Have a great month and be more animal!

“The magic is inside you, there ain’t no crystal ball.” ~ Dolly Parton

For the last few days my feed has been nothing but Dolly. Not the hits—the stories. The Imagination Library. The people she quietly paid for. The way she treated a stagehand and a president the same.

And the letters.

Subscribe now

Eminem posted one this week that she’d sent him after they were both inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Your performance was amazing and everybody said so. Even though I don’t know a lot about rap music, I’ve come to know that you are the very best at it.

She told him she’d always felt some unexplained connection to him, that she’d hoped to meet him at the show and missed her chance. Then: keep doing what you’re doing, because you do it very well, and no matter how complex your world may be, just know you are very special and touch people in ways you don’t even know.

Marshall Mathers is not a man short on validation. She wrote it anyway, said nothing about it, and he kept it for three years.

And nobody is posting about the records. What people are posting is something she said to them, or to somebody, twenty years ago. A moment on a set. A letter. Every one of them is about how she was with someone, and none of them are about what she achieved. Which is not how we usually mourn famous people.

I clicked one of the links and it took me to an interview with Barbara Walters, 1978.

Walters comes at her about the look. You don’t have to wear the blonde wigs. You don’t have to wear the extreme clothes.

Dolly doesn’t flinch.

“It’s certainly a choice. I don’t like to be like everybody else. I’ve often made the statement that I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do.”

Then Walters goes for the throat. Do you ever feel that you’re a joke? That people make fun of you?

“Oh, I know that they make fun of me. But actually, all these years the people have thought the joke was on me. But it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing and I can change it at any time.”

And then the line the whole thing turns on:

“I like the kind of person that I am, so I can afford to piddle around and doo diddle around with makeup and clothes and stuff because I am secure with myself.”

She’s thirty-two years old, being asked on national television whether she knows she’s ridiculous. And she answers as though she’s been asked about the weather.

Secure with myself.

Share

Have you ever met an insecure animal?

I don’t mean a frightened one. Animals are frightened constantly, and correctly—a deer at the treeline is scanning for something that might actually eat it. Fear is information about the world. It arrives, it does its job, and when the wolf leaves, it goes.

Insecurity isn’t about the world. It’s about you: whether you’re enough, whether the version of you that showed up today will survive inspection. And it doesn’t arrive from anything. It just runs, in the background, in rooms containing no threat whatsoever.

No animal has that. Not because they’re brave. Because insecurity requires equipment they don’t have: a picture of yourself and a verdict pending. You need to be able to stand outside your own life and grade it. A crow can’t do that.

Which means when we call someone insecure, we’re not describing a personality flaw. We’re describing a piece of machinery that’s running.

We say confident, and we mean something loud. The firm handshake, the person who fills a room, the one who knows they’re the best in it. But look at what that requires: a comparison and a sense of standing. Confidence in that sense is a scoreboard reading that happens to be favorable. Which makes it the same instrument as insecurity, just printing good news for the moment. Both are answers to a question about how you’re doing. One is simply having a better week.

That’s why confident people collapse. The instrument didn’t break. It just returned a different number.

Now go look at a cat crossing a room. A hawk on a fence post. There’s nothing performed about it, nobody being shown anything. It isn’t confident in comparison to other cats. It’s entirely occupied with what it’s doing, and there’s no part of it standing off to the side taking notes.

We’d call that confidence, and it isn’t. We don’t have a good word for it in English, which is probably why we keep reaching for the wrong one. It isn’t a good score. It’s no scoring. And when you meet it in a person, it doesn’t sound like swagger. It sounds like ease.

Which is exactly what Dolly is doing in that chair. She isn’t defending herself. Watch it again—there’s nothing to defend, because Walters is aiming at a target that isn’t there. She’s asking a woman how it feels to be laughed at, and the woman has no equipment for receiving the question.

You cannot humiliate someone who isn’t checking.

And notice what she never claims. Not that she’s beautiful. Not that she’s better than anyone. She says she likes the kind of person she is. That’s not a ranking. It’s a settled fact she isn’t planning to revisit.

Then the best part. So I can afford to piddle around with makeup and clothes.

Afford. That’s the word. The wig is a luxury, purchased with the money she saved by not needing it to work. She wore the biggest costume in America precisely because nothing was riding on it. A woman who needed the costume to be taken seriously could never have said the joke was on the public.

The mirror is what makes a costume dangerous. Without one, it’s just clothes.

So I don’t think the lesson everyone’s reaching for this week is be yourself. She wasn’t especially being herself. She was in a wig and rhinestones and four-inch nails, playing a character she designed at twenty and ran for sixty years.

The lesson is smaller and stranger. She wasn’t checking.

Julia Roberts told a story about it. Steel Magnolias, Louisiana, brutal summer heat, and the whole cast is miserable. Ice on their wrists, asking for water, complaining. Roberts is twenty-one and finally says something to Dolly, who’s sitting there in a wig and wool. Come on. It’s hot. Sweat a little. Just say you’re hot. Say this is a drag.

And Dolly says: “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be famous and I wanted to be rich. And now I’m both those things. I’m not going to complain about it.”

Roberts said she’s never forgotten it. That every time she starts to moan about something, she hears Dolly on that porch, and it keeps her quiet.

Look at what isn’t in that answer. No suffering in silence. No performance of toughness for a younger actress. She’s simply noticed that she asked for this exact life, got it, and that complaining about the wool would require briefly forgetting that. And she’s telling a twenty-one-year-old what she wanted as a little girl, on a porch, in the heat. There’s nothing guarded in it at all.

That’s what the letters were, too. You only notice a stranger is about to give up if you’re actually looking at them. And you only write without telling anyone if there’s no scoreboard the gesture was meant for.

Every story pouring out this week is a story about someone who was completely available to whoever was in front of her, because none of her attention was reserved for monitoring how it was going.

You already know what that’s like. Absorbed in something, laughing before you decided anything was funny, in a conversation that got good and you forgot to watch yourself. You didn’t call it confidence. You didn’t call it anything. You just felt lighter afterward and couldn’t say why.

That’s the animal, and it never went anywhere. It’s usually just drowned out by a running commentary about how you’re doing.

Dolly Parton spent sixty years in the most self-conscious business on earth without ever installing a mirror.

Have you ever met an insecure animal?

It’s a ridiculous question. You knew that when I asked it. No hawk has ever wondered whether it’s hawk enough. No dog has lain awake replaying the afternoon. We’re the only ones who ask. And once you can ask, you can’t stop.

Dolly got asked hers out loud, on television, by a professional. Do you ever feel that you’re a joke?

And she had nothing for it to land on.

Leave a comment

Be more animal!

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~ T.S. Eliot

I was having coffee with a friend when the conversation turned to something I wrote years ago, in a book called I Am Keats: Escape Your Mind and Free Your Self.

The distinction was simple. You can spend your life staying alive, or you can spend it being alive. Staying alive runs on certainty, comparison, and comfort. Being alive runs on curiosity, compassion, and creativity.

He said that landed, and that he wanted the second one. And then he asked the question I’ve never had a good answer to.

“How?”

Subscribe now

Three words came out of my mouth before I could stop them.

“Be more animal.”

I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to say that. Four books, a screenplay, a novel, and a nine-hour video program. It turns out I could have said it at the table in about a second and a half.

Here’s what I mean, and here’s how long it took me to get there.

Sandbox Wisdom opened on a little girl with long braids and two missing front teeth. Unguarded. A child who hasn’t yet been told how any of this goes. Who plays without a picture of how the playing should look, and who isn’t measuring herself against anything or anyone. I was pointing at something I couldn’t name.

Your Brain on Story was about what happens when you make yourself the hero of your own self story. The problem was never stories. It was that a story needs someone watching it. Cast yourself as the hero and you’ve created an audience—and the audience is you, sitting off to the side, deciding how it should go and how you’re doing. I had it in my hands and I called it narrative identity.

Unwinding Want was about conditioned desire and the three delusions underneath it. This and That—the belief that life comes à la carte, that you can keep the good parts and decline the rest. Right and Wrong—the belief that there’s a correct way to be doing this. And Now and Then—not now, then. Do more, have more, be more. An endless journey toward a future point where it finally feels finished. I wrote a whole book about the engine before I understood what it was powering.

And I Am Keats!—which I wrote before some of these—used two Romantic poets as stand-ins for two ways of being in the world. Keats had a name for one of them: negative capability. The capacity to sit in uncertainty and mystery without reaching irritably after fact and reason. That one wasn’t a diagnosis at all. Keats was already describing the animal. I spent a book on it and still didn’t have the word.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also wrote a screenplay and a novel, and created a nine-hour video program called How to Be Alive! All of it circling the same question my friend asked me over coffee.

I don’t think any of it was wrong. It just didn’t contain the sentence, because the sentence couldn’t be assembled. It had to be said out loud, to someone who’d asked.

Now, the part I’d rather leave out.

People had objections to every one of those books, and the objections were never the same. The child was too simple. The poets were too strange. The self story was too abstract. The want was too complicated. For years I read that as evidence I hadn’t found the right frame, and I kept building new ones, which is how you end up with five books, a screenplay, nine hours of video, and no phrase.

I think I had it backwards. The complaints changed every time. What didn’t change was the flinch underneath them. Each one asked a reader to put something down—the plan, the certainty, the flattering story, the promised arrival—and there is no comfortable way to be asked that. So the objection arrives wearing whatever costume is nearest. Too simple. Too strange. Too much.

That’s not a failure of framing. That’s what it feels like to be asked to give something up.

So here it is with nothing on top of it.

You were born an animal. Then, gently, and by people who loved you and were handed the same thing themselves, you were given an assumption. Nobody said it out loud. You worked it out from faces, from tone, from what got a warm response and what got a cool one.

Do it this way and you’ll be okay.

That’s the engine. Everything else is what the engine runs.

You need to know how, so you take a script—someone else’s answer to how you should live, handed to you before you knew there was a question. You need to know you’re following it, so you install a mirror—not vanity, just a way to catch the mistake before someone else does. And you need proof you’re gaining ground, so you keep a scoreboard.

Three instruments, one promise. And the promise is a lie, though nobody meant it as one.

Look at what you were actually promised. Not a house, not a title. You’ll be okay. Accepted, safe, comfortable, someone. The permanent condition of being finally, unimpeachably fine.

But you were already that before any of it. Nothing had to be earned because nothing had been withdrawn. You spend your life trying to earn back a permission that was never revoked. Nobody took it away. Someone just implied it could be.

So what does it mean, be more animal?

Not be feral. Not follow your appetites. I’m not talking about animal morality. Keep every human value you’ve got. I’m talking about animal mode. How the thing runs, not what it does with the running.

And here’s what I got wrong for years. It doesn’t mean becoming one. You’re not being asked to strive towards anything. You already are one and always have been—breathing without asking, crying before you knew you were sad, reaching for someone falling before any part of you had time to think.

Being more animal means being less. Not less alive. Less equipment. One less script. One less mirror. One less scoreboard. One less reason you’re not allowed to be here yet.

