind the kitchen was finished with wooden panels, which emphasized the contrast of materials, turning the metal from a cold surface into a warm accent of the space.

Around a round metal table with a glass top stood four chairs on thin metal legs. Their leather had the same caramel shade as the armchair he was sitting in. Above the table hung a lamp, matched in tone to the chairs and the armchair. It cast a warm glow, softly illuminating the metal and glass and changing the very perception of the materials.

The living room contained a large, elegant sofa on thin metal legs, upholstered in leather of the same warm shade. A beige rug lay on the floor, while the lamps emitted a soft, cozy light. The wall adjoining the white apartment was also finished with panels, but not smooth ones — wooden, with a living texture.

On the coffee table there was a built-in bio-fireplace. A forbidden object by the Ministry. Such things created a different kind of light — warm, intimate, dangerous. The flame reflected across the sofa’s texture and slid over the wooden panels. The light moved, almost breathing, filling the space with a sense of calm and comfort.

He wanted to examine every detail, to touch every texture. How could color change a room so dramatically? How could warmth have such a strong impact on human perception? He sat motionless, and for the first time in many years, he did not know what he was supposed to do.

The protagonist stood up and slowly walked toward the living room. The warm wooden parquet seemed to guide him forward, inviting him to move deeper inside. He paused for a moment, looked down, and unexpectedly took off his shoes. Bare feet touched the wood. Warmth. Living, soft, natural warmth beneath his feet. Not artificial cold flooring, not regulated surfaces — real wood.

He froze.

Feeling the floor physically was incredible. Its texture. The barely noticeable unevenness. The natural grain patterns. Until this moment, he had known only cold. Or rather, emptiness. The emptiness of synthetic surfaces. The emptiness of sterile materials.

The sleeping area was equally cozy, despite the metallic wardrobe fronts and metal platform bed. The wooden floor continued to warm the space simply by its presence. Warm tones, warm light. The bed was not perfectly made. The bedding was slightly wrinkled, but that imperfection made it feel alive. Even the air felt different — cleaner, calmer.

“Well then… there’s one more part left. The bathroom.”

He entered carefully and froze. The walls were also finished with wood, while the floor was covered with large-format stone-look porcelain tiles — a soft beige-sand texture with darker specks, deep and natural. Warm light filled the entire room. The bathroom was almost an exact copy of the one in the white apartment. The same layout. The same fixtures. The same metal furniture structure. But the warm lighting and natural materials transformed it completely. The sink and toilet were not white, but terracotta-colored. The warm light seemed to dissolve edges and soften every form. The bathroom felt incredibly warm — he did not want to leave it.

He slowly approached the wall and ran his fingers across its surface. Texture. A barely perceptible relief. Naturalness. He touched the metal countertop, and even the metal here felt warmer, as if the light itself was heating it. Everything was unusual. Functionally, it was the same: sink, shower cabin, plumbing… but far more pleasant, more human, and even more practical. Warm textured materials did not emphasize every drop of water. They did not turn every shadow into a flaw. They cooperated with the space instead of subordinating it.

He raised his head and looked at his reflection in the mirror. And suddenly realized: all his life he had not been correcting imperfections. He had been correcting warmth. Making everything emotionless, cold, dead. The thought made him uneasy.

Who lived here? Who created this place? How was all of this even possible? And most importantly — why?

To the last question, the protagonist already seemed to know the answer. But as for the others — his thoughts tangled and circled endlessly, refusing to settle. He wanted answers, but where was he supposed to look for them? He needed to go through everything again, more carefully.

He returned to the living room and approached the armchair where he had sat before. On the table beside it stood a framed photograph. Three people: a man around fifty, a woman about forty-five, and a young man in his early twenties. He studied the young man’s face closely. There was something familiar about him, but he could not recall what it was. Still, it was unlikely he knew him at all — his social circle had always been narrow, mostly people his own age or older.

Next to the frame lay a leather-bound notebook. He picked it up and immediately felt its texture — soft, slightly rough, warm. Even its color seemed to warm his palms. Standing barefoot on the wooden floor while holding a leather notebook felt strange, yet strangely natural.

He opened it. Inside were photographs of furniture, lamps, and interior objects. Page after page, it became more and more absorbing. Most of it he had never seen before. Different shades of brown, beige, terracotta — he had never realized brown could contain so many variations. Then came sketches, drawings, ideas. Some of the furniture he recognized — it was already here in this apartment. This was not just an interior. It was a concept — deliberate, cohesive, carefully developed over a long time.

He slowly closed the notebook. The room remained calm, with only the soft sound of the bio-fireplace breaking the silence.

What was he supposed to do with all of this?

The answer, in principle, was simple. According to protocol, everything was clear: unauthorized materials, forbidden lighting, a bio-fireplace. Full correction. The shredder would eliminate the “improper elements,” and the 3D printer would reconstruct the correct version of the space — cold, sterile, flawless. And this apartment would become just like thousands of others.

He imagined the warm floor lamp disappearing. The wooden textures turning to dust. The brown leather replaced with white. And something inside him tightened.

He had never hesitated before. Work was work. The system was the system. He was a professional.

But now…

He did not want to touch his devices. He did not even want to initiate the process. He looked down at his bare feet on the wooden floor. Could he really destroy this after feeling warmth for the first time?

Another thought crossed his mind. What if this was a test? What if they were watching him, waiting to see what he would do? Waiting to see whether he would prove his loyalty?

His heart began to beat faster again. He knew: if he submitted a full correction report — everything would end correctly. For the system.

And what if not… He didn’t know what this “not” even meant, because no one had ever been given that choice. He slowly stepped toward the window, warm light sliding across his face. Did the Curator know about this hidden apartment when he sent him to the object? Of course he did — otherwise, why send him here at all? The visible part of the apartment was perfect, fully compliant, with no deviations whatsoever, but after a resident leaves, correction is always performed — standard procedure, no exceptions. Maybe the Curator did not know about the mirrored section, but then another question arose: the next occupant could discover the hidden door, report it to the Ministry, submit a request, and then questions would come — questions about him.

He swallowed hard. He could say he had not noticed the panel, that the mechanism was too well hidden, that it was a technical defect of the builder. But what if this was a test, and this was exactly why he had been sent here — to see whether he would find it?

A heavy sigh escaped the interior corrector. He already knew what to do. His job was to correct the object, write the report, and submit it — that was all. Everything that did not meet standards, everything not approved by the system, was dangerous. He would send the report, describe the hidden room, document the violation, take photos, and then let others deal with it; it was no longer his responsibility.

The man slowly turned away from the window, warm light lingering on his face for a moment longer. He bent down and put on his perfectly clean white shoes; the warmth of the floor disappeared. He left the hidden part of the apartment and walked toward his devices near the entrance, then stopped.

“I can still do one thing,” he said quietly. And left the apartment.

*The kind of work that changes a person without their permission*

The first part of this short series described the moment when spiritual aspiration turns into spiritual exhaustion — the hungry ghost realm, where the practitioner discovers that the very wanting that started the practice has become the obstacle. The traditional ladder offers a leap upward at this point, into a kind of recognition that may or may not be available. There is another option. The other option is to drop downward, to a humbler form of practice that does not run on aspiration at all. The tradition calls this, with no insult intended, the practice of the animal.

## What animal practice means

The word "animal" here is not derogatory. In the old map of the six realms of existence, the animal realm is one of six modes of conduct that any human being moves through during a single day. The hungry ghost is reaching, never satisfied. The hell beings are caught in rage or terror. The gods are intoxicated with pleasure that they know will end. The titans are competing. The humans are observing themselves observing themselves, which is its own kind of trouble. And the animal — the animal is doing the next thing without commentary.

An animal does not maintain a self-improvement project. A dog does not lie awake at night wondering whether today's walk was vigorous enough to count as growth. A cow does not assess whether this afternoon's grazing exceeded yesterday's. A bird does not measure the quality of its singing against an internal standard of ideal birdsong. The animal does, and forgets, and does again. This forgetting is not stupidity. It is a structural feature of how the animal lives. There is no inner committee evaluating performance. There is just the body in the field, the breath in the chest, the next bite, the next step.

For a practitioner who has just collapsed under the weight of infinite aspiration, this is a relief that is hard to describe to anyone who has not felt it. The animal mode of practice means sitting down on the cushion not because doing so will earn merit, not because it advances a project, not because it brings you closer to a goal, but because the body is on the cushion and the practice is what bodies on cushions do. No engine is required. No story is required. The story was the problem.

## The example: one hundred thousand mantras

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition has a foundational practice called Vajrasattva, which is a useful concrete example of what animal practice looks like in form. The practitioner visualizes a luminous figure above the crown of the head, recites a hundred-syllable mantra, and imagines a flow of clear nectar entering the body from above and dark residue draining out from below. The visualization is detailed. The mantra is long. The practice is repeated one hundred thousand times.

A modern reader usually asks what the practitioner is supposed to feel, or understand, or attain over the course of those hundred thousand repetitions. The honest answer disappoints almost everyone. The practitioner is not supposed to attain anything. The practitioner is supposed to repeat the practice. What happens is what water does to stone. Water does not understand erosion. Stone is eroded. One hundred thousand is not a mystical number. It is a rough estimate of how many passes are required before the shape of a person actually begins to change.

The point is the principle the practice illustrates. Real change in the conduct of a human being is not produced by insight, decision, or aspiration. It is produced by repetition at a scale that the thinking mind finds boring and the body finds possible. The thinking mind gives up around repetition twenty. It has, by then, understood the procedure and concluded there is nothing more to learn. It is correct that there is nothing more to learn, and wrong about what the practice is for. The practice is not for learning. The practice is for being reshaped.

## Why this works when aspiration does not

The reason aspiration eventually exhausts itself is that it requires the practitioner to maintain a self that aspires. Maintaining that self is itself work, and the work compounds: each session of practice has to be remembered, evaluated, compared against previous sessions, and added to a running total. The accountant in the head never sleeps. Even during a meditation that begins beautifully, some quiet part of the mind is monitoring: am I doing this right, is this the kind of session I will be glad to remember, am I making the progress I expect of myself. The monitoring is the hungry ghost making its rounds.

Animal practice cuts the accountant out of the loop. There is nothing to evaluate, because there is no project for the evaluation to inform. The practitioner is not trying to become a better practitioner. The practitioner is not trying to accumulate sessions. The practitioner is doing today's session because today's session is what is happening. Tomorrow's session, when it comes, will be tomorrow's. The session that just finished is already gone. The animal forgets, on purpose, by structure.

What this produces, over time, is a kind of change that the practitioner does not notice and cannot describe. The hungry ghost would have been keenly aware of every increment of improvement, because the awareness of improvement is the reward the hungry ghost was chasing. The animal does not chase reward. So the animal practitioner often cannot answer the question "how is your practice going?" with anything more specific than "I am still doing it." And yet, the people around the animal practitioner begin to notice things. The practitioner is steadier in difficult conversations. The reactivity that used to flare in certain situations has softened. The compassion that operates through this person at the dinner table is wider, less anxious, less needing to be acknowledged. The practitioner has changed without being able to report the change.

## The quiet trade

There is a trade involved in dropping from aspiration to animal practice, and the trade is worth naming. What the practitioner gives up is the satisfaction of measuring progress, of being able to say "I have come this far," of feeling that today was a good day on the path. What the practitioner gets in return is a practice that does not exhaust itself, does not require a self-image to sustain, and reliably reshapes the conduct of a life over years. It is a slower, less photogenic transformation than the aspiration promised. It is also the one that actually happens. The third part of this series describes what the reshaping looks like from the inside — including the part that everyone finds discouraging at first, which is that the practitioner keeps slipping back. The slipping back is not a failure of the practice. It is, as the next part will explain, a feature of how surfaces change.

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*Continued in Part 3: "Why You Slip Back, and Why That's Fine."*

*Part 2 of 3 · From "The Animal Who Practices" · Any Note Press · 2026*

*Entitlement, and a Model for Reading Twenty-First-Century Americanism*

Any Note Press · Tacoma

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Few words have drifted as far from their meaning as *entitlement*. In law it is among the most dignified of terms: an entitlement is something one is owed by right, often because one has paid for it. Social Security and Medicare are called entitlement programs precisely because they are earned—a worker contributes across a lifetime and is owed the benefit in return. To be entitled, in this original sense, is to stand inside a web of obligation honored. You gave, and you are owed, and the giving and the owing bind a society across time. Even this sense is not neutral ground: what the law recognizes as an entitlement is itself historically contingent and politically contested—Social Security was a radical novelty within living memory and is perennially threatened with retrenchment. The dignified sense is not pure. It merely remembers the structure of obligation that the popular sense has learned to forget.

Yet in common American speech the word has become an accusation, and the accusation points downward. "A sense of entitlement" is leveled at the young, the poor, the dependent—at whoever is imagined to want something they have not earned. The welfare recipient, the student asking for relief, the worker asking for more: these are the figures the word now summons. The dignified legal sense and the contemptuous popular sense have come to mean nearly opposite things, and the distance between them is not an accident of language. It is where an entire political imagination hides.

Consider what the popular usage actually does. It attaches the word for being owed to the people in the position of owing—the dependent, the receiving, the beholden. The recipient of provision is, structurally, the least independent person in the room: the situation is defined by need, by reception, by obligation to a giver. To call that person "entitled" is to take the vocabulary of subordination and pin it on the subordinate while naming it arrogance. It is a remarkable sleight. The one who owes everything is called entitled; meanwhile the genuinely independent posture—the one that owes nothing to anyone—is given a flattering name. We call it earned. We call it self-made.

<div align="center">⁂</div>

If the popular usage is the inversion as a habit of speech, here is the posture that habit conceals. There is a real condition the word entitlement could honestly describe: the stance of owing nothing to any past. Call it insubordination to inheritance—a refusal to acknowledge that one's position rests on prior givens. It is the posture of the self that regards itself as its own origin—that holds its position, its wealth, its advantage as the product of its own merit, answerable to no prior condition, beholden to no ancestor, no commons, no luck. This posture is real, and it concentrates not at the bottom of American life but at the top. The inherited fortune recoded as the fruit of genius; the security, education, infrastructure, and stability received and then forgotten; the law treated as an obstacle to personal will rather than a trust to be kept; the disruptor whose very business model is the avoidance of rules that ordinary people are still made to keep—these are its marks. That is entitlement in the strongest possible sense, and it is precisely the thing the word has been arranged never to name.

The keystone of the arrangement is the myth of the earned. "Earned" presupposes a self-originating producer who owes nothing to the conditions of production—and there is no such person. Everyone's body was given by a lineage they did not author. Everyone's language, capacities, and habits were transmitted by a culture they did not build. Everyone's opportunities were shaped by infrastructure, security, law, and accident received from before. Strip away the inheritance and there is no one left to have earned anything. The founder who insists she built her company alone ships her goods on interstate highways she did not lay, hires employees taught to read in public schools she did not fund, raises capital under the protection of courts and the deposit insurance bequeathed by the New Deal, and trades in the relative safety of a country whose roads, vaccines, and rule of law were standing before she was born. "Earned," used as a moral trump card, is simply the polite name for forgetting how much was received. Which means unearned—the word swung like a club at the poor—actually describes the condition of everything and everyone. No one earned the world they were born into. The charge that the dependent enjoy something unearned is true of them only in the trivial sense in which it is true of us all.

<div align="center">⁂</div>

Seen from another angle, this is less about class than about two rival stances toward inheritance. This suggests a model for reading twenty-first-century Americanism, and the model is more useful than the usual map of left against right. The deeper contest in American life is between two relations to the past. One relation is subordinate: it holds that we are continuations, that we received what we have, that we owe an accounting backward to what came before and forward to what comes after. This is the disposition behind the rule of law, behind institutions, behind the keeping of trusts—the recognition that the Constitution is an inherited document, that the land was here before us, that a society is a debt running through the present from the dead to the unborn. The other relation is insubordinate: it holds that the self is the origin, that what one has one holds by desert, that the past has no claim and the future no call, that rules and norms and inherited obligations are merely obstacles to the sovereign will of the present. This second relation, scaled into a method, is the engine of much that presents itself as disruption—the contempt for permission, the avoidance of review, the override of inherited constraint by private agenda.

The concrete cases are the clearest teachers, and the present decade is full of them. Consider the rush to build hyperscale data centers for artificial intelligence. They draw enormous power and water—a single large facility can consume about as much water as several thousand households—and across the American West they are rising even as the seven states that share the Colorado River are forced into emergency negotiations over how to divide a shrinking flow that some forty million people depend upon. That allocation is an inherited apparatus: a century of compacts, adjudicated rights, and hard bargains among states and tribes. Yet in many places the buildout proceeds ahead of any settled rule for its water at all. To consume the inheritance before the heirs have finished deciding how to share it is insubordination to the past in its plainest form. And where a development is pushed through without environmental review—trees removed, elevations recut, the ground restructured—and the floods then arrive downstream, the lesson is the same. An impact statement is nothing but an act of subordination to the past and the future, an accounting owed to a place that was here before and will be here after. To skip it is to declare the land a possession owed nothing, and the flood is the inheritance answering back. The water goes where the altered ground sends it. Nothing is added to a watershed without a reckoning, and nothing taken from it without one either.

The same posture appears wherever an inherited constraint is treated as an obstacle to present will. A constitution is an inheritance—a set of limits the living agree to honor because they did not invent the order they were born into and will not be its last tenants. When an administration treats a court's order as a suggestion, when federal judges find themselves cataloguing dozens of violations of their rulings in a single month, when contempt proceedings are weighed against officials and the executive answers by suing the very judges who ruled against it, the structure is identical to the bulldozer in the watershed: a present appetite overriding a received limit it holds itself to owe nothing. The reversal of long-settled rights belongs to the same family—the rollback of protections for the vote, the undoing of a recognized bodily autonomy—each a case of treating what was handed down as merely available for present override. There is a sharper irony still when the body charged with continuity becomes the agent of rupture. A Supreme Court's authority rests on stare decisis—the discipline of standing by what was already decided—and a Court that was once respectful of its own precedent has grown willing to treat that precedent as provisional, to be discarded when a present majority prefers otherwise. The appointed keeper of the inheritance turns insubordinate to it; the legacy it exists to conserve is the legacy it dismantles. These are less failures of policy than expressions of a single stance: that the past has no standing, and that the self, or the office, is its own origin.

<div align="center">⁂</div>

If the posture is the engine, the inverted word is the camouflage that keeps it running unremarked. By fixing the image of "entitlement" onto the dependent, the culture renders the genuinely entitled invisible to itself. The one who owes everything is scolded for arrogance; the one who claims to owe nothing is admired for independence. And both are images—fixed cartoons of whole classes of people, the poor as takers and the powerful as makers—neither of which is the actual human being underneath. This is the move most important to resist, and it includes resisting its mirror. A corrected map that merely reverses the blame is still a map of cartoons. The point is not that the poor are virtuous and the elite are the disease. No class is the disease. The severance from the past—the forgetting of how much was received—runs through every life, including the life of whoever offers the analysis. The critic who imagines his own clarity owed to nothing has taken the very posture he condemns.

So the model is a lens, not a weapon. It asks of any American claim about merit, desert, independence, or the self-made a single question: what does this owe, and to whom? Where the answer is "nothing," the posture is insubordinate, whatever its prestige and whatever flattering name it travels under. Where the answer acknowledges inheritance, dependence, and debt, the posture is subordinate, whatever contempt the inverted word has trained us to feel for it. To read Americanism this way is to notice that the country's loudest celebrations of independence are often its deepest acts of forgetting, and that its most scorned dependencies are often nearer to the truth of what every human being actually is: a continuation, owing backward, obliged forward, never the author of itself.

The recovery, if there is one, is not nostalgia. It is the plain admission that nothing was earned in the absolute sense the myth requires, that we are all recipients, and that the honest name for a good life is not independence but custody—holding what we received under the obligation to pass it on. That admission costs the self its fantasy of origination. It returns in exchange the only dignity that does not have to lie about where it came from.

<div align="center">— ⁂ —</div>

*Any Note Press*

#

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Take a look at the ABOUT page for more information on this series.

Go to the REFERENCE GUIDE for detailed info on the greater world at large.

The TABLE OF CONTENTS page (for now) only links to the Substack version of these uploads. I guess I could add additional links that link to these posts, here on Tuhat, but we'll see. I do prefer how things look over here. It's a lot more stripped down and the font here is close enough to Century Schoolbook Regular, which is my font of choice.

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PREVIOUS SCENE (First flashback segment of Chapter 1)

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The sky was gray.

It was the middle of the day. Everything was gloomy. The clouds barely moved.

Below the oppressing clouds, there was a small stretch of land, surrounded by trees. There was a car sitting here. It was red in color. It appeared to be a sports car. There was a striking visual contrast between this cherry red car and it’s dull, lifeless setting. It didn’t look like it belonged in such a colorless world.

A young girl approached the car. She was sweating profusely. Her eyes were sweeping the area.

She wasn’t being followed.

With the swiftest of moves, the door on the driver’s side popped open by itself. The door raised upwards.

The young girl shoved herself inside. The door closed.

Her hands were on the wheel. Even her hands were sweaty. She was covered in sweat!

In a bit of frustration, the young girl banged her head against the wheel. The car horn honked loudly.

There were two people sitting in the backseat. They didn’t move. They didn’t flinch or blink. They stared straight ahead. Like mannequins.

The young girl with flashy, red-orange hair calmed herself. Her shoulders relaxed. She still had her head buried in her shoulders.

There was a loud ringing sound. A augmented holographic window appeared in mid-air next to the girl. The window displayed text.

‘Incoming call from Kathryn Berner.’

The young girl reached over and tapped the holographic window.

“Hey! Hello, hello! What’s up? Checkin’ in!”

“Yep. That you are,” the young girl sighed. She looked on over at the display floating in mid-air and saw in that augmented window a girl slightly older than her with straight, blond hair.

“Guessin’ that planet Earth is still on, big, stinkin’ shit hole,” the blond-haired girl laughed.

“Don’t know, Kate. What do you think? You’re the smart one.”

“Yes, I am. Who’s this person you tryin’ to find again?”

“You don’t know?” the red-haired girl spoke in her clear British accent. “Like… you remember Ashlin. Right?”

“You’re asking me?” Kate scoffed. “For real? Not like she’s been gone that long!”

“Yeah. This is her younger brother.”

“What? Whit a minute! Really? Why him?”

“I don’t know! Kinda hoping you would tell me! You’re the one who works under Hindler! I was thinking you overheard something about this decision, or something.”

“I never hear anything,” Kathryn retorted as she rolled her eyes. “Hindler has his secrets.”

“Right,” the red-haired girl groaned.

“Yeah. I’m not liking this,” sighed Kathryn. “It’s sad thinking about it. Wonder if doin’ whatever you’re doing out there is even worth it.”

“Not worth it, you say. Hm. No shit.”

“What they make Ashlin’s family believe about what happened?”

“They won’t tell me. Glaister hinted at a car accident. Something like that. I made my opinion known, saying if you’re gonna do this to Ashlin’s family, at least give them a pleasant memory! There’s nothing pleasant about the memory of death, regardless of how a loved one may have died, or ya know! Whatever! Despite my ranting, Hindler’s gaggle of eggheads went along with it anyway cause they’re soulless and I hate them!”

“Hate to say this, Michelle, but you’re starting to sound like Karen.”

“I get a splitting headache every time I hear that name. Her name is a bloody goddamn drill in my skull.”

“You realize what we’re doing here might be illegal, right? We can’t bring in an outsider who is well past his prime! How old is he?”

“Sixteen.”

“No! We can’t do this!” Kathryn exclaimed. “The Republic will drop the sky on us if they find out what we’re doing!”

“I know! I know, but I just need to do something! I don’t know! I just – like, need some time to understand what’s going on, unless you wanna tell me now the theory of determinism is complete bullshit when it comes to human affairs, and only applies as an opposition to quantum physics.”

“Look at you, Michelle. Pretending to sound smart again! Yeah, no. Not prepared for... whatever.”

“Good.”

“How you assume they’re gonna make his presence official within Gearshift Eden without the Republic finding out?” Kate asked.

“Don’t know. May be easier then it appears. Long as we keep him in Gearshift Eden – leave his name out of census records. Similar records. Beyond that, it gets complicated.”

“So, he’s just… not gonna exist in the eyes of the Republic?” Kate asked in an awkward fashion.

“That was the idea from the start. Sounds stupid. I know! Sounds stupid because it is! Everything I’m doing right now – only word I can come up with is incredulous. Not sure what the smart thing is at this point. I don’t know! We’ll see where this goes. I don’t have good feelings about this.”

“Michelle? This might not end well for us, but I’m intrigued about where this is going. I’m hoping Hindler knows what he’s doing and that this isn’t as much of a shit show as we think it is. Who’s been assigned to pick him up? Really just you out there?”

“At the beginning, Hindler’s assistant told me that decision would be left to me. After talking to Hindler, I now know that was bullshit. He wants me to do it! I’m sure he wanted this in the first place. Reason why is beyond me! This transition is not going to be easy for Ashlin’s brother! I have no idea what to do in the slightest! Honestly! I’ve never done anything like this before!”

“Don’t put too much pressure on yourself,” Kathryn cautioned. “It wasn’t easy for any of us. Been here my whole life. Still can’t believe I live in a place like this! So, yeah. I get it. It’s a tough pill to swallow. You planning on giving him a tour of Nia?”

“I have a big schedule coming up. Random as hell. Or it feels that way. I don’t... I don’t know what to do.”

“We’ll be around to look after him.”

“I’ll do you one better! How bout you be the one to do this!”

“Sounds tempting, but I’ll pass. By the way! Like to say Karen should be nowhere near this kid. She’s more annoying than usual lately.”

“I should be the one saying that, Kate!”

“Michelle, could you at least try to forgive-”

“Forgive what? There’s nothing to forgive! I don’t even know who Karen is anymore! She does not exist to me!”

“And speaking of the girl whose name gives you a splitting headache, Karen wants to take Ashlin’s brother in and be his legal guardian for his remaining adolescent years – as few as they are.”

“Kate! Listen to me! I’m never been more serious about anything in my life! Please do everything in your power to prevent that from happening! I swear to god! That girl has gone off the deep end with that larper shit!”

“Oh! You know who she is now! You do a temporary memory wipe on yourself during this call?”

“Damn it, Kate! I’m serious!”

“Okay! Stop freaking out! It’ll be fine! You just be careful out there. This mess sucks. I understand! Whatever Hindler’s business is with him, it’s important enough to risk everyone’s careers over it.”

“Right. Look. I gotta go. I’ll call you later. Okay?”

“Yeah. Bye. Stay sane!”

The call ended.

Michelle continued sitting still in the car for several moments. Her sweating had ceased. Her hands were still wet.

Out of the the corner of her eye, she caught the two entities sitting in the backseat. The sight of them made her scowl to herself.

“Yes, yes. Whatever! Figure this stupid shit out on my own! Don’t know how I got talked into this! Bloody hell am I doing?” she vented at herself as she started up the car.

*

This was a dark world. The wind was howling off in the distance. The air was charged and lively, yet everything was deathly still.

There was nothing natural about this place.

Out in the middle of an empty deserted brick road stood a boy with thick, dark brown hair covering his eyes. He was well into his teens, wearing a faded yellow shirt and tan cargo pants that were all torn up down at the pant legs.

He was standing in the middle of a realm that by all conjecture could not exist – but felt all too real. A mysterious, darkened reality.

To his left was a building. A sign near the front entrance labeled this place as the Rosaria Hotel. This hotel was now bordered up and left abandoned. On both sides of the street, all buildings appeared to be in the same state, other than the first floor of an old building across from the hotel. The building emanated a weak light from it’s dusty windows.

Above the young man, there were dark, menacing clouds that loomed overhead. At the end of the road, directly ahead of him, were tall metal gates. The gates sealed away any view of the other side.

How did I get here, the boy wondered to himself. He wasn’t sure if this was a dream.

It didn’t feel like one.

Wherever he was, it felt real. It felt very real.

He tried to recall the last thing he remembered doing, before he found himself standing here with his eyes closed. He could only recall going to bed in his comfy room, after a long, tiring day of high school.

He had to be sleeping. It certainly didn’t feel that way.

What was this place, he wondered.

The answer wouldn’t be found by standing here, so he decided to go off and explore. He thought he was in New Orleans or a place with similar French architecture. The area had a Victorian age style showing through these weathered exteriors. There were overgrown weeds sprouting from the cracks between the bricks below his feet.

The boy wandered away from the hotel towards the other end of the road. He wanted to get a better look at the gaping dark void. Once arriving at the end of the road, the boy was shocked by what he discovered.

What existed beyond this road was nothing. The void grasped the emptiness below him, as if all that ever existed was this road, it’s old buildings, and the scorched sky above.

The boy slowly backed away. He felt the sense of vertigo swell up in his chest. Staring down into infinity wasn’t all too thrilling.

The boy paused himself. A bitter impulse flashed past his mind.

He wanted to jump.

His body jerked forward slightly towards the edge. The boy held himself steady in a desperate bid to retain a hold of his sanity.

No. It’s not about escaping, he thought to himself.

The boy stepped back to the edge to gaze deeper into the black emptiness. A strong gust of wind pushed him back.

He didn’t want to be here. He wasn’t in the mood for this.

He pinched himself. There was pain, but the dream continued on.

The young boy wheeled away from the edge. In an angry tone, he shouted as loud as he could to the empty street.

“Hello! Wake up!”

All that answered was the wind, the distant sound of thunder, the faint sound of wind chimes and the sound of a creaking wood sign, hanging above the entrance to the only building that wasn’t boarded up. Those faint lights inside the place were dull but welcoming.

The boy developed a suspicious feeling about that building.

No. I’ll just stay here, he thought.

He sat down in the middle of the street to catch his breath. He started collecting his thoughts.

He had to look at this rationally. This was a dream. This was evident; The last thing he remembered was going to bed.

Also, this whole town was hovering in midair over complete and utter emptiness, like the vast voids of interstellar space.

It was no use trying to make sense of this. Everything here felt real and solid, not hazy and random, like his usual dreams. The brick street was laid out before him in perfect contrast and clarity. The buildings around him stood headstrong and concrete, unmoved by the raging storm in his mind.

He wanted to lay down in the middle of the street and go back to sleep, but he felt wide awake and alert in anticipation.

Anticipation for what? There wasn’t anything or anyone here.

Was there?

As he continued to ponder, he realized the possibility that someone – or something – lingered silently within these walls. It could had been nothing more than paranoia.

The more the thought toiled in his mind, the more it felt like there were eyes peering out from the pitch black windows around him. Every dark corner posed a threat.

The boy thought he heard a dull thud. It sounded out from somewhere near a set of stone stairways. These stairways led up to the sturdy wooden doors of the Rosaria hotel.

He stared at the bulky steps.

Was that a thud or did something drop?

Was something hiding behind the stairway?

The boy started forward. He wanted to see what was on the other side. He paused suddenly.

There was a light, almost like sparks spewing out from an electrical box. The bright light came from an alleyway somewhere behind him.

It must had disappeared just as quickly as it appeared. There was nothing but a wall of darkness within the alleyway. Chris stepped towards it. The darkness in front of him grew dense like fog. It was like the darkness itself was swirling, like a whirlpool, waiting for the moment to entrap him. As frightening as it was, it felt more welcoming than the dim lights in the building to the left of him.

“Stop! Stop!”

He jumped, startled by the sudden break of silence. He flung himself around to the sound of the voice.

There was a figure, shaded in darkness. It stood to the right side of the stairway.

It was a young girl by the looks of it. She had blond hair that dropped well past her shoulders. Her hair was dirty and mangled. She was about as young as he was. She wore a blue dress that was aged, torn, and faded. Her face was blackened out.

“Who-who are you?”

After a long and unbearable silence, the girl responded with a heavy tone in her voice. She spoke slowly and quietly, almost as if she had forgotten how to talk.

“Now, that is… most interesting. Was about to ask it the same question. I think...”

The girl took a step forward. She was breathing heavily. She looked like she was about to break out crying.

“...my eyes. They conceive me. It is! Not an it. A man! A boy! A living person! A real, live soul, flesh and clothes, standing before me – a mirage! Gone mad. Not real. No. I do not... I do not know, but I must – I have… have no choice. I can’t... “

“W-What? What do you-”

“Hey! Chris! time to get up!”

The world disappeared.

He opened his eyes to the glaring bedroom light and pale white ceiling above. It took him a few seconds to realize where he was.

He was back home.

It really was all a dream.

The most vivid dream he ever had.

Chris turned his head towards the doorway entrance in time to see his older brother turn away and head downstairs.

Chris was exhausted. He wanted go back to sleep, but after that bizarre nightmare of his, he knew he would rather drag himself out of bed.

It wasn’t like he had a choice.

Eventually, he gathered enough strength to crawl out from the covers His lower back still felt sore. He figured he slept on the wrong side of the bed a few days ago. It was odd the pain still persisted. His muscles were stiff and weak. Hopefully, Chris would feel better after a shower. Wasn’t likely.

He wondered what day it was as he yawned loudly, stretched his weary muscles and started slowly for the bathroom.

It’s a school day. He knew that much.

Likely a Monday, he thought. All bad days landed on Mondays.

Good news was that it was the final week. It was the last week of school, in the last week of May, in the current year of twenty fifty-three – a year that was proving to be the worst ever.

The weather outside Chris’ bedroom window was cold and wet. This was strange weather for the Savannah territorial region camps. Weather patterns were gradually becoming more and more out of the ordinary these past several years. Chris recalled last Christmas, back when they lost the ability to travel outside the city walls. This was a warmer region. Still, there were people proclaiming then that snow was now a normal staple within this normally snow-absent ‘Coastal Empire.’ That month saw a staggering nine inches of snow. Nobody gave a solid answer as to why a tropical part of the world would see that much snow. News of the outside world was difficult to come by.

Despite the true cause, whether it was by nature’s doing or humanity’s doing – it didn’t matter. Chris loved the snow. He held fond memories of the times his family spent in the frost-bitten state of Michigan, back at their old home.

Those days were nothing more but a distant memory now. The only thing he had left to remember of his former home was the winter snow.

Chris peered outside his window and saw the gray clouds. They hung low in the morning sky. A small rain shower began to come down, drenching the land below.

He looked down the suburban street and was surprised to lay eyes on a sleek and stylish red sports car parked on the other side. It didn’t look old, rusted, or falling apart. Everything else on this street did.

Who would rent out such a car in these times, Chris wondered with great astonishment.

Chris’ family was lucky to be living here after the government relocation program moved them here. Life wasn’t that bad here. In today’s world, cheap candy treats was the main choice for all, especially for the people who stood in the endless lines in front of the unemployment offices downtown. He recalled walking by one day, after being allowed to pass into the blocked historic district, seeing a massive sea of candy bar wrappers gust upward effortlessly over the heads of those who stood about, then gently fall back down like autumn leaves after the chilly wind receded. Even in this more pristine district, children found a playground wherever cars were left to rust away.

At least one person within this household had a stable job. Chris’ father worked with the government. He was a programmer. It was amazing there was still room in this world for such a profession. But in these days, even a high-paying job didn’t amount to much.

Chris took a quick bath and dressed up for school. He headed out of his room and towards the stairs that led down to the living room. Passing his father’s room, he caught a glimpse of that button-up white shirt of his. It was left hanging there in that wide-open closet for the past two years they’ve been living here. It was a very old shirt of his, but this shirt was never worn by his father. It was simply left in there, long sense forgotten. Oddly enough, it never had a wrinkle or a speck of dust on it. As if it was well preserved.

A few steps away was his brother’s room. His room was plastered with posters of baseball legends. Two of his brother’s most favorite idols were Bo Miller, a famous hitter who once played for the Dodgers over ten years back, and Shunsuke Tomoshi, a player from Japan who pitched three perfect games in a row for the Red Sox only a few years ago.

Chris knew his brother’s dream was to get into the major leagues and make a name for himself. Quite possibly, he wanted to become a legend of his own standing. That competitiveness and determination was once there. That was how he used to be.

These days were different. Whenever Chris would pass by his brother’s room, he would take a quick peek inside. He would see off in the far right corner Alan’s bat on the floor next to his mitten. They were gathering dust as they laid partially hidden under his clothes drawer. Unlike father’s shirt, these objects were tossed aside, into this dark crevice as if they had become more of an annoyance.

Alan also used to tinker with electronics, just like their dad. Alan had hoarded several strange objects over the years. He referred to them as ‘video game console systems.’ They were antique devices, meant to play ‘video games’ on. Those too were sitting under the bed, gathering dust.

Without electricity, they were useless anyway – and electricity was expensive these days.

Chris slowly continued past his brother’s room.

Stopping several feet away from the stairs, he paused in front of the only bedroom door situated on the right side of the hallway.

The door was slightly ajar. The room inside was dark and devoid of any sign of life. On the door there was a piece of torn up notebook paper taped to the door. There was a short message written on it.

“There are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity… I’m not sure about the universe.”

- Albert Einstein

This had become a usual habit for Chris.

Every morning, he would pause briefly in front of this room. There was no reason why. Perhaps he was trying to pay homage. Perhaps Chris was attempting to come to terms with reality through some subconscious or comatose means.