My friend asked me how. I’d spent twenty-five years answering that question, which is the one thing I now think shouldn’t be answered for anyone.

Twenty-five years, five books, a screenplay, and nine hours of video to arrive at a sentence I could have said at a coffee table. Which is either embarrassing or exactly right, depending on whether you think the twenty-five years were the detour or the road.

I’ve stopped keeping score on that one.

And speaking of how. Dolly Parton died yesterday. She wore the biggest costume in America and was never once inside it. She knew exactly what the wig was, told everyone, and let people underestimate her for sixty years without ever correcting them.

No mirror. No scoreboard. In a business made of both.

Dolly had a how. She wrote it herself, and it fit nobody else.

She got it without any of this.

Leave a comment

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~ T.S. Eliot

There’s an old clip of Paul Simon on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970. A few minutes in, too shy to simply sit and talk, he reaches for a guitar the crew has tucked behind the couch. Prompted by Cavett, he begins explaining how he wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

He plays the opening. Hums it.

When you’re weary, feeling small.

Then he says the next phrase came, more or less without thinking, from a Bach chorale.

And then he stops playing.

Subscribe now

“I was stuck there,” he says. “That was all I had of that melody.”

Cavett asks him what that means. What makes you stuck?

And Simon says something I’ve been thinking about for weeks. “Well, everywhere I went led me where I didn’t want to be. So I was stuck.”

Sit with that, because it isn’t what we usually mean by the word.

The common picture of stuck is no motion. Wheels turning in mud. The blank page. Stuck as absence. Nothing happening, nothing coming.

But Simon was playing the whole time. Humming, reaching, producing. He wasn’t blocked. Melodies were arriving. The problem was that every one of them led somewhere he didn’t want to go. His stuck wasn’t too little movement. It was a surplus of it, all pointed the wrong way. Every road open, and none of them home.

I know that one intimately, because it’s mine.

I am not blocked. The ideas keep coming, sometimes faster than I can hold them. By every visible measure, I am creating, producing and moving. And almost none of it is carrying me to the place I actually want to be, which is not “having written.” It’s being with people. Together. Playing, learning, giggling, discovering, adding something to each other’s actual lives. That’s the melody I keep almost reaching and never quite landing. Everywhere I go leads me where I don’t want to be. Published, and still not there.

So how did Simon get unstuck? This is the part worth slowing down for, because the answer is not what you’d expect from a man that gifted.

He didn’t push harder. He didn’t out-work it. He didn’t step away from it. What broke it loose was a gospel group called the Swan Silvertones. And listen to exactly how he describes it.

“Every time I’d come home, I’d put them on, and I’d listen to it, and I think that must have subconsciously influenced me.”

The line that finished the song, the bridge itself, came from a record he’d been living with. Not studying. Living with. Coming home to it, night after night, until it seeped in below the level of thought and handed him something he could not have manufactured on his own.

That’s the whole thing, and I almost missed it. He didn’t get unstuck by producing. He got unstuck by returning. By coming home to the same thing, over and over, until it saturated him.

Now here is where I have to be honest about something I wrote years ago, believed in, and built on.

I wrote, in a book, that the thing that lights a person up is a scene.

“A location where people of similar desires and worldviews gather. A richly interdependent community of talents and opportunities.”

Heartfelt exchange of ideas. Support of each other’s uniqueness and passions. I still believe every word of that. It is exactly the thing I’m reaching for and can’t land.

But I also wrote this:

“Due to the power and ubiquity of the Internet, many scenes are now taking place online.”

And I meant it. I built on it. I believed the gathering could happen through the screen.

I think I was half right.

The internet is a magnificent finding instrument. It can locate the players. It can carry your melody to the far side of the earth by lunchtime. It found me most of the people I connect with and care about. What I got wrong wasn’t the value of the scene. It was the architecture. Because the thing that unstuck Simon wasn’t reach, and it wasn’t even the gathering. It was coming home to it. And you cannot come home to a feed. You scroll past everything and return to nothing. The medium is built for the one motion that doesn’t saturate. Onward, onward, onward, everything available and nothing lived with.

For a while I thought the answer must be the opposite of the screen. Get people in a room. And rooms are better. Presence is real in a way the feed can’t fake. But even a great gathering has the same hole in it, just harder to see. People come, something ignites, and then everyone leaves. The retreat ends. The conversation scatters. It’s a spike, not a saturation. You don’t come home to it. You go home from it, and the glow starts to fade on the flight back.

There’s one more answer, and it’s the most seductive, because it tells you to stop looking.

Nietzsche spent his last productive decade as a nomad, moving between Swiss villages and Italian coast towns with a trunk of books, mostly alone. His ideas had exiled him, and he made a philosophy of the exile. Clarity itself, the story goes, is what strands you. The moment you see what’s really under the shared myths, you become a stranger to the crowd.

It’s a beautiful story, and it’s a trap. It takes an ordinary loneliness and hands it back as a badge. The distance isn’t a problem to solve, it says. It’s the mark of someone who sees clearly. Stay out here in the cold. The cold is where the truth is.

I don’t buy it. I’m no Nietzsche, and I don’t want his ending, alone in a rented room, calling the exile a calling. Being on the outside isn’t proof of anything. It’s just the distance I’m trying to close. Dress it up as a higher calling and I never will, because you don’t walk home from a place you’ve decided to be proud of.

Which is how I finally found the shape of what’s missing. Not the answer. The ingredient every substitute lacks.

It isn’t reach. It isn’t even presence. It’s return. The Silvertones worked because Simon kept coming back. Same record, same rooms, again and again, until it rearranged him without his noticing. The thing that changes you is never the thing you meet once, however bright. It’s the thing you return to.

I want to end this with the answer and I don’t have it. I only know its shape now, which is more than I had a month ago. It isn’t a broadcast. It isn’t an event. It’s a place people come back to, often enough and freely enough that it seeps in below thought and starts to change everyone who keeps showing up. Not a stage. Not a feed. Not a weekend that ends. Something you come home to.

I don’t know where that is, but I know that’s the melody. And for the first time in a while, being stuck doesn’t feel like the mud.

It feels like Simon, guitar in his lap, the song not finished, going home to listen for the rest of it.

If you’ve found a place you come home to—one that saturates you slowly, the way the record did for him—tell me. I’m still looking for mine.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

“What day is it?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet. “My favorite day,” said Pooh. ~ A.A. Milne

Sugar doesn’t know it’s Tuesday.

She doesn’t dread Monday, or replay last week, or lie awake rehearsing a conversation that hasn’t happened. When I come home she meets me like it’s the first and best thing that has ever happened. Because for her, it is. There’s no yesterday leaning on it. No tomorrow thinning it out. Whatever is in front of her is the whole of what’s real, and she gives it everything.

I used to think that she was just a simpler creature than me, running on less. Then I read something about trees, and understood it was something else entirely. It wasn’t that she had less than me. It was that she was missing one specific thing, and its absence was her peace.

Subscribe now

Trees raised in sealed environments—no storms, nothing to push against—grow tall and fast and topple before they mature. What they’re missing is wind. A tree needs to be bent to know where to grow strong. Flexed by a gust, it lays down what’s called stress or reaction wood, thickening exactly where the force was greatest. The tree remembers the wind in its own body, and reinforces itself against the next one.

So a tree learns from experience. It stores that experience physically and lets it shape what it becomes. That sounded, to me, a lot like memory. And I’d always assumed memory was one of the things that made us different. It isn’t. Almost nothing does, and it’s worth walking through what doesn’t, because the one thing that finally remains is the whole of the human condition.

Let’s start with the chemistry. A photon strikes a molecule in a leaf and bends the whole plant toward the light. A memory strikes a network in your skull and bends your whole day toward dread. Different molecules, same kind of event: chemistry causing chemistry, all the way up. There’s no rung where the physical stops and a ghost takes over. I’ll grant the materialist every inch of that.

The same goes for memory. We just saw the tree has it. So does the seed that won’t sprout until enough winter has passed. So does the Venus flytrap, which won’t close until it’s been touched twice inside twenty seconds. Storing the past and letting it shape the future is not our invention. It goes most of the way down.

And as far as learning from experience. The tree reinforced by real wind is learning. Sugar, who once tangled with something that stung and now is on alert in that corner of the yard, is learning. Both edit themselves in response to what actually happened to them. This, too, is not ours alone.

So what’s left? Everything is conceded, the chemistry, the memory, the learning—and the human still stands apart somewhere. Where?

Here. It’s not that we remember. It’s not even that we remember experience. It’s what our memory can be a memory of.

The tree’s memory is a record of wind that actually blew. The reaction wood forms where real force actually bent it. The tree cannot brace itself against a storm it merely anticipates, or against a gust it remembers from a decade ago, or stiffen because it imagined being pushed. Its memory is welded to what physically happened. Every entry is real.

Ours isn’t.

We are the one organism that can form a vivid, durable, body-shaping memory of something that never happened. A future we’re only picturing. A verdict we were handed once, or maybe only inferred. A story about ourselves that may correspond to no event that ever occurred. And then we do exactly what the tree does. We reinforce. We grow rigid and defended, hard in all the places the wind is going to hit.

Except the wind never blew.

That’s the human condition in a single image. The tree grows strong where the wind really bent it. We grow rigid where the wind never came, against remembered storms, imagined storms, storms someone once told us about. We armor ourselves against weather that isn’t real, and then we call the armor our personality.

Now, sometimes the wind was real. This is where I have to be careful, because the most important objection to everything I’ve said is also the truest. Sometimes someone was hurt, really hurt, and learned to brace against the kind of harm that hurt them. And sometimes the wind was never one storm but a whole climate.

I read a woman describe it exactly. She couldn’t hear her own inner voice in the presence of a man. She’d grown up, she said, in a very traditional household where the patriarchy was alive and well. No single gust bent her. A thousand small ones did, year after year, until she laid down reaction wood against half the human race, losing her own voice in rooms where no one was trying to take it. That wariness is not a fiction. Real weather blew. She isn’t imagining it. She’s calibrated by it.

But watch what the mind builds on top of the real thing. The wind happened; the story says it’s still blowing. The household was real; the story says every room is that household. The event ends. The story never does. And you can tell the two apart by what they do: the real memory protects her. It’s information, it points at something, it can keep her safe. The story only imprisons her. It braces her in rooms where nothing threatens her, closes her throat in front of the kind man, and won’t let her be anywhere but in a permanent invented storm.

We like to say that life weathers us into something wiser and stronger. Sometimes it does. That’s the tree, bent by real wind into real strength. But sometimes what we call being weathered is just the armor thickening against storms that stopped blowing years ago. Not every scar is wisdom. Some are only old bracing we never learned to set down.

And notice the cruel twist in the sheltered tree. It’s weak because it was spared all stress. It needed the real wind and never got it. Our problem is the mirror of that. We’re not weak from too little real stress. We’re rigid from too much unreal stress. The sheltered tree suffers from the wind that never came. We suffer from the imagined wind, the one we can’t stop bracing for.

Which is, at last, what Ram Dass meant. Be here now. We’ve sanded that phrase down into a fridge magnet: relax, savor the moment, stop and smell things. Soft advice for stressed people. But there’s nothing soft in it. It’s the most precise instruction ever given for the exact disorder we’ve been describing.

Because here and now is the only place without fiction. It is the one location where every stimulus is real. The wind that’s actually on your face. The light that’s actually in the room. The person actually across from you. Step out of here-now in either direction and you enter invented weather. Go back, and you’re in the storm that already passed, re-suffering it. Go forward, and you’re bracing for the one that hasn’t come and mostly won’t.

Sugar has no choice. She is always here now. She cannot leave the present to go dread a drought. That’s what I mistook for simplicity. And for one odd moment I envied her, until I saw that the same machinery that exiles me from the present is the only thing that could ever return me to it.

She’s here now because she can’t be anywhere else. I can be here now on purpose, by turning my attention to what’s actually touching me. That’s the rarer and greater thing, because it means noticing the manufactured wind for what it is, and letting it go.

She’s asleep at my feet as I write this, in a patch of sun, breathing. Not knowing it’s Tuesday.

There’s no wind here, now. Most days there isn’t.

I’m trying to learn it from her.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

“You cannot step into the same river twice.” ~ Heraclitus

I was watching a conversation between an actor and a cognitive neuroscientist about what makes you you, and the neuroscientist, Anil Seth, said something that stopped me.

He was careful about it. Generous, even. He called us “very complicated objects,” then added, in the same breath, “I don’t want to undersell how amazing, rich and beautiful human beings and other animals are. But we’re made of stuff.”

Subscribe now

I understand what he’s defending. He’s swinging at a ghost—the old idea that you’re a spirit piloting a body, some immaterial pilot in the cockpit, separate from the meat. That ghost has caused a lot of trouble, and he’s right to want it gone. There is no second substance. Nobody has ever found the pilot.

But watch what he reaches for once the ghost is dead. Object. Complicated, beautiful, but a thing. A very sophisticated arrangement of stuff.

And I think that word costs us more than the ghost ever did.

Take a walk in the woods. Find a stream, and near a rock, a small whirlpool—that little spinning dimple in the current. Come back next week and it’s still there. Same place. Same shape. Same size. You could point to it, name it, photograph it, describe it to a friend. In every way that matters to your eye, it’s a thing.

It isn’t. There’s no such object as a whirlpool.

Not one molecule of water in it today was there last week. Nothing that constitutes it has stayed. What persists is not a substance but a shape—a pattern the water makes as it moves past the rock. It’s not a noun. It’s a verb that’s been holding together long enough to fool you.

And here’s the part that undoes the whole idea of it as a separate thing: you can’t say where it starts or stops. The rain that fell in the hills last night is in it. The snowmelt is in it. The trees that shade the bank and slow the warming are in it. The beaver two miles up who moved a branch is in it. Change any of that and the whirlpool changes, or stops being at all. Its edges are a convenience of your looking, not a fact about the world. The whirlpool doesn’t have a relationship with the stream. The whirlpool is the stream, doing something particular for a while.

That’s you.

This isn’t my idea. Alan Watts spent a career pointing at it—that you’re not a thing in the universe but something the universe is doing, the way a wave is something the ocean is doing. But it’s worth walking all the way through, because the consequences are larger than they first appear.

Almost none of the matter in your body was there a decade ago. You are eating, drinking, and breathing yourself into existence continuously—air becoming blood, bread becoming muscle, the atoms of some field in Kansas becoming, briefly, the hand you’re reading this with, before moving on. There is no stuff underneath. It’s doing all the way down.

And like the whirlpool, your edges are drawn by convenience. The oxygen half an inch outside your lips—is that you? A second later it’s in your blood. The people you talk to daily are shaping the pattern as surely as that beaver upstream. The light hitting you right now is running your chemistry. You don’t have an environment. You’re a local intensification of one.

So when a scientist says we’re objects—complicated ones, beautiful ones, but objects—he’s describing the whirlpool as a thing sitting in a stream. And that single word hands you a whole way of living, most of it wrong.

Because objects can be fixed. Optimized. Repaired. If you’re a thing, then your body is a vehicle needing constant maintenance to get you somewhere better, and your mind is a machine with a performance problem, and your life is a project of upgrades. That’s the anxious hum underneath most modern advice: you are a device with a spec sheet, and you are behind on updates.

Objects can also be found. That’s the other trap. If there’s a you-thing in there somewhere, then it makes sense to go looking for it—to excavate, to sit with a teacher, to take the assessment, to discover who you really are. People spend decades on this search and come up empty, and conclude they’ve failed. They haven’t. They went looking for a noun in a place that only ever contained a verb. You can no more find your true self than you can find the whirlpool’s true self by draining the stream.

And objects have insides and outsides. That’s the loneliest part. If you’re a thing, then other people are other things, and the space between you is empty, and connection is something you have to build across a gap. But the whirlpool never has to build a bridge to the stream. It was never over here while the water was over there. The gap you’re trying to cross is an artifact of the noun.

None of this makes you less real. This is where people get nervous—as if calling you a process rather than a thing dissolves you into vapor. It doesn’t. The whirlpool is unmistakably real. It has force. It has a shape you can recognize a mile off. It does things to what passes through it. It’s just real the way dancing is real rather than the way a rock is real. Nobody says a dance isn’t real because you can’t put it in a box.

What changes isn’t your reality. It’s what your reality requires.

A thing requires maintenance. A process requires participation. If you’re an object, the questions are what am I, what’s wrong with me, how do I fix it. If you’re a movement, the questions are entirely different. What am I in relationship with? What’s flowing through me? What am I doing to the water that leaves me and goes on downstream? Am I moving, or have I hardened into a shape I’m now defending?

That last one is the whole thing, I think. Because the only way a process can fail is by stopping. By mistaking the shape it’s currently making for the thing it actually is—and then spending its one brief run protecting a form instead of living a flow.

So he’s right that there’s no ghost. There’s no little pilot, no soul-stuff, no second substance hiding in the machinery.

But there’s no machine either.

There’s just a pattern the universe is making in the shape of you—fed by everything upstream, feeding everything down, holding its form for a while at the edge of a rock.

Go stand in the woods and watch one. It’ll look like an object.

It’s the most alive thing there.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” ~ Simone Weil

You’ve heard the advice a thousand times. Quiet your mind. Be still. And you’ve tried, which means you already know it doesn’t work. You sit down to quiet your mind and within seconds you’re arguing with yourself about whether you’re doing it right, which is more noise, produced by the very effort to make less of it.

There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t a lack of discipline.

Subscribe now

The thinking mind works like the AI everyone’s suddenly talking to. A language model generates one word at a time, and each word it produces becomes part of what it reads to produce the next word. It runs on its own output.

For example, it takes three words—“The cat sat”—and the model picks what comes next: “on.” Here’s the part most people miss. It doesn’t remember it was just reaching for “on.” It reads the whole line back, “The cat sat on,” as if the words had come from somewhere else, and asks the same question again—what comes next? “the.” Then it reads “The cat sat on the” and asks again. “mat.” Every word it writes becomes part of the prompt for the next one. It isn’t building a sentence it planned. It’s answering one question, over and over—what comes next?—and each answer changes the question.

There’s a name for this: autoregressive. What comes next is generated from what came before.

You do the same thing. The thought “maybe she’s angry” is something you generated. But a second later you read it back as a fact about the world, a thing that’s simply true now, and you answer it. You’ve already forgotten you were the one who wrote it.

This is why you lie awake at two in the morning. Not because something is wrong, but because you keep answering. The thought says what did she mean by that, and instead of letting it sit there, you reply, and your reply becomes the next thing you have to respond to, and you’re off, generating the night away, one prompt at a time.

We already had a word for this: rumination. We just couldn’t see inside it.

We use it to mean turning a worry over and over, and we borrowed it, centuries ago, from the cow. Ruminare, to chew the cud. The cow swallows, brings the food back up, and chews it again. We thought we were describing repetition. We were describing something more exact, and we didn’t know it until the machines showed us.

The cow isn’t only repeating. It’s re-consuming its own output, feeding itself what it already produced. That is precisely what the anxious mind does. It generates a thought, swallows it, brings it back up, and feeds on it again, and the feeding produces the next thing to feed on. The word had the mechanism hidden inside it the whole time. It took a machine that runs on its own output to let us finally read it. To ruminate is to autoregress. To chew again is to feed.

And here is the part that changes everything, because it tells you what to do.

An autoregressive system does nothing unless it’s prompted. That’s not a detail. That’s the whole of what it is. The language model sits perfectly silent until something asks it a question. It has no restlessness of its own. It generates only when fed.

So the mind isn’t loud on its own. It’s loud because it’s being fed. And the thing feeding it is you.

Every anxious spiral is a conversation you’re having with yourself in which you keep taking your turn. The mind serves up a thought, and you pick it up and hand it back as a question, and it answers, and you hand that back too. You experience this as the mind racing, as if it were running on its own power. It isn’t. Look closely at any spiral and you’ll find your own fingerprints on every step. You re-prompted it. Every time.

Which means you can’t think your way out, and now we know exactly why.

Thinking is prompting. Every attempt to reason your way to peace is another question handed to the machine, another turn taken, another mouthful brought back up to chew. Trying not to think is the loudest prompt of all, because don’t think about it is a thought about it. You cannot end the conversation by talking. You can only end it by stopping.

And here’s the trap inside the trap: you can’t will your way to quiet either. The will is part of the thinking mind. “I’m going to stop now” is a thought, and the moment you think it, you’ve handed the machine another prompt: am I stopping yet, am I doing this right, why isn’t it working. Resolve is just the loop wearing a stern face. Every white-knuckle attempt to control your mind is the mind trying to control itself, which is more mind. You cannot effort your way out of effort.

There’s only one lever that isn’t part of the mechanism, and it’s attention. Not what you think, but what you attend to. You don’t stop the loop. You turn away from it and put your attention on something real—the weight of your feet, the sound in the room, the person actually in front of you—and the loop, with no one looking at it and no one answering, goes quiet on its own. You didn’t silence it. You stopped feeding it your attention, and it starved the way it was always going to.

Watch what happens when a real conversation ends. Nobody wrestles it to the ground. One person simply stops replying, and the thing runs out of road. That’s the move. When the thought generates its next question, you don’t pick it up. You let it hang there, unanswered, and you turn your attention elsewhere. You stop taking your turn. And the mind, prompted by nothing, does the only thing an unprompted machine can do.

Nothing.

This is what all the good instructions were pointing at and mostly mangling. “Be here now” isn’t a command to feel peaceful. It’s a description of where your attention goes when it stops feeding the loop. The present is simply what’s here when you quit answering. You were never required to silence anything. The silence was underneath the whole time, waiting for you to stop talking over it.

I won’t oversell how easy this is, because it isn’t. The mind re-prompts itself fast, and it’s sneaky about it. You set the thought down, and half a second later you’ve picked it back up without noticing, and you’re three questions deep again. So the practice was never one heroic act of stopping. It’s noticing you’ve started answering again, and turning away again. And again. A thousand small releases, not one clean break. What you get, with practice, isn’t a mind that stays quiet. It’s a quicker eye for the moment you’ve picked the thread back up, and a little more willingness, each time, to set it down.