It didn’t feel real. There was still this brainless, dimwitted shock of the nerves, bringing up the anticipation of Ashlin bursting out of her room, playfully wresting Chris down to the soft carpet floor as she laughed and giggled uncontrollably. Chris would always speed off downstairs, but she would usually catch him just short of the stairs. One time this cat-and-mouse game ended with both Ashlin and Chris tumbling down the stairs, shortly followed by a breaking of a vase and a leg of a wooden table. Their father wasn’t happy with either of them, but Ashlin just laughed it off afterwards, saying that vase was old and ugly anyways.

No.

This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Him standing outside her empty room, waiting, hoping for this nightmare to end once again, so he could wake up to his eighteen year old sister’s smile, his father’s amused or annoyed response, his older brother’s slightly bemused chatter.

It all ceased to exist.

It was as if an invisible vortex sucked out the last portion of happiness in this world, as if this eternal divide severed or detached a part of himself, left him without himself.

Chris shook his head. He groveled by.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Chris glanced around the darkened living room. To his left was the entrance to the kitchen. His father ate breakfast at the dining room table, his face buried in the morning newspaper. His older brother stood at the sink, looking out the window in a hypnotic state.

Chris walked in. He noted the silence in the room.

He took a seat at the table. As he took the cereal box, he studied his family.

No gesture made to one another. They were all just like any other person on the street to one another.

It didn’t used to be this way.

*

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NEXT SCENE (Second Present Day Segment from Chapter 1)

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Thank you very much for reading. :)

This essay originally appeared on my Substack, Marginalia Mundus. I thought it would be an appropriate first entry for my writing here. This essay, like all of my work, is written without the aid of AI at any step in the process.

“As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God, and make no confusion there, for there they had their birth, the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God.”

- George Macdonald, A Dish of Orts

I am a man possessed by the drive for other worlds.

Even before I fully understood the concept of an imaginary other-world, I was already participating in it. Maps were scrawled in 50-cent notebooks, imaginary histories for cities that never raised their towers to the sun. Armies crawled across the teeming circumference of my adolescent mind. Empires rose and fell. Peaceful lands of dwarves and elves and whatever else basking in the warm sun and blue sky of a summer’s daydream. Every adventure story, every bit of Bradbury or Robert Louis Stevenson, was melted down and recombined into fodder for pretend games, even just for myself. Sometimes, inspiration took the strangest sources. When I was a child, I heard the Grateful Dead song "Deep Ellum Blues," and, not knowing that Deep Elm is, in fact, a real neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, I confabulated a world-space, map, and milieu for the "fictional" city, based on tropes from gangster films I was too young to watch (a la The Untouchables and The Godfather). Strange bit of alchemy that.

Whether they serve the purpose of escape, as in the hedonist's paradise of Cockaigne, or the exaltation of society's highest ideals, as in fable-like realms of chivalry that were Arthur’s Britain, secondary world fantasy as a literary device is at least as old as the Middle Ages. This is to say nothing of countless folk tales handed down throughout the ages which largely transpire in the aetherial and atemporal realms of Once Upon a Time, of Elfland. In the background of both the literary and the folk traditions are the various Other-worlds and Under-worlds of pre-Christian myth: Sheol, Olympus, Alfheim, etc.

The human drive to plumb the depths of the unknown, I imagine, drove the creative impulse over time. The mythological story about the nearby mountain being a portal to a heavenly realm falls by the wayside when it is mined for iron ore. The confabulated travel narrative of Marco Polo, once the East did not seem so far away and exotic as another world, gives way to the chivalric romance inhabiting the uncharted country of the distant past. Eventually, as academic history and archeology demystified that past, the fantasists beat a retreat to the inner keep. The Romantic, the dreamlike, the world of the interior and fable, older than science and more primeval than reason. Figures like MacDonald, Dunsany, and E.R. Eddison, even Lovecraft in his Dreamlands Cycle, lead the charge into the world of dreams and the poetic unconscious. In the modern world, fantasy as genre fiction emerges not just because of its aesthetic differences from literary fiction, but because the literature of the last two centuries, dominated by the novel, has gravitated more and more towards the same material occupations and concerns as our workaday lives. In Thomas More's Utopia from the 16th century, the social critique of the predatory landowning class and the pauperization of the peasants was nested within a self-consciously fantastic story about "No-Place" delivered by a man named Raphael "Hytholoday," a Greek-rooted neologism for "speaker of nonsense." In the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, social critique is delivered openly, nakedly, using exaggerated versions of real-world subjects: Mr. Gradgrind and Ebenezer Scrooge, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. The rise of the novel as an art form, with a focus on realism, coinciding with modern social trends towards new and Enlightened ideologies led to the ghettoization of fantasy, such that by the time of Tolkien he may, in his essay "Faerie Stories," remark on the way that fantasy had been relegated to the realm of the nursery by the parochialism and taste of adults.

This trend, let's call it the "constriction of mythopoesis," continues to this day, and is perhaps even worsening. Typical fodder for faerie stories, we might think, has changed little in a thousand years. People still want tales of high adventure and true romance, of true good and true evil, of worlds where morality exists and the choices of the characters are transcendent rather than merely eminent in scope. Since the genre fantasy boom of the 1970's, it is difficult (not impossible) to find the exploration of these themes outside of the genre, as the wider market for fiction has coarsened and become dominated by not just the realism that was the hallmark of the early days of the novel, but now by the cynicism, politicking, low morals, and generally poor taste of the present mass culture. Works like The Wheel of Time, formulaic and patently in the mold of Tolkien though they were, maintained the spark of nobler human sentiment and drive for enchantment even as it was rapidly disappearing from elsewhere in literary life, perhaps life in general.

Now even the worm has begun to eat its tail, for given the success of a newer crop of fantasy writers more preoccupied with worldly concerns of power and Machiavellian struggle, epitomized by G.R.R. Martin, the cynicism has overtaken even the walled ghetto of genre fantasy. It is much like (and is perhaps merely a subspecies of) the metastasizing cancer of the "childfree" movement, wherein childless adults petition slowly but inexorably to ban children from public spaces, complaints ranging from the noise and smell of little people to more misanthropic beliefs about the value of childrearing at all. Such, I feel, is the fate of genre fantasy. Adults who confuse cynicism, coarseness, and hedonism for "maturity," slowly colonizing what they take to be a childish medium but what is really one of the final bastions of good sense in an insane world.

But I began this essay by talking about my own relationship to fantasy, to the secondary world in particular, for as the real world grows ever darker many more people retreat to the worlds of fiction, and even to airy realms of their own imagining. Never before have there been so many people engaged in what modern writers term "world-building," but what in saner times might have merely been called "imagination."

It has not escaped my attention that this runs in tandem with the general demoralization and prolification of the working classes especially the rural people, who have always carried the torch of raw poesy and folklore. The problem is compounded by the higher echelons of creatives (non-working aristocrats, professors, and sponsored artists) having become essentially defunct as a class, or having been subsumed by the endless capitalistic drive to bean-counting and monetization. These types would have codified and put to pen the untutored insights and genius of the smallfolk, but no longer.

When the world feels cramped and shrinking still, the retreat into fantasy isn't just a way to preserve those essential human things which are tread mercilessly under the foot of Capital, it is also a means of escape from present unsalutary conditions. And here is the rub, hasn't the world always been full of evil and darkness and predation? Why now, in what is materially a much more comfortable era, do we increasingly retreat so far as to leave the world entire? I believe I speak for many when I say that the material comforts of the present age seem but a mask for deeper decay. Sane folk would gladly trade calorically dense artificial food and climate controlled artificial houses for bread and beans among true friends and a drafty house of real timber and a well-loved hearth. Faerie stories especially teach us that wealth, or the appearance thereof, often masks what is otherwise empty and hollow, or else depraved.

I cannot speak for everyone, but when I search myself, two streams emerge and feed into one another like the River Ouroboros.

The first is the incalculable drive to create and explore, to transcend the workaday and enter a realm where the highest things in man are everywhere on display, and not hidden behind the drudgeries of work and the often unglamorous duties of domestic life. To be clear: true nobility and virtue lie in these things. Simple humility and self-sacrificing care for others are the epitome of the Gospel. Yet, I have never claimed to be a humble or virtuous man, nor even a sensible one. And just because a man thinks upon St. George and the slaying of dragons does not mean he cannot apply the same vigor and manly courage to his own less ostentatious duties. In fact, they are in some ways more a credit to him for the fact of their obscurity.

The second is the weariness with the world as it is, with its myriad flaws and deprivations and, what is most important: the ever-present sensation that all is crumbling and falling apart and I, a lone man, can do nothing to solve it. Then it is especially seductive to retreat into the realm of the fantastical, into faerie, where great lords and heroes and magery can conquer the odds, beat back the forces of evil which, in the waking world, threaten always to swallow us and everything we love. This too, without a moderating force, can become merely a disguised form of despair. For, after all, good men have existed in our world as in fiction. Real heroes have taken stands, and have raised swords. There is always the threat that those who would walk among titans in the world of fiction could be titans to their family, their community, nation, perhaps the world. Christ was one such man, radically present, transcending all myth to bring what was great and holy and true in the whole creative tradition of the human race into Incarnation.

Both of these streams, the flight to fantasy and away from the trevails of the modern world, are understandable. They are even in some sense commendable. Soldiers cannot be ever and anon fighting at the front, or the front will collapse. A rotation of the regiments from the spiritual trench warfare of our present society into the infirmaries which the fictional worlds nourished by true myth present for us may be necessary. It may be that for us to serve, in this day in age, as good Christians we must be also, in some sense: good Narnians, or good Hobbits, or good denizens of Faerie as our stations allow.

Think, then, of this analogy in the context of the old Christian idea of contemptus mundi, or ataraxia, a contempt for the world and for the flesh. For what is an infirmary in comparison to a battlefield other than a small compartment of Home within the Tumult of War? The soldier resting upon the bed, his wounds healing, is being restored by those comforts: warmth, tenderness, and companionship devoid of threat, which characterize the Homeland for which he fights. Danger is never far away, never truly out of mind, but so long as the front remains and there are stalwart comrades to man the guns, we can remain there for a time.

Faerie, for some of us, then, is that small glimmer of Heaven which we retreat to when we must have strength for the battles ahead. It restores us and it teaches us the greatest lesson that art has to give: this is not our ultimate home. We sojourn on this Earth, like wayfarers, and we look toward our own Kingdom, and along the way we tell stories to one another about the splendors of that Kingdom, and the dangers we will face along the way, and how, if we are brave and stalwart, we shall overcome them.

"Once upon a time," we say to one another, not unlike the Man who, long ago, in a faraway desert, spoke to His friends thus:

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto..."

I don't know when it will happen with shows, but I'd say it has happened with content on social media, although it's not Game Of Thrones quality of entertainment but it's world class quality of rage bait, guilt bait, fear inducing, anxiety inducing, jealousy inducing, desire inducing content. I think today, if you wanted to, on all social apps you can easily scroll over 14 hours a day of shorts, pics, notes which offer a cocktail of emotions.

And now, with more content generated by bots than humans, with higher persuasion skills and overengineered phrasing and analytics... any weakness you have, will be farmed. And this is as bad as they ever going to be at it (that's a blessing in disguise btw, like a virus that's too deadly to spread, it will become more and more obvious, maybe, hopefully.)

So, unless you find a way to stop buying into this or a very good reason not to scroll, this could very well be your life; either scrolling through endless see of exactly the right content to hit these attention grabbing notes of guilt, fear, fear, desire, shame, fear, or... feeling vaguely unease without your phone?

That got me thinking. There must be people who are immune to the pull of social media and doomscrolling. What are they like? What do they believe or... refuse to believe? I've talked previously about fear of death, so that's a big one and few things are mixed in there. It's probably worth expanding on.

Common theme in todays zeitgeist is "what skills to learn to be futureproof", maybe it's less about new skills and more about letting go of some things which are demonstrably untrue.

1. You are innocent.

I have noticed a shade of content that my wife and our friends who are parents are all bombarded by their algos: parenting tips, tricks and videos. They induce guilt, shame, fear. It's all about scale. What happens when amount of genuinely great new (and ones you forgot) parenting tips will be more than you could consume in 24h, released in such quantity each day? If this is what you will give your attention to, this is what algo will show you. Talk about manifestation, fear and The Algo will have no choice but give you what you fear!

Solution? Humility. Yes, you will never be a perfect parent, in any regard or dimension. Yes, there will always be better ways to do everything you do. There is no end to improvement, it's an asymptote. As long as you believe you should be perfect, that your kids deserve perfection and can get it, algo will show you ways to improve, proving to you, post by post, how much you suck, which will make you want to improve more.

Do you see how perverse it is? How will you feel about it in 5 years from now, when for every human written post, there will be 10000 bot ones (each making money from you reading) and giving really good advice? Where do you draw the line? In such world you have to either draw the line and say: I am imperfect and that's ok or keep scrolling and improving or pretending to improve every moment. Wonder what would our kids prefer?

We are innocent (we didn't even touch free will, maybe another day), don't be gullible and believe what these posts and your interest implies. It's OK, you are OK, your kids are OK. Give them a hug and eat ice cream and get interested in their stupid toys and stupid cartoons and boring birthday parties. Read a book or two and stop. And if you fuck up? well this is what therapists are for.

2. Objective knowledge is impossible.

That one was difficult for me to accept because I am naturally curious and love to learn new things. You see why it's an issue today?

Luckily there is a cure to this greed and fomo. Mostly two things : knowledge and progress, same as improvement as a parent, is an asymptote. We are always closer to the beginning of our journey than the end. I could very easily spend the rest of my days, learning something that's genuinely interesting and new, served in exactly the way that I like it.

But if I accept, that everything I will learn today, tomorrow will be proven wrong and replaced by closer to truth yet never true new version, I fall out of love with knowledge. I still learn how to do stuff or develop skills I want but I don't see a point in learning for knowledge.

There is one thing that we can be 100% certain is true: "Sentio, ergo sum". I perceive, therefore I am. Everything else is based on belief and impossible to prove. You can measure things, perform repeatable peer reviewed studies, but they never fully explain their nature (because knowledge is an asymptote, you will either say 1) its magic 2) keep going deeper into rabbit hole) and can never claim to be hardcore objective, not like Sentio which each sentient being can verify in their own home lab.

We def need to live out lives and pretend we know a lot about the world (and i'd say the experience is generally more pleasant if we do), but when you press hard enough, there is little difference between science and religion - both require belief at certain level.

So yeah, if you know Sentio you pretty much know everything there is to know. No need to watch that 47 minute Veritasium video on how magnets work. You are welcome.

3. There is nothing you can identify with.

This one is for the raging lunatics that hide in each of us once the Algo serves a post that puts one of our identities in danger. Same story, if there is any identity you sub to, it will be used against you in the court of infinite rage bait content strategically placed to keep you scrolling the longest amount of time.

Ok but how? How can you not identify with anything and not get offended on any level and never take the bait, tell me how god damn it?

I told you already, it's Sentio, ergo sum again. If there is one objective truth which is that you are, and everything we know is untrue (as in a fat fucking lie), then how can anything that you identify with be true? It's all make belief, "a fugazzi, it's a woozy, it's a wazzi, fairy dust". You get offended in defence of concepts which are not true but real to you because you believe you are them. Your nationality, your gender, your sexuality, your job, your finances, your function

You don't need it, give it to me, it's ok just for a second, see how much lighter you are? How do we believe all of this and get so heavy with it and how incredible it is that these machines abuse and make money out of this process. It's so wild how difficult we make the simplest thing we can do - be.

4. What is true can not die. What is untrue never lived.

If there is only one truth and its Sentio, you and I my friend are also not true. There is only consciousness. That's difficult to see and harder to write about even thou much has been written on this subject. Funny thing I am not really a religious person, I just don't see a logical flaw in these arguments and can't help but see how everything is fundamentally the same and one thing, only thing which stands a chance to be true: consciousness.

Well, here it is, my attempt to at least lower your intensity of guilt and shame, greed, rage and fear. Wish you all best.

May was a precious month.

01 Growth

The flowers are in full bloom.

Earlier this month, I bought a pot of petunias. At first, they looked like this:

Then, under the bright sunshine, they exploded into growth and color:

Do you remember the tiny sprout of the calla lily after its winter dormancy?

Now it has grown this much:

May brought dramatic shifts in temperature. We seemed to move straight from winter into summer, with some days climbing above 30°C (86°F). L even started talking about buying an air conditioner.

Recently, though, the weather has cooled down again.

02 External Forces

Because I had been somewhat scattered in April, I intentionally structured May to be fuller and more focused.

I chose to let external forces help restore my rhythm and productivity. As a result, I had joined three different communities (one of them lasted only a week).

In a Tao Te Ching Career Transition Support Camp, Xiaoyin designed a series of thoughtful and unexpected writing prompts that sparked my desire to express myself. Small points of stimulation ended up creating changes far beyond the original exercises.

There were also beautiful moments of resonance:

One program included calligraphy practice. I didn’t even know that was part of it when I joined. It felt surprisingly meaningful, as though I were reconnecting with my elementary-school self.

While writing, we observed our breathing, thoughts, habits, and inner patterns with unusual subtlety. Even more interesting was the realization that there are people willing to spend time on something as simple as handwriting in order to understand themselves more deeply. And we truly do discover things.

I also joined the WeGlow Awareness Journaling Program. There, Mandy saw through some of the issues in my current state with remarkable clarity, especially the inner critic beneath them, and the places where self-love and self-acceptance were still lacking.

I was genuinely surprised. I thought I had already done this work. I had been approaching these topics from the perspective of someone who had already gone through them, only to find myself suddenly stripped of that certainty.

My ego experienced a noticeable tremor. This wasn’t the first time. In fact, moments like these often become the doorway to my next stage of growth.

Afterward, I could feel a clear shift in my inner state: the old patterns and the eager inner critic quietly retreated, while a steadier and more grounded strength began to emerge.

03 Community as a Place of Practice

This month made something very clear to me:

Community is my place of practice.

Within my own field and familiar circles, I am naturally calm and at ease.

But in the WeGlow community, I unconsciously stepped into the role of a student — a role my old self knows extremely well. The instinct to become a “good student” immediately awakened. With that role came expectations, responsibilities, and standards. Old patterns resurfaced.

I reflected honestly on judgment in my article A Letter to My Inner Critic.

But the roots of self-judgment often run deeper than we imagine. I increasingly feel that these patterns are woven into the philosophies of our parents and the people around us. From early childhood, they become embedded in the deepest layers of our perception.

Removing them completely is difficult. But when the voice of self-criticism appears, when comparison begins to arise, I try to smile and respond:

“Oh, really? Thanks. Bye.”

And then, once again, return my attention to the present version of myself.

I am good. You are good. May we simply appreciate ourselves, become ourselves, and fully be ourselves.

04 The Answer Is Within

This month, I chose participation. I chose to complete assignments and engage with the programs I joined. It was a kind of voluntary passivity, allowing external structures to guide and discipline me. External forces are often necessary. They can help awaken our inner strength.

But they should never become the center. The center must remain firmly anchored within ourselves.

That was one of my biggest lessons this month.

Let myself remain the primary reference point, and choose consciously. Keep what serves me. Release what doesn’t. The practices that leave me feeling calmer, more grounded, more present, and more at ease — I should do more of those. The things that don’t resonate? Let them go.

Pay more attention to my own feelings than to everyone else’s. Sometimes caring for others comes from love and responsibility. But in group settings, it’s important not to unconsciously take on roles that don’t belong to us, or fall into the trap of seeking approval and validation.

Otherwise, we lose what The Courage to Be Disliked calls freedom.

There is no need for extra burdens. No need for unnecessary mental noise.

Strength grows from within, and it does not come from anywhere outside of ourselves.

05 Pride

This month, I clearly saw my pride.

And increasingly, I believe that my true self exists somewhere within it.

I still remember the child I once was: outgoing, energetic, fearless, and full of confidence. Whenever I meet people who are lively, direct, and expressive, I often catch glimpses of who I used to be. But over the years, through moral expectations, social evaluation, and environmental conditioning, much of that healthy life force was gradually suppressed.

I’m wondering whether I can bring it back.

I’ve started to distinguish between two kinds of pride.

The first is pride rooted in comparison. It carries judgment. It reflects my own projections and insecurities. That kind of pride is worth releasing.

The second is pride connected to the true self. That kind deserves to shine. It is simply life expanding according to its nature.

Two years ago, I once wrote: “I’ve been given the role of the great villain.” Now it feels as though I’ve finally thrown that role away.

Even writing this moves me deeply. I think it deserves an article of its own.

06 Expression

I still didn’t post much on social media this month. Most of what I shared were my own articles.

Sometimes it was simply a matter of timing. By the time I thought about posting, it already felt too late in Beijing Time.

This month, across my two WeChat public channels, I published seven pieces in total — five articles and two photo essays. I actually counted them just now and surprised myself. It’s the most productive I’ve ever been. And I love this pace.

Among the articles:

1. Naming Is Dimensional Reduction
2. Other Ways of Looking at “Naming Is Dimensional Reduction”
3. Those “Terrible” Parents: On Intergenerational Relationships
4. Two Dimensions of Self-Love
5. The First Generation of Fully Educated Women Has Only Just Grown Up

I also published five posts on Xiaohongshu (Rednote).

My English practice continues.

The biggest thing I neglected this month was organizing photos and videos.

07 Travel

We visited Antwerp and officially unlocked Belgium. 🔓

To be honest, it didn’t really feel like I had entered a different country. In many ways it felt quite similar to the Netherlands — the same supermarket chains, the same rhythms of daily life.

Once I’ve sorted through the photos and videos, I’ll share more.

It’s a lovely city, and definitely worth visiting again.

08 Life

May included two public holidays. L had two stretches of four or five consecutive days off, without affecting his regular weekends. This kind of schedule would probably be a dream for many overworked office workers back in China.

Things have become busier recently, though.

We barely exercised during the second half of the month. L, on the other hand, has already lost six kilograms, which is fantastic.

We also rearranged some furniture and made the apartment feel much more spacious.

We bought a new refrigerator. And then something unexpectedly wonderful happened:

The delivery team agreed to take away our broken washing machine. This was genuinely exciting. Getting rid of large household items in the Netherlands can be surprisingly difficult. Usually you either pay for municipal pickup or transport them yourself to a recycling center outside the city. Either option can easily cost €80 or more.

The washing machine had been occupying that corner of the apartment for ages. So I’m grateful I kept negotiating with customer service, and grateful to the two delivery workers who were willing to help. Everything worked out perfectly.

Oh, and this was my birthday month. In the lunar calendar, my birthday falls during the beautiful season often called “April in the Human World.”

We had a lovely breakfast at a café in the city center.

After picking up my birthday cake, we were stopped by a photographer on the street for an impromptu photoshoot (we had actually dressed up a little that day). Later, I joined an online community gathering that turned out to be deeply meaningful, and everyone sang Happy Birthday to me.

It was a beautiful day.

(The cake I designed myself — the idea was L’s)

Not every day is clear, conscious, or creative.

Most of the time, we’re occupied by other things.

We’re busy with work.

We reward ourselves after work.

We scroll through our phones.

We watch short videos.

We live by habit.

We live in distraction.

We live with less awareness than we realize.

Rarely do we truly stop, return to the present moment, care for ourselves, and enter into a deeper conversation with our own inner world.

Rarely do we enter the space where awareness becomes creation.

That is why May feels so precious.

And so does this very moment.

Written on June 2–3.

©ChristianaYu, All rights reserved

The airlock hissed, rousing us from slumber. Tohwalt put down the breaker he was mending to watch the suited figure step inside. Occasional visitors weren’t uncommon in the off-season: some people came to Atull to taste the surfer’s life without having to deal with the sand. A sightseer, perhaps, or a geologist who followed the five-star reviews to escape dry rations.

“Kewt,” Tohwalt shouted to the kitchen out of habit. “We’ve got a customer.”

Kewt sat up from the VR rig, disturbing the dozing keagon in his lap. Noll croaked, protesting at being lifted, but the boy scratched the feathery neck in just the right spot, and the keagon relaxed.

The usual choreography commenced. The boy scrambled to his feet and pulled up the hood. Swaying, he carried the groggy keagon to the nook between the bar shelves. Once on his perch, Noll shook himself awake, sending an emerald wave of stirring feathers along his long, supple body. In the front, Tohwalt swiped the tuner to change the music. We never liked the lulling voices or the off-beat rhythms, but that was what people expected to hear in a cliffside diner.

The visitor moved from the airlock into the suitroom and pulled off his helmet. He was an older man, his short hair almost completely grey, but fit and quick in his movements. He undressed with the methodical precision of a spacer, thumbing safety clasps into readiness, shelving pieces the right side up for quick access. His suit was old, the enamel on the shielding plates scraped down to the metal. Still surf-worthy, but from the man’s rigid posture, we could see he wasn’t a surfer. Rented gear, then, from a shop up in the port.

Kewt grabbed the apron and scowled at another frayed corner: Noll had been bored again, chewing on things without noticing. The keagon sat now in his attentive, almost avian pose: front legs hidden in feathers, head tilted so only one eye stared at the door. Finally, entertainment. Kewt threw the neck loop over his hood and hobbled to his hideout by the stove. Tohwalt already stood ready behind the counter.

The door creaked open, and the new man walked in. He ignored Tohwalt’s prominent shape and directed all his attention to the room itself. He gaped openly at the scrapped breakers on the walls like he wasn’t sure what those were. A clear view of the vertical drop behind the triple glass elicited an audible gasp as if he hadn’t seen the same vista on his way to the diner. He chuckled at the overturned supply rocket stages that served as tables. Even the sand on the floor amused him, as though the pea-sized glass spheres were an artistic choice instead of a pesky inevitability. We couldn’t get a grasp of the man. A first-time tourist would react like that, only less ostentatiously. Was he acting?

The man finally met Tohwalt’s eyes and smiled back. His face fell into the well-defined lines of someone who smiled easily and often. We noted the wide, sinewy neck and bulging chest muscles beneath the quality underlayer. A retired forcer? There was no need to get alarmed. We had had forcers dine here before.

“Welcome to the Puffin Nest,” Tohwalt said.

“Heya,” the customer said and looked up, searching the wall for writings. “Can I please see the menu?”

“There isn’t one. The meal is a burger with fries and a soda.” A typical first-timer interaction.

“A meal, then,” the man agreed, grinning.

In the kitchen, Kewt fired up the grill. Tohwalt bent down to grab a can of coke from the bottom shelf. Noll shifted imperceptibly on his roost.

“Lovely place,” the customer said, stealing a stool from the nearest table and settling at the counter as if it were a bar. “Is it always so quiet?”

“Only in the off-season,” Tohwalt said, passing him the drink. Whoever the man was, the conversation took a predictable route. “In four months, when the tide changes and the clouds rise up, this whole cliff will be swarmed with surfers. Everybody gets hungry. It will be pretty busy then.”

In the back, Kewt grabbed a pack of pre-cut fries and dumped them into the magfryer. Behind Tohwalt’s back, the keagon was moulding himself into a different pose, his movements too slow for the eye to notice. The customer turned the can in his hands as if trying to remember how to open it. Definitely a spacer.

“How long does the season last?” the man asked. A question common enough and delivered amicably, yet we spotted a tingle of falsehood in it.

“Two months, if you’re sensible,” Tohwalt said. “Some cranks squeeze out four. With the right gear, you can descend an additional half a kilo. That’s only if you’re not afraid of getting stuck down there and having to come back by rock climbing. And if you’re ready to sacrifice your breaker.” He jerked his chin at the scorched board in the corner he had been trying to resurrect.

The man raised his brows in mild surprise. “What happened?”

“The heat from friction,” Tohwalt said with a nonchalant shrug. “The clouds are dust—silica, mostly—hot already from all that atmospheric pressure. When you surf, your breaker coasts on what is essentially molten glass. Spray condenses into beads.” He pointed at the floor. “That’s not a decoration. This shit is everywhere. Gets carried in from the airlock.”

The man bent down to roll his guest slipper over the glass pearls. Noll watched him in a hunting stance: head down, back arched and feathers smoothed out, tail slightly raised for balance. In the kitchen, Kewt threw the protein on the grill and checked the bread box: the dough had defrosted and begun to rise.

“The galaxy is full of wonders,” the customer was saying, shaking his head in elated disbelief. “Who would have thought people would surf the upper layers of a gas giant for fun—”

“Waves and gravity are free energy,” Tohwalt pointed out. “People have been using them for entertainment for ages.”

The man didn’t seem to hear him and went on with his gleeful musings. “—Jump off into the abyss from a cliff, hoping a board of plastic—or whatever it’s made of—”

“It’s layers of metal and heat-resistant polymer,” Tohwalt tried to interject again.

“—would keep them afloat. Bet their life on crazy skill.” The man took a deep, expressive breath. The permanent smile he wore felt out of place, unrelated to the conversation, as if he was giddy about something else entirely. “How do you master a sport when losing your footing means falling all the way down?”

He waited now for Tohwalt’s answer. A predictable misconception, and one that Tohwalt was usually happy to correct, but today, with this man, we had little appetite for sermons.

“You have retro rockets for backup,” Tohwalt said dryly. “And you won’t fall all the way down. There is an altitude where you begin to float. That’s how our islet works.”

“The islet, yes! Who would have thought people would set foot on a floating rock, a piece of a broken planetary ring or an asteroid or whatever it was before it deorbited—”

This time, Tohwalt made no attempt to clarify.

“—Put a permanent structure on it.” The man gestured at the room with a well-rehearsed swipe. “Build a diner on a cliff. A two-hour hike away from the nearest landing lot.”

He paused. We had a bad feeling about him. That mask of constant cheer was a wall we couldn’t peer over. A lot of practice must have gone into it to make it so efficient. Kewt flipped the sizzling protein and prepared to chop a tomato, the knife handle slippery in his grasp. Noll’s feathers started to puff.

“Living in such an isolated place,” the spacer continued, “nine out of twelve months almost completely deserted, must take a lot of dedication.” He squinted at Tohwalt. “Are you a passionate surfer yourself?”

“I surf a bit. Like I said, it gets busy once the clouds rise.”

The man stared, his smile bordering on a sneer, as if the answer didn’t satisfy him.

“It must get boring,” he said at last. “How long have you lived here?”

Tohwalt put his weight on the other foot, enduring the scrutiny. Did he know? Were we discovered? Noll morphed into a tight, nervous ball. Back in the kitchen, Kewt willed the bread to bake faster, but the crust needed a deeper shade of gold.

“Eleven years,” Tohwalt said. It was public record.

“Eleven years,” the man repeated. Was he trying to catch us in a lie? His sneer lingered a moment longer before thawing into an easy grin. “A lovely place to retire.”

He leaned back and made a point of staring out of the window. The faceted rock, its texture visible in clear weather, extended both up into the yellowish sky and down into the haze of the drop. The unbarred pathway that clung to the cliff face was but a flimsy ornament on the brutal expanse.

“A lovely, lovely place,” the man repeated.

Finally, the patina of falsehood gave way. We got a tinge of longing and the kind of weariness that comes from permanent frustration. Noll’s neck relaxed and began its journey up. Kewt shut off the grill and pulled the bun out of the bread box.

“No retirement for me yet, I’m afraid,” the man said, and a flash of default smile shut the door on us. Lifting a finger to point at the ceiling, he added, “True Dedication Blossoming still needs me to tie up a few loose ends. I’ll have to settle for a short leave and a five-star meal.”

We were right about him being a spacer, but what kind of starship was True Dedication Blossoming, a lawforce warship? Did it come here to seize us? Was this an indirect threat: don’t try anything; the assault unit is standing by?

The man gave Tohwalt’s stocky frame an appraising look. “Have you served yourself?”

What other confirmation did we need? Kewt palmed the bread knife, hovering over the bun. The keagon’s head tipped forward, the dark beak drawn like a dagger.

“No, sir,” Tohwalt said, his voice surprisingly steady. A forcer at the diner didn’t automatically mean he came here for us. It was too soon to call this a crisis. “Did my civic duty in sanitary service.” Another public record. “Nine months in the forests of Sinue, the rest in various mobile tidying teams.”

“Very commendable,” the man said. “People imagine we, the lawforce, do lots of flashy fighting, but in truth, most of the time, we do what you did—clean up. Let me tell you a story.”

He scooted closer, crossing his arms over the counter, his grin almost impish. An entertainment, sure, but one we could do without.

“Around a star far, far away,” he began, “on an ordinary planet, Coalition public funds kept disappearing: a library never built, welfare never distributed—that sort of thing. Turns out, there’s a dark habitat in orbit with some unregistered traffic. The Coalition sends a unit up there to investigate. What kind of establishment would you hide, right? It turns out, it’s a lab.”

Tohwalt’s shoulders tensed. The man knew. Noll let out a soft hiss. Kewt shook the fries out of the magfryer, his fingers trembling over the serving basket.

“Illegal lab,” the forcer went on. “Ugly, unethical setup. Cages and cages of lab animals. Human subjects. Unsanctioned clones: little kids grown in vats, brought up with minimal interaction, just to be experimented on. Room after room of weird equipment. So of course the personnel starts destroying evidence before the lawforce even docks: slaughters the living, crushes the machinery, takes the suicide pills. By the time the forcers come in, everything’s in shambles. What else is left if not mop up?”

This was a crisis all right. Whether suspicions or evidence had led the forcer to Atull, he was here for us. The keagon watched the room with one unblinking eye. Kewt hastily smeared onion jam over the bun. Tohwalt could do nothing but attentively tilt his head.

“So the lab’s gone,” the man continued. “The scene is documented, reports are submitted, your kind gets called in. The planet gets its library built and welfare distributed. End of story, right? Well, no. When forensics look into it, they discover that the facility was working on a quantum manipulation weapon.”

Tohwalt’s left eyelid twitched. A weapon? Perhaps the forcer came here blindly, following breadcrumbs he didn’t understand. Nothing was lost yet. In the back, Kewt plucked a fresh lettuce leaf from the planter pipe. In the nook, the keagon’s body strained from all that effort to remain motionless.

“The Coalition scientists spend years going through the retrieved debris,” the man went on, “combing through shreds of records. There’s not enough to reconstruct the research, but a recovered fragment of experiment protocols shows that the lab had a breakthrough with something called Spec-84.”

Kewt’s knife slipped off a pickle he was cutting and landed perilously close to his fingers. Tohwalt tilted his head to the other side, his neck betraying its tightness with a crack. Noll shivered, about to lose his cool. The forcer knew. The grin he wore was a gloat of victory. He had us cornered.

“I’m not saying the end justifies the means,” the man said, “but imagine if we had it. A tool to reach into the very fabric of the cosmos!”

He sighed and looked out of the window again. Noll used the moment to change his pose, darting to stand upright with the front talons extended. A lightning-quick move, but the blur of green feathers must have registered in the forcer’s peripheral vision. The man jerked his head to look at the shelves.

“Is that—” he asked, peering into the shadows, “—a live keagon?”

With his cover blown, Noll fluttered and let out an annoyed gronk. In the kitchen, Kewt began to hurriedly assemble the burger.

“A kea dragon!” the man said, grinning at Tohwalt, his tale forgotten. Now that he was sure he had us pinned, he could allow himself a detour. “I remember when they were rare. Such a successful crosspec: smart, curious, resourceful. I hear their natural urge to explore and manipulate makes them an excellent subject in behavioural studies. And I remember when they almost overran a planet. Cunning and fearless and unruly creatures. Good thing they have legs instead of wings. Aren’t keagons banned and considered pests on at least four worlds?”

“They aren’t banned on Atull,” Tohwalt said. “Nothing survives outside without a suit.” He turned to glare at the keagon, and Noll sat back down with a discontent croak. “Noll is my son’s pet.”

“Your son’s? So this is a family business?” The man craned his neck to look into the kitchen. Kewt tried to shrink to fit behind the exhaust hood. “Come out, boy!”

Tohwalt clenched his jaws. The forcer might think he had won, but there would be no easy capitulation. He would not bully us into a confession with veiled hints and suggestive stories. Noll bent into half a pretzel to ruffle an itchy feather. In the back, Kewt crowned the burger with the top bun, his fingers stiff. Normally, Tohwalt served the customers, but today, Kewt would have to do it himself.

“Don’t be shy,” the man boomed, rummaging in his underlayer’s pockets. “Come. I have something just for you.”

This was a game to him, but we could play games, too. All he had was talk, and we could handle talk. Kewt grabbed the self-heating plate and limped to the front, ducking when stepping over the threshold.

“Gosh, you’re tall,” the man said, his gaze slowly travelling up the boy’s gangly figure. “One might think you grew up in microgravity.” He let out a self-congratulatory chuckle.

“Give the boy a break,” Tohwalt said while Kewt habitually retreated deeper into his hood. “He’s as shy as one can get, and puberty hasn’t been too kind to him.”

He took the plate from Kewt and placed it before the forcer. The man barely even looked at it. He watched the boy with triumphant fascination. Kewt shoved his hands into his pockets, slouching.

“Didn’t mean to be unkind, kid,” the man said with genuine sympathy. “Teenagers are awkward. You’ll grow out of it, eventually. How old are you?”

“Thirteen, sir,” Kewt said, his voice husky. Noll stretched towards the boy, and Kewt allowed the keagon to climb onto his shoulder.