And there’s a reason this matters beyond a good night’s sleep.

While you’re answering yourself, nothing new gets in. The loop has only its own contents to work with, the same worries, the same stories, the same worn material it’s been chewing for years. It can rearrange the furniture forever and never carry in a single new thing, because a mind talking to itself is a closed room. Everything real, the actual person, the actual weather, the world that might change you, is knocking on a door you can’t hear over your own voice.

Stop answering, and the door opens. The thing you weren’t generating comes in. This is why people go quiet in the woods and come back changed, and scroll for six hours and come back exactly as they left. One is contact. The other is the loop, wearing the costume of the world.

So here it is, as plainly as I can put it. You are running a machine that only ever answers what it’s asked. And you are the one asking. You don’t have to empty it, or fight it, or drug it quiet. You only have to look somewhere else.

One last thing, and you can test it right now.

There’s spit in your mouth. You swallow it all day and never notice. But spit it into a glass, look at it, swirl it around, and try to drink it back down. You can’t. The same spit that was nothing a moment ago, still warm, still yours, turns your stomach.

Here is what I want you to see. In the dark before sleep, or the moment you surface before the day has started, when you bring the same worry up again and again, turning it over and swallowing it and bringing it up once more, that is what you’re doing. You are drinking it back down. The only reason it doesn’t disgust you is that you can’t see the glass.

So the next time you catch yourself mid-loop, try to see it. Not to stop it by force, you can’t. Just to see it plainly, for one second: this is me, drinking it back down. You cannot watch yourself do that and keep doing it, any more than you could raise the glass to your lips. The seeing is what makes your hand come down.

Let the thought sit there.

Don’t answer.

The quiet you were reaching for arrives the moment you stop reaching.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Someone left a comment on my TEDx talk that I can’t stop thinking about. I’d quoted the screenwriter Robert McKee—that what happens is fact, and what we think about what happens is truth—and I said I agreed. Here’s the reply:

“What happens is fact and what we think about it is truth? I’m going to call BS right there. What we think about it is our perception. Not the truth. there are not many different truths.”

Subscribe now

It’s a fair objection. Answering it means first agreeing with him more than he’d expect. Because he is defending something worth defending: that truth is singular, that there’s what’s so and then there’s what people merely think.

Nothing can travel faster than light. What happened in yesterday’s meeting happened, whether or not we agree about what it meant. Those facts are solid, and they can’t be argued with.

I’ll go further. I agree with his core claim completely: truth is singular. What he’s mistaken about is which singular thing it is. Because the whole objection rests on a hidden assumption about what the word “truth” means. And the answer is hiding in the word itself.

Let’s start with the word fact. It comes from the Latin factum, “a thing done,” from facere, to make or do. The same root gives us factory and manufacture. Built into the word, at its origin, is this: a fact is an event. Something that occurred, whether or not anyone was around to have feelings about it.

Then there’s truth. And here’s where it gets interesting. “Truth” does not come from a word meaning “accurate description of reality.” It comes from the Old English trēowth, meaning faithfulness. Fidelity. It’s the same root as troth, the word buried inside betrothed. To plight your troth is to pledge your faithfulness. It’s the same “true” we mean when we call someone a true friend, or when a carpenter says a wall is true—not “factually accurate,” but aligned, faithful to plumb, something you can build on.

Truth, at its origin, is relational. It means being someone, or something, you can count on. Stay with that, because it flips the objection without contradicting it.

The commenter says truth is singular. He’s right. He just thinks the singular thing is a fact, a correct description of reality. But the deeper meaning of truth was never a description at all. It’s a fidelity.

So when I say truth is what we make of the facts—what we build and keep faith with, together—I'm not stretching the word. I'm telling you what it actually means. Truth is still singular. It's just a singular pact, not a singular snapshot.

Let me make this clear by putting it all into one ordinary moment, so you can feel the difference between the words instead of just reading about it.

You’re driving on a two-lane highway. A forty-thousand-pound truck is coming straight at you in the opposite lane, closing at a combined hundred and twenty miles an hour, a few feet away.

Between you: a painted line.

Here is a fact: you are going to die. Not today, presumably. But certainly, and you don’t know when. It’s as solid a fact as exists. It’s even useful. It’s why you carry life insurance, why you wrote a will, why you should call your mother back.

And here is what you believe: not me, not now. You don’t actually live as though death is real and coming. Almost no one does. Because belief isn’t what’s factual. Belief is what we wish were so. The word traces to an old root, lief, meaning dear, willing, to hold precious. We believe what we want to be true. And we do not want that one to be true, so we quietly don’t believe it, even while we know it.

So there you are, hurtling toward a truck, knowing you’ll die and not believing it. And what is keeping you alive in that exact moment?

Not the fact. Not the belief. The truth. The mutual fidelity that says he keeps to his side and you keep to yours, an agreement neither of you signed, both of you keeping. It doesn’t matter which side we chose. It matters that we’re all faithful to the same one. That fidelity is the only thing standing between you and the fact you refuse to believe.

Notice the strangeness of it. You spend your whole life not believing you’ll die, and you spend your whole life, every time you drive, trusting a silent pact whose entire purpose is to keep you from dying. You deny the fact and you’re saved by the truth, in the same breath, without noticing either. It’s almost funny: we’re the only creatures who know we’ll die, refuse to believe it, and then drive defensively about it anyway.

That is what truth was always for. Not matching reality on a page. Keeping faith well enough that we can live near each other and not perish.

Now—doesn’t this multiply truth into a thousand private versions, the thing the commenter can’t stand? Just the opposite. This is the part I most want to get right.

Truth is harder to come by than the commenter’s version, not easier. If truth is just a correct description, then everyone with eyes has their own, and we’re off to the races: my perception against yours, my facts against your “alternative” ones. But if truth is a fidelity, then it isn’t yours or mine at all. It’s the thing between us that holds. You can’t have a private pact. The right lane only saves your life because it isn’t your opinion about lanes. It’s the one we all keep. So truth doesn’t fracture into millions. It contracts into the few agreements we actually honor together.

Which is exactly why “my truth” is an oxymoron, and here I’ll irritate the other side of this fight too. “My truth” is like “my agreement.” The instant it’s only yours, it isn’t the truth anymore. What people usually mean by “my truth” is my belief, what I hold dear, what I wish. And that’s a different word, doing a different job. Truth is what we can count on together. Belief is what we hold dear. Perception is neither. The commenter was right that perception isn’t truth. He just stopped one word too soon.

And “our truth” fails the same way, though it’s sneakier, because it looks shared. But the possessive is the problem, not the head count. A group can keep perfect faith with each other and still break faith with the facts—and that shared story isn’t a truth, it’s how a conspiracy holds together. Truth is shared, but it’s never owned. It stays answerable to a floor that belongs to no one.

None of this loosens truth’s grip on the facts. It tightens it. A fidelity that stops keeping faith with reality isn’t a truth anymore; it’s a lie we’ve agreed to tell, and it curdles fast. The truck is real, the cars are where we agreed to put them, you are going to die. Fidelity to fact is the price of admission. What I’m adding is only this: matching the facts was never the whole of it. A snapshot can be accurate and hold no one together. Truth does the second thing. That’s the part the word has always carried, and the part we forgot.

There are three signs above the doors at our local elementary school. Before the children walk through, they read: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

I’ve come to think we have the order backwards. Start with necessary—what do we actually need to make together? Then kind—how will we treat each other while we make it? And only then does truth arrive, not as a fact we hand each other across a table, but as the fidelity we’ve kept the whole way through, which is the only thing that ever holds.

So let me put it back to the commenter, and to you.

When the truck is bearing down in the oncoming lane, and your life depends entirely on a stranger keeping faith with an agreement neither of you ever signed—is the thing saving your life a fact? Or is it a truth?

I know which word I’d use. Tell me I’m wrong.

Leave a comment

If someone came to mind while you read this, send it to them. And if you’re sure it’s them and not you—send it anyway, and let them decide.

Send it up the chain, too, to the people who make the agreements the rest of us live by. They, most of all, are only as good as their word.

Stay passionate!

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

I was listening to a podcast about biological agency. Stay with me. The idea is that living things aren’t just passive genetic machines, but agents—that even a cell or a seed wants, acts, and strives. We’re used to thinking of evolution as blind variation, but there’s growing evidence for inherited memory and directional adaptation at the cellular level. The whole conversation was about this hidden aliveness: the will, the wanting, the quiet, universal learning that separates what’s alive from what’s merely there.

Late in the conversation, the guest said something truer than he knew.

Subscribe now

He drives to town, he said, and passes maybe ten million trees—big ones, little ones, every kind. He notices none of them. But if he saw a tree that was somehow impossible—one made of glass, or growing upside down with its roots in the air, or a deep, unnatural purple—he’d remember it for the rest of his life. Because it would break the rules. It would be something he thought couldn’t be.

His idea underneath this is a beautiful one, and I don’t want to dismiss it. He thinks the mind is always testing the edges of the possible, that we spend our sleeping hours forming guesses about what the world can contain, and our waking hours playing them out. The impossible tree lodges in memory forever because it enlarges the map. It whispers: the world can hold something I didn’t know it could hold.

I love that idea. So let me take it all the way.

Because if that’s the measure, if what stops us and stays with us is whatever stretches our sense of what the world can contain, then he drove right past his own point. He was waiting for something that looked impossible, surrounded by things that genuinely were.

Consider what an actual tree is. A seed the size of a fingernail falls into the dirt. From that speck, over decades, sometimes centuries, a living tower assembles itself. It hauls water eighty feet into the air against gravity, with no pump. It eats light, turning sunshine into sugar in a trick we still can’t fully reproduce. It breathes out the exact gas we need to live and breathes in the one we can’t. It survives droughts, ice storms, fires, three hundred winters. It feeds its neighbors, insects, birds and soil and us. It rebuilds itself every spring out of nothing but light and rain and time. And it does all this silently, at the side of the road, ten million times over, while a brilliant man drives past and sees not one.

Now, someone will object that in saying all this I’ve done the very thing that kills wonder. That by cataloguing the machinery, the water pressure, the chemistry of light, I’ve drained the magic out and left a diagram. John Keats leveled this charge two hundred years ago, at a dinner where he accused Newton of destroying all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. He put it into verse in Lamia:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
...
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
...
Unweave a rainbow.

Keats had it backwards. The facts don’t drain the wonder out of the world. The facts are the wonder. It should astonish you more, not less, to know that a rainbow is light itself pulled apart into the colors it was secretly carrying all along and hung in the air over your commute. The tree is running a chemistry we can’t reproduce, lifting water higher than any pump could raise it. Knowing that doesn’t kill the wonder. It is the wonder. Cold philosophy didn’t unweave the rainbow. It showed you how impossible the rainbow actually is, and you looked away anyway, because you’d already filed it under ordinary. The poetry was never destroyed by the explaining. It was destroyed by the not-looking.

And it doesn’t stop at rainbows and trees. A bird is a warm-blooded animal that defies gravity and crosses oceans steering by the stars, and it used to be a dinosaur. Your own hand is a piece of the earth that somehow learned to grip, and feel, and know that it is yours. Every one of these is more impossible than a purple tree. And every one of them, we drive straight past.

So why is that? Why does the ordinary miracle go invisible?

I wrote about this in Unwinding Want, chasing a single word: mundane. We use it to mean dull, forgettable, beneath our attention. But it comes from the Latin mundus, meaning the world. The mundane, at its root, means of this world: the trees, the birds, the faces across the table, the hand at the end of your arm. It was only later, with the rise of a faith that placed the real action in a heavenly realm, that “worldly” curdled into “lesser.” Earthly things, birds and trees, children and colleagues, became the uninteresting stuff, less important than what waited somewhere else.

And we never stopped. We just swapped heavens. We took our gaze off the beauty of the now and fixed it on a destination: the promotion, the arrival, the finished version of ourselves, the happily-ever-after. Life became a journey to somewhere better, and everything here became scenery. Just things we use to get there. Or things that get in our way.

Look again at the podcast guest’s own example. He is driving to town. The town is the destination, the thing that matters, the place he’s going. The ten million trees are what he passes through to get there. They aren’t the point. They’re the commute. He has done, on one ordinary drive, exactly what we’ve all done with one ordinary life: aimed himself at the arrival and turned the whole living world into the distance he has to cross.

But have you ever met anyone who actually arrived? Who improved and accumulated and became someone, and then finally relaxed into blissful, childlike completeness, calm, unafraid, lit up by life? Me either. The ultra-successful are buying islands and building bunkers to hide from the very life they were supposedly climbing toward. The destination was always a mirage. And while we chase it, the only thing that was ever real, the light on the water, the smell of the rain, the person walking down the road, slides by the window, unseen, filed under mundane.

So the ordinary world isn’t the lesser experience. It’s the harder one. Anyone can be jolted by an impossible-looking tree. The strangeness does the work for you, no attention required. To be moved by a plain oak you’ve passed six hundred times asks something the strange tree never asks. Presence. The willingness to look at what you’ve decided is scenery and see that it was never scenery at all.

Beauty was never in the tree. There is no inherent beauty, and no inherent dullness. Both live in the looking. Beauty is a sensitivity and responsiveness to the aliveness of a thing, and the same tree is a miracle or a blur depending entirely on whether anyone is home behind the eyes. The strange tree makes the choice for you. The ordinary tree leaves the choice to you.

Jesus said, in the Gospel of Thomas, that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. He wasn’t naming a place you travel to. He was naming a way of seeing, one you practice or you don’t, right here, in the mundus, among the ten million trees. Not a journey to somewhere. A state of presence, alertness, sensitivity to what is already, impossibly, here.

So the guest was right. He’ll remember the impossible tree forever, if he ever meets one. But I’d offer him the harder, better memory. Not the one that only looks impossible. The one that actually is: the living, light-eating, century-standing marvel he passes every morning on his way to town, and has never once seen.

It’s there again tomorrow. Rooted, patient, holding its quiet impossibility at the edge of the road.

The only question is whether anyone will be there to notice.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

Have a great month and stay passionate!

“The only source of knowledge is experience.” ~ Albert Einstein

Odysseus knew what was coming.

He’d been warned about the Sirens—their voices drifting across the water, pulling sailors off course and onto the rocks. But almost nobody knows the actual account. The Sirens didn’t tempt him with beauty. They didn’t tempt him with pleasure. They sang, “Come here. We know everything that happened on the broad earth.”

Subscribe now

They tempted Odysseus with knowing.

Complete understanding. Total clarity. The fantasy that if you just listen a little longer, everything will finally make sense. Your past. Your purpose. Your place in it all. One more verse and the confusion lifts. One more insight and you’re at peace.

And Odysseus wanted it. Desperately. He didn’t pretend to be above the temptation. He had his crew plug their ears with wax and lash him to the mast, and he told them—no matter how I beg, no matter how I plead, don’t untie me.

He knew his future self would trade the voyage for the song.

We’re all being sung to.

The song comes through your phone now. Through the feed you scroll at midnight, promising that the next post will finally explain what’s happening to the world. Through the podcast queue, the productivity system, the personality framework, the spiritual teacher with the answer. Through the quiet voice that says you can’t act yet—not until you understand yourself better, not until you’ve figured out how to do it right, not until the picture is complete.

Just one more insight. One more revelation.

And while you’re listening, your life stops moving.

I’ve watched a lot of smart people run aground on those rocks. A woman years into a coaching program, still excavating why she keeps choosing the people she chooses, while the relationship in front of her quietly starves. A man who dreams of writing a book, and has read every book about writing books, and still hasn’t written a page. A seeker who attends every retreat, masters every framework, can explain the ego from six different traditions—and has never once felt the raw, undefended aliveness those traditions are pointing at.

They weren’t undisciplined. They were the most disciplined people I know. That was the problem.

They were captivated.

That’s the thing about the Sirens’ song. The danger isn’t ignorance. The danger is being so enchanted by the promise of understanding that you forget to live. The song doesn’t feel like a trap. It feels like transcendence. It feels like you’re finally getting somewhere. That’s what makes it lethal.

Because here’s what nobody tells you: the song never ends. There is no final verse. The Sirens don’t deliver complete knowledge. They deliver the perpetual promise of it. That’s their genius. They keep you anchored offshore, leaning toward the music, while the wind you were born to sail dies behind you.

Notice what the knowing-hunger actually feels like in your body. It’s not curiosity. Curiosity is light, playful, alive—it moves with the world. This is something else. It’s a clenching. A grasping. A refusal to move until the ground is guaranteed. It’s the ego whispering that you, uniquely, can indulge just a little longer and still make it out. That’s the tell. Real curiosity sets you in motion. The Sirens’ song holds you still.

The child on the beach doesn’t need to understand the sand before digging in. The dancer doesn’t wait for a complete theory of music. The mother holding her newborn at three in the morning isn’t consulting a framework. She’s there. Fully. Her hands know what to do before her mind catches up.

That’s not ignorance. That’s intelligence—the kind that shows up when you stop demanding the map and start feeling the territory.

Odysseus heard the song. This matters. He didn’t sail past with wax in his own ears, pretending the temptation wasn’t real. He let it wash over him, let it wrack his body, wept and strained against the ropes—and stayed bound to his course. He experienced the pull of total knowing and kept moving anyway.

That’s the practice. Not suppressing the hunger to understand. Not shaming your seeking. Just refusing to let it replace the voyage.

Because the Sirens are selling certainty. And certainty is another word for dead—for the rocks. That’s the whole con: to explain a thing you have to stop it, hold it still, pin it to the board, and a world held still has stopped being alive.

What they hand you isn’t reality. It’s reality killed and mounted, and the stillness is the tell. And every hour you spend leaning toward the song is an hour you’re not out in the weather of your actual life, where the real knowing happens.

Life doesn’t reveal itself to spectators. It reveals itself to participants.

So here’s the uncomfortable question. What’s the song you keep telling yourself you need to finish before you can move—the research phase that never ends, the self-analysis that never resolves, the scroll that never satisfies? What would you do this week if you accepted, fully and finally, that complete understanding is never coming?

Not because the world is unknowable in some bleak way. Because it’s alive. And living things can’t be captured in an answer. They can only be met.

Odysseus made it home not because he understood everything, but because he stayed faithful to the journey while the voices promised him he wouldn’t have to take it. The wisdom wasn’t in the song.

It was in the sailing.

The wind is up. The rocks are singing. Let them sing.

Stay faithful to your bearing—not the one certainty draws on a map, but the one your aliveness is already pulling you toward. You don’t need to know everything that happened on the broad earth.

You need to happen with it.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

“Once you label me you negate me.” ~ Søren Kierkegaard

I’ve written about Joshua Bell before. Most people who think about human behavior eventually do, because his story is one of those rare experiments that keeps giving. When I first wrote about it, I was interested in the machinery of value—scarcity, pricing, what a hundred-dollar ticket teaches you before you hear a note. But now that excellence is free and everywhere, that lens explains less than it used to. Last week the story found me again, and what it showed me this time is harder to sit with.

Subscribe now

You may know the story. On a January morning in 2007, one of the world’s great violinists stood against a wall in a Washington, D.C. metro station, opened his case, and began to play. A Stradivarius worth millions under his chin. Bach’s Chaconne—one of the most demanding pieces ever written for the instrument—pouring into the rush-hour air.

Three days earlier, Bell had sold out a concert hall where decent seats cost a hundred dollars.

In the station, over a thousand people walked past him. A handful paused. He earned about thirty-two dollars in forty-five minutes, most of it in pocket change tossed by people who never broke stride.

Same violinist. Same violin. Same music. The quality of the music on offer was identical to the concert hall’s—arguably better, since it was free and inches away.

So what was missing?

The easy answer is context: no stage, no lighting, no program notes telling people what to feel. But I think that answer lets us off too gently. Something more uncomfortable was missing that morning, and it’s the thing nobody wants to admit.

There was nothing in it for them.

Think about what a ticket to a Joshua Bell concert actually buys. Yes, the music. But also: a story about yourself. I am the kind of person who attends the symphony. I recognize greatness. I belong among the people who belong here. The evening confers identity. You walk out carrying not just the memory of the Chaconne but a small upgrade to your self-image, a marker you can display—in conversation, in memory, in the account you keep of who you are.

The metro station offered none of that. Stopping for a street musician confers nothing. There’s no velvet rope, no exclusivity, no elite club whose membership is confirmed by your presence. The music was all that was on offer.

And the music, by itself, wasn’t enough to make people stop.

That’s the part that haunts me. We tell ourselves we love art, ideas, beauty, truth. But strip away the identity payoff—the status, the belonging, the story—and watch what happens. We keep walking. Not because we’ve judged the work and found it wanting. We never judged it at all. Our filters judged it for us, before a single note reached anything you could call listening.

Psychologists have a name for part of this—prestige bias, the shortcut by which we grant attention to high-status names and withhold it from unknown ones. But the metro reveals something deeper than deference. It’s not only that we bow to prestige. It’s that we engage where engagement pays us—where connecting with someone’s identity enhances our own.

Now look at your screen.

Online, this calculus runs at industrial scale. Before anyone reads a sentence you’ve written, they’ve scanned the metadata of you: follower count, credentials, affiliations, blue checks, the company you keep. Not to assess your quality—quality was never the question—but to answer the only question they’re actually asking: what does engaging with this person do for me? Does sharing your work signal my sophistication? Does connecting with you enhance my status with the club? Does your name reflect light onto mine?

If yes, engagement flows. If no, you get the metro treatment. Not criticized. Not rejected. Simply walked past—by people who would swear, sincerely, that they value exactly what you’re offering.

This is the frustration so many honest voices feel and can’t quite name. You write something true. You share something valuable. You make something beautiful. And the silence that answers isn’t a verdict on the work. It’s an accounting decision. You didn’t offer a status transaction, so there was no transaction.