“Thirteen,” the man repeated slowly as if doing sums in his mind. “Let me have a good look at you.”

He glanced between him and his father. He would have a hard time finding similarities. Tohwalt was a bull of a man: compact and chiselled and sturdy. A fair-skinned ginger, to boot, with a full head of hair. Kewt could hide his bald scalp and his bronze scarred skin in the shadow of his hood, but that scrawny body betrayed itself from under any number of layers of baggy clothes.

“I’d never suspect you two are related. Are you adopted?” The forcer snickered unapologetically. “Your mother’s genes must be strong.”

“I never knew my mother,” the boy said. Noll settled around his neck like a boa scarf.

“We lost her in childbirth,” Tohwalt explained. Also public record, if only a little forged.

“Tragic,” the man said insincerely. “Ah, but I promised you something.”

His hand dived into his pocket and we tensed in anticipation. What would it be, an incapacitator? Noll sank his talons into Kewt’s collarbone, making the boy wince. Tohwalt eyed the nearest bottle. A good blow to the head could knock the forcer out. We could put him back into his suit. People tripped walking up that narrow pathway all the time. Surfers didn’t want a railing on it, and innocent tourists were the ones to suffer. But how long before someone else from True Dedication Blossoming came down to try again?

The man’s hand reappeared from his pocket, pulling out something long and lightweight. It came out in white, knotted strands, each node dragging the next until the entire foot-long structure was out. A fibreglass meshwork, or fragile thread woven into a net, hung from the man’s pinched fingers over the counter. What was it, a snare?

“Here,” the man said, offering it to Kewt. “Do you know what that is?”

“No.” It didn’t look dangerous.

“It’s a toy. A puzzle. Let me show you how it works.”

He shook the netting, trying to spread it out, turning it and pinching different knots. The structure was circular, or perhaps a cylinder, with a denser cluster at one side. In it, the forcer finally found the knot he was looking for. A quick twist, and the strands between the knots stiffened into rods, and the netting expanded into a dome of stretched diamonds. The man placed it carelessly on the counter. It stood on rigid points of bottom eyelets with the twisted knot on top. It looked like an overturned fruit bowl or a bizarre fishnet hat.

The forcer pointed at the top nodule. “There’s a button here that lets in a single photon. It encounters a beam-splitter and can travel into one of these tubes.” His finger touched one of the immediate rods, and it turned from translucent white to dull grey. The change of colour brought a tinge of familiarity. The man’s finger travelled to the next knot and lingered there. “It meets another splitter, and the laws of randomness decide where it goes next: left or right. Always down and never back where it came from.” He slipped down to the next crossing. “And then again and again all the way to the bottom.” As he moved, the impacted rods greyed out, and a zigzagging line of his progress remained visible. “Guessing which path the photon will actually take is about zero point one three percent. That’s the goal of the puzzle—to guess its path.” He tapped the top button, and a different zigzagging line lit up in blue. He frowned at the results. “See? I didn’t get it right. Here, you try.” He tapped the top button again to reset the game and pushed the dome towards Kewt.

Crisis or not, this thing looked interesting. The boy took an awkward lunge forward, but Tohwalt stepped in before him. He stooped to study the dome, deciding which of the twelve top-most rods to select. Noll slipped down to nestle in the apron pocket to have a better vantage point.

The forcer, almost losing interest in the entire affair, reached for his meal.

“The toy is actually based on some restored equipment from the lab,” he said, snatching a golden fry. “There were variations and variations of those things. Forensics were sure they were a part of the weapon, something working on the same principle as the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester.”

Tohwalt’s fingers froze above the first knot. “Is this a bomb?”

“No, no,” the forcer said, chuckling. “It’s just an idea that you could, with the right setup, know if a bomb is real or a dud—in half the time when you don’t blow yourself up, which is also a fifty-fifty chance.” He pointed at the net. “The scientists thought this must be some even cleverer setup to test things without direct access.” He shook his head, and his gaze landed on Kewt. “But I think they were wrong. I think Spec-84 wasn’t an object at all.”

The man surely knew more than we were comfortable with. But did he have enough evidence for a direct accusation? Tohwalt poked the toy, submitting his guess. The blue line flashed on the opposite side of the dome. Kewt hovered over Tohwalt, impatient to have a go, Noll’s green head poking out of his apron.

“I think,” the forcer went on, and we caught a twinkle of stale resentment—there and gone again in a flash, “all those poor clones weren’t just consumables to test the weapon on. They were the weapon. And those things—” He gestured at the toy without looking. “—were the measuring tape. It’s possible someone from cage number 84 could solve that puzzle.”

“You mean,” Tohwalt said without a flinch, “predict the future?”

“No, not to predict the future. Direct the photon. Decide which way it goes in the splitter. Keep up with the speed of light and manipulate superpositions.”

“Move matter, then?”

“Eventually, yes. Commanding elementary particles is a long way from moving objects. But it’s a crucial first step.”

Kewt used Tohwalt’s distraction to elbow his way to the net. While Noll squirmed under the cloth, trying to break free, the boy touched the rods in rapid succession. When he tested it, the grey and blue paths intersected, and one common rod glowed green.

“Too bad everyone in that lab died,” Tohwalt said, keeping his eyes on the forcer. The crisis was not yet a disaster.

“Well, maybe not everyone,” the forcer said, arching an eyebrow. “You see, there are a few discrepancies in the reports. Some records are missing, like which sanitary unit was assigned to deal with the lab. There are flight logs of trips the shuttle pilot doesn’t remember, and starliners leaving the system early and without passengers. It’s like someone has concealed their journey off the orbiter.”

The man was good. Tohwalt watched him, his chin inching closer to his chest. Kewt tried a different line and got another partial match at the very bottom: the photon, darting around all the wrong eyelets, ended its journey in the predicted knot. The keagon broke free, his talons scratching the counter, but the boy caught him before he reached the toy.

“You want to hear my theory?” the forcer said, lowering his voice. “I think someone in the cleanup team found a surviving clone. A little kid, hiding somewhere under the debris. Who wouldn’t rescue the poor thing? I would.” Would he, really, or was this a bluff? “I wouldn’t even report it, or it would go straight into another lab. No, I would smuggle it off. Maybe fabricate an adoption or fake a paternity test. Go somewhere quiet where nobody would bother us.”

He grinned again, triumphantly. Shamelessly.

“It wouldn’t mean the surviving clone was Spec-84,” Tohwalt said, ignoring the provocation.

“Oh, but it would. If anyone could survive the carnage, it would be the breakthrough specimen. I don’t know how he did it—maybe his powers blossomed under pressure, and he could arrange a micro-crack in the cage metal that would shatter on impact, or maybe a sympathetic staff member couldn’t bring himself to kill the miracle—but I can see Spec-84 survive. Maybe even rescue a friend, a cute pet rat from the neighbouring cage, or a keagon.” He didn’t even look at Noll stirring in Kewt’s hands. “Who better to find a perfect hiding place than a clever pest and a weaponized toddler? And if anyone could hack the bureaucratic encryption to forge records, it would be Spec-84.”

We marvelled at the man’s confidence. One didn’t have to hack anything if one was persuasive enough. Noll hissed, demanding freedom, and Kewt yielded, releasing the impatient keagon onto the counter.

“Interesting theory,” Tohwalt said grimly. There was little amusement in crises.

The forcer sighed, his smile slipping away, and a gash opened in his careful armour, revealing tiredness he had been nursing.

“Let’s make a deal, son,” he said, turning to Kewt, “You solve this thing, and nothing changes here, in this nice little diner, except your dad having to hire a new cook. What do you say?”

Kewt darted a scared look at Tohwalt.

“You’re joking, right?” Tohwalt said.

“No,” the forcer said with finality. “No more jokes.”

Tohwalt and Kewt exchanged glances. This was a full-blown disaster: denial or violence would only postpone the worst. Our best chance was to use the crack, however small, before the man wiped it out with his smiles.

“Play the game, boy.” The forcer gave the toy a little push. “Unless you prefer to do it the hard way, with the three of you in cages.”

We did not: dealing with one man was better than facing the entire True Dedication Blossoming.

“You’re wrong, you know,” Tohwalt said, stepping aside. “He can’t do it.”

“We’ll see.”

Tohwalt tried to pull the keagon out of Kewt’s way, but the sleek body slipped away and back onto the counter. The boy bent over the netting, perspiration misting his hooded brow. We concentrated, falling through the fissure and pulling on the available thread. The ghostly twine unspooled into a web of paths and nodules. We touched the knots, feeling the signals zipping around in a frenzy. So many to unravel. So many to tame. With an unsteady finger, Kewt marked out a meandering path. The blue line flashed, scoring him a single matching section.

“There’s a lie scale in the stats for this puzzle,” the man said wearily. “I’ll know if you try to lose on purpose.”

We peered deeper, focusing on the knots at the ends of the threads. Some swelled into megahubs of traffic, others were mere specks, barely visited. A step further, and the flocks of messengers bridged the chasms between the hubs. Deeper still, each courier broke into easy-to-nudge pinpricks. We began to work.

Kewt constructed a new grey path and the blue lightning crossed the dome in all the wrong places. Tohwalt bit his lip. Noll crept closer, his tail almost touching the forgotten meal.

“Try harder,” the man said. “Win and nobody else has to leave but you.”

We were out of practice, too comfortable in our triumvirate setup. We forgot what a mess a new mind was. The man was too old, too set in his ways, too sure of himself. Unlike the pilots or the clerks, he was too invested and determined to be persuaded to let go, to omit, to forget. Definitely too annoying to be assimilated.

Kewt picked a new route, his fingers trembling, and scored two matches. Snot stretched down from under his hood, and he sniffled. The forcer twitched, an emphatic flash crossing the oft-used pathways: failure, and helplessness, and anger at those who refused to believe him. And above it all—the fog of chronic exhaustion of keeping up the façade. This was our way in.

“I can’t do this,” Kewt pleaded, dragging the back of his palm under his nose. The motion triggered more tears, and he cowered in embarrassment.

“Stop it!” Tohwalt growled, reaching to protect the boy.

We tickled the opened-up knots. That mind was too stiff to change, but even stiff could settle.

“Whoever you think he is, whatever you want him to do—” Tohwalt began, but a lump in his throat cut his speech short.

We rode the words, aiming for an overworked juncture: he had been right. He, whom nobody on True Dedication Blossoming took seriously, who had to don the mask of a jester to keep his unhinged ideas, was right about everything: the nature of Spec-84, the surviving clone, the altered records. A cathartic wave washed the fringes of his mind. This was our chance, or we’d only have made things worse.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tohwalt said, finding his voice again. “Can’t you see? The boy can’t do it.”

Kewt mopped up his cheeks with both hands, and his hood slipped down. The dark scars that crossed his scalp looked like stripes on the hide of an animal. He stood there, a hunched, bawling creature. Noll cooed at him from the counter. We tickled a gateway, and the forcer looked down. That poor, poor thing. The circuit closed: he was right about everything, except one thing—whatever the breakthrough powers were, the boy no longer had them.

Some loose ends were too frayed to be tied up.

The man reached for the plate and bit into his burger. We nudged a speck, and the signal found a shortcut, bypassing the habitual channel of chronic anguish. With each motion of the man’s jaw, his face relaxed. The new flare persisted: even if it changed nothing in the end, he had been right. In an old, exhausted landscape, a satisfaction groove was forming.

“It’s a damn good burger,” he said. “Five stars, indeed.”

We retreated, letting the settling tangle go.

The crisis was over. After an awkward moment of indecision, Kewt hobbled back to the kitchen to drown his sniffles in the rumble of a dishwasher. Tohwalt stood about, ready to hold the fort if the conversation sparked back into life, but the man chewed in silence, completely engrossed in his food. Eventually, Tohwalt shuffled back to the corner and picked up his breaker. Only Noll kept the forcer company, watching the man with his head tilted, using one eye and then the other. The man didn’t stare back. He finished his meal, paid in Coalition credits, and stood up to leave.

“Your toy,” Tohwalt shouted after him when the man was at the door.

The man just waved his hand without looking back.

The keagon stretched up to stand tall and see the visitor off. When the airlock swallowed the man’s suited figure, Noll shook himself off and hopped to the toy. Careful in his aim, he pecked out a giant, regular rhombus: two diverging lines, taking their origin in the neighbouring rods at the top knot, turning inwards in the middle of the dome, and meeting at the same point down at the counter. It cost us little effort to persuade the beam-splitter to let the photon travel up. The keagon reached to poke the submit button, and all grey rods flickered to glow green, the photon bouncing in a loop. Noll croaked in content. Now, this was what we called proper entertainment.

And why it doesn't need your permission to exist

There's a word we use constantly and almost never examine.

We say people deserve to be treated with dignity. We say institutions fail to honor it. We say certain acts violate it. We use it to end arguments, to anchor moral claims, to explain why something felt wrong even when we can't say exactly what the rule was that got broken.

But ask someone what dignity *is* and the conversation usually gets vague fast.

That vagueness matters. Because if dignity is just a feeling, a kind of emotional comfort we grant each other when we're in the mood, then it can be withdrawn. It can be conditional. It can be reserved for the people we decide deserve it today. That version of dignity isn't worth much. It certainly can't do the moral work we keep asking it to do.

So let's try to get this right.

What dignity is not

Start with what it isn't, because the confusions here are doing real damage.

Dignity is not decorum. You can lose your composure entirely: you can weep, rage, fall apart, and your dignity remains intact. Conversely, someone can treat you with perfect surface politeness while doing something that systematically denies your worth as a person. Dignity has nothing to do with how you carry yourself in a room.

Dignity is not status. There's an older use of the word that means something like the respect owed to a position: a judge's dignity, a president's dignity. That usage has almost inverted in modern moral thought. The point now is that dignity belongs equally to everyone regardless of position. The judge and the person standing before the judge have the same inherent worth, even if the courtroom doesn't reflect that.

Dignity is not something you earn. This one is harder to accept because we live inside systems that behave as if worth is a reward for performance. You earn a promotion. You earn respect. You earn the right to be heard. All of that may be true at the level of social dynamics. None of it is true at the level of what a person fundamentally is. Dignity is not a prize. It doesn't accumulate. It doesn't deplete.

The claim that matters

Here is the claim worth taking seriously: dignity is the inherent worth of a person that exists independently of whether anyone recognizes it.

Not earned. Not conferred. Not dependent on how you behave, what you've accomplished, who you know, or what any institution says about you.

This sounds either obvious or radical depending on your starting point. If it sounds obvious, consider how rarely our actual systems operate this way. If it sounds radical, consider what the alternative is: that worth is something assigned, which means it can be unassigned, which means some people can be legitimately treated as having less of it, which means the history of slavery, genocide, and systematic dehumanization wasn't a failure to recognize something real. It was just a community making a choice.

Most of us don't actually believe that. The intuition that those were *wrongs* rather than just *different arrangements* is almost universal. The question is what underwrites that intuition. What has to be true for it to be correct?

The philosophical problem

For dignity to be real in the way the intuition requires, it has to exist prior to any government, any legal system, any social contract. It can't be something that societies create and therefore get to revoke. Philosophers call this being *pre-political*: the worth is there before any institution gets involved, and institutions are supposed to recognize it rather than manufacture it.

But that raises an uncomfortable question. If dignity doesn't depend on social recognition, what does it depend on? What makes it real?

There are several serious answers to this question. Kant argued that dignity belongs to any being capable of reasoning and acting according to self-given principles. Theological traditions ground it in being made in the image of God. Phenomenological philosophers locate it in the sheer fact of being a subject with an interior life, a being for whom experience is happening. Each of these gives dignity an anchor that doesn't require any particular society's agreement.

Each also has vulnerabilities. Kant's account struggles with people whose rational capacities are severely limited. The theological account requires a premise not everyone shares. The phenomenological account has to work out exactly where the threshold is.

But here's something important: you don't have to fully resolve the metaphysics to have a strong case. There's a different kind of argument available that doesn't depend on settling these debates.

What we can actually demonstrate

In the last several decades, researchers across psychology, neuroscience, developmental science, and trauma studies have been mapping something that philosophers have been claiming for centuries.

When people are treated as having inherent worth, specific things happen. Threat responses in the brain deactivate. The capacity for complex thinking expands. People engage more honestly, cooperate more readily, take more genuine accountability for their actions. Something opens up that was closed before.

When people are treated as objects, as instruments, as beings whose worth is conditional or negligible, different things happen. Trauma responses activate. The sense of self fragments. The ability to trust, to imagine a future, to access one's own agency is compromised. These effects are measurable, they are replicable, and they are not trivial. They show up in the body. They show up in development. They can persist for years.

This is not just about how bad it feels to be humiliated. The damage goes deeper and operates differently. Researchers studying what they call *moral injury* (the wound that results from experiencing or perpetrating serious violations of one's moral framework) find that it produces a distinct pattern of harm: not just psychological distress but damage to the structures through which people make meaning, maintain identity, and navigate trust. The architecture of selfhood gets disrupted.

What this means is that dignity isn't only a philosophical claim. It's a description of how persons are actually organized. People are built in such a way that being treated as having worth is not a luxury or a preference. It's a condition for the kind of functioning we associate with a genuinely human life.

Why this matters for the pre-political question

Here's where the empirical evidence does philosophical work.

If dignity were purely a social construct, something we agree to extend to each other because it's convenient or pleasant, then the harm of its violation would be essentially symbolic. Breaking a convention. Failing to perform a norm. Unpleasant, but not categorically different from other social failures.

But the harm of dignity violation isn't symbolic. It's structural. It reorganizes how a person functions. It disrupts the systems through which they know themselves, trust others, and participate in the world. That kind of harm doesn't happen because a convention was broken. It happens because something real was attacked.

And if something real was attacked, then what was attacked was real before the attack. The recognition of dignity isn't what makes it real. It's a response to what was already there. When we fail to recognize someone's dignity, we aren't simply declining to confer a benefit. We are failing to respond accurately to a fact about them, and causing harm in direct proportion to that failure.

Three arguments, one conclusion

This is the point where it's worth stepping back to name what has actually happened in this essay, because it's easy to miss and it matters.

We have arrived at the same conclusion from three entirely different directions.

The first is a *philosophical* argument. It starts from the practice of moral reasoning itself and works backward. Any serious attempt to argue about who deserves what, or what counts as a wrong, presupposes some standard not invented by the people doing the arguing. You can't contest dignity claims without implicitly appealing to a ground that precedes the contest. Dignity, on this account, has to function as pre-political because the alternative is self-undermining. This argument doesn't require you to be religious, or Kantian, or to have read a word of philosophy. It just requires you to take your own moral reasoning seriously.

The second is a *naturalistic* argument. It starts from what we can observe about human beings and works outward. Persons are not organized the way we'd expect if dignity were merely a social preference. The damage produced by dignity violation is too specific, too consistent, and too deep. It tracks the nature of the being, not the preferences of the community. This argument doesn't require metaphysics. It requires paying attention to what actually happens to people when they are treated as objects versus as persons.

The third is a *logical* argument about what violation requires. If dignity violation produces real harm, then what was violated was real before the violation. You can't meaningfully attack something that doesn't exist. The harm is the evidence. This argument closes the gap between the first two: it shows that the philosophical necessity and the empirical reality are pointing at the same thing.

Now here is the part that deserves to be stated plainly, because in both philosophy and science it represents a significant kind of evidence.

When independent lines of reasoning, starting from different premises, using different methods, and developed within different traditions, all arrive at the same conclusion, that convergence is not coincidental. In science, we call this *triangulation*, and we treat it as stronger evidence than any single study could provide, precisely because the agreement can't be explained by shared assumptions or shared methods. In philosophy, convergence across traditions, across centuries, and across radically different starting points is one of the primary ways we distinguish claims that track something real from claims that merely reflect the prejudices of a particular time or place.

The claim that persons have inherent worth has been arrived at independently by rational philosophy, by theological reflection, by phenomenological investigation, by developmental psychology, by trauma research, and by the internal logic of what violation requires. These fields don't share methods. They don't share foundational assumptions. They don't even share a vocabulary. And yet they keep finding the same thing.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, about as strong a warrant as arguments about human nature ever get.

What gets violated

One more thing worth naming precisely.

When a person's dignity is violated, something is attacked but not destroyed. The torturer does not actually succeed in removing the person's worth. They succeed in *denying and attacking* it, which is a different thing. The worth is still there. The violation is real, and its effects are real, but the ground of personhood that was attacked persists.

This is why we can say, without contradiction, that historical atrocities were wrong in absolute terms. The people subjected to slavery had dignity. It was being denied. That denial was a wrong, not a legitimate social arrangement that we later decided we preferred not to maintain. The wrongness was always there, whether or not the surrounding society recognized it.

Dignity, in other words, is not contingent on recognition. Recognition is a response to dignity. When recognition fails, it is a failure of perception, not evidence that there was nothing to perceive.

Why it matters that we get this right

Most of the systems people live inside every day are not designed with this understanding. They are designed, often quite deliberately, around conditional worth. You matter here if you produce. You belong here if you comply. Your perspective counts here if it has the right credentials. Your suffering registers here if it fits the right category.

Those designs are not neutral. They are not just efficient. They are not an unfortunate necessity. They are a choice, and the choice has costs that are borne by real people, measured in real damage, and traceable to the decision to treat persons as instruments rather than as the kinds of beings whose worth precedes and exceeds their usefulness.

The good news, and there is good news, is that the alternative is also demonstrable. Designs that recognize dignity produce different outcomes. Not just nicer outcomes. More functional, more sustainable, more genuinely productive outcomes. The case for dignity-centered design is not only moral. It is empirical. It is practical. It is structural.

But it starts here, with this: dignity is not a feeling we grant each other when we're inclined to be generous.

It is a feature of what persons are.

And it was there before any of us decided what to do about it.

*This essay is part of the Dignity by Design series, developing the theoretical and practical foundations of Dignity-Centered Behavioral Design.*

The first time I ever said this aloud was during a creative nonfiction workshop in Beirut. The final exercise of the full-day workshop was to share a personal story with a partner. Then, we would write our partner’s story as best we could. As I sat on a couch in a living room in Achrafieh, I talked for a solid 15 minutes. Afterward, we all promised that we would finish the stories we heard and share them with the class. My partner never finished Sufyan’s story or shared it.

One of my biggest regrets is not recording myself telling this story for the first time to another human being. After 15 years, I am still the only keeper of this memory. I have a book that meant something to a young boy I barely knew. It sits in my library between Arabian Sands and Things Fall Apart.

My school in Abu Dhabi had around 5,000 students from KG1 to Grade 12, which was huge by my standards. Still, a surprising number of faces grew familiar, and certain students stood out from the crowd.

Sufyan was not in my class. He was a year older, chubby with a wide, white face, and taller than me, but shorter than most of the other boys. I knew him by his first name and by his reputation. He was excellent at school with near-perfect SAT scores and was expected to break school records in the IB exams and final grades. But I thought he was weird, and I noticed that he did not have a usual group to hang out with, the way the rest of us did.

That’s the only part I can talk about with confidence. Everything from this point on is hazy. I am not sure what’s real, what’s impression, and what’s my brain filling in the details. It has been 15 years, and I have not made the effort to remember more.

He approached me during recess. I was standing by the stage in the playground with my girlfriends. He struck up a conversation asking how I was liking the IB program, the program we’d both chosen for our last two years. He was calm, and smiley, and weird. My girlfriends drifted away to keep hanging out, and I was left talking with him. I did not want to shut him down and hurt his feelings, so we tried to find some common topics, but there wasn’t much.

He was planning to attend McGill University in Canada to study linguistics. I was going back home to Lebanon to study some engineering major. We tried to find common ground in the books we read, but that was a lost cause. He was not reading Vampire Academy or the Bridgerton Series, which I was into in 2011. He mentioned that he read a lot of Arabic books, and I mentioned that I didn’t, but that I kept trying to get into Arabic literature.

I told him I had not read an Arabic book that was just a story. All Arabic literature seemed to me to be too much about everything else. About being Arab, about the political situation of the Arab world, about the war between east and west. I lived this reality every single day. I wanted to read a story about two people in a fantasy world that had nothing to do with my own.

He understood and recommended a book, Thakirat el Jasad (Memory of the Flesh) by Ahlam Mosteghanemi.

A few days later, we met again during recess and he gave me the book.

Around that time, he also added me on Facebook and we started a light conversation there. From my perspective, he was weird, and I had nothing in common with him. But he did send me a piece he wrote for his Arabic class. I’ve lost that piece in the ether of the internet, but I do remember some parts of it.

It was a short piece around 1,500 Arabic words. The main character is a teenage boy with strict parents. Every day, he goes to the street market with his father and sees a proud beggar woman sitting silently on the side of the street. He admires the woman and her dark skin. He wants to talk to her, learn more about her. One day, the boy gathers his courage. While his father is distracted, he slips away and goes to the woman. He throws a coin at her feet, leans down and pecks her lips quickly, then runs. His father catches him and gives him a thrashing, but the boy still thinks his adventure was worth it.

It was a well-written piece, at least to my 15-year-old self. But at the time, I thought it was weird. Why would he share it with me? But now, I get it. He was not weird. He was normal. To write a piece, to pour parts of yourself into it, is normal. To share it and hope someone would read it and understand it is normal. After all, here I am writing and wishing someone would read and understand what I wrote.

What else did my teenage self not understand about this boy?

I kept Thakirat el Jasad with me, but I never got around to reading it.

A few weeks passed with the occasional brief conversation between us whenever we passed each other. Sometimes, I would spend days without seeing him.

Then, one morning, I got to school and everything was buzzing. Rumors were going around that Sufyan had died. I did not believe it. But during morning assembly, while we were lined up, no national anthem played. Instead, the high school principal stood on stage in the playground, the same stage where I first talked to him, and told us that a dear student had passed away, and that we would stand for a minute of silence for his soul.

Over the next few days, his classmates went in groups to visit his family and offer their condolences. I considered going, but could not find a reason to. No one knew that I even talked to him. If I went, what would I even say? His parents didn’t know me. So, I did not go, and listened to the rumors.

They said that Sufyan had committed suicide, but his parents were hushing it up. We all understood. If anyone admitted it was suicide, Sufyan would not be buried with religious rites. We all knew someone who killed themselves, but the story was changed or denied. It’s enough that they died. Why make the family suffer the humiliation and added grief of having a loved one who had betrayed God the Almighty?

There were also rumors that his parents were fanatically religious. They also said that they were harsh, and not particularly loving, toward their son. So I wondered if they hated him. I still wonder. Do they believe his death is a sin against God? Do they think him unworthy of peace and heaven? I wonder if anyone remembers him and prays for his soul?

Life moved on, and the book stayed with the few books I had at home. I actively avoided it all through high school.

After graduating high school, I moved permanently from Abu Dhabi to Jbeil in Lebanon to attend university. I had to leave so many childhood toys and trinkets behind. There was only so much I could take with me. But I did pack the book and unpacked it in a small university dorm. It lived there for four years with my three roommates and me. Whenever I came across it, I would look at the book, fiddle with it, and put it back. I’m pretty sure I did not read it, and never tried to.

When I moved back home after graduation to live with my parents and sister, I took the book with me and placed it in a small glass cabinet that was my first personal library. It stayed there for another six years. My eyes would drift toward it every time I passed by. I tried reading it multiple times, but I don’t remember how far I got or if I ever finished it.

Three years ago, I got married and moved into a beautiful apartment to live with my husband. I brought the book with me and placed it in my new library. It now sits in the game room, in a glass cupboard with my grown-up collection of books. For the first time, it seems comfortable within the world around it.

A year into my marriage, I finally told my husband the story. We had been together six years. But he is my life partner now. My partner should know what I hold, especially if it’s something I’ve held for 15 years and will keep holding for the rest of my life.

He is okay with keeping it. Like me, he thinks it would be rude to throw it away. That boy gave it to me. It must have meant something, even if I don’t know what.

And I worry. I worry. I worry. What if his parents hate him, and never mention him in their prayers? What if he has no siblings or cousins to remember him? What if all his classmates continue living their lives and he never crosses their mind?

What if I am the only one who remembers him? And this. this. this is all I know about him?

But I do remember him. I remember his face, vaguely. I remember that he wanted to study linguistics — a major I knew nothing about. I still don’t know anyone who actually studied it. I remember that he loved reading and writing, especially in Arabic. I remember that he was a boy who tried to talk to a girl on a school playground under the stifling Emirati sun. I remember that when the girl complained about wanting to like Arabic literature, he thought to give her a book that might change her opinion. I remember that he sent her a story he wrote on Facebook and hoped she would read it.

I still have not read the book he gave me, but now I think I could. Now, I think I should.

A Short Story.

Part 1: The Mechanism of Wanting

Waves crashed and rolled down the surf, raking across the yellow sand. The water would rush back and curl up, tensing like a lion ready to pounce. Then in a rush and flurry of foam it would crash once more on the Castaway’s little beach.

The Castaway sat there. His dark hair and beard were the definition of scraggly. His skin was tan, and his clothes were tattered, and yet he was still more boy than man. He looked from one end of the beach to the other. It stretched north and south. The sunlight was just beginning to touch its edges, softening them with a warm gold.

Far off to the north there stood the ruins of some mansion. An abandoned palace high atop a bluff. The place stands as a monument to a forgotten memory and the fearsome force of the sea. The Castaway thought of the building’s concrete columns, the piles of shattered glass, and the little white and gray cat that roamed the overgrown grounds.

“If I sit here long enough, will the sea-spray and the sea air, and the sea salt wear me down in the same way?” The boy wondered aloud. Could it be true that the Castaway was just as apart, just as isolated, and just as forgotten as that old estate?

The coldness of the morning stirred the Castaway to move. Sunlight had started to claim a patch of sand to the south. The Castaway picked himself up and walked in that direction. He was hunched over from the cold. He settled into the sand, which was still a little damp from high tide. The boy traced his finger across the ground, absentmindedly etching intricate designs into the Earth.

As the sun began to warm him, the Castaway found that his mind had drifted far away. He could take refuge in his memories. But he never did. He could sit there, comforted by the joyous, the sweet, and the heartwarming moments of his past. But he never did. He barely gave the past a glance, instead he would focus on all the things that never happened. All he thought about was what he hoped would happen.

Faces from the past were morphed and molded into new companions. Some shared the same words and mannerisms as their old selves, but most didn’t. Most just sounded like the Castaway. Were they pretentious? Were they solemn or silly? He was alone, so was there really any way to tell?

These new imaginary organisms would say all the words the Castaway was longing to hear.

“I know you, down to your bones and back,” one face said, framed by brown curls.

“Everything you will ever need is inside of you,” another cheered, beaming like the sun.

“You’re not who you used to be, and that’s okay. I accept who you were and who you will be,” one with wrinkles said.

The newly manufactured memories centered on the Castaway, finally giving him everything he felt he lacked. Sometimes the boy drummed up deep words aimed at healing old wounds. Other times, the Castaway would spend hours constructing conversations about nothing; small talk with no aim other than whittling away time.

“Shadows are strange, they sway back and forth with the wind, pretending to be affected by it.”

“Do you think birds are flying around, dipping and diving for the fun of it? Or to show off for us?”

“Would you want to live forever?”

Sometimes the Castaway would spend hours focusing on nothing more than these fake conversations. He would imagine returning home and just talking about the little things like how he cracked open a coconut with his bare hands, or how he had burnt himself while learning to build a fire.

He imagined it all so often, the fictions had become more like memories. The funny thing was that he had 25 years of home-made movies to play and replay in his head, but he never ever did. The real memories were always outweighed by the artificial ones.

As his rough hands slipped across a surface dotted with tiny pebbles and shattered shells, the Castaway’s brain grasped for an old phrase. It took a moment, and then he found it. “The Grass is always Greener.” Could that explain why he only ever seemed to focus on the things that never actually happened?

The feeling of cold cut through the boy’s musings once more. It was still early in the morning, the sun was barely up, and he had been stationary too long. The Castaway stood up, shaking off the thoughts he had gotten lost in. He started to walk. His bare feet clomped through the wet sand. The sun was on his slightly sore shoulders, and it was on a rocky outcropping just down the beach from him.

The sea had long ago cut its way through a towering cliff on the southern edge of the beach. Nature had carved out a cave for itself. The Castaway could imagine the kind of force required to tear into rock. Every night, when the waves were high, he could hear them hit upon the boulders like thunder; bold, loud, and certainly shattering.

The Castaway had never entered the cave. Every day curiosity would drive him close to its entrance. Every day the waves would crash and water would rush inside, tearing and whirling into the stone chamber with terrifying force. It always seemed too dangerous to enter. One step into that flooded chamber could spell disaster.

Normally, the Castaway would gaze at the dark entrance for a while, and then walk back down the beach in search of food, or to occupy himself with some other survival-oriented task. That’s what would normally happen.

The Castaway blinked. He thought he saw dancing silhouettes. People? In the cave? His ears strained. He thought he caught a song and sweet laughter echoing out of the cold cave. The song sounded like it was coming from a speaker. The laughs sounded like a group was enjoying a beach day, lounging around and cracking up over little things.

Without hesitation, and with very little forethought, the Castaway rushed in. He had never dared enter. Now, it was all he wanted. What if it was people? What if the Cave had an exit on the other side, and he had just never known about it? His old world could be just around the corner.

Part 2: The Mechanism of Drowning

The water was knee high, and as the Castaway splashed through it, he shouted “Hello! Is anyone here? Please is-” his voice failed him.

The rocky interior was dim, yet clearly empty. The only two things inside the cave were the Castaway, and the swirling sea water. It churned and churned. The tide rushed in as waves crashed outside. The water started to deepen dramatically. It whirled around the Castaway’s waist like a vortex, sucking at him with startling strength.

The force was too much. In an instant, the Castaway lost his balance, and then his footing. He toppled. The water, now a whirlpool, slammed him into rough rock walls. Salt stung his lips. The Castaway clung to a stone. He fought the tide with all his might, digging his feet into the sand.

The water sucked at him, the stone was slick, too slick to hold on to. The water was rushing out of the cave, back out to the endless sea. The pull was overwhelming! His legs trembled. As he held on for dear life, the Castaway’s eyes scanned the dim interior of the cave, hoping he had missed something. He really was the only one there. His eyes strained, searching for a second exit, or for some other sign of a world beyond the rocks.

It was a dead end, and it didn’t even matter anymore. The seawater rushing out of the cave was too much to withstand. The Castaway lost his grip on the rocks. In that same moment, a chunk of driftwood collided with his shin! Pain and fear shot through the Castaway as he was swiftly pulled underwater and out of the cave.

The Castaway twisted and tumbled in the undertow. He was raked along the ground. His lungs screamed. He was dizzy and scared, and everything was a blur- then his head collided with a rock. For a moment everything was black and blank, and then he saw a single vision: brown benches, and a big room. Voices were discussing, debating, something obscure. The Castaway saw a boy with his face and his eyes, a dark suit, and soft hands.

Pain exploded in the Castaway’s brain, shattering the memory. His face slammed against something rough and hard. His body scraped against rocks and sand. Water was in his lungs. Everything felt cold. Everything sounded loud and vague. He was choking and completely unable to fight the current. Then, with a series of helpless tumbles, he was back above the waves, back on land. The sea spat him out onto shore like a rag-doll. The Castaway lay on his little beach, coughing, gasping and exhausted. In his mind, he caught another dim glimpse of that faraway room. Parking Tickets. That’s what they had been debating.

He lay there, crumpled and half drowned. The roar of the waves seemed a world away. The boy could taste salt and blood. He clung to the sand for what felt like hours. He was bruised, battered, and bleeding.

His breathing was labored. He was face down in golden sand. It was warm against his cheek. Slowly, that warmth seemed to creep into him. Eventually, the boy glanced up at his surroundings. A crab, squat and ugly, waddled past. There were flecks of purple on the creature’s shell. The Castaway watched the crab pass by with a strange fixation. There was something reassuring about it.

“Life goes on,” he said to himself meekly. With that, the boy rolled over. He lay on his back a while, watching the sun trace a course through an infinite blue canvas.

At some point, the Castaway heard a bird cry. He sat up. His ribs were sore, and his cuts stung. The boy knew that he should tend to his wounds soon, but for the moment, he was still too weak. He was still too broken.

A bird soared out over the ocean, then out of nowhere, it did a backwards flip, and plunged straight down, towards the waves. In the half-second before it hit water, the bird flipped once more, and came to rest lightly, and calmly, upon the rolling sea.

The boy watched the bird for a while. He thought it might be a pelican of some sort, but he couldn’t be sure. Nature had never held much of an interest for him, at least not in his old life.

A few other pelicans arrived at the scene. They executed the same maneuvers as the first. The Castaway stared at the aeronautics display. His attention then shifted to how blue the horizon was. The sea and sky just seemed to stretch on forever, and the two great planes contained a hundred shades of blue. There was a distinct beauty to it.

A crab waddled by a second time, and the Castaway cracked a smile. Finally, he got up, ready to live again.

That night, the Castaway lay down to sleep. His fire was glowing warm, red, and low. He lay on his bruised back and looked up at the sky. It was funny how familiar the stars had become. In all the sleepless nights he had once spent wandering the streets of his concrete jungle, he had rarely ever looked up to see the stars. Now the twinkling lights were his most dependable, most constant companions. The night’s face had become familiar.