The world’s advice at this point is unanimous: fix your signaling. Build the identity. Get the markers, join the club, become the kind of name that pays people to engage with you. Turn yourself into the concert hall.

I want to suggest the opposite.

Because notice what the concert hall actually produces. An audience primed to feel greatness whether or not they hear it. Applause for the label, projected onto the sound. The people in those hundred-dollar seats weren’t better listeners than the commuters—they were the same people with the filter set to open instead of shut.

There was one exception in that metro station, and it’s the detail worth building a life around. The children. Nearly every child who passed tried to stop, turned toward the sound, pulled against the hand dragging them along. They had no filter yet. No status calculus. No self-image requiring maintenance. They heard someone making something extraordinary and they responded to what was actually there.

That’s not innocence. That’s accuracy.

The executive checking his phone, the commuter with earbuds in—they weren’t experiencing the station more maturely than the children. They were experiencing it less. The identity machinery they’d spent decades building—the very machinery we’re all told to invest in—had made them deaf to a masterpiece three feet away.

So no, I won’t tell you to build a better brand. The brand is the deafness. Every hour spent engineering an identity that pays others to engage is an hour spent thickening the filter—theirs and yours. You become easier to transact with and harder to hear.

But I can hear the objection, because it lives in me too. Why play if no one is listening?

Look at that question closely. It carries the commuters’ disease inside it. It assumes expression is a transaction requiring a counterparty—that making something only counts if someone pays attention for it. The people who walked past Bell made a calculation: nothing in it for me. The artist who stops creating because no one’s engaging has made the identical calculation, from the other side of the open case. Same accounting. Same deafness. You’ve just walked past yourself.

Here’s what the question misses. Playing isn’t for anything.

A bird doesn’t sing for an audience. Your heart doesn’t beat for applause. And Bell in that station, at his best, wasn’t performing at all—he was doing the thing his whole organism is organized to do, and the doing was the payment.

Watch what happens the moment listening becomes the condition for creating: the work changes. It gets shaped for the filter, tuned for the club, sanded down to what travels. The aliveness drains out of it. That’s the real cost of playing for an audience—not that you might fail to get one, but that you get one and lose the music.

And if that sounds like philosophy, consider what happened when one artist actually lived it.

In 1945, Jackson Pollock left the New York art scene—the galleries, the critics, the rooms where reputations were traded like currency—and moved to a small property in Springs, Long Island. He converted a barn into a studio. And there, away from every watching eye, he stopped painting for the scene and started following something older. Curiosity. Feeling. The body’s own intelligence.

He took the canvas off the easel and laid it on the floor. He moved around it, over it, into it. Paint dripped—and instead of correcting the accident, he followed it. “When I am in my painting,” he said, “I’m not aware of what I’m doing.” No audience. No plan. No identity to maintain. Just a man in a barn, in full contact with what was happening. The drip paintings—the most alive work of his life, the work that changed painting itself—weren’t produced by the scene. They were produced by leaving it. He stopped performing and became the child at the canvas.

So here’s the alternative, and it’s not a strategy. Play in the station anyway. Write what’s true without checking whether truth is trending. Make the thing, say the thing, be the thing—and let the listening find you, the way the children found Bell: pulled by something real. And on the receiving end, be the child: stop for what stops you, before the accounting kicks in, before you check whether stopping says the right thing about you.

You are not here to be engaged with. You are here to be alive, out loud.

A thousand people walked past Joshua Bell that morning and felt nothing.

He played his heart out anyway.

So can you.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

The interviewer had waited decades to ask the question.

Since 1994, when he saw the Rolling Stones as a teenager, David Marchese had wondered about a lyric from the song Sway—“destroyed your notion of circular time.” What did it mean? Where did it come from? What philosophical rupture, what dark night of the soul, had produced it? He finally got Mick Jagger in a chair and asked him.

Subscribe now

Jagger’s answer: he made it up on the spot. Keith was late to the session. Everyone was standing around waiting. So he started singing whatever came out. “That’s why it’s a bit random.”

Decades of wondering, dissolved in ten seconds.

And here’s the thing—that exchange wasn’t an anomaly. It was the whole interview. Marchese, a thoughtful and skilled interviewer, kept extending invitations for Mick to go deep. How do you inhabit a song differently now than at 32? “I don’t really think about it very much.” What wisdom has aging brought you? “You don’t get wisdom, you forget everything.” How has your relationship to sex evolved philosophically? “I don’t know the answer, honestly.” What’s the last thing you wanted but couldn’t get, only to find you got what you needed? “I can’t recall one that stands out.”

Again and again, the interviewer held up a mirror of meaning and asked the rock star to admire himself in it. Again and again, Jagger set it down.

It would be easy to read this as evasion. A canny celebrity deflecting. Or worse, shallowness—the pretty frontman who never had much going on upstairs. But that reading misses what was actually happening in that room. Because the interviewer wasn’t wrong to sense something profound in Jagger. He was just looking for it in the wrong place. He was looking for it in Jagger’s thoughts about his life, when it lives entirely in Jagger’s contact with it.

Listen to what happens when the conversation turns from meaning to making. Jagger lights up. He describes sitting alone at a piano before a show, doodling. No agenda. No audience in his head. “Your mind is not really being serious. It’s playful. Playful is a better word than fun.” He describes letting the mind go this way, that way. And then the line that should be tattooed on the forearm of every anxious creator alive: “Don’t be worried if nothing happens, nothing happens. Something will happen later or tomorrow.”

That’s not a man without a philosophy. That’s a man whose philosophy is so complete he doesn’t need to hold it as one.

We do this to people all the time—what Marchese did. We meet someone whose life works, whose work sings, and we demand they hand over the theory. The blueprint. The ten principles. We assume that behind every graceful act sits a graceful idea, and that if we can just extract the idea, we can skip the living and go straight to the grace.

But watch a mother soothe a crying infant at three in the morning. Ask her afterward what technique she used, what attachment theory informed her touch. She’ll look at you blankly. She wasn’t using anything. She was responding. Watch a World Cup soccer player one-touch a pass into space no one else saw. There’s no philosophy guiding his foot. No formula, no narrator. The seeing and the doing are one motion. Watch a jazz drummer lock into a groove. If he starts thinking about the groove, he’s already fallen out of it.

The meaning isn’t behind the act. The meaning is the act.

Jagger understands this in his bones, which is precisely why he can’t articulate it—and why his inability to articulate it is the most articulate answer he could give. When Marchese asked what performing means to him, Jagger didn’t offer a manifesto. He described a process. You walk out. You get the adrenaline. You control it. You read the crowd—are they cold, are they tired, have they been waiting too long? And then your job, your whole job, is to give them two hours where their mortgages and their problems and little Danny’s hurt tooth disappear. To make a temporary community out of eighty thousand strangers. He learned it from watching Little Richard do it in tiny rooms sixty years ago.

That’s not the absence of meaning. That’s meaning with the packaging removed.

Here’s what struck me hardest, though. The interviewer’s questions all shared a hidden assumption: that the real Jagger is the one who reflects, and the performing Jagger is the mask. Get past the persona, the strut, the characters, and you’ll find the true self underneath, presumably sitting in an armchair with considered opinions about mortality and desire. Jagger gently dismantled this too. He’s the character on stage, the character in the interview, the character writing the song. “Songs are pretty direct in a way,” he offered. Meaning: if you want to know me, don’t ask me about the songs. Listen to the songs.

The self the interviewer was searching for—the archival self, the one with a curated inner museum of insights—doesn’t run the show. It never has. It shows up afterward, like a critic arriving when the paint is dry, and writes the wall text.

And we believe the wall text. That’s our mistake. We spend our lives polishing explanations of ourselves while the actual self—the responsive, improvising, doodling self—waits at the piano in the quiet room.

So here’s the lesson, and it cuts against everything the culture of intentionality is selling you. You don’t need a philosophy of your work before you work. You don’t need to know what your life means in order to live it fully. The demand for meaning, held too tightly, is just another way of standing outside the moment, arms crossed, taking notes.

The interviewer asked about wisdom. Jagger said he’d forgotten his.

Maybe that’s the wisdom.

Stop narrating. Sit down at the piano. Doodle. Let the mind go this way, that way. Don’t worry if nothing happens.

Something will happen later. Or tomorrow.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

“The body is wiser than its wisest philosopher.” ~ Walt Whitman

In college, my dorm room had nothing in it. No TV. No computer. No phone. No machine humming nearby waiting to catch me. So when boredom arrived—that low static discomfort of nothing to do—there was nowhere to put it. It just sat there, growing louder, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. And then I did the only thing left. I left the room.

Subscribe now

Down the hall. Into someone else’s doorway. Into a conversation that hadn’t been planned, a card game that hadn’t been scheduled, a walk that existed for no reason at all. And within minutes, the discomfort was gone—not muted, gone—because it had done exactly what it was built to do. It had moved me toward life.

This is the body’s oldest trick. It’s called homeostasis, and it is not a state of calm. It’s a process of correction. Blood sugar drops, hunger rises, you eat. Temperature climbs, you sweat. Loneliness thickens, you seek. The signal isn’t the enemy. The signal is the whole point. It’s the body tapping you on the shoulder and saying, this way.

Here’s what’s changed. The room is never empty now. Boredom rises the same way it always did—it’s built into us, it isn’t going anywhere—but before it can send us down the hall, it gets caught. A machine catches it. Not answers it. Catches it, the way a net catches a fish. And here’s what happens to a caught fish: it stops thrashing. It goes still. The life is still in it—it just has nowhere to go. And this is the part worth sitting with, because that stillness looks like relief and it is not relief.

That’s the real cost, and it’s not the one people usually name. People say the phone makes us anxious, makes us sad, makes us compare ourselves into misery. Maybe. But underneath that is something quieter and worse.

The phone doesn’t complete the loop. It interrupts it. Feeling arises, and instead of moving you toward the person, the touch, the risk, the room down the hall—it just sits you back down. The signal doesn’t disappear because you muted it. The tap on the shoulder passes—but what it was pointing to doesn’t. The need goes underground, and a need that never gets answered doesn’t fade. It grows.

Which is maybe why so much of modern life doesn’t feel like acute pain. It feels like an itch you can’t locate. Like that smoke detector chirp somewhere in the house—intermittent, maddening—the one you keep meaning to deal with and never do. Low-grade static, always on, nothing you can point to, because nothing ever got addressed.

Now—before this turns into another sermon against screens—let me complicate it, because I think the deeper trap isn’t the phone. It’s routine itself.

Routine looks like homeostasis. A steady job, a fixed schedule, the same coffee at the same hour—isn’t that the body’s love of balance, and isn’t balance good for us? We even call it work/life balance, as if the clock and the calendar were keeping us level. And habit wears the same disguise—the drink at the end of every day, the cigarette that answers boredom and anxiety alike, the snack that isn’t hunger, the reach that’s become automatic. Both look like the body keeping itself steady. Neither one is. That’s the trap.