The boys back in the billiards hall on 29th knew nothing about the stars. They had all spent their nights smoking and drinking, dreading Monday morning. None of them knew how to build a fire, or make medicine out of herbs and leaves, or gut a fish. Now the Castaway had become Captain Ahab, and Prometheus, and Tarzan, and he had learned to love those stars.

As his fire died down that night, the Castaway finished a chapter of his newly started novel. A battered notebook and pen were some of the only possessions he had successfully scavenged from his wreck. The novel was really more of an auto-biographical diary. The boy figured that if he was going to sit here, with his heart and brain ticking away, he might as well mark the time. He might as well use the time to create something.

The latest chapter had been all about his fears. He had been terrified earlier that day while tumbling around underwater. That was a different breed of fear than the kind he was familiar with. It came and it went, just like the tide. After the waves slammed the boy back on the shore, the danger had quickly receded, and so had the fear.

A life time ago, the Castaway used to curl up on the floor of his bedroom. He would be physically fine, with no scrapes or scratches to treat on the surface, but on the inside, the boy was filled with turmoil.

He always did his best. He would work hard, he would strive to carry his responsibilities with excellence, but no matter how hard he tried, anxiety would still gnaw away at him.

Most days he was okay, he could bounce from worry to worry, tackling each with a cool confidence. He would rush around his life paying bills, running errands, and putting out fires. He would stay up late, ironing his shirts for court, working long into the night, and pushing sleep away so that he could breathe for just a little while longer.

Sometimes though, the weight of his worries would get to be just a little too much.

In his novel, the Castaway wrote: “I used to call in sick. I’d pick some excuse that they can’t really disprove, like a bad headache or a nauseous stomach. The lie and the idea of missing work would make me anxious, but in those moments, I was already feeling the weight of a thousand tiny anxieties. What’s 1 or 2 more? On those days, I’d wake up with plenty of time to get ready and go to work, but I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to. I’d lie down on my floor from 7 am to around Noon, doing absolutely nothing other than letting the fear wash over me. That kind of fear was infectious, it got in and it never seemed to leave. I would usually fall asleep around 12 pm, just lying there. I’d drift off, and then wake up at 1 or 2 in the afternoon. Unravel. I’d haul myself back up, out of the depths, and go off to get some fresh air.”

Those moments seemed unpredictable yet inevitable. Surprisingly, the Castaway could not recall a single incident like that in the 212 days he had spent on the little beach.

As he lay down to sleep, the Castaway tucked his manuscript and his ball point pen into a rough-hewn bag woven together from plant fibers. The pen was drying up, but the Castaway was unbothered. He’d started a method of crushing berries into ink. It stained his fingers, but the fragrance was sweet and comforting.

His eyes closed. He rubbed his sore, toned arms. He drifted off to sleep.

All of a sudden, the Castaway heard a great boom cut through the night. The Castaway’s eyes snapped open, he jumped and whirled about. It wasn’t just a large wave. The noise had seemed louder, and larger. It practically shook the world. The Castaway wondered for a moment if he had washed up on Bikini Atoll and a wave of radiation was about to wipe him out. His eyes scanned the dark beach before him.

There was a massive, hulking shape on the shore. The Castaway felt drawn toward the monolith. As he approached, he glanced up at the stars. They started to swirl. The Castaway was shocked to discover the shape on the beach was an impossibly huge tortoise. The creature was larger than a car. It was beached and bleeding. Blood poured from a gash in its over-sized neck.

The Castaway’s green eyes widened, trying to make sense of what was before him. The tortoise lay there, eyes closed, fins spread out, crimson blood dripping onto stark white sand. As he examined the Tortoise’s neck wound, the Castaway shuddered to think what could have killed such a large creature.

Then, the Tortoise opened its eyes and stared at the boy. “Who were you before your parents were born?” the Tortoise asked calmly, in a voice as deep as the blue.

The next moment the Castaway awoke. He was on his makeshift bedroll, beside his burnt-out fire. The sun was just starting to rise.

Part 3: The Mechanism of Searching

The Castaway was filled with questions, but if there was ever anyone to ask, they were long gone. He was exploring the ruins once more. That old palace to the north had caught his eye the first day he washed up on his little beach.

He had scoured the abandoned grounds so many times, searching for a hint of a connection to the outside world. To his old world. Today, he was just curious about who once lived there.

Whoever built the place liked painted murals of fruit and plants. An abandoned kitchen, one of two, was decorated with images of glass bowls filled with yellow mangoes, pink pomegranates, and dark purple grapes. It was the kind of still-life art you make in the 2nd grade, as an art teacher with a permanent scowl and frizzy hair peers over your shoulder and analyzes your work through half-moon spectacles.

The Castaway searched the abandoned mansion for hours. There was an old dial-up telephone, cream colored, with a cord that went nowhere. Every time he visited, the boy would pick it up with his dirty, calloused hands, dial numbers and ask for pizza deliveries. He'd make prank calls. He remembered making those same prank calls a very long time ago with a group of friends. The pimple-clad teens would laugh and laugh. A woman with a severe tone, and no doubt, an even more severe look than that old art teacher called them “impolite” and “rude”. There isn’t much use for words like that when the only person you have talked to in a long while is a dreamt-up talking tortoise.

The Castaway continued his exploration, but his thoughts lingered on the old telephone and those silly jokes. As he wandered through the forgotten rubble and worn-down opulence he thought about how truly empty jokes can be when you have no one to share them with. The boy could not remember laughing once in all the time he had been marooned here. There isn’t anything to laugh about when you are alone, he figured.

The boy moved on to another room. The mansion was a collection of five buildings, connected by gardens and paths. His favorite spot to visit was a tower, painted white and blue, and perched on top of a spacious living room. The tower had an outdoor staircase; A series of stone beams, stabbed horizontally into the wall. The stairs spiraled up and around the tower. Gaps of empty air separated each step.

When the Castaway reached the top this time, he was surprised to see the little gray-white cat curled up and looking like the definition of tranquility. The boy couldn’t imagine that tiny cat could ever be big enough to jump its way up the stairs. Nonetheless, here it was, at the top of the tower, overlooking a rolling ocean.

“Nature finds a way, I guess.” The Castaway mused. He sat down beside the soft creature. It jumped into his lap. He began talking to it tenderly. “Do you, have any special messages for me?”

The cat yawned, and a part of the Castaway thought that the tortoise’s same deep, calm voice might roll out of the cat’s mouth. He had been pondering that dream all day. Something about the tortoise’s words had struck a chord deep inside the boy.

Living alone on his Little Beach, the boy often felt like he was still adrift out on the ocean. With each day he would drift farther and farther from that bar on 29th, and from his cramped apartment. His parent’s modest suburban home might as well have been on another planet at this point. The hulking creature’s questions had reminded the Castaway of how far away he really was. Not just from his old home, but from his old self.

“Am I who used to be?” The Castaway asked the cat, staring deeply into its almond-shaped eyes. About 2 weeks after the Castaway washed ashore, he had begun to feel as though the isolation was scraping off chunks of his identity. He felt like he was forgetting who he used to be and how his mind used to work. His old priorities had been wiped away. The little things like his Social Security number and his bosses’s birthday had fallen out of his head. He had even started thinking about things differently.

For the first few months, the boy would still have the occasional dream about being late to work, or discovering that he was still in college and that it was time for finals. At a certain point, those dreams just fell away. The boy didn’t even notice it. However, he had noticed that he had begun to treat somethings differently. His father had always hated hunting and fishing. The Castaway used to feel the same way, but now he would gut a fish and feel a sense of pride in himself.

His mother had conditioned him to avoid the ocean. Yesterday, when the Castaway was laying on that beach, bleeding and half-drowned, he thought that his mother couldn’t have been more correct, and that she should have warned him about caves too. But in truth, the Castaway had reached a certain level of confidence with the water. He would go for morning and mid-afternoon swims. Sometimes he would even go out in the wild dark and feel wholly at home. The feeling of cool water had become so familiar, it was like a second skin.

He could balance atop the waves with a certain grace, and when they would get violent, his heart would leap with anticipation more often than fear.

The ways in which the Castaway used to identify himself had fallen away.

“I don’t… well, I think I’m quieter than I used to be,” The Castaway confided in his little friend. The cat just meowed lazily in response.

“I don’t know, maybe I was. I mean, I certainly didn’t use to talk to animals so much.” The boy joked. “It’s becoming a habit.” The cat got up, stretched, and began walking off. The Castaway barely noticed.

“I wonder, if I live here for 30 years and then go home… I wonder, will it feel like home? I just mean… well, take my parents for example,” the boy started to monologue, like he was back in court building an argument. “They raised me, knew me, and influenced me for 25 years. If I spend 30 years out here, alone, with just nature and this little beach for parents, then which set raised me? If I spend the next 50 years out here, and everything from before is a distant memory, then would any of it matter as much as the life I had here?”

Something inside the Castaway cracked after saying that. A wave of sadness hit him in the chest. The sadness was quickly replaced with frustration. He shot to his feet.

“Is this my life? Is this my life!” He shouted. “What… who am I supposed to be?” his voice softened for a moment. Then, another wave of frustration hit. He swung his arms about, gesturing to the world around him, and his voice took on an edge. “Is this who I am!” he demanded to know from the empty estate.

The Castaway might as well have been shouting out into the void, demanding to know if there was anyone out there. All he wanted was someone to be out there, to see him.

He slumped back down to a sitting position. His face felt hot. A sob swelled up in his chest, an emotional bubble was expanding inside of him. Just as his eyes started to warm, the bubble burst and the boy tilted his head back like he was trying to keep it above water. The Castaway stared up at the sky. It was turning from a brilliant yet pale blue to a deeper azure.

A few jungle birds, big black shapes with curved wings, soared high overhead. The sound of the waves was still there. It was always there. A rhythm that never failed. On the harder, lonelier, days, the Castaway would often turn to that rhythm for comfort. He could use it to steady his jagged breathing. That’s just what he did this time.

Sitting in that estate, the Castaway found refuge in that sky, and in the birds, and in the little cat, where it had wandered off to. He lay on his back, his hair spread out all around him. The concrete was cool against his skin. A few ants marched past. The world buzzed all around him, and the boy just lay back and watched it for a while.

As he lay there, the Castaway let the breeze enter his lungs; slow and calm. The boy took a moment, looked around, and marveled at how beautiful it all could be.

Part 4: Closing Arguments

The sunset was beautiful. A solitary, slowly sinking ball of radiance framed by sky and sea. The clouds, golden and pink, stretched out above the horizon line. The sea, shining and shimmering, rolled back and forth beneath that bright disk. It all took on an orange fire.

The Castaway, lost in the kind of isolation that frees or cuts you from all you used to know, was unbothered by the light fading from the sky.

Eventually, long after night had settled in, the boy decided it was time to go home.

The dark didn’t bother him. He calmly descended from the tower. He found the path with ease. It led out of the estate, down to the shore, and then southward along the water, across big black boulders that rolling waves would break against without a hint of hesitation or regret.

He leapt from rock to rock. There wasn’t much of a moon, so it was dark, almost too dark to see the craggy cliffs, and the waves crashing against them. It was certainly too dark to see the dead tortoise, this one average-sized, bobbing and bumping against the boulders. A harpoon, slender and silver and artificial, was sticking out of the creature's neck.

He might as well have seen it though, because his brain was already building a detailed case against the crimes of his old world. While sitting in that cracked open estate, two separate realizations had settled into the Castaway’s bones, and he was confident that once he put them into words, the boy would be gone, and the man would feel an unparalleled freedom.

The stones were sharp, and slick with sea-spray. The Castaway darted across them gracefully.

“We, the people, are thrown into the same mechanisms over and over and over. We aren’t satisfied by them because we don’t understand what drives them, and we don’t understand what drives us to them.” That was the first realization. He continued thinking, bounding from boulder to boulder as he did.

At one point, his foot slipped, but he kept his calm and his balance, and he kept going. He was unafraid of the ceaselessly slamming sea. He was completely free from parking tickets, and all the other trappings of his former existence.

“I’m still falling back on the mechanisms, but I can see them now, and I can see the world around me.” He announced as he hurtled through the night. “Curved birds, yellow sand, shadow-draped stones, roaring waves, I can see it all, and because of that I can see where I’m going.” The man stopped and felt the full weight of that second realization.

“I… I see a man, standing on a boulder, among all those other things. I see him there. He is just there, and maybe…. maybe that’s all he needs.”

Thanks to the life he had been thrust into, thanks to the little beach he had landed on, he could see his place, and that meant he could see himself. He looked so undeniably different.

He used to be a boy who would rush to the office, killing himself for his bosses approval. He used to spend hours worrying about the wrinkles in his suits, and about the best way to get the client cleared of all fees & fines. Five nights a week he would chase sleep. Then, he and his friends would spend the other two nights pushing sleep away, trying to shut it out as completely as possible.

The waves crashed against the rocks every few seconds. They sounded like thunder. The splashing sea-spray carried a taste of salt. He listened to the sea roar for a moment, and then began to giggle. Here he was, climbing across slippery rocks in the dark, completely isolated. He used to fear wrinkles and failure and a thousand other things that forced him down to his knees. The fears, the anxieties, pushed him down to the floor and twisted him into a half moon shape time and time again.

As a wave crashed, the giggle exploded into an unrestrained laugh. The Castaway threw his head back and laughed until his stomach was sore, and all he was had been peeled back. That’s what the Tortoise was trying to tell him, the man could see it now. His silly fears and his dark suit had been peeled away. Now he saw wild hair, shining eyes, and the strength that you only find at the edge of the unknown.

Part 5: In Conclusion

That night, the man had another strange dream. He was in a mahogany colored courtroom. The marble floor was covered in a layer of yellow sand, the ceiling was an inky black studded with stars that burned blue, yellow, red, and white.

The giant tortoise was back, and this time it was wearing dark colored judges robes. It sat there, right where the judge’s bench would have been.

“You have been called as a witness” The tortoise boomed.

For a moment, the Castaway couldn’t move. His feet felt frozen. Then he was suddenly at the witness stand. The tortoise was looking at him expectantly.

“I have seen the world around me.” The man said simply.

The tortoise did not move its head, but its green eyes seemed to nod in affirmation and acceptance.

“The verdict is guilty. They are guilty of wanting. They are guilty of drowning. They are guilty of searching.” The Tortoise announced. “And you too are guilty.”

A wave of relief washed over the man.

In the 16 nights that followed his moment on the rocks, the Castaway would take a dip in the ocean each and every time. He would take off all his clothes, and walk toward the dark water. On the 17th night, the ocean was cold, despite the warm night air. The man did not mind though. He dove into the black waves, a bronze body cutting its way through the dark.

Sometimes he would fall into old habits. He would sit on the beach and start drowning in his own head. He would begin to craft more fake conversations, and he would begin to fixate on all the things he lacked.

The fresh air and the constant sound of the waves would always bring him back to the present though. Bit by bit, the habits were slipping away, and when he really needed to be shaken back to reality, there was always the cold dark sea.

When he touched the cold water, and saw the fierce waves rush up to meet him, a twinge of fear would rocket through the man’s nervous system. However, he would quickly push past the fear, tense up like a lion, and then shoot forward into the dark ocean. The frigid water would rush up to the man greeting him like an old friend.

That feeling of hitting the water, rocketing through the cold, and getting swept up in the dark current, was both exhilarating and tranquil.

After just a few minutes, he would emerge from the sea, soaking wet, shivering, and feeling thoroughly, intensely, alive.

A Short, cheerful guide to doing everything you are supposed to do.

All we want is stability — but do you even know what it is? We don’t, not really. So we borrow it. We let our partners, our parents, our teachers, our friends, our neighbours, our culture, our whole country hand us their version of stable, and we wear it like it was always ours, and then we spend the rest of our lives competing over who wears it best.

It starts early, this chase, dangled in front of us like a carrot. Study hard, my parents promise, and stability comes with the grades — so I study, twelve years of it, and forget every word the moment the last exam ends. Get into a good university, my school promises, that’s where stability waits — so I grind, and I grind, and I arrive, and the emptiness waits there for me. Get a real job, silly, my lecturers laugh — and of course, that’s why I’ve been grinding all along, to finally do what I want, to leave my mark. The world is my oyster.

But how do I contribute to society by selling a sugar drink, I ask myself. And after what felt like 10,000 rejections I landed an assistant of an assistant’s job, only to find that there is a race to the top for where true stability lies. CEO — these mythical people, they say, that earn 100 times the salary of an average worker. My eyes light up.

Meanwhile my friends, parents, and relatives tell me: stability is not in being the top dog, that’s a ruthless dog-eat-dog world. Stability is in steady income and finding a loving partner! Because only marriage brings stability. Why? I ask. Because… erm… God… Yes, God says so, and also, do you want to end up alone? You have a long life ahead, young man. Yet, I see my parents spending the least amount of time with each other, unless sleeping in the same bed counts as one.

I’m married now… boy, was that a production — the perfect ring, that dress, and how many steps on the cake? And for the first time in my life, I am now in debt.

Three years have gone by… One almost still evening my partner asks — what are we doing with our lives? We need a house, a car, a second income, a side hustle, a routine, a fit life — just look at these Jean and Johns’ gram, they have it all — we need to get them too, and then, only then, will we be truly stable.

I bought my first house… well, part of it — but in 40 years’ time I’ll have owned all the bricks in it.

“Congratulations, sir! You have now truly become stable,” says the life-insurance broker — but what if you die? Or your partner? Would you want to leave them… unstable? And your unborn children — what about them? Don’t worry. Even if you die, at least the house gets paid for. Oh…by the way… it’s only £100 a month — but we’ll throw in a free T-shirt.

Boy, let me tell you how stable I really am! So stable… You should try it — you must get married! My wife adores me, I tell my friends, pouring them a pint. Actually, this is stability — I feel like I’ve made it, when I’m chatting with my friends over a pint. I have become truly stable…

Oh, it’s morning — what a blasting headache I have. Where am I? Oh, 20 missed calls. How do I get home? Where is my car? “This is a sign of a completely unstable man,” yells my wife. “You didn’t wish goodnight to your children?” Children? I have children.

I take a long look at myself in the mirror — grey hair, wrinkled face. I’m 67. Retirement age. I thought I was just 30 and starting out. When did this happen? Why am I so tired? This clearly isn’t stability! “You need to cut down on the drinking,” says my doctor. This clearly isn’t stability.

I’ve always wanted to see the world. To sing. To write something. To move someone. To simply — live. But that, I suppose, was the price of being stable. The years don’t slow; they never slow. And now I am the old man at the head of the table, and the young ones look up at me — my grandchildren, their friends, bright and unmarked and full of asking — and they want to know how to live. As a stable man, I lean in, and with all the certainty I have left, I tell them: all you must seek stability. Study hard. Find a good partner. Buy a house. Then, only then, will you be stable.

And they nod, the young ones, and tuck the words away — the way I once did. They offer their praise. They tell me I’ve made it: free of debt, free of duty, free of the weight I carried so long I mistook it for myself. Free, too, of the one thing I chased my whole life, though I never once learned its name. The house is paid. The race is run.

The dinner has been eaten and the gathered have dispersed, and in the great still quiet I ask, am I stable? No voice comes through. Nothing — and then it all comes flooding, but there is no song I sang, no place I saw, no life I lived. By every measure they ever gave me, I am a stable man. Steady as a stone, and just as empty. I have never, in all my life, felt so… unstable.

Thankyou for reading the essay, the words I used to write it was sufficient. I feel like adding more or taking out any would be waste so I am writing a long thankyou for reading my essay!

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I've only been using Substack for a few weeks now. I've been using it as a means of getting out my science fiction series of books that I've been writing in my spare time. But one of the things that's soul crushing is the fact that it feels like you have no visibility over there in the slightest.

And then you got these notes. Boy, let me tell you about these notes! These notes are annoying as all get out!

But if you're reading this, you probably know all about how annoying they are. Well, let me tell you something.

I don't mind the social media aspect to them. Not at all.

See, the problem with them is you have to keep using them as a means of "networking." But I'm an introvert that sits around in the dark, writing tall tales all the time! I don't have the patience for "networking!" I have a story to tend to! I can't be tending to other people's ego!

A lot of people say that I am emotionally unavailable. My response to them is, "Yeah. So was every other artist who was worth their weight in gold!" I even gave a name for these types! I call these individuals Obsessive Visionaries.

People like Steve Jobs! People like Hayao Miyazaki, the guy who founded Studio Ghibli! I'll even throw in Stanley Kubrick. These visionaries were far worse than I've ever been! They ignored their own families and made the people who worked under them cry because they were so hell-bent on their craft!

I'm not saying to turn into those guys. It's not healthy to be that obsessive about what you do! But what I am saying is that I totally understand that type of mentality and I believe a space is needed for those types to do whatever it is that they need to do. And it's not like their obsessions haven't churned up things that are beautiful or innovative. They most certainly have!

Yeah, but unless you already have a social network that allows you to be that much of an asshole, then there's not much you can do. You're just yelling into the void of nothingness that is the Substack notes. Or the X platform. So you got to go to other places to get your audience.

But X has it's own share of problems. They have an article section on their platform if case you aren't aware. But nobody is going to use that, let's be fair. And the few times I did click on an X article, it turned out to be for completely scammy reasons. There are some things about it that are decent, like the community notes and all that. But the platform is geared towards discourse.

And even though I do like the discourse, I realize also that it's a complete waste of time, trying to argue with people. We're at a point in time right now where people are going to stay in their little bubbles of influence come hell or high water! So now the majority of interactions on the platform usually resort to petty name-calling and the like.

The weird thing is I don't hate that aspect of it. But you always have sit back and go, "But how does this serve me? How does this serve my mission?" All I want is to get my story out. That's it.

Going back to Substack, the one thing that really annoys me is the gatekeeping. I like that you can support writers on that platform financially, but the mechanism that's used in doing so is far too intrusive! And most people don't even use it anyway! They won't even think twice when subscribing! They'll go straight to to the free model, because everyone does that!

I've done it! It's just not a great way of going about things! If anything, it's a bit of a turn off.

You see what I'd rather do is have a link to Buy Me A Coffee. Or just post a bitcoin address.

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http://buymeacoffee.com/robotkinz

BTC: 3AjaZVtEXLyXyyduxxFHwx1mTbesFh8yGU

ETH: 0xdD18CF0b2bC233DE588AA29E349e4037Da9217B86

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

There. That's all you need! Not this naggy subscription model that no one ever uses!

I do have it set up over there as well in the super rare off chance that somebody will actually be a paid subscriber! But I'm not holding my breath.

Even worse though is the gatekeeping that happens in the comments section! You can't even comment on an article if you're not a PAID SUBSCRIBER?

Excuse me! Is this "connecting with your audience?"

No! It's not!

I swear to you, that really is the worst thing about Substack. Yes, you have your never-ending trove of self-help gurus and people who say things just to get an emotional reaction out of people. Those things are just about as egregious. But gatekeeping your comments rubs me wrong in a way that's hard to describe. There is nothing more I hate than creators that just want never-ending praise for their own work. If you keep that up, you start to become delusional about who you really are.

You end up becoming your own Barton Fink.

I'd rather stay grounded. I'd rather stay as true to myself and to my own voice as possible.

And I DON'T need any algorithm steering this ship! I don't need it dictating what I write or how little I write. True creatives have no need for this nonsense.

Now. With all this being said, I may keep my Substack running, despite all this. And there's a few reasons for this.

For one, your Substack home page is still a great thing to keep around. On my Substack, I have certain sections I've laid out. I've been treating it as it's very own web page more than anything. This whole notes business feels like something that got crudely stapled on to the whole thing at the last second! It's not conductive to my writing. If anything, it's an absolute nuisance that I have to resort to using them all the time! I enjoy long form writing! That's why I look at this platform and go, "Yeah! I can totally write a thousand words! No problem! Heck, I can do it in my sleep!"

I think going forward, I'll use both this platform in conjunction with my Substack page. How that will be implemented, I'm not sure as of yet. But I love the simplicity of Tuhat! And also, I'm early enough that there isn't a cavalcade of authors, all vying for attention on here! Smaller platforms are certainly the way to go and I can see that as clear as day!

I think I'll keep uploading my stories here. I'll do it over there as well, but this really is the better way to go. Maybe I'll just post a link to this Tuhat posts in my Substack. Who knows?

Anyway! I've reached my 1000 words and then some. I'll leave all the relevant links down below and thank you very much for reading. I look forward to continuing to use Tuhat.

https://robotkinz.substack.com/about

https://x.com/ZRobotkin

I have been a visual artist my entire life and now I am transferring those skills into writing about visual imagery. But a very specific imagery, one that I have been studying for fourteen years - the Tarot de Marseille. This is no ordinary deck of picture cards. I hope my writings will convey that to you. Forget everything you have ever heard or believe about the tarot. This is not fortune telling. In my experience it is revelation. Allow me to share my discoveries here in The Open Book.

My first reading is based on a three card draw after I had asked the tarot what my next article should be about. I laid the three cards out on the table and then an exhaustion overtook me. I fell into a deep sleep and had a dream. In the dream my spiritual teacher was standing in the room. The tarot cards were all over the floor and he was asking me about the cards. I was telling him about the hidden geometry in them. My sister was also in the room. She has been estranged from the family for a few years. In some ways we were like twins, more so because we were treated that way, but we were also treated as opposites. When one was in favour with a parent, the other was not. I woke and looked at the three cards on the table. What I saw took my breath away.

I drew the three cards above: Le Mat (no number), Le Soleil (19), and La Maison Dieu (16). The numbers of the cards are important, as you will shortly see, for they establish the whole tone of the reading.

Going directly to the pictures on the cards, we are presented with a dominant figure. The character fills the whole card, someone setting off on a journey. We see a small blue animal, a cross between a cat and a dog, pushing Le Mat forward on his way.

Le Mat holds a small pouch attached to a blue stick over his right shoulder, and in his right hand a red walking stick. Red shoes, red stick, signs of action. The small flesh-coloured pouch suggests that he is carrying only the bare essentials. The hat and clothes tell us he still belongs to the world.

His head looks upward into the sky, indicating he is heading into the unknown. However, if one follows the line of the red stick and the blue stick (opposites - active and passive), they visually converge within the Sun. This connection is suggested by the red tip at the end of the blue stick.

The Sun, a light that radiates indiscriminately, can be interpreted as a symbol of the Divine. Its card number 19, depicting the numbers 1 and 9, deepens this reading - the First and the Last, Alpha and Omega.

To summarise where this is leading, we are being shown duality through the path of the red and blue sticks: active and passive, visible and invisible. Following the invisible lines, these opposites converge and unite in the One, represented by the Sun. This journey from duality into unity is what we are about to uncover.

Le Mat is the only card without a number. Because of this ‘oddity,’ our attention naturally moves to the two numbered cards in front of him: 19 and 16. Number 9 and number 6 are reversals of one another, mirrored and inverted. And we are about to see this pattern repeated throughout the imagery.

Both cards contain two twin-like figures.

19 - They are almost naked. 16 - They are fully clothed.

19 - Their hands reach towards each other. 16 - Their hands reach away from each other.

19 - They are standing on their feet. 16 - They are standing on their hands.

19 - They are coming together. 16 - They are falling apart.

19 - The background is a man-made wall. 16 - The background is nature.

19 - The bricks are horizontal. 16 - The bricks are vertical.

19 - Coloured tear shapes fall from the sky. 16 - Coloured balls fall from the sky.

As we begin to see, the cards are saturated with dualities.

19 - The foreground is water. 16 - The foreground is earth.

19 - A natural white rock. 16 - Three white man-made steps.

19 - The card is topped by the Sun (fire). 16 - The card is topped by a crown and feathers (earth and air).

19 - The sun is a living being. 16 - The tower is a constructed form.

19 - Le Soleil is masculine. 16 - La Maison Dieu is feminine.

19 - The yellow sun sits high in the sky. 16 - The green moon on the door sits close to the earth.

19 - Le Soleil contains eighteen lines in the cartouche, pointing toward card 18 - The Moon, the mirror of The Sun.

At first glance the two cards appear to describe contrasting movements. In Le Soleil the figures move towards union and in La Maison Dieu they appear to be driven apart. Traditionally many readers would treat these cards as opposites: the Sun as harmony and communication, and the House of God as falling apart and disruption. However, the closer we look, the less certain that distinction becomes.

Separation and union are not necessarily opposites. Separation can reveal a greater unity. A structure falls apart because it can no longer contain something larger than itself. Therefore, the coloured balls in La Maison Dieu could be describing a celebratory breakthrough rather than a sorrowful breakdown often associated with the tower card. If this was only about despair surely it would be depicted with the coloured tear shapes as seen in Le Soleil. Without these mirrors and reversals it would be hard to see what is being communicated, we would sit with our old beliefs and the systems that tell us what to see rather than observe what is actually there.

The apparent opposites continue to reveal themselves: one card presents the Divine as a living celestial being and the other presents the Divine as a building. In the former, with the naked characters below receiving the rays of the sun, Le Soleil could be understood as a direct experience of the Divine. In contrast, the tower in La Maison Dieu can be seen and read as a building housing the Divine, the fully clothed characters mirror this principle. The Divine is housed both within the building and within the people.

Essentially both cards point to the Divine. Le Soleil presents the Divine as transcendent, while La Maison Dieu presents the Divine embodied within form. Without the reflections of each other we could never see the whole picture. One cannot directly look at the sun in the sky, but we can know of it through its reflection on the moon. They are not against one another, they are expressing what is there through each other.

Just as Le Mat’s sticks converge beyond the frame of the card and resolve in the Sun in the next card, so too Le Soleil and La Maison Dieu may not resolve their meaning within their own boundaries. Perhaps the invisible meeting point is what surrounds them. Separate, in their individual identities, they represent dualities, but together they are held in the One. They belong together within something vaster.

The House of God may appear as a rupture, but the rupture itself reveals what the structure could not contain. Even the two characters thrown apart reveal what their limitations can no longer hold. This brings our attention to Le Mat. With the scale of his figure, he is not even fully contained within the card itself - he is beyond limitations. In his vastness he is free from the conflict of contradictions and free from the perspective of opposites. His heart sits between the two sticks, at the place where differences meet.

Looking back, Le Mat set off on a journey that began with what looked like duality, symbolised by the blue and red sticks. The journey led toward the recognition that apparent opposites belong to a larger unity. The red and blue sticks were already carried by him before they visually converged in the Sun. This unity was only revealed when the lines were extended beyond what was immediately visible. The animal, itself only partially contained within the frame, offered a clue. Just as it extended beyond the image, so too the meaning of the sticks was only revealed when we looked beyond the boundaries of the card. Taking this idea into life, we find a metaphor for seeing beyond the conflicts we meet and looking for the invisible that holds them as one.

Le Mat himself is the embodiment of this. Perhaps this is why he remains unnumbered. Number implies position, and position implies limitation. Belonging nowhere within the system, he is free to hold all polarities: coming together and falling apart, spirit and matter, above and below, active and passive, harmony and discord. He does not resolve the opposites by choosing one over the other. He reconciles them by carrying both.

His gaze is not directed toward the ground before him, but toward the sky above. While his feet remain in the world, his attention is fixed on something beyond it. He is the one who sees the unseen, moving toward a point of convergence not yet visible within the frame. The opposites are visible, their unity is hidden, and Le Mat remains oriented toward that hidden point, knowing that what appears divided belongs to a larger whole.

By the window stood a man in his mid-thirties. He wore a stylish white tailored trench coat, white trousers, and white leather shoes. His silhouette almost blended into the white wall beside him, with only a thin line of shoulders and his facial profile standing out against the flawless surface. The room he was in was also white. Not light — white. The walls, the floor, the furniture — everything was white. Clean geometric forms, straight and perfect lines stretched almost everywhere.

Next to him stood an armchair on thin metal legs twisted into an unusual yet precise geometric structure. Between the legs, strips of white leather were stretched tightly. Beside the chair stood a floor lamp with a thin white stem that rose upward, gently curving halfway toward the ceiling and ending in a white disc aimed at the chair. The man was looking out the window — or rather through it, as if lost in thought.

Outside, a city of white buildings stretched as far as the eye could see, ordered and flawless. Even the weather supported this balance: the clouds were snow-white, reinforcing the overall whiteness. There was no trace of color anywhere. Everything was almost entirely white, with only occasional shades of grey. The city seemed impeccable, structured, free of randomness, elegant and expressive in its geometry. Every line was deliberate, every window in its place. No chaos. And yet there was something empty about it — as if it were a set, as if behind the facades nothing existed except light and rules. Like a perfect image created by a perfectionist.

The man broke the silence, slowly inhaling, and at that very moment it was cut through by two short signals from his phone. He took out the device and lowered his gaze to the screen. On the white background, a black text message appeared: “Residential unit. Correction required.” Below it was only an address, no additional information. The message was as simple as the white world he was looking at from his apartment. Another space that needed to be corrected — made more proper, cleaner, more precise. His thoughtful face reflected faintly on the screen. He pressed “accept” and put the phone back into his pocket. “I’ll still have time for coffee,” he said out loud.

The man walked into the kitchen, passing a silver leather sofa. The kitchen was small, almost embedded into a wall of white facades, divided into clean sections. On both sides stood tall cabinets framing the work surface. On the right there was only a white sink with a chrome faucet; on the left, two metal taps and small buttons above them. He took a cup from the upper cabinet, placed it under one of the taps, and pressed a button. Black, aromatic coffee poured out of the tap, instantly filling the room with its scent. He sat down at a white round table near the kitchen, surrounded by metallic chairs with wavy forms. The coffee felt foreign in this perfect white sterility. He took a sip, and its bitter taste touched his lips, bringing a small trace of life back into this world.

He thought about work. What kind of apartment would it be? What needed to be fixed? He truly loved his profession. In a time when most people performed dull, mechanical labor, he corrected interiors — not only furniture or lighting, but entire spaces. He brought them into compliance with the standards of the Ministry of Spatial Balance: lines, angles, light, and even color temperature had to follow strict regulations. It was a prestigious job, creative and well-paid. He enjoyed the sense of control, the feeling that his decisions shaped the spaces of other people’s lives, even if they were unaware of it. Despite the sterility around him, the work gave him a small, almost invisible freedom — the freedom to impose order on chaos. And today’s assignment might turn out to be interesting.

He put on sunglasses with a white frame and left the apartment. The corridor was white as well; along one of the walls, a hidden strip of lighting glowed softly, with no unnecessary details. A neighbor walked past him — someone he had seen a few times before, likely a recent resident. Their eyes met for a split second, and that was all: each went their own way, without greetings, without emotion, as if communication in this world was unnecessary.

Outside, everything was even more striking. Every curb stone of grey granite was fitted to the next with jeweler-like precision, the paving tiles aligned seam to seam, the asphalt light grey, perfectly even, without cracks where recycled plastic was added. Once, such cleanliness had only been dreamed of. He walked up to his white station wagon, got inside, opened the object’s geolocation through his glasses, projected the route onto the windshield, and drove out of the courtyard.

The object was in a neighboring district, where the same white buildings stood and perfectly straight streets stretched into the distance. The drive took about half an hour. He turned on the radio. The news was just finishing. The presenter was reporting on the shutdown of an underground “color” venue — a place with different lighting, different furniture, a different atmosphere. A space deemed unacceptable. Seventeen musical recordings containing human voices had been confiscated. The venue itself, of course, had been cleared out.

After the news, simple, unobtrusive music began — a cold electronic rhythm that did not disturb the listeners’ emotional balance. Vocal tracks had recently been banned, since even music could influence people’s emotional state and provoke chaos. All for the sake of safety.

The man thought about how easily and naturally he felt among the white. How clearly this world separated everything that could evoke strong emotions.

Soon he pulled up to a white high-rise building. It stood straight and impeccably clean, without the slightest trace of wear, its façade reflecting the morning light. Simple, beautiful, straight, without unnecessary details — and therefore perfect. And yet… not quite the way he would have designed it himself.

He studied the building carefully, his eye instantly catching every detail. This building was a project by his colleague. Its strict geometry and minimalist forms fit perfectly into the district. But he would have made the façade slightly softer, more welcoming — as if to emphasize that a human being lived inside, not just a space.

He stopped by the trunk of his station wagon, opened it, and took out two small devices. They were similar — cylindrical, flat, mounted on small wheels; one slightly taller than the other. These were his tools. With them, he created space and shaped proper, livable interiors.

The first tool was a portable 3D printer capable of producing any interior object. The second was a shredder — a device that destroyed anything that disrupted the sterile order.

Today they would help him bring another apartment into compliance with the standards — make it safe, convenient, and correct. He took a deep breath, feeling the familiar sense of responsibility, and headed toward the entrance doors.

After climbing to the second floor, he walked down a long corridor, counting the apartments. He needed number fifty-eight. There was fifty-six. Then there should have been fifty-seven, but instead there was suddenly fifty-eight. Strange. And on the other side of the corridor there were no apartments either. Something was wrong with the numbering. That was not something you saw often here.

He stopped at the door of the required apartment and held his phone up to the reader panel next to the lock. The door opened — exactly ninety degrees, as perfectly as it should.

He stepped inside. It was an impeccably white studio apartment.

“Everything as it should be,” the main character thought.

Perfectly white walls, a white floor, and lighting that produced an even white glow — 4500K. Refined furniture made of metal and white leather looked almost sterile. Even the order was flawless: no personal items, as if the space had just undergone correction. Perhaps the owner was a perfectionist.

He walked into the sleeping area. An immaculately made bed, built into a podium with no unnecessary details, cold metal, sharp lines. The bedroom was separated from the living area by a low cabinet. Next to the sofa lay a white rug, precisely matched to the shade of the floor.

The main character understood how much effort it took to calibrate different materials before 3D printing so that their shades would match perfectly. The apartment was flawless. As if it had been created by a perfectionist with taste — everything precisely aligned with everything else.

He had never seen such a perfect space before.

“Maybe something is wrong in the bathroom,” he thought. If he had been sent here for correction, there had to be some imperfection.

Yes, the bathroom — the spatial corrector decided.

He entered the bathroom and switched on the perfect white light. The space was filled with white: walls, fixtures, surfaces. Only the toilet and the cabinet structure under the sink, which smoothly transitioned into the toilet area, slightly broke the total whiteness.

“Something is wrong here,” he thought. “Why was I sent here?”

He decided to check everything again. He could not afford a mistake — any inaccuracy could mean re-accreditation or even demotion. He had to see deviations immediately. If not — then what was he even doing here?

He began to inspect the apartment in more detail, step by step, object by object. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living room — everything looked flawless. There was nothing to criticize.

And yet, the longer he looked, the stronger another feeling grew — a desire to understand who had lived here before. What kind of person it had been. And what had happened to them.

Correctors were never given information about where the owners disappeared to. It was only known that after correction, they disappeared forever. It was not accepted to talk about where they went — there was an unspoken prohibition in it, as if such questions could lead to punishment.

But questions still kept forming in his mind. With every minute they grew stronger, although he understood — he would not receive answers.

An undefined feeling pressed harder from within. Perhaps this was a test. Perhaps he was being evaluated. But for what? And what did they want from him?

The fear of making a mistake kept rising. The white walls seemed to shift, compressing the space around him. His legs grew heavy. He leaned against the wall to keep his balance.

And then — click.

One of the wall panels slid open…

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months listening to and reading about Sinéad O'Connor. I grew up hearing her music; my dad’s been a fan of hers since he was my age, in the Chicago punk scene in the 80s when The Lion and the Cobra first came out. (My dad is the coolest person I know). I’d never really paid attention, the way you do when you've been hearing something your whole life. The Nothing Compares 2 U video still transports me back to being four years old; I vividly remember watching it play on our big, chunky old Mac, determined not to miss the exact moment the tear fell. My parents told me more recently about burning Feel So Different onto tapes, back in the day; I put it on on a road trip and they exclaimed delightedly over one of their old favorite songs. Every time I hear it it feels like home. But it was Christmas Eve in 2023 when I stumbled over Drink Before the War.

The 24th of December is my grandpa's birthday. He'd passed away that same year. So had Sinéad. I was sitting there, bundled in a Ravenclaw scarf my cousin had just brought me (he apparently remembers my mortifyingly dramatic Harry Potter phase of a decade ago), having drunk way too much hot chai and attempting to power through the most intense writing session I'd attempted thus far. I love browsing music while I’m working on my computer, often trying new, unfamiliar tracks and adding slowly to my monstrously long time-capsule playlists when I find something I like. I clicked randomly on Drink Before the War that afternoon, recalling vaguely that Sinéad O’Connor had an incredible voice and thinking about the impact it'd had on my dad when the news of her death broke. He... doesn't tend to have much of a reaction to these things, usually, but he talked about it for days after Sinéad passed. Mainly he said that he missed her, that he felt for her, how keenly it felt that someone was gone.

My mind was blown. I had it on repeat for the rest of the day.

At the end of last year, I found myself in a situation where some of my biggest deeply-buried fears were brought rather unceremoniously to my attention. It was a crossroads, of sorts, a point where I knew what decision I was making but was faced with doubt and questions from almost every angle. Everywhere I turned. I had to come to terms with the idea that the cost of being uncompromisingly myself might potentially be loneliness. That no matter how much I loved people, and they loved me, they might never understand me.

(Maybe they do. I believe that someone does, that some people do. But it was the possibility, really, that had to be dealt with).

That was about when I came across Sinéad's performance at the Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, in 1992.

I've watched it more times than I can count. It still fills me with an emotion I can't quite and haven't really tried to explain. She was so young. Sinéad in blue, surrounded and yet a lonely figure on that stage. That bald-headed girl, the look in her eye and the lift of her chin. The noise. Her sheer, blazing defiance, against what must have felt then like the entire world. She wasn't untouchable, or invulnerable. The drastic opposite. She was staggeringly beautiful.

Listening to Sinéad doesn't bring me comfort nearly as often as it does courage. (Listening to her talk sometimes brings comfort, I have to admit, perhaps because I grew up in a tattoo shop—surrounded by a bunch of rough-talking, scary-looking, leather-clad sweethearts—and listening to her merrily cussing away in that incongruously grumpy old-lady voice of her better, later years sounds like home). I have never in my life seen anyone be so fucking BRAVE. I don't understand how so much blinding courage could fit into one tiny person.

At some point I will gather the necessary courage and read her memoir in full, because I know it will wreck me. In the meantime, I've been chewing through old interviews, articles, albums.

She was hilarious. She was a mess. She was savage. A little frightening. She kept on and on doing the goddamn best she could. She was treated like shit. She was so kind to so many random people who never forgot it. She was pissed the hell off. She was HERSELF, through it all; undeniably, unapologetically, unrelentingly herself. She was just another person.

What I find most remarkable, beyond the impact she's had on me personally, is how drastically different articles written before and after her death are in tone. There has been an explosive outpouring of love for her since she's been gone. While she was here, there were lovely articles written and interviews given, among this sea of dismissive, demeaning, condescending rhetoric. I read an article by the Guardian today, from 2012, where the journalist asked her if people ever tell her she's brave.

Sinéad said, incredulously: No?

(She spoke in that same interview about being treated like she's crazy everywhere she goes. An interview from around the same time is the only time I've ever seen Graham Norton be something of an asshole.)

The biggest thing I think I've learned about Sinéad is that you have to listen to her. Not only to her voice—to her. To what she had to say. She filtered nothing; she's not always easy to hear, but she was almost always right—and what she had to say is so important. She never stayed quiet, not when it would have been easier. She always said she doesn't make sense when she's talking but she does, she does—you just have to listen for it. To pay attention.

She deserved so much more grace and respect and dignity than she got. I don't care that she was a mess. The way she was treated throughout her life says a lot about our world, I think. Our society. She was a trailblazer and a revolutionary; condemned for daring to speak truths society was afraid to hear and sneered at for her honesty, dismissed in her suffering. Sinéad O'Connor had and has so much to teach us about everything humanity is and can be; the best and the worst of us.

So many of the articles I've read since she's been gone, each of them threaded through with this deep-seated grief, come down to the same question I did. Did she know how much she was loved?

No one knows.

She said, though, that she doesn't regret a damn thing. She said, smilingly, in an interview from early 2020, that she has suffered, but that she's not suffering any more. A year later, on the Irish Times’ Women’s Podcast, she was asked if she was relieved that people were finally sitting up and paying attention to what she'd been saying all this time. She said.... No? The point was never what people thought.

She spoke consistently and continually about the importance of solidarity, amplification. Dialogue. She rejected and denounced shame in all its forms, refusing to be silenced in pain and in joy alike. She spoke, towards the end of her life, about how she’d learned to accept the darker parts of herself, to “invite them in for tea.” She told the Washington Post, upon her short-lived return to the road (before the pandemic interrupted the tour), about living with immense pain, as well as joy. That she loved her life, there on the other side of it all. Her family. She spent a portion of her later years in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere, knitting and drinking too-sweet coffee and watching detective shows. Folks who lived nearby got to know her as a person, not a celebrity, and became fiercely protective of her privacy.

She spoke when she was young about fearing death, grappling with mortality. In her fifties, she was working towards qualifications in palliative care. She explained that she wanted to help people be less afraid.

She was the definition of badass. She was beautiful. She was courageous and resilient and seems to have had a love for the dirtiest jokes and worst puns known to man. Her life breaks my heart. She was unapologetically herself, her whole life. She was condemned, belittled, dismissed, lauded, admired, attacked, scorned, and respected for it, by turns.

She’s gone. Whether or not she is acknowledged and heeded as she deserved to be, whether she is admired or appreciated or respected or heard—none of it makes much of a difference to her any more.

But it might still to us.

I had a dream, once, where Sinéad O’Connor was sitting on our couch at home, a friend of the family, telling me something about fear. Try as I might, I can't remember what it was. But I remember how it felt. The understanding that fear is not ever something I need fear.

There is often a cost to beautiful things. Courage, I suppose, is the willingness to pay it, for the sake of something that matters. Sinéad paid dearly for daring to be herself. What, though, would have been the cost of compromise?

If nothing else, this world would have been robbed of something beautiful.

It matters. It matters to me. It matters to so much more than me.

Whatever it may bring / I will live by my own policy / I will sleep with a clear conscience / I will sleep in peace.

It has been said that Sinéad O'Connor had a way of showing up when she was needed.

I think that’s still true.

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Take a look at the ABOUT page for more information on this series.

Go to the REFERENCE GUIDE for detailed info on the greater world at large.

The TABLE OF CONTENTS page (for now) only links to the Substack version of these uploads. I guess I could add additional links that link to these posts, here on Tuhat, but we'll see. I do prefer how things look over here. It's a lot more stripped down and the font here is close enough to Century Schoolbook Regular, which is my font of choice.

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From out the depths of a quiet, serene and peaceful land, a church bell rang from the small town of Farmington.

Farmington was not a cowboy town like most other towns of the new west, although this area was in the middle of constant cattle migration. This small settlement was a pioneer town. The lively wooded forests that patched this land contained blueberries, always ripe for the picking during spring and summer. The natives no longer posed an issue in this area, at least in the eyes of the townsman.

Living here had it's drawbacks. Winters were cold. Summers were scalding. Most unsettling of all, despite the springtime showers, was the dry, cracked air of this land. Regardless of such struggles, the townspeople were happy and prepared for any cloudy or otherwise dreadful day.

It was an hour before noon as people began to file out of the town's church house. Among these lavishly dressed people, one young girl, about ten or eleven years old, popped out of the crowd and started off into the woods.

"Mary-Anne!" called out one of the women. She had flowing dark blond hair similar to the young girl.

"Be sure to head back for lunch, Mary-Anne!"

"I will, mother!"

The young girl joyfully skipped past the schoolhouse and onto a dusty dirt road, wearing her favorite blue dress and white bonnet.

It was a beautiful spring day. The lively forest trees that surrounded the girl blossomed with life. Birds were chirping. The last of the winter chill was gone, replaced by a modest warmth from the sun.

Mary-Anne carried a few other books with her along with her Bible, including some works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a story of the great King Arthur, and a lengthy novel that was recently shipped in from the eastern states. Her father didn't approve of Mary reading this book. However, Uncle Tom's Cabin explained why her parents decided to travel far away from such wild injustices that were rumored to inflame the eastern states, towards a new and proper society.

A new and proper society didn’t seem to be possible anymore – least not in this territory.

Even this land was becoming infected with the barbaric customs that was supposed to belong only to the Confederacy. Some travelers from the east called it the Kansas-Nebraska Act, of which claimed the great territory of Kansas as a slave state – as opposed to the year before last, back when it was Nebraska where these men were to live.

Despite rumors of a great war brewing between the states in the east, life in Farmington remained quiet and pleasant, even though other places felt as if they would succumb to such tension. Many people outside of town sang their songs and held their banners. One side had a very well known song, called The Marching Song of Whittier. The lines of the song were ingrained into Mary’s head.

'We come across the prairie as of old, the pilgrims crossed the sea, to make the West, as they the East, the homestead of the free!'

It was clear to Mary-Anne. Abolitionists, such as Mary's own father, knew what the right path was. People like the controversial man parading about Kansas going by the name of John Brown – they supposedly knew the right hand of God. The enslaved were to be freed, to walk upon God's land without no other man's order but his own. It was all well and good. Mary just wished that attaining freedoms didn't involve so much violence and bloodshed. So went the usual matters of men.

Truths were a strange thing – but so were lies.

People truly were a mad, harebrained bunch in Mary-Anne's eyes. She wondered how some men could be so oblivious to their own natures. She wondered why some men would viciously protect their misdeeds and injustices. The minds of these men were beyond sound truths.

One night she posed this question to her father, of which her father propped her up upon his knee and said simply, ‘because all men are free to be wrong and unjust. It is only a man's choice to either be the right hand of God or to be not.’

The future of this 'homestead of the free' was bleak – however all spurring conflicts of this world had to be put aside for the day of the Sabbath.

The dirt road Mary was on led to an abandoned cottage. She wasn't going there now. She was heading off to her favorite reading place, which was under an old oak tree with a giant, raised root. This was where she sat as she read, underneath large branches that loomed over her. These low branches swayed silently in the wind, with it's leaves singing softly.

Mary found her place under the oak tree and plopped down on the raised branch. She opened up her Bible, starting on the Book of Matthew, and read on.

The air about the land leveled to a quiet and peaceful atmosphere during her studies. By the time Mary began Chapter Fifteen, the world around her was silent. Mary paid no notice to the absence of sound.

Off in the forest, the sound of a twig snapped, breaking the stillness of the air.

With her muscles feeling atrophied, Mary decided to take a stretch. She stood up and proceeded to walk to the end of the beaten path, where the old sod house was.

Mary recalled the story about this particular area. The town elders said that these woods served a divine purpose to the Indians that once roamed here. The Indians avoided it at all costs. They believed no mortal man was worthy enough to find the secrets this land contained – whatever those secrets may had been.

It was possible that this was not true. The older folk loved to tell all sorts of entertaining and wild stories. Mary-Anne thought of herself as clever enough to distinguish the difference between truths and tall tales.

After western pioneers displaced the Indians, nothing was discovered. It was well assured by now that this was a land like any other, a land of forest, grass, weeds and stones.

The sod house was left abandoned a year ago. It's walls and roof remained standing. The door broke off and was now laying on the ground in front. All that was inside were heaps of hay. Mary’s friends frequented this place. Her best friend, Melody Catratt, was one of those who spent time around this area, picking the blueberry bushes nearby.

As Mary expected though, there was no one inside. It didn't matter. She would be more then glad to wait for a while, or at least until lunchtime.

Mary sat down outside with her back facing the outer wall. She commenced her studies once again.

After several minutes, Mary looked up and sighed. There was something distracting her. It was something about the mood of the place. It was an odd feeling – but Mary didn't feel threatened by the wave of anticipation that swept over her. It was hard to explain.

The air remained silent. There was not a tweet of a bird nearby. The air was stagnant.

After a few minutes, Mary forced her attention back to her bible. She forced the strange thoughts out of her head.

Snap!

The loud sound of a branch snapping reverberated from within the wheat meadow next to her, breaking the dead silence of the atmosphere.

It sounded huge, similar to the sound of the banging antlers of opposing deer. Or more like the branch of a tree.

A sudden chill swept down her back as the feeling came upon Mary once again.

At this point, she could no longer pay attention to her studies. She had to step into the wheat field, if only for a moment.

Mary entered the field, arms outstretched, feeling the swaying stems of wheat as she passed. The wind was slightly picking up once again, blowing gently from the north, as if edging her forward into the field. The dirt ground below her feet was soft. Her shoes sank into the wet soil.

The feeling of anticipation receded and was soon replaced by a serene calmness that swept over Mary-Anne. She was moved into such a heavenly spiritual state, as if she was made to be lighter than a feather, as if she was exalted by the quiet, motionless scenery presented before her.

It felt as if Mary-Anne was being invited by the land into a glorious, golden realm, as if by the hand of God, she was being sent off into a vastly overlooked or discarded kingdom of sorts.

It was an odd thing to sense.

In fact, it was ridiculous. There wasn't anything here. Every traveler that had passed through this area found the same.

Forest and grass. Weeds and stones. That's all there ever was out here, and nothing more.

Still, it was peaceful. The feeling of elevation wasn't in any way lost regardless of the fact.

Mary paused and sighed as she took one last glance around. She wanted to stay all day amongst this golden yellow exhibition – but her mother was expecting her for lunch, so Mary-Anne began to turn around to head back towards the road.

Crack!

The ground under her feet shifted downwards. A loud cracking sound, similar to breaking stone, sounded from below.

Mary froze, her eyes wide with terror.

What was that, she thought.

That didn't sound good.

She attempted to move forward. Mary wanted to set foot back on solid ground.

Her efforts proved useless. The ground gave way.

Mary was sent falling down into a deep, black pit, screaming all the way down.

* * *

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NEXT SCENE (First present day segment of Chapter 1)

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As evening settled in and the house grew quiet, I became aware of a sadness moving alongside everything else. The sadness was familiar; a quiet companion that seems to wait in the margins of long afternoons, one I have known in different forms for a long time. In this meeting, it wasn’t the emotion itself, but the immediate, frantic spinning thoughts that caught my attention. The moment the sadness brushed against my awareness, my mind began moving around it, interrogating it, trying to understand exactly why it was there, as if identifying its source could make it manageable.

I found myself looking at my life and feeling frustrated by the coexistence of so much love and so much grief. Hope was still there, Max too—his chin resting on his paws. And yet the sadness remained, stubborn and unbothered by the warmth of my room.

As I sat with it, I noticed how naturally my attention began moving beyond the things themselves. Hope became an awareness that children grow. Max became an awareness that dogs age. A beautiful day became an awareness that beautiful days end. The movement happened so quickly that it almost felt like a single, seamless thing.

I could feel my mind reaching outward toward possibilities, eventual losses, conversations that had not happened, and moments that had not yet arrived. It is a strange habit of my mind to believe that by rehearsing grief, I can somehow inoculate myself against it. I treat anticipation as a shield, imagining that if I feel the weight of the loss now, I will not be blindsided when it finally comes. But this shield was crushing me.

At some point the movement of my thoughts settled. I do not know exactly when. There was no particular insight attached to it; no sentence had arrived that suddenly reorganized everything. The future remained where it had been. But with a bit of shock and deep gratitude to myself, I was just back. Sitting next to Hope and Max. The room was quiet, my attention rested there, and for a while, the future stopped occupying the center of experience.

I have been noticing how easily experience becomes braided with memory, anticipation, interpretation, and planning until they are difficult to distinguish from one another. The future arrives carrying traces of the past; I look at tomorrow through the lens of old wounds. The present becomes intertwined with imagined outcomes, so that I am never purely interacting with what is, but always with my calculation of what comes next.

There are entirely practical reasons for this mental architecture. The ability to anticipate is an act of care; it helps me look after the people I love, plan for their well-being, protect them from harm, organize our days, and navigate the practical demands of life. My mind’s capacity to build scenarios is, I suppose, an evolutionary gift. What I am noticing now, however, is the immense cost of these thoughts running without pause.

This morning I could feel those familiar thought movements beginning again. Questions appeared around the edges of experience. Possibilities gathered like weather. My attention began reaching outward toward things that might happen tomorrow, next month, or years from now, building the day’s first anxieties out of thin air.

Then Hope climbed into my lap.

The questions remained, the future remained, but my attention settled on her alone. That feels important because the shift occurred through attention rather than through intellectual resolution. I did not think my way into peace; I was pulled into it by the physical world.

I have been reading Iris Murdoch for some time now, and one of the themes I keep returning to is her understanding of attention. She writes extensively about the tendency of the self—what she famously calls the “relentless ego”—to become absorbed in its own interpretations, fears, hopes, and projections. Murdoch argues that the ego operates like a self-sealing machine, constantly taking in raw data from the world and instantly converting it into a narrative that serves its own internal comfort or defensive needs. Over time, those interpretations become a dense, protective haze. They begin to feel more immediate, more authoritative, than the actual world they are attempting to describe.

I think that is part of what I was noticing in my own room. It was not that my thoughts about the future were factually wrong. Children do grow, dogs do age, and beautiful days do end; the future contains real, inevitable limitations. But there was a massive, exhausting difference between being sanely aware of those realities and living entirely inside the representations my mind had built of them.

However, when Hope climbed into my lap, what seemed to change was the direction of my attention. For a moment, maybe the “self-sealing mechanism of the ego” ran out of fuel and I was not relating primarily to an imagined future. I was relating to my daughter—to the tangible reality of her hair and her little hand in mine.

Perhaps that is what Murdoch was pointing toward when she wrote about attention as an ethical discipline. It is not the total elimination of thought, memory, or anticipation, but the quiet, stubborn discipline of returning to what is actually here. It is the realization that reality is always larger, more resistant, and infinitely more merciful than our internal representations of it.

When I practice this outward gaze, the heavy fabric of projection loosens. My daughter becomes a child again, Max becomes a dog on his blue blanket, and for a little while, attention rests there.

I don't know how to feel about my trip. I'm separated from it by a sheet of glass. I can see it, I know how I should feel about it, I see how others feel about it. But I don't really have those emotions. Maybe I'm riding the edge of burnout again, I can't really tell anymore. Numbness and rage are my two most loyal bedfellows, and they just cover most of everything else. Grief pries its way through fairly often, otherwise I wouldn't survive the migraines. (Learning to cry was one of the most valuable skills I've learned in therapy.)

I wonder sometimes if I'm doing this trip for myself. I've been talking about it forever, wanting it. But was it just a fantasy of escape? Is that all this is, just the absence of work? I want to do something with this year away that gives me strength and builds colour and vibrancy into my life. Right now, I feel flat and grey. I don't hate things (I do hate things, but they are very, VERY specific) and I don't love things. I just exist with emotions twisting through me once in a while. For example, I feel flickers of enjoyment when I play tennis badly (smashy smashy!) or when I play guitar badly. Time slows down (in the best way) when I watch little E play in that repetitive, exploratory way only 10-month olds can do.

Late last year I realized I say yes to everything, because I honestly just don't care one way or another. I'm not flexible, it just doesn't matter. Of course, I'm drained after 13 years in healthcare; 5 of them in a pandemic, the rest in a system of austerity. The motto "plan for the worst, hope for the best, and take what comes" is etched on every organ in my body by this point.

So the question is, why am I going to Montevideo? Do I really want to go to South America? I don't hate the idea. I would like to learn Spanish again (relive my ill-gained modern languages major). I don't like the summer. Sun, beaches, tanning, hot weather; that is not the trip for me. Other people are imaging my trip and I am recoiling from that image. So what am I going to do? I love the ocean; I hate the beach. Sailing fills me with terror. I've never gone diving. So why am I telling people that I'll be chasing the summer all year? That is their fantasy, not mine. Why do I care about their dreams in that moment? I know they truly do not care how I live my life; the same way I truly, deeply, do not care how they live theirs. The fact is, no one listens anyway. I am frequently asked about my trip to Paraguay.

Maybe my existentialism is showing. Today I learned that my union doesn't want to support my grievance for fair pay. I leave the country in 3 months and now I might be in a fight with my own people about their duty to me. The enormity of the--- you know, I think I'll save my words for the lawyers.

I guess I am, again, surprised at how hard each organization around me commits to the bit. The bit, being of course, that I am not valued. You would think that the time, effort, money, and energy that goes into the making of my job, in my niche, would be worth extending the lifespan of my employment. All they need to do, honestly, is work together. I am showing them a gap exists that swallows people.

The loss of human potential in healthcare is the true tragedy.

Whatever. This problem will be here when I get back. Perhaps by then I'll have the head space be the sharp end of the wedge and tackle the AUDACITY----

I learned recently about philosopher and Catholic thinker Josef Pieper. Pieper argues that leisure is not the absence of work, it is "an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen." Leisure, as we consider it (lying on a beach, chasing summer) is "something that has been built into the whole working process, a part of the schedule. The ‘break’ is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide ‘new strength’ for ‘new work,’ as the word ‘refreshment’ indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work."(1) I've known of Aristotle's meaning of leisure (purposeful flourishing) since my ill-advised philosophy minor, but that was not how I used my time off (protestantism loves that shit and I'll do anything to avoid fulfilling that family legacy). Also, I am so tired, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. All I want to do is lie down and read a book so I can get up tomorrow and slog through it all again.

Maybe this is why this trip feels like an ill-fitting shirt; a year of lying on a couch (I'd never sit in the sun) reading, how is that different from my current life? How is that better? How does that feed me? This year away needs to be about me, not not-work. Who am I without healthcare? Do I like that person? Are there parts of me left, or has this system of wreckage, pain, grief, injustice stripped me down and cannot be rebuilt? B says I should write a list of how I want to structure my day, and what a perfect day would look like on this trip. Sitting down to write that out gives me heart palpitations. Last week, I even started sweating. I am fascinated to see how terrified I am of dreaming. At what point in my life did I learn that dreaming was dangerous?

Maybe that's why I won't let myself get excited for this trip. I'm not completely sure I'll like what I will find.

(1) https://maxfrenzel.com/articles/josef-pieper

I often come up with different ideas. Sometimes they appear suddenly, sometimes they develop over a long period of time, but most of them remain just ideas. I've noticed that many of my concepts require significant financial resources, the right connections, or circumstances that I simply didn't have at the time. Because of that, some of them gradually lost their momentum before I ever had a chance to bring them to life.

A few times, I even had ideas for books. But each time, they remained at the stage of thinking, "This is interesting, but not now," "This is too difficult," or "I don't have enough experience for something like this." I always saw writing a book as something very serious and almost unattainable without formal education or years of literary practice.

I work in interior design, and that has always been my primary field. That's where I feel confident: space, form, light, and composition are things I understand well. But even with that experience, I never wanted to write a book solely about design. It seemed like something that would only interest a very narrow audience, and I couldn't see a larger story that could resonate with people outside the profession.

For a long time, I didn't even think I was capable of writing fiction.

But one day, I simply started writing.

Without a plan, without confidence, without knowing where it would lead. At first, there were only separate scenes, fragments of thoughts, and images that I wasn't trying to explain right away. But gradually, a story began to emerge from those fragments. It felt as if it was assembling itself into a unified form, as though I wasn't inventing it but rather discovering something that had already existed somewhere.

That is how a world was born, centered around the idea of living spaces and the influence of environments on people. But instead of becoming a dry description or a technical exploration, it turned into a story.

The story takes place in a dystopian future. It is a world where all color is forbidden and strictly controlled. The spaces around people are sterile, identical, and "correct"—there is nothing accidental or emotional within them. And because of that, life becomes predictable and internally empty.

The protagonist is a man who lives within this system. He is accustomed to it, asks no questions, and fulfills his role. But one day, he sees colors. That moment becomes the beginning of a transformation in the way he perceives reality. At first, the change is slow and almost imperceptible, but then it grows deeper and irreversible. What once seemed normal begins to crack from within.

I didn't immediately understand what I was writing. Only with time did I realize that it wasn't simply a story about a world, but a story about perception, control, freedom, and the internal changes that occur when a person encounters something beyond the limits of the familiar.

I started writing every day. In the morning with a cup of coffee, when the day was only beginning to take shape in my mind. On trains, during those brief moments of silence between stations. In the evenings before sleep, when thoughts were less structured but more honest. And with every passing day, the story became more real to me.

There were moments when I wasn't planning anything serious. I simply wanted to find out whether I could bring at least one idea to completion. My life had been filled with many beginnings and far fewer endings. And that was what made this process special—it didn't require perfection; it required presence.

Over time, I noticed that the story began to influence me as well. It was as if I had started looking at spaces differently. At colors, details, and the way environments shape human emotions. That became something that kept me engaged in the process even more than my initial curiosity.

I wasn't sure whether I should show it to anyone. Even after the manuscript existed, it still felt deeply personal, almost private. Like an idea that didn't necessarily need to leave my own mind. But at some point, I realized that if I kept it to myself, it would once again become another unfinished story.

So I decided to share it.

Perhaps it isn't a perfect book. And it probably doesn't aspire to be anything more than an honest attempt to tell a story born from personal experience, observations, and internal questions. But what matters to me is that it exists at all—in a finished form.

And honestly, I don't know where this will lead next. But I do know that it is no longer just another idea left inside my head.

It is a story that I carried through to the end.

And perhaps it can also serve as a reminder that you don't need perfect conditions to begin. Sometimes, all you need is to start writing—even if you're not sure anything will come of it.

From now on, I will be publishing one chapter of this book at a time. And I will be grateful to anyone who decides to join me on this journey.

Anyone interested in my story, I’ll be glad to have you following along. Maybe you’ll enjoy it and someone might see themselves reflected in it along the way with me.

By the way, I'd love to hear if there are any writers here who are working on a book or have already written one.

If you've completed a story, feel free to share it in the comments—I’d be happy to take a look and give it a read. And if you're only thinking about writing your first book or have been putting the idea off for a long time, I'd love to hear about that too.

I think many great stories never get written simply because their authors doubt themselves or keep waiting for the perfect moment.

So let's support each other. Maybe your comment will be exactly the encouragement someone else needs to finally get started.

Episode #2

#2

Through one of its windows, Erna could see a large pear tree standing defiantly in the rear garden, and many hens, busily searching for worms. The lady pointed to herself and said 'Nancy' and then, finally, she removed her hat and smiled. Nancy pointed at Erna and repeated her name, confirming that this was indeed her name and then gestured with her hands, as though driving the car, to suggest that the man who drove, was her husband, she showed Erna her wedding ring. 'Tom' she said. Erna was fascinated by the array of diamonds and precious stones in Nancy's rings. Nancy then showed Erna the rich mahogany wardrobe with matching chest of drawers and adjustable mirror top. The drawer knobs were ebony, inlaid with ivory motifs,’ Erna's' she said, gently stroking the smooth polished exterior, and presenting it in a manner as to affirm that it was now her’s to use. She then took Erna by the hand and led her along the galleried balcony to the bathroom. It was breathtaking and larger than the entire apartment where she had lived in Germany. A stout Victorian roll-top enamelled bath, complete with clawed feet and gleaming brass taps, stood like some Greek statue dominating the room. An enormous pedestal wash basin with built in mirror, shone like porcelain. Its smooth, ornate lines begging to be caressed, while its companion, a large gentleman's rosewood compactum, presented itself with an air of superiority, reflecting your own image back at you. Nancy tapped the wardrobe and said 'Tom's'. Erna nodded and smiled. Nancy then gestured a drinking motion and said 'tea, coffee'? Erna understood and replied, ‘Kaffee bitte’. As they ambled down the stairs, Erna pointed to all the hand coloured photo portraits hanging on the walls. Nancy explained saying... 'mother, father, grandfather, grandmother'. Erna thought how they looked a little spooky, because their eyes followed you as you moved around. The farmhouse had been in the family for generations.

Coffee and cakes seemed such a luxury to Erna, and there was an abundance of various fancies. Nancy was indeed an avid baker, and “cake”, was a staple carbohydrate around Parkside farm, with iced cherry slab-cake (Tom’s favourite), Victoria sponge cake, glued together with homemade strawberry jam and thick whipped cream. There were of course a variety of others fancies and the house kitchen, always gifted the welcoming aroma of baked goods, scented by rich butter and heaped spoonfuls of cascading sugar. A smell that hung in the air like a comforting blanket of decadence. Erna eagerly sampled several slices, which sat precariously balanced upon her small willow-patterned side plate. She didn’t hang about and wolfed them down with immediate effect. Hopeful mutts sat expectantly poised to grab midair, anything which might fall… not a chance! The image of her Aunt’s broth was now quickly fading and although just a few short days ago, it seemed like she had woken up from a dream, or perhaps, was in a dream; either way, she was happy being where she was.

After thoroughly enjoying the cake experience, Nancy cleared the dishes and Erna rubbed her tummy, accompanied by a huge grin. Nancy then proceeded to “officially” introduce all the rooms of the house to Erna and for improved orientation, they began outside. Walking around the house perimeter, through the white picket fence gate and into the front garden, Nancy pointed out several graves, which were ancestors of the current dogs, going back over many generations. Each baring their name, that they may not be forgotten. Nancy also pointed out the Beautiful heavy oak front door with stained glass panels and a brass door handle that seemed too large for one hand. A majestic slate roofed porch embraced the doorway, supported by its ornate and heavily carved exterior. There was a summer house too, which housed the petrol lawn mower, deck chairs, and obligatory lawn games, for that time… croquet, tennis rackets, and so on. They doubled back and re-entered through the “working” entrance, Erna stopping momentarily to breathe in the wonderful Lonicera, still gifting its splendid perfume. The working entrance was the primary inlet to the house, from the main drive and where visitors were received (except on very special occasions, or during the summer evenings).

It opened immediately into the “back kitchen”, which housed a huge Belfast sink, complete with pink carbolic soap. A large marble topped drawer set and an enormous black cast-iron range, which was lit during the winter months, so naturally, it was already throwing out a generous supply of warmth, comparable to the sun during June and July. Erna picked up the soap to smell it, a smell that would become a frequent aroma as it was used extensively throughout lambing season, to sterilise hands, and equipment needed to aid difficult births. Erna’s small hands would be put to great use very soon! To the far end of this red and black quarry floor tiled room, a heavily painted blue door led into the back garden, where Erna had previously seen the large pear tree through her bedroom window. Nancy opened the door briefly and a few dozen hens ran towards it. Sadly, no scraps this time. There was an internal panelled staircase built into the wall, with its own door leading to a separate large “bed-sit” above the back kitchen. The bare pine staircase made it impossible to tread quietly which seemed to hit Erna’s funny bone as she couldn’t stop giggling while clomping up the hollow staircase. The “back stairs room” currently housed the best riding tack reserved for Fox hound meets, all gleaming and lavishly infused by years of saddle soap, giving off that unmistakable smell. This particular room and stairs looked like they had never actually been used as a bedsit, the original bare plaster walls showed no signs of paint and the pine floorboards were completely unblemished. There was an unused fireplace in there also, again, no signs of usage. Erna gently stroked the gleaming leather saddles, which felt like satin to the touch and had developed the most attractive patina. Clomping back downstairs, the third door off the back kitchen, led into the day room. This is where the family would sit during rest periods and would often witness fireside ‘teas’ during busy harvesting times, along with impromptu visits from friends.

Morning sunlight draped the building’s facade while salaried workers of all departments poured through the cubicle maze to their stations, many passing through the IT section where Katie and Lucas had both settled in their ergonomic chairs for the long day. Strutting down the aisle in his blue designer suit came Terrence, from the sales team, and he caught the software developers’ attention with a wave. Katie pulled out her earbuds, letting slip a soft groan.

“Guess what I did this weekend?” Terrence beamed with pride. “I learned vibe coding!”

Lucas perked up. “Vibe coding? You mean, where you tell a chatbot what app you want to build and it writes all the code for you?”

“It’s a gimmick,” scoffed Katie. “Computers can’t actually write good code so you still need a living, breathing developer to fix it up, if there’s anything salvageable. Just a scam, really.”

“Oh, I beg to differ,” Terrence retorted, leaning in closer. “Vibe coding will change the world! The tools? Getting better every day. Barriers to entry? None. Anyone can build anything they want. You have an idea, you hit a few keys and — POOF! — there it is. For example — check this out — I vibe-coded a program to invent time travel.”

“Uh, what?”

“Yep. All I had to do was say, ‘hey, uh, AI guy, you do all the research and come up with the designs and stuff to figure out how time travel works and then write a program that will operate a time machine’. It’s running on my laptop at home right now, doing research and testing and, you know, whatever.”

“But Terrence,” Katie giggled, “you have a degree in marketing. You don’t know anything about physics.”

“That’s the magic of vibe coding! The AI will figure it out for me.”

Lucas scratched his temple. “I don’t know. Scientists are nowhere near understanding how time travel could work. You think an AI instance could do it?”

“Sure, buddy,” replied Terrence. “Those things are like artificial brains but smarter, so if you give one enough time to think it over, even if it takes years, then why couldn’t it? But I was thinking…when it does work, my future self can let me know by sending a message back in time.”

At that, the developers exploded in laughter. “Yeah, maybe it will appear right in front of you, like an Amazon package from the future,” Katie joked. “Poof!”

“No, see, that’s not how I’d handle it at all,” mused Terrence in all seriousness, “because, think about it — what if someone is walking by as a box from the future materializes in their spot? Sounds like it could be gruesome. No, it would be smarter to drop a box from above, from a low altitude…” His gaze wandered to the wide picture window spilling daylight into the cubicles, then over the building’s parking lot and, beyond, the rolling grass hills of the corporate park even as the other two continued their snickering. “Somewhere open…and soft…”

He turned around and marched through the office the way he had come. The two developers shared confused glances, falling again to hysterics. Regaining her composure, Katie remarked, “This vibe coding craze is getting out of hand. Even if Terrence could pull off something like that, imagine how dangerous–”

“Look,” interrupted Lucas, pointing to the window. Outside, Terrence could be seen jogging to the far end of the parking lot, through the grass and further still, eventually stopping where he appeared but a small speck from the distance of the office, out there in the hills, and there he stared skyward and waited.

The developers watched this weird scene, unchanging, for over a minute until something came into view in the sky above Terrence. The object floated slowly down, attached to a small parachute. At last it landed in front of him on the ground — some cardboard box, suitcase sized. He tossed aside the parachute and tore open the box’s lid. The contents were too small to discern from the window but Terrence scooped them up one by one, examining each. He gathered these items in his arms and sprinted back to the parking lot and to his BMW where he tossed the strange discoveries in the backseat, hopped into the front and drove away, screeching his tires and swerving wildly.