Here’s the distinction, and it’s the whole article in one sentence: real homeostasis is always checking. It responds to what’s actually true right now—this hunger, this cold, this ache for contact—not to what the clock says, or the calendar, or the habit worn so deep you’ve stopped calling it a choice. You eat lunch at noon because it’s noon, not because you’re hungry. You show up at the job because it’s Tuesday, not because the work is still feeding anything in you. The schedule runs whether the signal is present or not. And when that happens, routine stops being homeostasis and becomes its impersonation. Comfort wearing the mask of balance.

This is the same sleight of hand as the phone, just slower, quieter, dressed better. The phone silences a single signal in real time. Routine silences a whole range of them across a lifetime—restlessness, hunger for real contact, the dull ache of doing something already dead inside you—by pre-answering the question before it’s even asked. You don’t feel the ache because you never gave it room to speak. That’s not peace. That’s a groove worn so deep into the floor that you’ve stopped noticing you’re walking in a circle.

And here’s where it goes, if you follow it far enough. Every caught signal is a small severing. The feeling that would have sent you down the hall, toward a person, toward the trees, toward contact—muted, and muted again, until the reaching itself goes quiet. We remove ourselves from the world of relationship, from each other and from nature, one intercepted signal at a time. And we move further and further out, not noticing that we’re the ones disappearing. Because we were never separate from that world. We’re made of it. The reaching was the relationship. Silence the reaching long enough and you don’t just lose the connection—you lose yourself, because there was never a self apart from it to keep.

So what do you do with a body that’s always trying to tell you something, in a world that’s built, on every level, to keep you from hearing it?

You leave the room. Again and again, on purpose now, because nobody’s making you. And that’s the part we don’t like to admit: nobody was making you before, either. The machine didn’t capture you. You reached for it. The signal rose, and you reached for the thing that would mute it—every time, because muting is easier than moving.

You can also not reach. You let the discomfort get loud enough to move you instead of numbing it the moment it arrives. You ask, before lunch, before the meeting, before the same drive down the same street—is this still feeding something, or am I just running the program? That single question, asked enough times, is the difference between a life in homeostasis and a life merely arranged to look like one.

The dorm room taught me something I didn’t understand until decades later. Nothing to catch the feeling meant the feeling had to send me somewhere. That’s not a design flaw of a bare room. That’s the whole architecture of being alive—discomfort as a compass, not a malfunction.

The room isn’t bare anymore. Not yours, not mine, not anyone’s.

But you can still choose, every single time the static rises, to leave it anyway.

Leave a comment

Share

Stay passionate!

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” ~ Helen Keller

I was reading a play last week by my friend Jonathan Baskin—one of four one-acts in his collection, Hypotheses: Four One-Act Plays About Science & Life. It’s called Holes. In it, Lord Byron and Charles Babbage meet by chance in a Cambridge pub in 1811 and, with help from a quick-witted barmaid, begin to explore whether the machines coming to remake the world will deepen the experience of being human or hollow it out. It’s wonderful—funny and thought-provoking in equal measure, the kind of play that keeps working on you after it’s over.

By the end, they’ve found their way somewhere unexpected: that poetry and thinking machines aren’t opposites but complements, each incomplete without the other. And the play closes on an idea that put words to something I’ve always felt. Nature, it suggests, resists our every attempt to pin her down. The definition of being human is that you cannot define it.

Subscribe now

But the line that first stopped me came early. Two characters meet, and instead of the usual pleasantries, one asks the other: “So, what is your chosen adventure?”

I’ve been turning it over ever since. Because I think that should be the question. Not the one we actually ask.

You know the one. You meet someone at a party, a wedding, a kid’s soccer game, and within ninety seconds it arrives: “So, what do you do?” We ask it reflexively, and we answer it reflexively, and something in both of us goes slightly flat as we do. Because “what do you do” isn’t really a question about you. It’s a request for your category. Your slot. It wants a noun—accountant, teacher, engineer—so the asker can file you and move on. It freezes you into a role and asks you to confirm the freezing.

“What’s your chosen adventure?” does the opposite. It assumes you’re in motion—changing, growing. It assumes you’re alive to something—and it asks you to say what. It doesn’t want your description. It wants your direction.

Notice what the word adventure does. It can’t be answered with a slot. It insists on movement—on curiosity, discovery, the leaning-toward that makes a life feel like a life instead of a holding pattern. And notice the other word: chosen. Not the adventure you fell into. Not the one you were handed. The one you chose, or are choosing, right now.

Here’s what I want to be careful about, because “adventure” is a word people misunderstand. It doesn’t mean Patagonia. It doesn’t mean quitting your job to sail around the world, or anything with a passport and a price tag. That’s the small version, the Instagram version, and it quietly tells most people that adventure isn’t for them.

The truth is stranger and better. Adventure isn’t a destination. It’s an orientation.

A woman kneeling in her garden, watching to see whether the thing she planted will take—that’s an adventure. She doesn’t know what will happen. She’s leaning toward an outcome she can’t control, paying close attention, a little in love with the not-knowing. Meanwhile someone can fly to the other side of the earth and experience nothing at all, because they brought their whole closed self with them and never once looked up. One of them is on an adventure. It isn’t the one with the boarding pass.

That’s the thing we get wrong. Adventure was never about where. It’s about how. It’s the quality of your attention, the willingness to not know, the leaning-in instead of the settling-back.

And nowhere is that truer than in making something. To create is to move into the unknown—it’s the purest adventure there is. The writer doesn’t know what the next phrase will be until she writes it. The cook improvising at the stove, the dancer discovering the shape mid-air, the painter who follows the canvas somewhere she didn’t plan to go, the gardener kneeling to see if the seed will take—every one of them is reaching into the not-yet-existing and pulling something back. A conversation can be an adventure, if you let the other person surprise you. A Tuesday can be an adventure. Raising a child, learning an instrument at sixty, repairing something you’ve never repaired, saying the true thing you’ve been swallowing—these are adventures, every one, and not a single one requires you to leave your zip code.

Which is why Keller’s line lands the way it does. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Consider who said it. A woman who could not see and could not hear—who had every external reason to call life a locked room, a closed door—and who instead called it a daring adventure. She wasn’t describing her circumstances. She was describing her stance toward them. That’s the whole secret. Adventure isn’t what the world hands you. It’s what you decide to make of what you’re handed.

So most of us are walking around answering the wrong question. “What do you do?” has trained us to lead with our cage—to introduce ourselves by our slot, and then to live down to it. We become the noun. We forget we were ever a verb.

But you were a verb first. Before you were a job title, you were a small creature who ran toward things—toward the water, the dog, the loud music, the edge of the yard—just to see. That creature didn’t have a profession. It had appetites. Directions. Things it was leaning toward with its whole body. That’s still in there. It never left. It just got quiet under the weight of a hundred people asking what you do instead of what you’re moving toward.

So here’s what I’d offer. The next time you meet someone, don’t ask them for their slot. Ask them for their motion. “What’s your chosen adventure?” Watch what happens to their face—the flicker of surprise, then something waking up, because someone finally asked about the alive part instead of the filed part.

And then turn it on yourself, because that’s the harder one. What is your chosen adventure? Not your job. Not your obligations. What are you leaning toward right now, a little in love with the not-knowing? And if the honest answer is nothing—if you can’t find the verb anymore—then that’s not a failure. It’s an invitation. It means the creature that runs toward things is in there waiting, and it’s time to let it out.

You don’t have to go far. You just have to go toward something.

That’s what Holes understood. For two hundred years we’ve been told the machines would either save us or ruin us—that being human was a problem, and the only question was what would finally solve it. Efficiency would solve it. Productivity would solve it. The right job, the right title, the right slot would solve it. “What do you do?” is that whole worldview compressed into four words: define yourself, name your function, tell me the box you fit in.

But you can’t be defined that way. That was the play’s final insight, and it’s the truest thing I know: a human being isn’t a problem to be solved or a question to be answered. Nature won’t be pinned down, and neither will you. The poem and the machine, the dreamer and the engineer, the gardener and the traveler—none of them is a thing to be finished. Each is a life still leaning toward something, still becoming.

So choose your adventure. Not your function. Your direction.

And then—finally, actually—come alive.

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

“Freedom lies in being bold.” ~ Robert Frost

Years ago, the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell told an unforgettable story to Bill Moyers while filming the PBS documentary, The Power of Myth.

Campbell: Remember the last line [of Babbitt]? “I have never done the thing that I wanted to in all my life.” That is a man who never followed his bliss. Well, I actually heard that line when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence.

Before I was married, I used to eat out in the restaurants of town for my lunch and dinners. Thursday night was the maid’s night off in Bronxville, so that many of the families were out in restaurants. One fine evening, I was in my favorite restaurant there, and at the next table there was a father, a mother, and a scrawny boy about twelve years old.

The father said to the boy, “Drink your tomato juice.”

And the boy said, “I don’t want to.”

Then the father, with a louder voice, said, “Drink your tomato juice.”

And the mother said, “Don’t make him do what he doesn’t want to do.”

The father looked at her and said, “He can’t go through life doing what he wants to do. If he only does what he wants to do, he’ll be dead. Look at me. I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.”

And I thought, “There’s Babbitt incarnate.”

That’s the man who never followed his bliss. You may have a success in life, but then just think of it—what kind of life was it? What good was it—you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life.

I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.

What stays with me wasn’t the father’s harshness. It was his certainty. He wasn’t cruel—he was convinced. He truly believed he was helping. He was handing his son the only wisdom he had—the wisdom that had cost him his own life. He’d swallowed his own tomato juice, every day, for decades. And now, without quite realizing it, he was teaching his son to swallow his too.

That’s how it works. The cage isn’t usually locked by malice. It’s passed down, lovingly, by people who walked into it themselves and never found the door. They mean well. They’re trying to keep you safe. And “safe,” in their hands, means small, seated, hands folded at the table.

Notice what the father actually said: If he only does what he wants to do, he’ll be dead. He had it exactly backwards. He was the one who was dead—going through the motions of a life he never chose, mistaking endurance for maturity. The boy, refusing his tomato juice, was the only one at that table still alive to what he wanted. And he was being trained out of it, one meal at a time.

Here’s the part we don’t like to admit: most of us are somewhere at that table. Sometimes we’re the boy, still feeling the pull toward what’s ours, still capable of “I don’t want to.” More often, by adulthood, we’ve become the father—reciting the reasons, calling it realism, quietly grieving a life we never lived while insisting it’s the only sensible way.

So how do you leave the table? Not through rebellion—that’s just noise. Freedom asks for a different, quieter kind of courage.

Ernest Hemingway understood that courage wasn’t frenzy but composure: “To calmly watch the bull come is the most necessary and primarily difficult thing in bullfighting.” True independence asks for the same steadiness. You hear the incredibly loud, fearful voice of society—and then you move in your own direction. You do what you really want to do with what Mary Oliver called your “one wild and precious life.”

This doesn’t mean recklessness. The bullfighter isn’t fearless—he’s present. He feels the danger fully and doesn’t flinch from it, doesn’t bolt. That stillness is the whole art. Independence is the same. It isn’t the absence of society’s voice; that voice never goes quiet. It’s the capacity to hear it at full volume—be reasonable, be safe, drink your tomato juice—and stay rooted in what’s yours anyway.