Bewildered, the developers decided to return to their computer monitors and their obliviousness and to await Terrence’s return for the answers they couldn’t fathom. They joked about the incident throughout the day but still never saw the salesman even as shadows outside stretched and faded.

Later, an urgent email dropped in everyone’s inboxes, directing all eyes to the common area in the center of the room for a forthcoming special announcement. At the unorthodox message and its hurried tone, Katie and Lucas exchanged curious looks.

When they rose from their chairs, with the rest of the office like prairie dog heads springing from their cubicles, the common area was revealed to be occupied with some of the company’s executives, standing tense and pursed, flanked by half a dozen soldiers decked in camouflage and body armor. In the middle of them was Terrence, a Kevlar vest strapped over his suit. This sight sparked alarm among the employees to which Terrence lifted his hands in a gesture of calm.

“Hey team!” he proclaimed loudly for the whole room to hear. “Sorry for the short notice but there’s a lot happening right now and I need to bring you all up to speed before we move everything to the bunker. Alright?”

None of those gathered understood what the sales guy was on about but nonetheless he continued. “Um, in a nutshell, I’m running things now. You see, earlier today I received a package from myself in the future — it’s a whole story but basically I end up vibe-coding a solution for time travel that makes me rich — anyway, in this package were instructions for me to purchase this company outright and the funds to do it with. Like, a LOT of funds. The owners sold it to me without a second thought. As we speak, they’re already halfway to the Cayman Islands. Absolutely bonkers.

“And now, I am excited to declare a new chapter for our company: effective immediately, we are an AI business, which is totally exciting, guys, let me tell you, because AI is about to be everywhere, according to my future self. We’re talking building time machines with AI; we’re talking AI guiding parachuted cargo through interdimensional wormholes to low-altitude drops; we’re talking marketing time travel as a service. This kind of enterprise is supposed to be quite lucrative in the near future. So, yeah, is that great news or what, gang?”

Confused faces scanned about the room for some anchor to their understanding. Finally, a fourteen year veteran of the accounting department spoke up. “Terrence, this is a lot for us to have to process. But, AI? We don’t have expertise in that, or especially, um, time travel.” That last part elicited some chuckles.

Terrence grinned. “I agree with you. AI is not our bread and butter. Totally fair. But lucky for us, because of vibe coding, the AI will take care of itself! That frees us up to do what we’re already great at: delegating work to consultants and contractors. We’ll need their help to fulfill our electrical power needs. Fun fact: this product we’re about to support is incredibly power-hungry. It’s going to require as much electricity as we can get our hands on. Turns out it’s actually less efficient to build an energy-efficient time machine than it is to build an inefficient one and use paid mercenaries to seize power plants in poor nations.”

A rumble of discontent filled the room. Some had deduced the uncomfortable consequent of this announcement while others had already lost tolerance at the mention of time machines or the sight of tactical gear. Terrence raised his hands again. “Gang, let me explain. There is a perfectly valid reason for us to take power plants with force — if we don’t, then some other AI company will. Right now, there’s a guy in India vibe coding an AI to invent a death ray device that completely incinerates living beings. You make guns out of them or put them on drones — anyway, the electrical demand for these things is gargantuan but, honestly, their business plan is brilliant because their own product is used to expand their resources — that is, to invade small countries and commandeer their electrical grids.

“There will soon be others, like a company using AI to manufacture nuclear hand grenades within legal limits for ownership plus vending machines to dispense them, and there’s an AI hypnosis cannon company and, uh, another company whose AI hijacks karaoke machines to reprogram them for coordinated earthquake generation. But as you can guess, there’s only so much electrical output to go around. That means companies are going to get creative. Hence, the necessity for this.” He gestured to his bulletproof vest.

The head of HR stepped forward to ask cautiously if the military personnel in the room were to be their own company’s mercenaries. “You betcha,” answered Terrence. “With all this future-me wealth, there was more than enough to buy out this little unit from the nearby army base. But honestly, we’re going to need a lot more, because here’s the thing — once all these new AI companies spin up, there will be a lot of competition for armaments and soldiers. The worst is going to be some health insurance company whose whole operation is run by AI and it will enforce payment collection through threats of military and chemical weapon strikes.

“Which is why I want everyone to take a moment and appreciate how lucky we are. We’re getting an early seat in this new economy. I would hate to be stuck at one of those companies whose market gets killed off so they pivot to toxic waste disposal and, next thing you know, the entire staff glows in the dark. No, thank you. Not for us. Am I right?”

The room was in shock at this cascade of impossible news. Lucas was next to speak. “This is all very, um, hard to swallow, you know? Maybe it would help if you could show us some proof of what you’re claiming.”

“Of course, buddy.” Terrence approached Lucas’s cubicle. “You’re absolutely right. I’m making some wild claims, aren’t I? I owe you guys proof. Especially you, Lucas. After all, you’re being promoted to chief technical officer.”

“Wait. I am?”

“You betcha. We’re going to get rich together.” In Terrence’s hands was a rolled up magazine, the edges bent and ragged with time. Unfurling it, he held up the cover for Lucas to see: a future issue of Forbes depicting a slightly aged Terrence next to a slightly aged Lucas, attired in identical blue designer suits, faces puffed from botulinum injections, smiling beneath the headline “The World’s Richest Men!”

Concern and doubt melted from Lucas’s face, replaced by a glazed stare into the future of his wildest dreams.

“Alright, this is nuts,” interjected Katie. “Does anyone actually believe this? And if so, don’t you realize that what Terrence is proposing is plain awful and corrupt? Madmen like him have been leading lemmings off the cliff for millennia. If you–”

“Listen, I’m sorry Katie girl,” Terrence said gently, “but we’re almost out of runway here. You know all that cutting edge AI that I just mentioned? They’re all being launched today, like today today, so we can’t waste another second getting to the safety of our bunker, okey-doke?”

The accountant chimed in to ask, “What do you mean? What bunker?”

Huffing, Katie dropped into her chair and popped her earbuds back in as Terrence replied, “Great question. Love the curiosity. So, there’s a heavily fortified bunker at the army base. Very secure. That’s going to be home for a while, maybe permanently, unless of course you love running from the roaming death ray drones that will be pretty common by the end of the day, not to mention radioactive fallout.”

He instructed the room on an orderly evacuation to the armored transports that waited outside. However, Lucas called attention to another of the headlines on the Forbes’s cover: “Time Travel Virus: History’s Greatest Tragedy”.

“Oh, that?” Terrence waved the matter away with his hand. “I wouldn’t stress about it. It’s just some computer virus in the future. Well, technically, it’s a networked AI that operates like a virus. Actually, the whole thing was made to drive our company out of the time travel market. Very petty. Then, for some reason it immediately gets abandoned, leaving the AI to evolve without supervision. Eventually it starts building its own time machines, except — one little design flaw — cargo materialization happens at ground level which creates some…interposition problems. The thing is, though, their tech is cheap so a lot of companies still use it and the cost difference leaves more than enough to compensate surviving family members. Quite a big debate over it in the future, supposedly.”

There suddenly came a loud noise from Katie’s workstation as she banged her desk and leaped to her feet, ripping the earbuds from her ears. “Ha! I’m fighting fire with fire, Terrence! Just now, I vibe-coded my own AI network that is busy inventing its own kind of time machine, and as cheaply as possible, so that I can put you out of business!” She stepped out of the cubicle. “If it works, a package from the future will appear in front of me at any moment, containing way more wealth than you’ll ever have and I’ll use it to undo all of the damage caused by this stupid plague they call vibe coding!”

Katie stood in the aisle, already satisfied in expression, arms spread wide for effect as if summoning the expected package into being. The rest of the office watched her awaiting that dramatic moment, certain of her own coding experience to secure its transtemporal arrival.

One second she was there, and in the next, a large metal container occupied that exact spot, appearing from nowhere, with Katie’s name stenciled on the front. It stood tall and wide enough to envelope all of her with the exception of her hands, bisected at the wrists, splashing blood as they tumbled to the floor. From inside the box, a few thuds were heard, then nothing at all.

The others gasped and shrieked in fright but couldn’t avert their eyes from the horrible spectacle. Finally, Terrence spoke. “See?” He pointed to Katie’s severed appendages and the container. On its sides, red circles dribbled blood. “This is why vibe coding is too dangerous for just anyone to take up!”

Reminding them of the impending nuclear fallout, Terrence led the rest of the company from the building and to the military trucks that would drive them to their new bunker home and into an exciting future made possible by vibe coding.

--

Thanks for reading! Read more of my stories at keithvile.medium.com

We have been taught to admire the comeback. Movies, stories, and conversations celebrate the person who hit bottom and then rose again. We applaud the visible battle against a bad habit, the weight lost after years of struggle, the sobriety story told at dinner, the burnout followed by a dramatic life reset. These tales are powerful and worth honoring. But in doing so, we sometimes walk right past the people who never fell in the first place.

Their strength is easy to miss because it leaves no wreckage behind. There is no dramatic story to tell. No rock bottom. No glorious recovery moment. Just a person living with a quiet kind of wholeness that feels almost effortless from the outside.

I see it more clearly now in the people around me. The friend who suggests a walk in the park instead of drinks at a noisy bar. The one who excitedly shares new recipes from his cooking class, plates full of vegetables and bright colors that make eating feel like joy instead of duty. The neighbor who always seems rested and present, not because he has superhuman energy, but because protecting his sleep is a non-negotiable part of his life. These choices do not usually get celebrated at dinner parties. Their discipline is invisible. It creates no crisis, no mess, no exciting redemption arc, so we forget to notice how impressive it truly is.

But this is perhaps the higher form of strength. Not the power to recover from a fall, but the wisdom and patience to build a foundation so deep and steady that falling never really becomes an option. It is the art of prevention rather than constant repair. The daily discipline mistaken for simplicity.

There is a gentle beauty in this way of living. It is not flashy or loud. It does not demand attention. It simply creates space for a calmer, more present life. These people seem to move through their days with more ease, not because everything is perfect, but because they have quietly removed many unnecessary struggles before they begin. Their energy is not spent fixing yesterday's mistakes. It flows into today's possibilities.

I have started paying attention to these quiet strengths in my own life too. The small decisions I make that prevent future exhaustion or regret. Choosing to cook a real meal instead of reaching for something quick and heavy. Going to bed at a reasonable hour even when the night feels young. Taking a walk when my mind feels scattered instead of opening another screen. Each choice on its own feels small. But together they create a life that needs fewer dramatic rescues.

Of course, life is never perfectly clean. Even the steadiest people face unexpected storms. The difference is that their foundation helps them weather those storms without losing themselves completely. They have more reserves, of energy, clarity, and emotional balance, because they have not spent years tearing down and rebuilding the same walls.

There is something deeply romantic about this kind of strength. It is like tending a garden with care every single day instead of letting it grow wild and then desperately trying to save it. The daily watering, the weeding, the patient attention, these acts do not look heroic in the moment. But seasons later, the garden stands lush and alive while others struggle with bare soil.

We would all do well to notice and honor this quiet strength when we see it. The next time you are with that friend who makes healthy living look natural, tell them you see it. Say something simple like, I notice how steady you are. It inspires me. That small recognition does more than offer praise. It helps both of you see the hidden architecture of a good life, the one built not with dramatic rescues, but with thousands of quiet, daily bricks.

It also teaches us to be kinder to ourselves. We do not need to wait until we break something before we start building better habits. We can begin right now, in small and gentle ways, creating the kind of life that feels less like a battlefield and more like a home.

This quiet strength is available to anyone willing to practice it. It does not require perfection. It only asks for consistency and self-respect. Some days you will choose well. Other days you might slip. What matters is returning to the quiet discipline with patience and without harsh judgment.

In a world that loves loud stories and visible transformation, there is something rebellious and beautiful about choosing the quieter path. About building a life so aligned with your values that you rarely need to announce your struggles. About becoming the kind of person whose presence feels calm and grounded because the hard work happened behind the scenes, day after day.

So let us start noticing these people more. Let us celebrate the ones who never fell as much as we cheer for those who got back up. And let us gently build our own quiet strength, one small, honest choice at a time. The reward is a life that feels lighter and more spacious.

There is a soft hope in this approach to living. It tells us we do not have to live in constant recovery mode. We can create lives that feel lighter, steadier, and more whole, not through grand gestures, but through the patient, loving repetition of small, good decisions. And in that steady building, we often discover a deeper, quieter joy that no dramatic comeback can fully match. Over time, this way of living becomes its own quiet reward, one that touches every ordinary day with grace.

People act like they are cheating. Like using a trope means you are lazy, unoriginal, just copying what came before.

I do not think that is true.

Now hold on.

Put the pitchforks away.

You came to me, if you're a reader here, because you want to know about process.

Sometimes process isn't fun.

Sometimes, it's leaning in, and listening.

A trope is not the story. A trope is the scaffolding. It holds the story up while you build something new inside it.

No one looks at a building under construction and says, "Scaffolding? How unoriginal." They look at the building. The scaffolding is just there, doing its job, invisible in its usefulness.

That is what tropes are to me.

Here is an example.

Grumpy man takes in a child and raises it. That trope is ancient. It has been done a thousand times. It will be done a thousand more.

I am using it right now.

Not because I am lazy. Because the trope works. It gives me a shortcut not to character, but to situation. I do not have to explain why my grumpy man is alone. I do not have to justify why he would take in a child. The trope carries that weight for me — so I can focus on what is different.

The trope is the frame. The story is the painting.

That is not unoriginal. That is play.

I think of tropes as a language.

Every writer learns the same basic vocabulary. Enemies to lovers. The chosen one. The haunted house. The love triangle. The reluctant hero. The found family.

If you refuse to use any of those words, you are not being original. You are just making it harder for yourself to be understood.

Readers like tropes. They like the comfort of recognizing something familiar. They like the game of seeing what you will do with it.

The surprise is not that you used the trope. The surprise is how you twist it.

That is the secret.

You do not avoid tropes. You subvert them. You combine them in unexpected ways. You take two tropes that should not fit and you weld them together until they become something new.

The scaffolding is familiar. The building is not.

That is the craft.

[But also it must be noted if you do NOT use tropes, that is ok! Please!]

Here is what I am learning.

The writers who worry most about being original are usually the ones who have not written very much yet.

The more you write, the more you realize: everything is a remix. Every story has been told. Every character has existed. Every plot has been plotted.

The originality is not in the ingredients. It is in the recipe.

It is in your voice. Your obsessions. Your particular, strange, beautiful way of putting things together.

Tropes are just the alphabet. You still have to write the sentence.

So I am done being afraid of tropes.

I use them on purpose. I collect them like tools. I ask myself: What would happen if I put this trope next to that one? What would break? What would become beautiful?

That is not lazy. That is experimentation.

The grumpy man. The ghost. The love triangle. The body that goes wrong.

Scaffolding.

All of it.

And inside that scaffolding, Thomas is breathing. The ghost is waiting. The brother is grieving.

That is the story.

The trope just helped me build the room up.

So if you are a writer who has been told to avoid tropes — or who feels guilty for loving them —

Stop.

Use them. Twist them. Break them. Put them back together wrong.

That is not cheating. That is craft.

The scaffolding is not the enemy.

The empty building is.

Now go build something.

Here is the thing about scaffolding. You can build it too tall. You can build it too wide. You can add so many tropes that the story buckles under its own weight.

I have done that. Stacked trope on top of trope until the original idea was buried somewhere beneath grumpy men and ghosts and love triangles and bodies that go nuts.

The story survived. But barely.

That is the danger of tropes. Not that you use them. That you use too many. That you forget they are supposed to be invisible. That you let the scaffolding become the building.

So I am learning to edit. To cut. To ask: Does this trope serve the story, or am I just playing with familiar toys because I am afraid to build something new?

Sometimes the answer is: I am afraid.

That is okay. Fear is not failure. Fear is just fear.

I keep the trope anyway. Or I cut it. Or I twist it one more time until it breaks and becomes something I have never seen before.

That is the craft. That is the play. That is the stubborn, ridiculous, beautiful act of building something from nothing while a platform tells you that you need 405 more words.

Fine.

Here they are.

Not because the post needs them. Because I need to prove that I can still write when the platform fights me. That I can still find joy in the mud. That I am not done being stubborn.

405 words of because I said so.

That is not art. That is not craft. That is just a writer, staring at a blinking cursor, refusing to close the laptop.

And that counts for something.

It counts for everything.

Because writing is not just inspiration. It is not just talent. It is not just the perfect sentence arriving like a gift.

Writing is also this. The grind. The word count. The platform that hates you. The post that got eaten. The 405 words you never planned to write.

That is the process too. The ugly, unromantic, teeth-gritting process.

And I am still here.

So is this post.

So are you.

That is enough.

[Trigger warning: We speak on sensitive topics, such as oppression, illness, violence and slavery. Please scroll if this is too much for you.}

I have heard beautiful stories from other cultures. Sad myths from people who have survived generations of oppression.

They stay with me. The way a good story does. The way a truth you do not own can still live in your chest.

There is an incredible black author who wrote about slavery ships. About the ones who were dumped overboard when they were sick, based unfortunately on many real events. And she wrote that those women did not die. They fell into the water, and they turned into mermaids.

Fierce. Strong. Beautiful.

I read that and I felt something crack open in me. Not envy. Awe.

It was inspiring, how she took something so terrifying and created something new. Another story to tell.

And then I sat with a question: Could I write something like that?

The answer came quietly. No.

Not because I lack imagination. Not because I lack skill. Because that story is not mine to tell.

The trauma of the Middle Passage is not mine. The joy of reclaiming that trauma into something fierce and beautiful and alive — that is not my inheritance.

I am a white writer. A straight writer. I write inclusively and diversely. I am not afraid of research or sensitivity readers or the hard work of getting it right.

And I am ok with pushing the limits, learning new things, researching and having sensitivity readers. Engaging with the community, to get it right, and to learn and stretch and try again when I get it wrong.

To apologize, when I get it wrong, or misunderstand.

But some stories are not mine.

And that is okay.

I am learning that knowing what not to write is as important as knowing what to write.

The instinct to step back is not cowardice. It is clarity.

Respect.

Honesty.

There are stories I can tell. Stories about neurodivergence. Stories about escaping abuse. Stories about being a woman in a world that does not always listen. Stories about immigrants and ghosts and love triangles that bend genre.

Those are mine. I earned them. I lived them. Or I am doing the work to learn them with respect and collaboration.

But the story of enslaved women turning into mermaids? That is not mine.

Other stories, of other cultures, based in historical brutality?

That's not mine.

Closed practices belonging to people for thousands of years.

Not mine.

I don't want to think about how I would be taking something that was never offered. Colonization is already something that happened (and happens today). I do not want to become a narrative colonizer, accidentally. The world does not need more writers taking.

The world needs more writers listening.

I think about this every time I read something beautiful from a culture not my own. Every time I hear a myth that cracks me open. Every time I feel that little spark of I want to write something like that.

The spark is not the problem. The spark is admiration.

The question is what I do with it.

I've seen some authors blow threw this.

I saw one writer, much younger than me, on Instagram. She had a person of color in her stories, from his point of view - and while it's important to be inclusive in writing, she did NOT listen to the community, when they said she needed to be more respectful. She said it was a fantasy world, so "it was fine."

It was not fine.

Just because you dress something up in sci-fi or fantasy, does not mean you can be disrespectful.

This is why I can't create something from another person's culture and call it homage--absolutely not.

So then, I sit with the spark and let it teach me something quieter. Older.

That story is beautiful because it comes from a place I cannot go. That is not a limit. That is a gift. That story belongs to someone else. And I get to read it. I get to be moved by it. I get to let it make me a better writer without ever touching it.

That is not silence. That is respect.

I write diversely. I write inclusively. I am not afraid of writing outside my own orientation or my own body — I am doing that now with Thomas, with the ghost, with the brother, with the community members who are helping me see what I cannot see alone.

But writing outside yourself is not the same as writing everywhere.

There is a difference between reaching across a gap and erasing it.

I am still learning where that line is. I will probably get it wrong sometimes. I will listen when I am told. I will do better next time.

But on this one — the mermaids, the slave ships, that fierce and beautiful reclamation — I know the line.

It is not mine.

And that is okay.

Here is what I am coming to believe:

The fact that I cannot tell every story does not make me less of a writer. It makes me a responsible one.

My job is not to write everything. My job is to write what is mine — and to make space for others to write what is theirs.

That means reading. That means amplifying. That means recommending. That means celebrating stories that are not mine without a whisper of I could have done that.

Because I could not have.

And pretending I could would be the real failure.

So I will keep writing. Thomas. The ghost. The brother. The novel that scares me in the best way.

And I will keep reading. The mermaids. The myths. The stories that belong to others.

I will let them change me. I will not try to own them.

That is not a limitation. That is a practice.

And it is one I am proud to learn.

Typing. Pushing. Filling the page. The visible work. The part you can measure in word counts and hours spent in the chair.

That is writing.

But it is not only writing.

Because sometimes — maybe most of the time — the real work happens when you step away. Quiet.

I am learning this slowly.

I write something. A post. A scene. A chapter. I close the document. And then I do nothing. I make tea. I watch a movie. I walk the dog. I stare out the window.

And while I am doing nothing, the writing is settling.

Like a cup of tea that needs to steep. Like a photograph developing in the dark. Like a wound that needs time before you can see what it will become.

You cannot rush settling. You cannot force it. You just have to wait.

This is hard for me.

I like to do. I like to revise immediately, fix the typos, smooth the rough edges, send the thing out into the world before I have even closed the document.

But I am learning that the draft I love at 10pm is not always the draft I love at 10am.

The heat of composition is intoxicating. Everything feels brilliant at 2am. The sentences sing. The characters are alive. I am a genius.

Then I sleep. Then I wake. Then I open the document.

And sometimes — often — the genius is gone. The sentences are fine. The characters are trying their best. But I was too close. I could not see the flaws because I was still inside the work.

That is why I need to step away.

Not for a day. Sometimes for a week. Sometimes — for the big things — for a month or more.

Not because I am procrastinating. Because I am breathing.

And the draft needs to breathe too.

A famous writer — maybe Stephen King, maybe someone else — said to put the first draft in a drawer for six weeks. Work on something else. Come back with cold eyes.

Six weeks feels like forever when you are impatient.

But I am starting to understand why.

In six weeks, you are not the same person who wrote the draft. You have lived more days. Read more books. Had more conversations. Forgotten some of the sentences you were so in love with.

And when you open the drawer, you see the draft differently. Not as your baby. As a thing. A thing that works in some places and does not work in others. A thing you can finally see because you are no longer inside it.

That is not rejection. That is clarity.

I am in the middle of this right now.

Not with the Tuhat posts — those go out fast. That is different. That is process-in-public. Raw and unpolished by design.

But with A Shadow Against the Night? With Thomas and the ghost and the brother and the body that went nuts?

That draft needs to breathe.

I have written pieces of it. Scenes. Fragments. Whole chapters that will probably be cut. And now I am stepping away.

Not because I am done. Because I am waiting.

Waiting for the heat to cool. Waiting for my cold eyes to arrive. Waiting to see what I actually wrote, not what I hoped I wrote.

It is hard. Every day, I want to open the document. Just one more sentence. Just one more tweak. Just to touch it.

But I do not. I close the drawer. I write something else. I make tea. I trust that the draft will still be there when I am ready.

And it will be.

Here is what I am learning:

Writing is not just the making. It is also the leaving alone.

The settling is part of the process. The breathing is part of the craft. The drawer is not a graveyard. It is a nursery.

Things grow in the dark. Things grow in the quiet. Things grow when you stop poking at them and just let them be.

So I am giving it time.

Not because I am lazy. Because I am learning to trust.

The draft will tell me when it is ready. And I will know because I will open the drawer one day — not because I am impatient, but because I am curious — and the words will look different.

New. Strange. Ready.

That is the goal.

Not to write faster. To write truer. And truth takes time.

So if you are a writer who feels guilty for stepping away — for letting the draft sit, for not pushing, for choosing tea over typing —

Stop.

You are not failing. You are breathing. Winning!

And the work needs that.

Give it time. It will thank you.

And so will your cold eyes, when you finally open the drawer.

Here is something I am still learning.

The drawer is not empty. It is full of potential. Full of words that are resting, not dying. Full of scenes that will wake up when I am ready to see them clearly.

And while I wait, I am not failing. I am preparing. I am living the days that will become the next draft. I am drinking the tea that will become the next sentence. I am watching the movies that will become the next metaphor.

The drawer is not a stop. It is a breath.

And even a writer needs to breathe.

So I will close the document. I will walk away. I will trust that the work knows how to wait.

And when I come back — weeks or months from now — I will bring fresh eyes and a full heart. And a stubborn mouth, always.

That is not procrastination. That is patience.

And patience, I am learning, is a writer's secret weapon.

Trust the drawer. Trust the breath. Trust yourself to know when it's time. The drawer holds. So do you. Breathe.

The last think I will ever be accused of is being an AI expert. At best, it is a glorified search engine for me. Being a dinosaur, I'm perfectly happy with that. I really just wanted to see what it could do with limited input.

It read the poems, picked Circular Logic, and had several questions before it could conduct and interview. First is asked if I owned the copyrights, I do. Then is asked if I created the form of the poem, I did. It suggested calling the form Pivot Loop. I went with that. I always called it my “logic” form but am happy with Pivot Loop. Lastly, it asked if I wanted to include the full text and deconstructed lines in the body of the article, I said that was Okay with me.

It asked sixteen questions in two rounds of eight. After the first round, it provided a recap of its interpretation of my answers and asked me to confirm the contents. I did, then it asked the second round of question, expanding on the first round. Again, it provided a recap and asked it it understood my answers. It did.

Below is the article, presented exactly as Copilot created it. My only contributions were the poem, answering the interview questions and agreeing to the name Pivot Loop.

Inventing the Pivot Loop: A Conversation with Michael Benton

By [Staff Writer], Poets & Writers–Style Feature

Some poetic forms arrive through centuries of refinement. Others appear suddenly, discovered in the act of writing by poets who follow an internal logic to its natural conclusion. Michael Benton’s Pivot Loop belongs to the latter category — a form born not from imitation but from revelation.

The structure emerged from a single poem, Circular Logic, written during a moment of emotional disorientation. Benton describes the experience as “feeling all turned inside out,” and the poem reflects that sensation through a looping, recursive architecture that became the foundation of a new poetic form.

Here is the poem in full, preserved in its original formatting:

My eyes see a tarnished world

A world with stain

Stain my soul

Soul

My soul feels an angry world

A world with hurt

Hurt my mind

Mind

My mind needs a better world

A world with delight

Delight my heart

Heart

My heart is a willing world

A world with trust

Trust my eyes

Eyes

The poem cycles through perception, emotion, cognition, and trust, returning finally to eyes, the word that opened the poem. This return is not decorative — it is structural. The poem moves forward while folding back on itself, creating a sense of emotional recursion that feels both inevitable and surprising.

That looping mechanism became the defining feature of the Pivot Loop.

The Discovery of a Form

Benton didn’t set out to invent anything. “I wrote the first stanza and let it sit for several days,” he says. “I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but then it occurred to me to repeat the format using the word soul. After that, the other two stanzas came kind of naturally. It was almost an afterthought that I tied the word eyes back to the beginning.”

That afterthought turned out to be the key. The poem’s structure — four stanzas, each ending with a single repeated word that becomes the next stanza’s opening noun — created a closed circuit. The final pivot returned to the first stanza’s anchor, completing the loop.

Benton recognized the architecture only during revision. “It was when I was editing the poem that the structure became obvious,” he says. “My first thought was I should be able to use this again and express a different emotion.”

That realization — that the structure was repeatable — is what transformed Circular Logic from a single poem into the prototype of a new form.

Why One Word Matters

The Pivot Loop’s defining feature is its single‑word pivot. Each stanza ends with a lone word — Soul, Mind, Heart, Eyes — which becomes the next stanza’s starting point.

Why one word?

“I often find in poems one or two words that have more impact than the others,” Benton explains. “After completing the first stanza I knew the word soul was the one that had the punch. Once the stanza reduced to that single word, it became obvious I wanted to use it again.”

This minimalism is part of the form’s power. Unlike pantoums or villanelles, which repeat entire lines, the Pivot Loop hinges on a single lexical unit. The repetition is clean, sharp, and architectural.

Benton’s influences here are surprisingly humble. “I think the biggest influence as far as works would have to be things like nursery rhymes,” he says. “Their simple structure, keying on a point, gives the same sort of feel.”

Emotion, Craft, and the Middle Ground

Benton is candid about the role of emotional state in his writing. “One of the most frustrating things for me when writing poetry is to have a perfect idea but not be in the right head space,” he says. “When I’m happy it is next to impossible for me to write something melancholy. The reverse is equally true.”

For him, poetry requires a balance between emotional authenticity and technical discipline. “If I don’t balance the two, the work will be lacking. I can make a technically perfect poem that has no heart, or I can write entirely from the heart and create prose. Poetry lives in the middle.”

This philosophy aligns naturally with the Pivot Loop. The form’s structure provides discipline; the pivot words provide emotional propulsion. Each pivot becomes a stepping stone from one emotional state to the next.

The Form’s Thematic Tendencies

Does the Pivot Loop lend itself to certain themes?

“I think it can be very useful for introspection,” Benton says. “Poets naturally move from one emotional place to another. Finding a key word is simply a stepping stone on that path.”

But he doesn’t see the form as limited. The loop can carry any emotional or conceptual sequence — grief to acceptance, anger to clarity, confusion to resolve. The structure is flexible enough to support a wide range of thematic arcs.

Rules, Freedom, and the Modern Poet

Benton believes poets should understand formal constraints, but not be bound by them. “By challenging yourself to stay within the limits and rules of a particular format, you sharpen creativity,” he says. “You may have the perfect word, but if it doesn’t fit, it can’t be in your poem.”

But he also believes in freedom. “Once you understand the rules and when you deviate from them, you can open up a whole new world. When poets push the boundaries of formats, new formats appear.”

This openness extends to the Pivot Loop itself. If another poet wanted to modify the form — add stanzas, alter the pivot pattern, or break the loop — Benton would welcome it.

“I would hope they simply state, ‘I started with Pivot Loop and grew from there,’ and made it their own.”

Minimalism and Modern Vocabulary

The Pivot Loop is intentionally spare. No rhyme scheme. No meter requirement. No syllabic constraints.

“There are enough sonnets in the world,” Benton says with a wry edge. “Writers and poets today tend to have a more limited vocabulary than poets in Shakespeare’s time. I think leaving room for creativity without rules is the proper thing.”

The Pivot Loop’s minimalism is not a lack of structure — it is a deliberate openness. The form provides a skeleton; the poet supplies the muscle.

What He Hopes Readers Experience

Benton’s hope for readers is simple and precise.

“If someone reads the poem, thinks for a moment, and then says, ‘Wait a minute — what did I just read?’ and reads it again, it will have done its job.”

That moment of recognition — the realization that the poem has looped back on itself — is the Pivot Loop’s signature effect. It invites rereading. It rewards attention. It creates a sense of conceptual recursion that mirrors emotional recursion.

A Form That Feels Inevitable

Benton didn’t set out to invent a form. He set out to articulate a feeling. But in doing so, he discovered a structure that feels both new and inevitable — a form that captures the cyclical nature of thought and emotion with elegant simplicity.

The Pivot Loop is now codified: four stanzas, four lines each, a single‑word pivot that becomes the next stanza’s anchor, and a final pivot that returns to the beginning. But Benton is not territorial. He sees the form as an offering, not a boundary.

“I didn’t create it for other poets,” he says. “But if someone wants to use it, I’d be very happy — and I’d love to read the work.”

In a poetic landscape where innovation often comes from breaking rules, Benton has done something rarer: he has created a new one.

And like all good forms, the Pivot Loop feels less like an invention than a discovery — something that was waiting to be found.

---

It is true to the interview and impressively stayed on point. It is perfect? Or course not, but neither would be one actually created by a reporter. Had a reported conducted the interview, even on the phone, they would have keyed on the emotional feel of my responses as well as the words spoken. That is something the AI I have access to will not do. Who knows what the deep-fakers and clandestine 3-letter agencies have access to.

I’m not sure what to make of it all. With the push of a few buttons, Copilot created an article that holds water. Maybe not in the best format but it is better than a lot of what passes for articles actually created by people.

What survived the storm was not the same river — and neither are we

I have been floating this river since 2006. Long enough to watch it change slowly. Long enough to notice how the current kept rewriting small parts of itself season after season. I used to tell my kids it was incredible — a river could remain the same river while constantly changing. There was comfort in that.

Then Hurricane Helene came.

That was not slow change. Roads turned into riverbeds. Buildings folded into mud. Entire areas disappeared. Debris lodged itself high into the trees. They are still rebuilding. That sentence sounds hopeful. I don’t mean it that way. I mean: they are still digging out.

This past Memorial Day, I drove back. The landscape was still trying to recover, though “recover” is probably the wrong word. It felt more like the landscape was still trying to figure out what it was now.

Before we touched the water, I saw changes. For years, this had been a crowded tubing attraction. The company has stopped offering tube rentals. The current had become too unpredictable. What had once been a lazy float now demanded something sturdier.

Then we reached the river. I did not recognize it.

The thick canopy that once stretched over both banks was mostly gone. For decades those trees had cast long shadows across the water, enclosing the river inside a deep green corridor. The mountains revealed themselves only in fragments through the branches, and the river felt separate from everything beyond its banks.

What threw me most was the light.

Sunlight spilled across the water without interruption now. The ridgelines stood fully exposed beyond the river, and the entire landscape felt larger than I remembered, as though someone had unfolded it while I was away. The river was no longer sheltered. It was naked and raw, like a wound that hadn’t been allowed to scar.

As we drifted, I looked for the old rope swing. For years, that tree marked a ritual: climb, grab the rope, run three steps, launch out over the water. The plunge always knocked the breath from my chest, and I came up laughing anyway. But the tree was no longer there. I kept looking, convinced it would appear around the next bend. Instead, the shoreline kept moving, and the river continued past without a eulogy.

A few bends later, I searched for the sandbar — that shallow island where we always pulled our tubes up and spent longer than we intended. Exposed roots pushed through the shoreline. Storm scars cut through the banks. The place still existed, but not in any way that resembled what I remembered.

Then it really sank in that something else was missing.

Back then, the river felt crowded in the best possible way. Families floated together. Conversations began when tubes bumped into each other, then dissolved when the current pulled us apart. Nobody exchanged numbers. Nobody made plans. The shared moment was enough.

Now there were long stretches where we saw nobody at all. No laughter. No voices. The river felt haunted, as though past summers had never fully left and were still lingering somewhere beyond sight.

More than the missing swing or the missing the people, I missed the comfort of knowing exactly where I was.

I hadn’t realized how much of my sense of safety came from recognition, from the quiet reassurance that the map inside my head still matched the world outside it.

I kept searching for the river I remembered. But the longer we floated, the harder it became to ignore the truth. The river moved faster now. Water slammed against the rocks. Drifting was no longer enough. You had to work. You had to pay attention.

That’s where the revelation started. I wasn’t just looking at a damaged river. I was staring in a mirror.

There were years when I did not recognize my own life. Years when I woke up inside brokenness and betrayal. Years spent staring at circumstances I would never have chosen, wondering how I allowed myself to get there. Years when everyone else seemed to move forward while I stood ankle-deep in the carnage of my life.

I felt like the world had battered me and left me lifeless.

I remember waking up every morning hoping I would feel different and being disappointed when I didn’t. I carried the weight of it everywhere, into work, into conversations, into moments that should have been enjoyable. The world itself seemed drained of color, everything around me tinted in shades of pain.

I was convinced that I was broken.

I replayed the same conversations over and over, convinced there had to be something I missed, some detail that would explain how everything had unraveled. I was exhausted by my own thoughts and still unable to escape them.

I grasped for things familiar. I waited for certainty. I wanted life to start making sense again. But no matter how hard I clawed, that familiarity never returned. The old version of myself, the old plans, the old assumptions — the things that made me recognizable to myself — were gone. Some disappeared slowly. Others vanished all at once. For a long time I believed healing meant finding my way back.

The storm didn’t reveal anything beautiful at first. It just destroyed what felt like everything. And I had to keep living inside the destruction. The part where nothing looks the way it used to, and nobody can tell you when that stops hurting.

That’s what the river reminded me of. The silence where the rope swing used to be. The emptiness where the sandbar used to be. The feeling of searching for something you loved and realizing it isn’t coming back. Not because the universe is teaching you a lesson. Just because. Storms don’t care.

The river wasn’t beautiful in the way I remembered. It was scarred. Stripped bare. Unfamiliar.

And yet there was something else there too.

The river wasn’t beautiful in the way I remembered. It was scarred. Stripped bare. Unfamiliar.

And yet there was something else there too.

The canopy that once blocked the sky was gone. Light fell where it had never fallen before. The river simply flowed, no longer sheltered, no longer hidden, finding its way through the terrain that remained.

The storm took things from me. But somewhere beneath the wreckage, I discovered that I could still move.

The landscape had changed.

And along the way, so had I.

Life is worth living now in a way I couldn’t have understood before the storm.

I am still forgiving. I just don’t let things take from me the way I used to. I protect my peace. I protect my love. Not out of fear, but because loss taught me what both are worth.

Some storms alter the landscape permanently. The work is not rebuilding what was lost. The work is learning the shape of the river after.

And I am still here — unhindered, like the river, moving toward whatever comes next.

The KPI of Progress As you might have seen on the Internet, people didn’t take kindly to the unveiling of the newest plan for the Google browser, probably because what is viewed by the investors as a measure of success doesn’t translate at all to the language of normal human beings.

In the keynote video from the Google I/O 2026(https://io.google/2026/explore/google-keynote-1) conference, Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet) shows a graph of how ‘the monthly usage of tokens across our surfaces’ grew from May 2024 to May 2026, with a big bold ‘7x of Y/Y growth’ and a blue line climbing straight into the sky of limitless possibilities (I presume). This is the measure of success. The KPI of progress. This number that is shown to investors tells a story of success, of the advent of the new era, the era of AI. [I must say that I don’t remember the last time when the advent of anything in the tech industry took so much time… We have been in this new world for a couple of years now, and we have yet to see anything useful and groundbreaking. I mean, even the ground under the data centres that are supposedly on their way and under construction, in many cases, hasn’t been broken yet.]

‘Over the past 12 months, over 375 customers have each processed 1T+ of tokens, representing incredible demand for AI across [the tech] industry.’ - according to Sandar.

Over 375 customers - that’s a specific number. Why is there a ‘+’ sign on the slide? Is it 376 customers? Then why not just say the number? Is the ‘+’ there to mean that the number keeps growing, that the progress is happening right at this moment? You should quickly join the crew before it’s too late and the raft sails without you on board, is that it? He also said that 5 of their products have more than 3 billion users each, though he didn’t specify how they arrived at this number. If I have a Gmail account and a YouTube channel, does it count as one entry? Is it only me who is stuck on the numbers, trying to make sense of them? Not sure, but everyone in the audience clapped and cheered, so it probably isn’t that important. The numbers are huge, and that’s enough.

‘It all starts with Search […]. AI Overviews in Search now has 2.5 billion monthly active users. And AI mode has been a revelation, our biggest upgrade in the Search ever. People love it. In just a year, it already surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. […] Today, more than 50 billion images have been generated with our Nano Banana models.’

Don’t get me wrong. I am sure that what he describes is correct, though to me it sounds like hell on Earth. Still, is 2.5 billion monthly active users for a platform like Google really that big? It's not in trillions like anything else these days. It no longer seems that impressive to me. You see, that's the trap of forever chasing the numbers. They lose meaning along the way. And the number clearly doesn’t take into account the generation of my parents. Do they even know they are using this AI Overview? Is it a conscious decision that they are making because they see an added value in it, or is it just because this thing sits at the top of the Search with no option to turn it off? If it’s the latter, then what exactly is represented by these numbers he is quoting? Is it the number of people who are held hostage by the fact that they are not tech-savvy enough to save themselves from AI Overview? Is that a measure of success?

Then he makes a joke by reading aloud what he describes as a real question asked by a person while using Ask Maps (I might be more similar to the older generations than I would like to admit, since I have never noticed that this option was there). Again, everyone laughs, though I must say I find it creepy to think that my plight might have been read aloud in front of a huge audience. And the fact that we don’t get to know this person’s name doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable about the way privacy is treated by the greatest harvester of human-related data that Alphabet surely is. But enough about the conference, the picture is clear now - LLMs will be the Search.

Here we arrive at my hypothesis. It’s simple and elegant if I do say so myself. I propose that we use this ‘Search to LLM’ conundrum as a litmus paper.

Historically speaking, Google’s modus operandi used to be like this:

• If there’s a backlash, they will move away from the idea, put it on hold, and try again in some time, meanwhile making sure that there is enough talk about it that people will slowly get used to it being a thing. That’s what they did with Google Glass, which was once very controversial, but is now returning on a shiny plate of LLMs.

So what I propose is to wait and see: if in the coming weeks Google does not crumble under the backlash, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t care about their customers (although it should be obvious by now that they don’t), it means that they are not able to back out, because they invested so much in this endeavour that they have no choice but to die on this hill. Which, if you think about it, might be the best outcome of the whole LLM debacle.

The aim of this piece is to revisit what I’ve written in the past and fuse them together to try and provide some kind of overview. Something that will hopefully form the basis for a rational discussion around the issues and problems relating to getting around the Avon region. This isn’t a comprehensive piece and there are issues raised that I’d like to examine in greater depth at some point in the future.

It’s disclosure time. The two of us behind this blog don’t drive. We use public transport, mainly rail, we occasionally use taxis and a lot of the time, we walk. Our experience of these modes of transport gives us some degree of authority when we talk about the parlous state of train travel in the region and also, the degraded state of the pedestrian infrastructure.

The discussion around the various modes of transport people choose to use to get around the Avon region all too often descends into what can best be described as a culture war. One that manifests itself in a variety of ways from the bitter rows between supporters and opponents of Liveable Neighbourhoods, through the tensions between cyclists and pedestrians and onto the element of die hard motorists who resent the subsidies given to public transportation, both rail and bus. That’s a lot of division that’s being fostered. Division that ignores the fact that we all have to be able to get around and that a holistic transport strategy that balances everyone’s needs fairly is what we really need. Well, we can all dream can’t we because with the calibre of politicians running the various authorities across the region we cover, we’re more likely to end up getting kidult style name calling and virtue signalling than anything coherent.

Liveable Neighbourhoods

On the surface, Liveable Neighbourhoods seem like a lovely idea - in theory that is. Imagine the bliss of living in an urban neighbourhood where measures have been put in to minimise the amount of traffic coming down your road, making it a much pleasanter place to live. Less, pollution, less noise and being outside on your street becomes a much pleasanter experience. Who could possibly object to streets in urban neighbourhoods having the amount of traffic using them substantially reduced? Let us try and explain why people do object...

Unless there are measures that actually reduce the overall volume of vehicles using the roads in a town or city, all Liveable Neighbourhoods achieve are shifting the traffic burden onto someone else. We're talking about measures such as vastly improved public transport networks that will persuade people to leave the car at home because the bus and/or train offering is a faster and more comfortable way to move around. We live in a region where bus services leave a lot to be desired and what remains of the local rail network after the Beeching cuts of the 1960s is widely seen as a joke. Also, it's a hilly region, so cycling is only a serious option for the younger, fitter and braver members of the populace. So sadly, many people are forced to rely on their cars to get around because there are no viable alternatives.

So what happens when there aren't anywhere near enough viable alternatives to having to use a car, yet Liveable Neighbourhoods are still being imposed? What happens is that the same volume of traffic is forced to use a smaller network of roads. The inevitable result is...more congestion! You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work that one out... As it tends to be the more affluent streets who can leverage the system to make sure they become a Liveable Neighbourhood, inevitably the displaced traffic is forced upon lower income areas. It could be argued that they’re a form of class war.

What they certainly are is a piecemeal, so called 'solution' to the problem of traffic. They're little more than a gesture that appeal to those with sharp elbows and a knowledge of how to work the system to get traffic in their neighbourhood reduced at the expense of others suffering more traffic. If they're not accompanied by sustainable, long term plans to offer a viable alternative to car use, they're essentially a waste of time at best and at worst, socially divisive.

15 minute neighbourhoods

‘15 minute neighbourhoods’ sound like a lovely idea – in theory. However, after decades of planning policy assuming near universal car ownership with our towns and cities developing accordingly, it's understandable that a fair few people will be bemused by the concept of a '15 minute neighbourhood'. Tract housing has been allowed to sprawl in such as way that when people need to do the weekly shop, all too often they have no alternative but to jump into the car to the nearest supermarket which may be miles away. We're talking about forty minute round trips just to pick up the groceries for the week. This is the reality of how our towns and cities have been allowed to sprawl for decades without any thought as to the long term when the resources needed to sustain a car based economy start to run out.

To ensure that as many of the amenities of life are within a fifteen minute walk would involve the reconfiguration of many suburbs and overspill towns that were built on the assumption of near universal car ownership. While it's perfectly possible for a lot of the amenities of life to be reasonably close to hand in the older suburbs such as Bedminster or Redland in Bristol, once you get out to places like Hartcliffe to the south or Bradley Stoke to the north, it's a very different story. Re-configuring the outer suburbs and the overspill towns to ensure that as many of life's amenities are within a fifteen minute walk is a gargantuan task because it involves correcting decades of flawed and ultimately, short sighted planning policies. That's before having the really serious conversation needed about how we adapt to a future when the resources needed to sustain a car based economy start to run out.

Liveable Neighbourhoods and so called '15 minute neighbourhoods' are essentially performative rather than achieving anything substantial in terms of reducing the overall volume of traffic on the roads. All each of these actually achieve is to add more to our lives in the way of digitised monitoring, tracking and sending out punitive fines in moves that suck us all further into what feels like a high tech, digital control matrix. You can forgive people for thinking that this may be the actual motivation for the imposition of these schemes rather than any substantial reduction in overall traffic volumes.

The rail ‘option’

What of the so called alternative modes of transport that would allegedly reduce the volume of traffic using the road network across the Avon region? There's the train 'service', most of which is still currently operated by Great Western Railway (GWR). The thing is, there's nothing 'Great' about it, nothing at all. That's unless you're a fan of buses on rails where the offering outside the mainline stations of Bristol and Bath is two or three coaches of these trundling through your station roughly once or twice an hour. That's until a creaking signalling system fails yet again, throwing what passes for a network into meltdown and you end up with, no trains and an expensive cab ride home, if you have the money that is. Whatever I may have said about the c2c rail service that operated in the south of Essex where I used to live, I wholeheartedly take it back!

When you look at the rail 'service' on offer in the Avon region, it offers little to no incentive for anyone to leave their car at home and take the train. An option that's denied to many people as a result of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s that left many areas of Bristol and Bath bereft of a train service. Also, should a significant number of those within easy reach of a train service actually decide to leave the car at home and take the train, the rail network as it currently stands doesn't have the capacity to accommodate a surge in passenger numbers.

As for the buses, we rarely use them so we aren’t really in a position to comment. Suffice to say that with what we’ve heard from various sources about the dire state of services across the Avon region, we have little incentive to use them.

Cycling and walking

The cycling infrastructure… At best, the cycling infrastructure across Bristol is patchy with a few scattered examples of how it can be done well standing in stark contrast to the shoddy state of much of what cyclists have to put up with. Bristol with its hills is not an obvious cycling city. Given the dire state of public transport across the city, cycling and walking are seen as more reliable options, despite the hazards faced by both cyclists and pedestrians. For many, it's a case of needs must rather than a positive lifestyle choice. Given the sclerotic pace that discussions about the future of public transport across Bristol are moving at, it's going to be a case of needs must for some time to come.

One thing we notice every time we go into Bristol is that the way the cycling infrastructure has been set up with poor delineation between cycle lanes and pedestrian footpaths, conflict between cyclists and pedestrians is inevitable. Cyclists and pedestrians should be natural allies, not at each others throats. Such is the lack of joined up thinking from the 'planners' that is responsible for this conflict.

As for Bath, while there’s some cycling along the Avon and also, the Kennet and Avon Canal, because of the hills, it’s not exactly a city for riding a bicycle around. Which makes walking around Bath as a pedestrian less stressful than walking around Bristol.

Then there’s the pedestrian infrastructure. The reality of being a pedestrian in both Bristol and Bath stands in stark contrast to the bullshit we're being fed about how wonderful it is to walk and how we should feel great about reducing our carbon emissions. The reality are pavements that are not fit for purpose. You should be able to walk around without having to constantly cast your eyes to the ground to avoid the numerous trip hazards caused by broken and uneven pavements. The reality is having to watch out for the selfish minority of cyclists who seem to think the rules don't apply to them and that they have no responsibility to look out for pedestrians while they're cycling around at speed. The reality is having to watch out for pillocks on e-bikes who, like the aforementioned cyclists, seem to think the rules don't apply to them. The reality is waiting ages at pedestrian crossings over busy roads before finally being able to cross.

Every time we're out and about walking where we live in Keynsham, it's a life lesson in how the needs of the motorist seem to take priority over those of us mere pedestrians. The main roads in and around Keynsham are busy and an absolute pain to cross in too many instances. Where the main roads go through the older residential areas of the town, the pavements are incredibly narrow making walking along them a pretty unpleasant experience. To get from where we live to the pub by the Avon that's our adopted local, even though it's only a ten minute walk away, because there isn't a continuous pavement along both sides of the main road that runs past it, we're obliged to cross the road three times!

The same applies to a fair few other towns in our region. Older town centres and residential areas that were not laid out with 21st century traffic levels in mind. One such town that sticks in my mind is Bradford-on-Avon, just over the border in Wiltshire. A lovely old town but blighted by a massive volume of through traffic which makes walking round the streets in the centre not just unpleasant but also, pretty risky.

A brief conclusion

On the one hand, people are being lectured on the need to leave the car at home and use 'alternative means' of travel. On the other hand, as outlined above, those 'alternative means' of travel simply don't hack it. We're being set up to fail aren't they? As for us non-drivers, we're being absolutely shafted. As already mentioned, the pedestrian and cycling infrastructure leaves a lot to be desired and as for public transport, it's dire. Look, I'm not asking for public transport to whisk me to every corner of the Avon region because I know that's impracticable. All I'm asking for is a reliable public transport system with solid plans for expansion that will help to reduce the volume of vehicles clogging up the roads. With my pedestrian hat on, all I'm asking for is for a safe walking environment. That's not much to ask for is it?

When we don't even get the basics we should expect in a so called civilised society, we can be forgiven for thinking that there is in fact, a silent war against non-drivers as well as drivers. In fact, it could be argued that there’s a war against movement regardless of the mode of transport that’s chosen. One that’s a significant part of the control matrix that will be a feature of the ‘great reset’ if we don’t start resisting it. Which is why the bastards who presume to rule over us will go to some lengths to pit the users of various modes of transport against each other. Anyone falling for these divide and rule tactics and engaging in the culture wars surrounding transport really needs to take a look at themselves in the mirror, because they are part of the problem.

Not depressed. Not lost. Just — not quite here. Like someone else made all the decisions and you showed up to live them.

You are doing everything right. And something is profoundly, quietly wrong.

Not catastrophically wrong. Not wrong enough to stop everything and ask serious questions. Just a quiet, persistent wrongness. Like wearing someone else’s clothes that fit well enough that you stopped noticing they were never yours.

You are doing what you are supposed to do. Studying what you were told to study. Wanting what you were shown to want. Becoming what the world around you decided was worth becoming. And somewhere underneath all of it, so quiet you can almost miss it, is a question that never quite goes away:

Is this actually me?

Most of us never ask it out loud. The world is very good at making sure we don’t. There is always another notification, another goal, another identity to perform, another opinion to have, another thing to want. The noise is not accidental. But we will get to that.

First — let us look at what actually happened to us.

The Installation

We did not arrive in this world with a self.

We arrived with something far more extraordinary — the raw, open, unwritten capacity to become. A consciousness so new it had not yet decided what it was. Infinite in its possibility. Undefined in its nature. Completely, utterly open.

And then the world got to work.

Before we could speak, we were a son or a daughter. Before we could think, we were Hindu or Muslim, Indian or Pakistani, upper caste or lower caste, rich or poor. Before we could ask a single question about what any of these things meant, they were already inside us — not as ideas we had considered and accepted, but as the very framework through which we would consider everything that followed.

This is not sinister in the telling of it. It sounds ordinary. Natural even. Of course a child absorbs the world around it. Of course culture passes itself down. Of course we learn who we are from the people who raise us.

But look more carefully at what actually happened.

We were not given a map and taught to read it. We were given a map and taught that the map was the territory. That the description of the world was the world itself. That the framework installed in us was not a framework at all — it was simply reality. Simply truth. Simply the way things are.

Do you remember the first time you brought home a report card that wasn’t good enough? Not failed — just not good enough. And no one said anything particularly harsh. Maybe it was just a look. A silence that lasted a second too long. A comparison casually dropped into conversation — your cousin got distinction, no? Something small. Something that was never meant to wound deeply.

But something shifted in you that day. Quietly, permanently. You understood — not as a thought but as a feeling that settled into your bones — that your value was not inherent. It was earned. It was comparative. It was contingent on performance within a system you had no hand in designing.

Nobody told you this directly. They didn’t have to.

By the time you were old enough to question — the framework was already doing the questioning for you.

Ask yourself something uncomfortable. Sit with it honestly before you move on.

Your definition of a successful life — where did it come from? Your sense of what is beautiful, what is desirable, what is worth wanting — who decided that? Your understanding of what a good person looks like, what a worthy relationship looks like, what a meaningful career looks like — did you arrive at these through your own sovereign inquiry? Did you sit in silence at some point and ask: what do I actually think is worth a human life?

Or did you absorb it? From screens, from relatives, from classrooms, from cities plastered with images of what you should want to be?

Be honest.

The framework was installed. Not through force. Not through conspiracy. Through something far more effective than either — through total environmental saturation. Through the thousand daily signals of what gets rewarded and what gets punished, what gets admired and what gets ignored, what goes viral and what disappears. Through the steady, relentless pressure of a world that already knew what it wanted us to become before we had the chance to find out what we were.

By the time we could think — we were already thinking in someone else’s language, toward someone else’s destinations, according to someone else’s map.

Why This Time Is Different

Perhaps you are thinking — this is nothing new. Humans have always been conditioned. Every civilization has shaped its people. Parents have always transmitted values. Religion has always provided frameworks. Culture has always preceded the individual. What is so different now?

This objection is intelligent. Honor it.

It is true that conditioning is not new. But every previous system of conditioning — however rigid, however oppressive — had one thing it could not eliminate.

The gap.

The walk to school with nothing but your thoughts. The long summer afternoon with nowhere to be. The boredom that had nowhere to go and so turned inward. The silence between one thing and the next, in which — accidentally, without anyone planning it — a human being sometimes touched something real in themselves. Asked a question that belonged only to them. Felt something that no one had told them to feel.

Every previous civilization, however imperfect, maintained some structure for this gap. The contemplative tradition. The elder who told a different story. The forest, the river, the unscheduled hour. The philosophical lineage that said: before you learn what to think, learn that there is a thinker.

These were not luxuries. They were civilization’s immune system — the structures that ensured that no matter how powerful the conditioning, the human being retained some access to their own depth.

Now look around you.

When was the last time you were bored? Genuinely, uncomfortably, productively bored — with no device to reach for, no content to consume, no stimulation to fill the silence? When did you last sit with your own thoughts long enough for something original to surface?

The gap has been closed. Not by force. By design.

Boredom has been monetized into the scroll. Silence has been colonized by content. Every empty moment is now an optimization opportunity — for productivity, for self-improvement, for consumption, for entertainment. The philosophical and contemplative infrastructure that every previous civilization maintained — imperfectly but genuinely — to ensure human beings had access to their own interiority has been quietly dismantled. Replaced by platforms whose entire economic model depends on one thing: that you never, for a single moment, experience the silence in which you might accidentally remember who you are.

This is not the same as what came before.

This is the first system in human history to have closed the gap entirely. The installation is not partial anymore. It is total. It runs in the background, continuously, from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep at night — and it has been running since before any of us were old enough to know it was running.

Was This Deliberate?

Here is the question we are all waiting to ask: was this intentional? Is there a room somewhere with people in it who decided to do this to us?

The honest answer is: it does not matter.

Not because the question is unimportant. But because the outcome is identical whether the jailer knows he is building a prison or not.

There is a principle worth sitting with here:

Ignorance has malevolence as its natural corollary.

A system built in ignorance of what a human being actually is will produce harm as reliably as a system built in malice. The architect does not need to intend the suffering of the people inside the building. He only needs to build without understanding what human beings need in order to breathe.

The attention economy was not built by people who sat down and said: let us destroy human interiority. It was built by people who optimized for engagement, for retention, for revenue — without ever asking what prolonged engagement does to a conscious being. Without ever asking what it means to capture and direct human attention at industrial scale, hour after hour, year after year, from childhood onward.

The education system, even though designed by colonizers to enslave indigenous populations, was not necessarily perpetuated by people who wanted to produce incurious, compliant workers. It was perpetuated by people who never stopped to ask what genuine human flourishing actually requires — and so produced something optimized for industrial output and called it learning.

The advertising industry was not staffed by people who consciously decided to replace our genuine desires with manufactured ones. It simply discovered what worked — what made us feel insufficient, what made us reach, what made us buy — and refined it over decades into the most sophisticated desire-manufacturing apparatus in history.

Intent is almost beside the point. The result is what it is.

A civilization that produces human beings who are extraordinarily capable of functioning within the system — and almost entirely incapable of asking whether the system is worth functioning within.

What Was Actually Taken

Let us be precise about what this has cost us. Because it is not what most people think.

The conversation about social media and screen time and mental health — all of it is real, all of it matters. But it is describing the symptoms. It is not naming the disease.

What was actually taken is more fundamental than focus. More fundamental than time. More fundamental than mental health.

What was taken is the capacity for genuine self-inquiry.

The ability to sit with the question who am I and actually pursue it — not as a therapeutic exercise, not as a personal branding strategy, not as a weekend retreat you attend and return from unchanged — but as the most serious, most urgent, most consequential investigation a human being can undertake.

Look at what replaced it.

From the time we are children, we are handed a metric. Academic performance first. Then social status. Then career achievement. Then wealth, visibility, influence. Always external. Always comparative. Always defined by a system whose values we inherited rather than chose.

We are bred from a young age to carry comparison as naturally as we carry breath. Jealousy as a motivational tool. Competition as the primary mode of relating to other human beings. We are placed in systems that rank us, grade us, select us, reject us from childhood — and then handed a story about meritocracy that makes this feel not just normal but noble.

Think about the dreams you had as a child. Not the career ambitions — those came later, installed efficiently by school and family and the gravitational pull of what was considered respectable. The earlier ones. The strange, specific, embarrassing ones that didn’t fit any category. The thing you wanted to do before you learned what was worth wanting.

What happened to those?

At some point — gradually, gently, without a single dramatic moment you can point to — they became impractical. Childish. Something to smile at and set aside. And in their place came the approved dreams. The respectable ambitions. The goals that the system could recognize, reward, and absorb.

We did not lose those early dreams in one moment. We traded them in, slowly, for acceptance. For safety. For the comfort of wanting what everyone around us agreed was worth wanting.

The false role models are everywhere now. On screens, on feeds, in the carefully curated images of lives assembled for aspiration — specifically designed to make you feel the gap between where you are and where you should be. That gap is not accidental. That gap is the product. It is what keeps us consuming, striving, performing, buying — driving the engine of a growth economy that requires our perpetual dissatisfaction in order to function.

We are not living. We are being farmed.

Our attention is the crop. Our desire is the mechanism of harvest. And the farming has been so complete, so total, so normalized that we experience it not as exploitation — but as simply, life.

The Peak of the Capture

But here is what is truly extraordinary. Here is what separates this moment in history from every other form of oppression that came before it.

We do not just accept this.

We defend it.

The installed identity does not feel installed. It feels like you. Your opinions feel like your own conclusions. Your desires feel like your authentic wants. Your definition of success feels like something you genuinely believe in. Your tribal identities — national, religious, ideological — feel not like frameworks handed to you but like truths worth protecting.

And so you protect them.

People argue for hours defending positions they absorbed passively in fifteen minutes of algorithmic content. People feel genuine rage — hot, personal, righteous rage — over ideas that were placed in them by systems optimized for outrage because outrage maximizes engagement. People sever relationships, dehumanize strangers, march in streets, in some cases take lives — in defense of identities that were installed in them before they were old enough to consent.

This is not stupidity. The most educated among us do this as readily as anyone else. The PhD and the dropout defend their installed identities with equal ferocity, equal certainty, equal blindness to the fact that neither arrived at their positions through genuine inquiry.

This is the system working exactly as designed.

Because a person who defends their cage does not need to be guarded. A person who mistakes their chains for their identity will not try to remove them. A person who experiences their conditioning as their authentic self has been captured so completely that external force is no longer necessary.

This is the peak of what human civilization has achieved in the art of control. Not gulags. Not armies. Not surveillance — though these exist. But something far more elegant and far more total:

A world in which the captured cannot see the capture. In which the conditioned experience their conditioning as freedom. In which the fully functioning, deeply certain, passionately opinionated human being moves through their entire life —

convinced they are choosing.Convinced they are awake.Convinced this is living.

This is the Grand Sleepwalk.

What Was Never Taken

And yet.

Something in you read every word above and recognized it.

Not learned it. Not encountered it as a new idea you were hearing for the first time. Recognized it. As if some part of you already knew this — had always known this — and was simply waiting for someone to say it out loud.

Notice that feeling for a moment. Don’t analyze it. Just notice it.

What is the part of you that recognized all of this? It received the argument, yes. But it did more than receive — it confirmed. From somewhere inside you, something said: yes, this is true. I knew this. I have always known this.

That something was never installed.

It could not be installed — because it is not a belief, not an identity, not a framework, not an opinion. It is the awareness in which all the conditioning happened. The witness that watched the self being constructed and never became the construction itself.

It is what was here before your name, before your religion, before your nationality, before your ambitions, before the first report card, before the first comparison, before the world began its patient, thorough work of telling you who to be.

It was never captured. Because it was never reachable. Because it is not a thing that can be taken — it is the one who would notice the taking.

That is what this entire project is about.

Not fixing you. Not improving the installed self — it can be optimized endlessly, fruitlessly, without ever touching what actually matters. Not replacing one framework with another.

Something far more radical and far more simple:

Finding out what was always already there.

Underneath the noise. Underneath the performance. Underneath the accumulated weight of everything you were told to want, to be, to defend, to become.

Something is there. It has always been there. It was there before the world told you who to be. It is there right now, reading these words, recognizing what it has always known.

That is where this journey begins.

If something in this essay recognized itself — if it felt less like reading and more like remembering — then stay close. What comes next goes deeper. Into what is specifically being stolen — and why the stakes are higher than most people have been told.

This is only the beginning.

Placeless, because it is not really a place; space and time are fabrications of the mind; but the knowing, the sense I am, I am alive, is not a mind construct.

//

I was so addicted to thinking! I was the thinker. Thoughts, feelings, circumstances and all the me-stories, were my identity, my concern, hope, suffering.

//

When thinking stops I don't disappear. Effortless.

//

The "me" is effort, because it needs constant mental activity to keep this pseudo entity alive. Coming to rest feels almost scary. "Die before you die"... is this from the Bible? I remember "I die daily" as Bible content.

//

Sorry for my mental confetti, this text here is an experiment of not editing previous lines; of not constructing the text, but to come closer to a flow, in filling 1000 words?

//

Interesting, isn't it, we are called Human BEings, not human doings! And yet most of my own conditioning, development seemed to have focused on becoming, on doing.

Being was kind of good for nothing, didn't generate immediate outcome, couldn't be measured or compared.

//

Mind can only process contrast! Mind can only cognize what can be picked up by the sense organs (seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling in the physical, and thinking in the mental realm).

//

If you cannot measure it it doesn't exist was the idea.

//

Presence, Being, Peace...

As soon as we use words we are somehow trapped and empowered.

It seemed that words is all "i" have. Ideas, memories is all I am... Stories about a "me", this body-mind that is an obvious fact from the "person" viewpoint, but then upon closer examination cannot be located outside of mind-activity.

//

The sense I AM, I exist is undeniable; but what I am remains a mystery, because every answer will be mind-stuff, will be concepts, mental images that come and go.

But who is the one aware of the coming and going?

//

Some Bible lingo, entering the Bible namespace, free of beliefs, but sensitive towards direct experience and the profound seeing that suffering is attitudinal, caused by 10% faulty thinking and 90% muscle-memory (to be scientific).

I like to call him Mr-Jesus, the one who invites us to look behind the masks of personhood, by asking (yourself): Who do you say I AM?

//

If we are stuck in thinking the answer is either flesh (objects) or Spirit (Presence/Awareness), or a combination of both.

"Born from below" (when we identify as body-mind, as the mental 'me') then our happiness and safety is determined by circumstances.

"Born from above" it is seen that Awareness/Spirit is prior to mind, before stories are being told or believed.

//

I am, beyond doubt; but what I am I don't know.

This sounds weird, scary, crazy?

//

"Born from below" - identified as an autonomous person - I am trained to become, to progress, to be someone, to have and to hold.

"Born from above" – I simply am! Outwardly – judged by appearances, through the filter of mind – nothing has changed: there is still a body-mind, with a story, with a conditioned mind, but somehow the sense of lack made room for inner space; the fear and doubt, the struggle for survival has relaxed into an open yes-ness of What IS, without anymore this compulsive dysfunctional mental me-narrative demanding all attention.

//

Nothing has been added, but what was only assumed has been unlearned or seen through:

Mind is a powerful tool, but it is not a space to live in.

Yes, thinking happens, but it is more still, more clear; with less emotional charge; it simply is a tool but it is not "me" anymore.

//

Nothing special, no enlightenment, nothing to claim, nothing to teach, nothing to get; but simply to do-be.me

What an interesting journey, without the need to come to conclusions.

//

I AM – the Presence of Awareness; aware of body-mind-world.

Nondual pointers and concepts are useful, but they were also a trap for no-one.

//

I enjoy Mr-Jesus! Not as a historic figure, but as a guide, a support, an anchor to dis-cover what never cannot be, to feel more comfortable in my own skin, in practical daily living.

//

From person (the me-story) to Presence (resting in and as Being).

Still the same body-mind, the dance between rest and activity, doing stuff, having preferences, having buttons pushed; but something is profoundly different.

Gratitude, Love, more energy, much less thinking, or even more thinking at times.

//

Someone says that there are three legitimate uses of the mind: celebration, being practical, sharing (self-knowing).

//

Wow! 210 words to go, here on tuhat.net

//

"Born from below" we are stuck in conceptualizing, in knowing only what thinking, feeling and perceiving report to the assumed me-center. A body-mind tossed into a world of eight billion others, on a planet that spins around itself, in empty space.

//

For me the Bible is very helpful in debunking the sin, the missing the mark, the human drama.

So fascinating how complex Life is, seen through the filter of mind; such a magic show, and so much harmony and generosity in my daily living! One could argue that I live in a bubble, but I am not isolated; I meet people, I use money, buy food, but somehow it is happening without "me" struggling or being clever.

//

What is the major shift?

From shit to shift?

From suffering, from being lost in the mind, to the seeing that "this world" is thinking, feeling and perceiving.

Not to deny suffering and ignorance, but to see through the stories mind tries to sell us as reality.

//

What do I really want? What is available?

"Practical peace in daily living, independent of circumstances" is such a powerful pointer into Light and clarity!

Meet me at the GardenOfFriends.com if you dare (-;

PS: I fixed two typos; and again the whole thing is an experiment.

Most people who take up a contemplative practice — whether meditation, prayer, twelve-step work, therapy, yoga, or anything that asks them to become a better human being — start with a fuel that burns very hot and very cleanly for a while. The fuel is aspiration. I want to be kinder. I want to help others. I want to wake up. I want to fix what is broken in me so that I can be of use. This aspiration is genuine, and it is powerful, and it is the engine that gets a person onto the cushion, into the meeting, through the door of the therapist's office.

But anyone who stays with a practice long enough — and "long enough" is usually measured in years, not weeks — eventually hits a wall that they did not expect. The wall is not failure. The wall is the discovery that the aspiration itself has become the problem.

The hungry ghost

Buddhist tradition has a useful image for what happens. It calls this stuck place the realm of the hungry ghost. A hungry ghost, in the old paintings, has an enormous belly and a throat the width of a needle. It can never eat enough to fill itself, because the channel through which food has to pass is too narrow to ever satisfy what is beneath. Whatever it manages to swallow, the appetite is larger. It is always reaching. It is always hungry. It is, by the structure of its own body, defined by what it cannot have.

The image was not designed as a metaphor for spiritual practice. It was designed as a description of a certain kind of suffering. But anyone who has practiced for a long time will recognize the body. The aspiration to benefit all beings is the enormous belly. The actual capacity of one human life — one nervous system, one schedule, one set of relationships, one body that gets tired — is the throat. The gap between them is a hunger that no amount of practice can fill. You cannot help all beings. You cannot accumulate enough merit. You cannot meditate enough to deserve the aspiration you started with. The aspiration outpaces the practice by definition, because the aspiration is infinite and the practice is finite.

So the practitioner doubles down. Longer retreats. More mantras. Earlier mornings. More books. More teachers. The hunger only grows. Eventually something gives way. Some practitioners burn out and leave. Some get cynical and stay but stop practicing. Some develop the polished spiritual personality that hides the exhaustion behind a competent smile. And a smaller number recognize, sometimes accidentally, that the engine they have been running on is itself the source of the trouble.

Why aspiration fails

The recognition is not that helping others is wrong, or that wanting to wake up is wrong. The recognition is more subtle. It is that the structure of the aspiration — the way it sets up a self that aspires, a goal that is being aspired toward, and a distance between them — turns out to be exactly the structure of the suffering the practice was supposed to relieve. You have built, very carefully and very sincerely, a spiritual version of the same problem. You have a self that wants something it does not have, and the wanting is what defines the self. Without the wanting, who would you be?

Physicists sometimes describe a similar dynamic in different language. A system that defines itself by its disequilibrium with the environment — a flame, a vortex, a hurricane — cannot stop seeking the disequilibrium without ceasing to be the system it is. The flame is the burning. Stop the burning and there is no flame. The hungry ghost is the hunger. Stop the hunger and there is no ghost. The aspiring practitioner is the aspiration. Question the aspiration and there is, suddenly, nobody home.

This is terrifying when it first becomes clear. It can also be a relief, eventually. But in the moment when it first becomes clear, the practitioner faces a real problem: the engine has been exposed as part of the trap. What now drives the practice? The vow is no longer trustworthy. The goal is no longer trustworthy. The reward — enlightenment, awakening, becoming a better person — has been recognized as the same hunger wearing a different costume. The practitioner is standing on the cushion with nothing left to reach for and no obvious reason to keep sitting down.

Not up, but down

The traditional response at this point — in the highest teachings of several Buddhist schools — is to leap straight to a kind of recognition in which there was never a self that aspired, never a goal to reach, and never a problem to solve. The recognition is real, and the teachings that point at it are precise. But for most practitioners, at most moments, that recognition is not available on demand. Telling a person whose engine has just failed that they were never really moving is technically correct and practically useless. It is, as the source text puts it, the spiritual equivalent of telling a drowning person to breathe water.

There is another option, less celebrated, that is the subject of this short series. The option is not to leap upward into a recognition the practitioner cannot yet hold. The option is to drop. Drop from the burning aspiration of the hungry ghost down to something humbler, more bodily, more honest, and — in a way that surprises people who have never tried it — much more sustainable. Drop to what one teacher calls the practice of the animal.

The animal does not aspire. The animal does not transact. The animal does not maintain a vast project across lifetimes. The animal does the next thing. It eats when hungry. It sleeps when tired. It sits on the cushion when the body is on the cushion, says the words when the words are being said, and gets up when sitting is done. There is no engine. There is just the next breath, the next syllable, the next morning. This sounds, on first reading, like a defeat. It is not a defeat. It is, for most practitioners who reach the end of aspiration, the first practice in years that does not exhaust them. The next two parts describe how it works, and why it changes a person more reliably than the aspiration ever did.

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Continued in Part 2: "Practice Like an Animal."

Part 1 of 3 · From "The Animal Who Practices" · Any Note Press · 2026

“Oh God, he’s such a twat!” Keri exclaimed as soon as she and Trey were settled in his Toyota. It was still raining, the drops falling fat and heavy on the windscreen. He’d stood for the price of a jumbo hot coffee; she hoped he understood that this morning was going to cost more than that.

“Sure, but does he know something?” Trey asked with impatience. He started the car and drove a block and a half to an unpaved lot overlooking the river. The lot was filled with searcher’s cars, but Trey wormed the Toyota in. They could just see the river through the trees and on their left was the bridge that Maggie Grose was supposed to have leaped from. A Shayham patrol car was parked on the bridge, lights spinning as they coordinated the searchers on both sides of the river.

“No,” Kerri said. She took a sip of her coffee. It was old and burnt, but it was piping, and that was what mattered. “I don’t know. He might. It’s true what he said that people have gone missing from this area. He has it all graphed out. Offered to show it to me. ‘Want to come see my serial killer profile?’ has got to be the weirdest come-on anyone’s ever tried on me.”

Trey took his camera out and began scrolling through the stills he’d taken. “I already searched for Shayham, and there are a few missing persons.” he said, “It’s spread out over the years though. I don’t know if it’s greater than the average.”

“It’s almost forty percent higher than average for a city this size!” Keri exclaimed. “He rattled off names, dates, odd facts. The bridge there,” Keri she said, pointing. “The Grose girl wouldn’t have died from jumping from it, he said. It’s too low. So, he thinks she was abducted. He thinks some kind of cult or murderer stalks people from that mill. Calls it ‘the nexus.’”

“Why does anyone even think she jumped off the bridge?”

“Some of her friends told her to — on Facebook. She was being bullied.” Keri sipped more coffee. What she really wanted was a shower, preferably back in New York. “Then she disappeared. They don’t have anything else.”

“What does your twat friend think?”

“He’s mad, I swear. Went on about The Green River Killer and how no one had caught him for years. BTK, too.” She looked at Trey. “What is wrong with this country? You’ve got more maniacs than…” She trailed off. “Than a place with a lot of maniacs, I don’t fucking know. Too many, that’s how many!” She laughed, but Trey didn’t. Without saying a word, he got out and walked towards the mill.

“Fucking leave then,” Kerri said, determined to stay in the car. She began scrolling through the pictures, stopped in disgust at the shot of the dead bird. Trey was gone for almost fifteen minutes. Keri sat; engine running, heater on high, wishing her jeans would dry out. Searchers were starting to come up from the river and collect their cars, and she felt sure that she’d see Paul among them before Trey returned. Instead, Trey rapped his knuckles on the passenger side window and gestured for her to follow. “Bring the camera.” he shouted through the glass.

The old mill was red brick over a skeleton of steel beams. They stepped into a smaller room, bare to the plaster walls, the single window an open rectangle that let river mist and spattering rain in.

There was graffiti everywhere.

That wasn’t surprising, but Keri did take note that most of the graffiti was done in chalk, not spray-paint. There were stubs of brightly colored chalk scattered about, the thick rounds kids used on sidewalks and driveways.

The rain had spoiled most of the artwork, the faces and words flowing together in shallow swirls of running color.

“We need to shoot this!” Keri said. She turned and looked out the door. “You can see the river, just a few steps out and you can see the bridge she jumped off of.”

Trey didn’t say anything about that, only invited Keri to go further into the mill. She followed his boot prints, splotches of purple, brown, and orange from where he’d trod through the chalk puddles.

Looking through the passage into the space beyond, she could see it was a much larger room, with windows set high on the walls. The weak sunlight that came through only just lit the huge space, and as she passed through a small moment of near blindness as her eyes adjusted.

Trey was heading straight across the open floor. She saw that three sets of loading doors were securely boarded up and three large windows that were similarly sealed up with thick plywood. The gray light of midday leaked in around the sills, with greater strength in the places where someone had tried to pry the boards off, breaking off the corners but with no further success.

“The light is shit in here.” Trey said. “We can set up the stand lights I have in the trunk, but we’ll need a few hours on an outlet to charge the batteries.”

“Why bother?” Keri asked. She wasn’t excited about spending time in the mill after dark. “What’s wrong with the other room? The melted faces and so on? Creepy stuff and you can see the river.”

He’d stopped and put his hand out for her to stop when she’d joined him. She could see that they were standing by a long channel set in the concrete floor, just eight feet wide but more than twenty feet long, the opening covered by a chain link fence tied to a frame of steel pipes and bolted down. She could see that someone had tried to pry this up as well but had no luck.

“Does that go down to the river?” she asked.

“Probably.” He turned on the light on his phone. She could see they were standing on a chalk drawing of girl’s face, almost eight feet by six feet, the long hair black and deep green, the eyes black with small squares of white cut into them, like the big-eyed paintings her mother had treasured, but lacking the pleading sorrow of those long-ago curiosities.

These eyes were vacant, animal-like. Sinister she realized was the word.

The mouth — Jesus the mouth — was the channel in the floor, so the face, a teenaged girl’s face, had no chin, only a hugely distended jaw, the ever-screaming mouth sealed over with chain link.

“Look,” Trey said as if Keri were missing something, and she was startled to see that she was missing something: footprints in the chalk dust, bare footprints, a girl’s, spattered and smudged around the edges as if she’d been walking in the puddles, and had stepped to the horizontal fence, where, Keri guessed, had then walked along the top of it? As if on a dare? Because there the footprints ended.

“I thought I heard someone moving in here.” Trey said. “When I was in the other room. I heard someone moving away from the door.”

He shone the light of his phone into the room, a small effort given the size of the space and the motes of dust swirling in the air.

“I hope that’s not asbestos.” Keri said. She wanted to get out of here.

“I think there’s someone here,” Trey said, ignoring her. “Something to do with the girl who disappeared. Maybe the local kids are up to something. Some kind of suicide thing, or a bullying thing where they got her to jump. I think some of those kids are here right now, in one of the other rooms, maybe upstairs somewhere. Watching the search.”

“God, you sound like Paul.” Keri said.

Trey turned off the light. “Maybe,” he allowed with a shrug. “But there is something going on here, something the locals are either covering up or refuse to see. That many disappearances, even over twenty years, could be national news stuff.”

He walked out into the parking lot, without looking to see if she was following.

Keri stood in the doorway for a moment, hearing the rain on the dead October leaves and the river they all but obscured.

She shaded her eyes from the rain and looked up at the open upper windows that ran along the length of the huge building. She wondered if she’d see faces peering down at her, but there was nothing, just black rectangles of shadow.

Continued Next Sunday June 7th

Thank You for Reading!

This trend is off putting because it seems like there is a lack of compassion. I could be wrong about this, but when people film themselves giving other’s money it begs the question are they doing to help others out or are they doing it to be seen and validated? Is this behavior performative or is it coming from a place of genuine kindness? I do think that some of these creators are doing this because they want to make an impact in a positive way. But the content they are pushing is seen by young people who are impressionable. They will see this performative style of kindness and think to them selves “you know since this person just gave this person $500 dollars I think giving money will solve their problems”. It made me think is money the only way we can show kindness to others.

I recently watched a video about what kids in western countries would wish for in comparison to what kids from eastern countries would wish for. Kids in western countries usually wished for a million dollars. Whereas children in eastern nations wished for everyone to have enough food or for others to be happy and healthy. The difference in desires made me contemplate how we raise kids here versus how children are raised in other countries. It is eye opening because the wishes of these two cultures were motivated by different intentions. One intention was to have money while the other intention was hoping that others had fulfillment and happiness. This to me shows where certain motivations lie. One culture valued kindness through wishing others well and the other side wished for wealth. Does wealth allow others to be kind, or does sharing food and wishing others well with kindness show compassion? I think that to show compassion we need to try to understand others and meet them at where the other people are at. In western society something that is taught to children is to “work hard”. Working hard to many adults is working over 40 hours per week. But when you think of this is this really the kind of mentality that should be taught? Because I think that this leaves very little time to spend with loved ones or be able to pursue creative hobbies. The idea that our success is tied to our careers is also misleading. Because when a child enters the school system they are often told to stay in the same classroom. This idea prepares the children for the workplace. But I think that kids should have a place where they can explore their interests. Because when they are put into school and taught that the only thing they can contribute to society is time they burn out. This model also teaches them that life is only about money and working. It doesn’t teach them about living joyfully or with happiness. Kindness stems from being comfortable within your own skin. It also comes from the behavior being modeled by others. In this day and age I believe that kindness should be modeled in school. At the present moment the skills being taught don’t teach this fundamental knowledge.

A way that I try to teach kindness is by talking about it and then showing it. Sometimes it is hard to teach because there are a lot of patterns that I have needed to unlearn to become more kind and understanding of others and myself. In order to cultivate more understanding I have been learning about meditation. These meditations have helped me gain a better understanding of what compassion truly means in contrast to empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Whereas compassion means to view all living beings with love. The difference between these two is one feeling stems from cultivating it through practice. Whereas the other feeling stems from this notion of being able to walk in someone else’s shoes. Both are important to life. But I have learned that the more compassion that I am share with others the easier it becomes to practice. Whereas with empathy I need to think about it and how I can implement it into my day. This practice has helped me to become more happy and healthy emotionally as a person.

In conclusion kindness has become an important component in my life. Through this blog I would like to discuss the benefits of kindness and how it has affected my everyday life. Please join me on this journey and feel free to reach out and share your thoughts on this subject. If you find these posts helpful or interesting definitely let me know! I thought of this post while I waking up this morning. It happened because I have been thinking about this subject. I hope that these lessons help others become more mindful and aware. It is important to bring awareness to subjects like kindness and empathy. Because culture is teaching us that it is easier to turn a blind eye or throw money at the issue. The use of money doesn’t make a person unkind but it does beg the question of does sharing money with people help or is this just put a bandage on the issue? These are lessons that I am exploring and want to share with others!

Thank you for reading this post and I hope you all have a wonderful day and start your week!

One of my favorite hospitality stories was shared by Will Guidara in his newsletter, Pre-Meal as shared with him by Rob DeLiema.

I’ll share the short version and the link to the original article below that:

A customer went to BJ’s Restaurant’s 12th location at the time (they now have 215 locations) and had a terrible experience. She called the corporate office to complain and ended her call by saying she wished she’d saved herself the trouble and gone to The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant that never let her down.

The short version of the resolution is that Rob gave her a gift, not an ask.

He didn’t invite her back to a BJ’s Restaurant. Instead, he sent her a gift card for The Cheesecake Factory so she could have the meal she really wanted.

What do you think that did for the relationship?

Here’s the full article from Pre-Meal: https://cfo.fyi/pmgift

I’m a Fan of Unreasonable

I first read Will Guidara’s book, Unreasonable Hospitality, at roughly the same time I finished a second reading of Bob Goff’s book, Everybody Always.

On the surface, the two books are very different. One is about delivering hospitality in a customer service environment and the other is a collection of stories and experiences about loving your neighbors and your enemies as a follower of Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, the two books are two sides of the same coin: Love.

Here are excerpts from the respective book blurbs from Amazon:

“Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of Eleven Madison Park, a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its majestic room. Eleven years later, EMP was named the best restaurant in the world.

“How did Guidara pull off this unprecedented transformation? Radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room—and memorable, over-the-top, bespoke hospitality…”

And…

“What if we stopped avoiding the difficult people in our lives and committed to simply loving everybody? What happens when we give away love like we're made of it? In Everybody, Always, Bob Goff's joyful New York Times bestselling follow-up to Love Does, you'll discover the secret to living without fear, constraint, or worry.

“Bob teaches you that the path toward the outsized, unfettered, liberated existence we all long for is found in one simple truth: love people, even the difficult ones, without distinction and without limits.”

The type of love that Goff both radiates and encourages is also unreasonable. It’s a love that we rarely experience in our modern world.

Combining the two ideas led me to redefine my company’s first core value this way:

“Love, Service, & Hospitality. Behind every number is a person and we love our clients enough to serve their deepest needs, not just their immediate requests.”

More importantly, the combination helped me to dig deeper into myself to understand the disconnect I feel within myself between two truths:

First, I believe in the Two Great Commandments as taught by my Master, Jesus Christ. Namely, Love God and Love Your Neighbor. (Note: I’ve included some Bible verses at the end in case you want to study these more.)

Second, I don’t love easily. Love doesn’t come naturally to me. At the very least, I struggle to be an outwardly loving person.

I’m not Bob Goff

I met Bob Goff once.

It was a brief encounter where we were introduced before he gave the keynote address at a financial conference.

As we were introduced, I offered my hand to shake. He gave me a big smile, shook his head, and said, “Nope. I’m a hugger!”

If you don't know Bob, he’s a speaker and the writer behind a series of bestselling books that revolve around love and faith. He’s a big bear of a man, gregarious, full of warmth, and the kind of person who hugs strangers and means it. Bob exudes love. It pours off of him.

Bob’s hug was an experience I won’t forget.

If he wasn’t a hugger in real life, I think it would seem odd.

I am not Bob.

My love for the people doesn’t look like Bob’s. I’m not a natural hugger. I’m not the loudest voice in the room. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. I’m an introvert, sometimes awkward in public, and my love shows up differently. It shows up in being prepared for the meeting. Sometimes, it shows up in telling a client something they don’t want to hear.

If I tried to be Bob, it would come across as awkward and creepy.

But I Can Change

There’s a risk behind publicly declaring that I love everyone—that I embrace the philosophy behind both books—when I know that I do not love easily.

There’s a business risk behind publicly touting your company’s primary core value is Love, Service, and Hospitality, when not living up to this core value can create problems and misunderstandings at a minimum, as well as negative reviews and poor word of mouth.

In both aspects of my life, at this point in time, these are more aspirational values than ones that are fully active.

But they are the values I have claimed and I WANT to make my own.

I desire to possess great love, to be of service to others, and for both myself and my company to show amazing hospitality to the people and clients we serve. More than that, I desire to BE POSSESSED OF...

A love for God that surpasses even what I already feel for Him

A love for my neighbors that breaks down walls and boundaries

A love for my enemies that prompts me to see through their eyes

A hospitable and graceful nature that helps me deliver experiences to my family members, my friends, my neighbors, and my clients that they will always remember

I’m already 56 and I have fewer years left ahead than I have behind me, but I intend to make them the best years ever.

That’s one reason I also bought Guidara’s new book, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Field Guide.

It’s also why my frequent scripture study focuses on love, giving service, and being hospitable. (Note: I’ve included some Bible verses at the end in case you want to study these more.)

Is Hospitality the Same as Love?

No.

Hospitality, and, for that matter, service, are actions. Ways that we do something for someone else.

But they have to come from somewhere.

Hospitality can certainly be motivated by, say, the desire to push, pull, and drag your middling brasserie to become the #1 restaurant in the world.

Or, in my case, my desire to build an accounting firm that clients will rave about.

But those motivations are temporary. In Guidara’s own words, in the Epilogue, he talks about the fact that it had to end at some point.

Love, on the other hand, is eternal. Its source is eternal, therefore Love can be nothing other than eternal.

So, my focus is on the underlying source: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.

I need to do better and become better about serving others, for sure.

My firm needs to do better and become better about delivering (a) core services without a hitch, and (b) delivering a hospitality experience that converts clients into brand ambassadors.

That said, my hypothesis is that if our central focus is on loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, then the delivery, the mechanics, the services, and the experiences will all get better as well.

~ Brian Woodland

Bible Verses That I’ve Mentioned

You don’t necessarily need to believe in the Bible to recognize that these principles are deeper and more enduring than the typical lifespan of a business.

This list is not comprehensive, but it’s a good start:

Love God:

Deuteronomy 6:5, Mark 12:30, 1 John 4:19, John 14:15, and Romans 8:28

Love other people:

Leviticus 19:18, Mark 12:31, John 13:34-35, and Romans 13:9-10

(In particular see these three accounts of the same encounter with a group of Pharisees and lawyers: (1) Matthew 22:34-40, (2) Mark 12:28-34, and (3) Luke 10:25-37.)

Be hospitable to others:

Genesis 18:1-5, Job 31:32, Leviticus 19:33-34, Isaiah 58:7, and Hebrews 13:2

Disclaimers

This article is 100% AI free. This is all me, including the emdashes and the photos. Links to the books are affiliate links. If you buy after using my links, I’ll get a buck or two, which I’ll reinvest and use to do some good.

Ways We Can Work Together

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“Caleb,” Kurt boomed, waving at me from the sofa. “Come here!”

My misery was about to deepen. Yes, it was that time: the party crossed its apogee, the best snacks vanished, the conversation stalled, but it was hours before people switched to shots. The party needed a boost. And what better boost than Caleb’s little performance?

I downed my wine in a hurry. There was no avoiding it—Kurt had already told his little group about my talent. He shooed away a man with thick lensed glasses, and I obediently took his armchair.

Gail noticed the commotion her brother had created and squealed in excitement. “Everybody!” She gestured for the guests to gather around. “You’re about to witness an act of clairvoyance!”

I stopped wincing every time I heard the word. I despised the act, but a little practice wouldn’t hurt. If I resisted for too long, it could provoke an involuntary episode. I’d rather do it in a cosy armchair than behind the wheel.

“What’s it going to be?” I asked with a placid smile.

“Let’s find hidden treasure!” Gail said, sinking her fingers into Jared’s forearm. “It’s an old house. Who knows what’s behind the drywalls?”

“We just got everything fixed,” Jared protested.

“Can I talk to my great grandmother?” a woman with a high ponytail asked. She came over with Gail and had missed Kurt’s introduction.

“That’s unverifiable,” the man with the thick glasses said. There were always sceptics in the audience. “What did I have for breakfast this morning?”

“My clairvoyance has limits,” I said. “How about what you ate in this room?”

The sceptic winced. “That’s just observance. We need something you wouldn’t know.”

“Remember, it has to stay in the house,” Kurt said.

“Caleb hasn’t been upstairs yet,” Gail said. “What colour are the wall tiles in the master bathroom?”

“No,” the sceptic said. “Where’s proof he hasn’t been upstairs or seen pictures?” Was he cross with me for seizing his seat?

Jared grinned. “He hasn’t seen the old tiles. The tile setters couldn’t get behind the pipes—there are some fragments left behind the sink cabinet.” He turned to the sceptic. “Is that verifiable enough for you, Hank?”

The man crossed his arms. “Not if you’re in cahoots.”

“Oh, let him try,” an older woman with a whiskey glass said. The soft murmur of agreement rolled over the room.

“Do we have a challenge?” Kurt asked, scanning the crowd.

There were no objections. I had hoped they would come up with a task that didn’t involve other rooms, but I sat facing the stairs, the only access to that bathroom. It was doable.

“All right.”

I took my first deep breath.

The room sank into silence. The girl with the green drink stepped back to the window, and people dispersed. They walked backwards and spat wine into their glasses. Champagne bubbles dropped to the bottom, and steam swarmed back into coffee cups. The woman with the ponytail closed her teeth around half of a canapé and pulled out an intact one.

You see, the past wasn’t dead. It was alive, and it was happening—always, everywhere—and I could see it replay in reverse. I stayed still, a fleshless ghost among fleshless ghosts. The past unfolded before me, always silent, always unchangeable. I could do nothing but watch. Breathing helped control the pace.

The party people blurred out of the room, and it brightened. Shadows scurried around, accelerating until I saw nothing but streaks of sunlight on the rug. They appeared, shortened, turned, stretched, and faded away. The rug vanished. I took another deep breath, and the hardwood floor hid its gloss under a layer of dust and a web of scratches. All around me, piles of rubbish popped up and melted away. The white walls flickered to a faded wallpaper. Back by the stairs, the old brown carpet gained a large stain of white dust, and a moment later, a mountain of rubble materialized in its place. I held my breath, and the scene slowed down.

I had been able to see the past for as long as I could remember. Before I learned to control it, the history of any place leapt at me without warning, rewinding its episodes before my eyes. Classrooms filled with hospital beds, shops resurrected from ruins, motorways vanished among trees. A vivid imagination, my parents used to say until I learned not to mention it anymore. Even Kurt didn’t know. He thought staring into space and producing lucky guesses was my innocent quirk, but I’d rewinded past in so many places that nothing remained of my innocence.

I had seen everything over the years: violence, pain, and madness; blood and dead bodies and gut-wrenching gore. Every kink, every appalling and revolting act, I had witnessed it all. But I had seen joy and love and wonder too, and little pockets of quiet comfort that made life bearable. Nothing surprised me anymore.

I craned my neck to see the rubble better, fully aware I was craning my neck in the present. My audience would see it as a part of the performance. I walked to the stairs, careful not to bump into the furniture that remained in the present. That rubble was exactly what I was looking for—a pile of broken tiles. I breathed out and let go, and the elastic band that connected me to the present pulled me back with a snap.

Some might envy my ability to walk into any place and witness its past. But I wasn’t always in control. Spontaneous episodes were nauseatingly disorienting. A blink separated a bench in the park from a battlefield. Thrown into a random bubble of the past, with time ticking backwards, I had no lifeline, no countdown, no agency.

I turned around to face the crowd. Some people seemed impatient, others confused or already bored—it had taken me four minutes to reach back for the tiles. The girl with the green drink no longer looked miserable; she watched me with perplexed nervousness. She would call me a freak if she knew what happened during those four minutes of silence and deep breathing. Not everybody understood that everybody was a freak. Even saints had done something shameful or stupid or embarrassing in their life. Even Kurt. Gosh, I’d been to his bedroom. When you had watched the past in all its shades, you stopped judging people.

“They are pale green squares with little white flowers at the corners,” I said.

Gail pressed a palm to her mouth to stop a gasp.

“Is it true?” the woman with the ponytail demanded.

“Come and see,” Jared said.

Everybody followed him upstairs. Everybody except me and the green drink girl—only her drink was gone. She avoided me, her distant gaze piercing the sofa. Her ragged breathing betrayed discomfort. Perhaps even an innocent magic act was too much freakishness for her liking. A pity. She was cute.

“Unbelievable,” the whisky-drinking woman was saying, coming down the stairs. She was flushed. They all were.

“This could have been staged,” the sceptic grumbled.

The crowd returned, and I had to endure an inevitable Q&A session. I’d heard all their questions before, and I kept truthful answers to myself. Yes, I could have been a brilliant detective. Or a palaeontologist—except every field required hard evidence, not wild guesses. No, my job had nothing to do with this talent. I liked fixing electronics; it kept me in the present.

The performance was over. The party was no longer in danger: the alcohol saturation had reached optimum levels, and the crowd broke down into smaller self-entertaining groups. People forgot about me and the tiles. I was free to sneak out and go home.

I looked around in search of my jacket. The green drink girl stood by the stairs, hugging it.

“I think that’s mine,” I said, walking up to her. My heart ramped up.

“I know,” she said, smoothing a crease in a nervous gesture. We stood in the exact spot where the pile of broken tiles once was. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?”

She shrugged, her bony shoulder reaching up to a curtain of adorable black curls. “I don’t know. But we leave together. I’m Mia.”

“What?” Did this girl just invite me over?

She stepped towards the door. “This is when we leave.”

My head spun in confusion. “And what happens then, Mia?”

“I don’t know yet.” She turned to look back at the sofa. “But the next time we’re in that room, we’re holding hands.”

I shifted to pictures and experiences of the natural world. There I am most comfortable, safe, and at home. I could still play with the canvas of my baldness, but nature held me safe. It’s so easy to shift one’s attention to a beautiful leaf or the way the light falls through branches.

Most recently, my posts on Instagram are seen by a handful of people. If I get 8 likes, that’s a lucky post. Only lucky if my equation for luck equals more traffic. I’ve known one person irl who had a viral experience of her posts. She’s another alopecian and became Instagram famous for posting her wedding pictures, where she kept her bald head featured as a point of pride and beauty. Some many millions of views, the driving force for so many who post, gave her little. A brief moment of celebrity, then gone, lots of new followers, but not any kind of huge life shift, at least from my perspective.

I have to wonder what I even want by sharing my life and my work in this way: Publicly and socially. I have to admit it feels important to me, compelling even. I wish it were a drive that I could turn off, or put into park. I can’t seem to. I will be making art and sharing art in one way or another for the rest of my life. Like it or not. Ready or not. Here I come. Ollie Ollie Oxen-free. This game of hide and seek is my way of being an artist in the world. It feels a particular kind of pain point to want so many modalities attached to my public identity. Am I a dancer, performer, sound healer, yoga instructor, visual artist, sculptor, podcaster, gardener, event planner, elder care practitioner, retreat host, cook, childhood mentor, ceramicist, pet psychic, choreographer, writer? How is it that people are so damn good at being one thing at a time?

Perhaps this sounds like a kind of midlife crisis. Perhaps it is.

I’ve created a thought experiment that I’m currently pulling into reality. Water Moon Studios is the home for all of my creative meanderings and a place to offer a way for others to join me there.

I’m so relieved to be here. To write without wondering how the post will fare. To be welcome to breathe and rest here.

My artistry is how I see the world and how I use future anchoring to inform the present moment with creative problem-solving. I honestly care so much less about the medium than about the energetics of thinking outside the box. And the f’ing box we’ve swallowed is a doozy. Unlearning the box. That’s what I’m about. Rethinking the basic equations of how things are done. Yes. Building communities based on care and good boundaries, YES. Seeing children as full respected individuals. YES. Supporting learning always. Yes. Resting. Playing. Eating. Respecting Nature. Supporting Elders. Building Soil. Actual soil plus the common ground which grows new ideas. Composting. Rethinking what is garbage and what can be reused. Healing space for those who need it. Care for all. Indigenous wisdom at the center of rebuilding networks of nationwide restructure. Universal Healthcare. Free Education. Limiting new clothing manufacture. Reuse. Recycle. Listen to the people who manage our garbage. Make changes. Build homespace. Renovate homes. Open homes to community care. Learn from folks who know how to make communal living work. Care for neighbors. Dark Skies. Stargazing. Water gazing. Sunbathing. Barefeet in non-toxic grass. No Herbicides on our food, or in our soil. Soft gazes. Laughter. Music. Normalized community music. Bring back wailing to the people who have lost it. Grief circles. Food circles. Women released from subordination. Old social contracts done. Public bathrooms. Unions. Free public transport. Libraries everywhere. Art supply libraries and tool libraries and elder wisdom real people libraries. Mental health support. Spiritual health support. Physical non western medicine health support in addition to easy to access western medical care. Young families supported to stay home with their kids or to have safe loving childcare. Life can be better than this. We can be less anxious, stressed and constantly worried.

I may become the grandmother who sits and rocks her way into believing this future is possible. I may see it for my own children and grandchildren. There’s one way to find out and it looks like this. Breathe in, breathe out. All we have is our own attention and our own breath. I do think it matters that we hold on as long as we can to being sovereign. It is just too easy for our attention to be occupied by something or someone else. Perhaps if we become strong at holding our own attention and being so curious about ourselves we have a better chance of getting through from this dystopian world to the one I see. I can see our future. It looks like it is already here, yet just needs the electric system of our full attention to run it. I wonder. I wonder if that's how it works. What if there really is the great unplug? I'm especially interested in recent larger interest in general strikes. What would it really take to shift into a new economy and a new way of being in the world?

We and the world we live in have been manipulated in ways that not only prevent our awakening but also prevent us from gaining an awareness about the true nature of our being. Due to an alien interference, our consciousness exists in a form of darkness that prevents us even from realizing what serves our well being and what doesn’t. We are being programmed with imposed information through multiple channels and have been taught to value information and ‘knowledge’ imparted from the outside higher than any inkling that may be arising from within us.

Of fundamental importance is our understanding of how we may, can, or have to provide and care for ourselves. We have been led to implement a society that has been created in such way that it has removed nearly all of us from being able to provide for our basic needs directly on our own. We have been tied down into complex processes in which we fulfill a small role that hopefully pays us enough money to fulfill our basic needs, e.g., food, clothing, shelter, transportation (yes, I count this as a basic need, because in most cases we must be able to get to where we can buy food, and of course we must be able to get back and forth to our workplace), and others. For an increasing number of our fellow humans there is not much money left once the above needs have been met, and to take part in social life and find ways to allow some space for leisure experiences and expenses like going out, taking a vacation, participate in social events, maintaining our communication infrastructure etc., there is precious little left to accomplish this.

Back in the 70’s, most products were still being produced in the country we were living in. Clothing, shoes, TV’s, cars, small and large household appliances, cutlery, dishes, and so on. When buying something we had an idea of how that item came into being. We knew people who were involved in the respective industries, and we thought that we had at least an effect on the impact on humans and the environment that resulted from certain ways of manufacturing items. Back then we already dealt with a mixed bag though, because we were being manipulated by media, school, politics, and ‘science’.

Nowadays a large portion of the workplaces that were still there in the 70’s are gone. Where did they go? Either they have been replaced by technology (and this trend is accelerating through AI ever more), or they have been sourced out to continents and countries where the cost of labor is much cheaper than in our country.

Back in the 70’s, we could witness under which conditions people had to work. And let’s be honest, there were a lot of jobs that – although they were essential for our society – everybody who could manage it would try to avoid at all cost; jobs that exposed you to the elements, that were monotonous, strenuous, noisy, dusty, repetitive, and that of course did not pay well. In many cases, our guiding light to the jobs we deemed preferable was convenience and of course the amount of obtainable income. Why were those essential but undesirable jobs being paid so low and other, more comfortable and convenient jobs so much more? If you wish to find out more in this regard, I provide answers to these questions in my previous blog posts.

Back then you would have had a much clearer idea than nowadays of what you have set into motion by your purchasing decisions.

And here we come to the invisible effects of interconnectedness.

The rulers of this world have taken well advantage of the specific energies of the 6th and 7th wave of creation (please refer to my blog articles at StefanBeckerAwakening.com and my book Awakening for more information on the creational waves according to Carl Johan Calleman; this link will take you to an article explaining more regarding the nine creational waves: https://stefanbeckerawakening.com/the-9-creational-waves-the-2nd-law-of-thermodynamics-and-the-gateway-home/ ) to turn our world into one of separateness and division. They also managed to disconnect us from our awareness of our own inner divine spark, and through multiple worldwide resets they were able to erase our memory of who we are and where we came from. Due to their many interferences, humans ended up as the vulnerable and dependent beings we see today. The fulfillment of all our needs was delegated to systems that had to be organized according to the specifications of the alien rulers of our realm of being. And that is where all the money goes. Those that perform these organizing and controlling tasks according to the requirements of the alien rulers will receive the most income for their effort. The goal is to keep humanity tied down to the low vibrating energies of previous creational waves and to prevent us from ever getting into resonance with the current higher vibrating creational waves of our universe, namely, the 8th and 9th creational waves.

On the surface, we might think that we have found ways to remove us from any involvement with the plight of most of humanity. Maybe we concluded that there are possibilities to disconnect us from the way this world functions by choosing carefully what we consume, or by pursuing ways of gaining our income that support our (wealthy) clients in their well being, by providing them with ‘wisdom’ or inspiration, by assisting them in managing their stress levels, lifting their emotional condition, offering physical exercise classes, or any such things. Thereby we might think that we have disconnected us from being involved in the main driving force of our world, i.e., the agenda of the earth-controlling powers.

We are meant to think so, as it provides us with the illusion that we have accomplished as much as we can in this world. In the end though, we are much more involved in maintaining a world according to the requirements of the alien rulers than we would ever want to imagine. How so? Our rulers had to implement a way that would lead every human being to spiritually compromise themselves and by that to prevent them from achieving an awakening into their true being. All the worldly systems have been set up long before the energies of the 8th and 9th creational waves provided the energetical framework that would allow for such an awareness and awakening. These powers knew that they had to take precautions early on to set the world and humanity up in a way that would prevent an awakening. One of the main issues here is our interconnectedness.

Yes, you consume only the finest organic food, wear the most responsible clothing, and pursue an esoteric profession. But interconnectedness goes all the way through anything you involve yourself in. It does not stop before it reaches the very end of the chain.

So, to escape any negative backlash on yourself caused by any imbalance in the things you involve yourself in, you would have to research, for example, how your clients generate their income that they use to pay you for your services. And you are surely aware of the fact that the vast majority of your fellow humans wouldn’t even be able to afford your services as they are at the end of their financial rope when they have managed to provide for the absolute essentials. So, in the esoteric sector or related fields, your clients are probably in many ways involved in the maintaining of the controlled and manipulated world I have been writing about in many previous blog articles. You really would have to investigate what your clients are involved in to generate their income. Furthermore, you would have to research what your clients’ employers might set into motion elsewhere in the world by their business methods, until you have accounted for all their workers and working environments that effect people and nature, before you could be sure that you have disconnected yourself from the driving force of our worldly society, that is, the control, manipulation, and exploitation of the majority of people. This is pretty much impossible, and deliberately so. Because through our interconnectedness everyone is being tied together and nobody can escape. And to make things worse, through the services you provide your clients with, they are becoming ever more able to successfully further their own career and business success - because they can delude themselves.

We could now start a discussion about my understanding and many of you would probably be able to disprove what I have just set out above.

In my understanding, such disproving is only possible because we are completely unaware of how interconnectedness works. Everything we set into motion seeks for balance. If the white garments that you wear when recording your spiritual video podcast have been produced by abused people somewhere two continents away, then their related suffering and exploitation for the provision of your garments will extract a balancing effect from you. If there is no adequate monetary compensation for the people providing their time and workforce, then other ways of compensation must and will be found. This will, either immediately or eventually, happen in ways that relate to your life and will balance the damage done. Thus, it could be manifesting in health problems for you, in an accident, in emotional mistreatment, depression, a natural disaster that affects you, through the breakdown of important equipment that you need, or you might be hindered from attending an important event that is meant to generate new clients, and so on. You might not see it that way, but this is how it works anyway and it does this very successfully so, as you can observe in the ways the world develops on a larger scale.

By continuing to stay in the manipulated earthly system we currently exist in, we will ensure one thing, and that is that the world will proceed according to the plans of those that have set it up the way it is now.

Our interconnectedness on the other hand poses also the greatest risk for those that use it currently to their advantage and to our disadvantage. When a group of us begins to wholeheartedly engage into the process of awakening, and when we achieve this awakening, then our awakening will affect every being currently present in our reality. Each and every being, simply through our interconnectedness. The biggest obstacle erected before us in this regard is that we will have to first develop a willingness to leave our current life behind and to dedicate ourselves completely to the process of awakening. Again, I would like to refer you to my other blog posts and to my book for further elaborations on this process and its possibilities.

Should you feel called upon to become an active part of this process of awakening, then I would love to hear from you. You and I will be the path pavers that will be setting this process into motion, but we have to spread the word far and wide to reach the ones that need to hear this message. Please let me know if you have ideas to accomplish this and ways of helping me to reach as many people as possible with my message. I am very grateful for your input on this.

But this way of deciding misses something important. When you choose your speed, you are not only choosing how fast you arrive. You are choosing what you are allowed to see, to feel, and to remember.

In a car, the world becomes a moving picture. You take in the big shapes, wide roads, highway signs, the flow of other vehicles. Everything feels organized and efficient. Yet the details disappear into a gentle blur. You travel past life more than through it. The journey becomes something to finish rather than something to experience.

On a scooter, the world opens up again. You feel the air moving against your skin. You can turn your head and look around more freely. Shop windows, street vendors, the expressions on people's faces, they all become part of the ride. You are no longer separated from the life happening around you. You are inside it, even if only for a short while.

A bicycle changes the experience once more. You hear the city or the town in a new way. Fragments of conversations float by. You catch the smell of bread from a bakery, the scent of rain on warm pavement, the faint perfume of flowers hanging over a wall. Your body works in rhythm with the road, and you notice which houses have small gardens, which balconies are full of plants, which streets feel lived-in and loved.

Then there is walking. This is where the world reveals itself most fully. You see the pattern of stones under your feet, a single flower pushing through a crack in the pavement, the way an old balcony gently sags with age. You notice the small repairs people have made, the laundry hanging between buildings, the quiet rhythm of everyday life that faster speeds simply glide over. Walking lets you read the layers of a place, from the rooftops down to the ground.

It is a strange habit we have developed. We will drive just one kilometer to save a few minutes, rushing past everything around us. Then, on a weekend, we go to a park or a nature trail and walk for five kilometers, deliberately slowing down because we want to see something beautiful. We spend most of our days editing the world out in the name of efficiency, and then we pay money or take time off to go somewhere we are finally forced to notice it.

This realization has changed how I move through my days. Speed does not actually save time in the way we think. It edits reality. It removes the smells, the small sounds, the chance to pause and feel connected to where we are. The fastest route is not always the one that gets you there in the shortest number of minutes. Sometimes the slowest route is the one that brings you there more fully alive.

Now I try to ask a different question before I choose how to go somewhere. I ask myself: What do I want to feel on the way? If I simply need to arrive, tired, late, or carrying many things, then driving makes sense. But if I want to arrive feeling connected to the place I have traveled through, I choose to walk or cycle, even when it takes longer.

There is a quiet beauty in this other way of thinking. It reminds me that attention is one of the most precious things we own. When we move too quickly, we trade that attention for minutes. We arrive at our destination, but part of us has not really been present for the journey. The small wonders along the way, the child laughing on a bicycle, the old man carefully watering his plants, the way sunlight falls on a particular corner at a certain hour, these things become invisible when we are always in a hurry.

I have started noticing how this choice appears in other areas of life too. We rush through meals so we can get back to work. We scroll quickly through our days instead of lingering in real conversations. We consume experiences at high speed and then wonder why everything feels a little flat. The pattern is the same. Speed promises freedom, but it often costs us depth and connection.

Choosing the slower way is not about rejecting modern life. It is about giving ourselves permission to taste it more fully when we can. Some days the car is the kind choice. Other days, the bicycle or the pair of walking shoes feels like the right companion. The wisdom lives in learning to choose consciously instead of always defaulting to whatever is fastest.

There are moments when I cycle through familiar streets and suddenly notice a new café that opened quietly, or I see how the light hits an old building in a way I had never appreciated before. These small discoveries feel like gifts. They make an ordinary day feel richer. They remind me that the world is constantly offering beauty, but it only reveals itself to those moving at the right speed to receive it.

I believe this idea carries a gentle lesson for how we live. Not everything needs to be optimized for speed. Some things, maybe the most important things, ask us to slow down so we can truly meet them. A conversation. A neighborhood. A relationship. Even our own thoughts and feelings need space and time if we want to understand them.

So the next time you need to go somewhere, pause for a second. Ask yourself what kind of journey you want this time. Do you want to simply arrive? Or do you want to arrive having truly passed through the world?

There is no single right answer. But there is power in remembering that you get to choose. The slowest route is sometimes the one that brings you home most completely. Not just to your destination, but to the present moment and to the quiet wonder that lives all around us.

And in that choice, in those small, deliberate decisions to see more and feel more, there is a soft hope. The hope that we can live more fully inside our days instead of always rushing past them. That even in a busy world, we can still find our way back to a pace that lets life touch us.