And it rarely arrives as a single dramatic leap. It’s quieter than that. It’s the daily refusal to swallow what you don’t want. The willingness to disappoint people who are only trying to keep you at the table. The moment you feel the pull toward something true and, instead of explaining it away, you move with it—and don’t let anyone throw you off.

The first act of freedom may be as simple as saying, “I don’t want to”—and meaning it.

That’s where your own life begins.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Stay passionate!

Before you go. . . want to play?

Stay passionate!

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” ~ William Shakespeare

For the past several months I’ve been working on a play. Though if I’m honest, I’ve been working on it for decades—I just didn’t know it.

It’s about two strangers who meet, and keep meeting, in Central Park. An architect who has become very good at a life that no longer feels like his own. And a dancer who is oriented around an entirely different logic.

It’s called Six Hundred Times or (A Book of Trees), and it is, I think, the closest I’ve come to saying the thing I’ve been trying to say for as long as I can remember—about what we want versus what we tell ourselves we have to do, about the life we’re actually living versus the one we keep postponing.

The play is finished. Which means I’ve arrived at the strange part—the part nobody warns you about.

A book, you write and you publish and it finds its readers. A book is a solid thing. A play is more like a sand mandala—made by many hands, beautifully alive only while it lasts, and gone when the lights come up. That’s not its weakness. It’s the whole point.

A play has to be produced. It has to find a stage, a director, actors, an audience sitting together in the dark. And plays find those things, almost always, through relationships and proximity—through someone local who walks into a theater and says, you should take a look at this.

I know Hollywood, at least a little. But theater is a different world entirely—and I’m new to it. No literary managers. No artistic directors. No producers. But . . .

There’s you.

Hundreds of you with a certain restlessness—and a lot of heart—who read what I write and find something useful in it—many of you for years now. And it occurred to me that the way this play finds its way into the world might be the very thing the play is about. It’s a story about connection—between strangers, and within ourselves. And the only way it reaches a stage is through exactly that: one person connecting it to another.

So here’s my question.

Do you want to play?

I’m looking for what I’m calling Founding Ambassadors. An ambassador is someone willing to reach out to a theater or two in their own town—a small professional theater, a community theater, a black box, wherever good work gets made near you—and introduce them to this play. Not sell it. Not pitch it. Just open a door.

Here’s what it isn’t. It isn’t a way to read the play for free. If you’re simply curious to read it, I’d love that, and it’s available on Amazon like all my books (here’s the link). The ambassador role is something different, and something I’m being selective about. Because to introduce a theater to this play, you’d want to have read it and to genuinely believe in it. You can’t stand behind something you haven’t encountered.

So here’s how I’d like to do it: if the role appeals to you, say so—and I’ll send you the play to read, a digital copy with your name on it, just for you. Read it. If it moves you—if it’s the kind of thing you’d be glad to see staged in your town—then let’s go find it a stage together. And if it doesn’t move you, you bow out with my real thanks and no obligation whatsoever. That part matters to me. I only want this carried by people who actually want to carry it.

What you’d get out of it is more than I can put on a list. The satisfaction of helping bring a brand-new work into the world from the ground floor. A reason to walk into your local theater and meet people you’d never otherwise have met. The play is just the vessel. What you’re really after is connection, and your own aliveness—which is exactly what the play is about.

And when a connection turns into a production: credit in the program, seats on opening night as my guest, a direct line to me throughout, and the title that means the most to me—Founding Ambassador. You were here first.

There may also, at some point, be a tote bag involved. The play has opinions about tote bags.

And you won’t be doing it alone—I’m only ever a message away. I’ll give you everything you need—an overview of the play, the words to use, answers to the questions a theater will ask. You make and nurture the connection. I’ll handle the script, the production vision, the rest.

If you want in, here’s the single step: click the link or the button below and fill out the form titled, fittingly, I Want to Play. Just your name, email, city and state, and a line about yourself, so I know there’s a real person there. From there I’ll take care of the rest: I’ll subscribe you to I heard the birds, the private home I’ve set up for this on Substack, and once you’re in, I’ll email you your own copy of the play to read.

I’ve spent years writing about presence, about aliveness, about refusing the default. This is me trying to live it. And rather than wait at the starting line for permission that isn’t coming, I’m moving—and I’d love some open-hearted people to come along with me.

Come play!

I WANT TO PLAY

Stay passionate!

So this asks more of you than a scroll. Ten minutes, maybe, and some willingness to follow a chain of reasoning to its end. In return, I think it can untangle something you’ve been caught in your whole life.

Read it when you can actually read it. Not now, if now isn’t right. And if you have questions—or think I’ve got it wrong—write to me. I mean that. This is an argument, and an argument is built to be tested.

And if you can’t break it yourself—send it to the one person you know who could. The teacher, the scientist, the friend who thinks for a living. Not to spread it. To test it. I’d rather it break in front of someone who knows than survive on people being polite.

But read it first.

Contact

“Nothing can harm a man so much as his own thoughts untamed.” ~ The Buddha

My sweet Sugar feels an itch and she scratches. She never asks why. The itch is reason enough—feeling, action, one closed loop, no story in between.

Now picture a different dog, one with mange. It scratches itself raw, because nothing in it ever says stop. Feeling becomes action becomes feeling, on and on, until the skin gives out.

Human beings broke that loop long ago. Somewhere we became creatures of cause and effect, and now we run on why.

Subscribe now

Teach a child that scratching spreads the rash, and the small hand stops. Cause, effect, lesson learned. That is the gift. The why is the brake the dog never had. It’s the thing that saves us from tearing our own skin open. It built medicine and bridges and every explanation we’ve ever trusted.

But it has no off switch.

The same faculty that stops the hand can’t stop itself. Give it a real problem and it solves it. But take the real problems away and it doesn’t go quiet—because the body is still throwing off uncomfortable feelings the mind can’t ignore. It reads those feelings as something to do, problems to be solved. It cannot sit with a feeling it takes for a problem.

Take Howard Hughes, one of the wealthiest men who ever lived: he died terrified of the dust in the air, the germs on a doorknob. He could afford to fix anything except the part of him that kept finding things to fix.

Here’s the mistake the mind makes, and it’s a subtle one.

Some feelings are signals. They report a specific need and name their own remedy. Thirst wants water. Hunger wants food. Cold wants warmth. Pain wants your hand out of the fire. The feeling is about something specific, and there’s a specific thing to do about it.

The mind’s whole genius is built for exactly this: find what’s wrong, fix it. Most of the time, it’s right.

But not every feeling is a signal. Some are just states—the body in a particular mode of activation, with no object attached. Pent up energy. The dread that’s there when you climb out of bed. A sense of unease with no name.

These are real physiological events—the tides of sleep and hormones and accumulated isolation and stress, your baseline activation rising and falling for reasons that have nothing to do with any external problem.

The feeling isn’t pointing at anything outside you, because it isn’t about anything outside you. And the mind, which knows only one move—find what the feeling is about, supply the fix—can’t tell the two kinds apart.

So it treats the state like a signal. It interrogates a feeling that has no answer, demands to know what this is about, and the body, which was never sending a signal, has nothing to say.

That—the not-knowing—is the thing the mind cannot bear. So it does the only thing it knows. It treats the feeling as a problem and starts solving.

But solving requires a cause, and there isn’t one. So the mind does what every problem-solver does when it has no answer: it guesses. Trial and error. It grabs the nearest candidate—not the true one, the closest one, whatever’s been on your mind—and tests it. Like AI completing a sentence with the most probable word, the mind completes your feeling with the most available story.

It’s the work. It’s the relationship. It’s the money. It’s those people. You want a drink. You want your phone. Fix this and the feeling will go away.

And it never admits it’s guessing. It hands you the story as fact.

That story is the scratch.

And like any scratch, it works. For a while. The drink, the scroll, the entertainment, the plan—each gives a flush of relief, and the feeling backs off. But they don’t soothe you. They drown you out. The moment you stop and do nothing, a channel switches on in the brain and begins to murmur—who you are, what you lack, what’s going to happen. Who slighted you. Who’s taking advantage. Who’s standing in your way.

That low narrative is unbearable to most people, so they reach for anything that fills the silence—something demanding enough to occupy the mind, numbing enough to dull it, or loud enough to drown it out. Sudoku isn’t a pleasure. It’s a place to hide. So is the fourth drink. So is the rage post. Every scratch is a way of drowning the feeling out.

We’ve gotten so good at it that we’ve stopped drowning it and started switching it off. Consider food-noise—that loop of thinking about eating when the body never asked. We’ve built a drug that switches it off, and millions report the same thing: a sudden quiet where the murmur used to be.

Whatever else it does, and it does real things, notice what we were willing to pay for. Not to understand the reach, but to end it. We would rather silence the feeling than learn to read it. That’s the scratch in its purest form: not what is this, but make it stop.

And it does stop—temporarily. Then it returns, because a feeling you silence doesn’t leave. It waits. And the mind, hearing it again, reaches for the next guess, and the next. Itch. Scratch. Itch. Scratch. A whole life spent wondering why you never arrive.

Watch the sleight of hand.

The feeling came first. The cause came second, invented after the fact—but the mind back-dates it and hands it to you as the origin. You’re not anxious and reaching for a reason. You’re anxious because of the money. Reverse it to the true order and the spell breaks: the dread came first and went looking for a story, and the money was top of mind because you’d been feeding it—checking the balance, running the numbers, grazing on it all day. You shined a light on it, and the mind seized what it saw.

Tomorrow it will be your health. The day after, your marriage. Notice how easily it swaps. A real signal points at one thing—thirst never decides it’s actually about your marriage. But this feeling takes any cause you hand it, because it was never about any of them. The mind isn’t finding the answer. It’s running guesses, and every guess fails the same way, because there was nothing to find.

And the want—the thing you’d swear on your life you want—is the same guessing, turned around: no longer at the cause but at the cure. I want a drink arrives with no seam, indistinguishable from desire. Your hand is reaching before a conscious thought has formed. You’re certain the wanting is yours. It isn’t. You don’t want the drink or the Oreos or the busyness. You want the feeling to stop.

So here is the move, and it is stranger than you’d expect.

The instinct is to resist—to grit your teeth and refuse the scratch. Don’t. That’s just another thought fighting the first, and it loses every time. Instead, when the mind offers you the distraction, the escape, claim it. Say it plainly, in your own voice. I want this drink. I want this distraction. I want this scratch. I want to do this.

Because the whole operation runs in the dark. The reach is automatic—the mind fleeing a feeling it can’t stand, calling its escape I have to, or I need, or nothing at all. And here’s the trick, the one that runs your life: it never feels like a choice. It feels like necessity. The hand is already moving, the drink already poured, and the whole time it feels like something happening to you, not something you’re doing. That’s the disguise. Compulsion survives by never letting you see it as a choice.

The instant you say I want, the disguise falls off. The automatic becomes chosen. And a reach you can see yourself making is no longer a reach that owns you. Its grip slips—not because you’ve won an argument, but because you’re now awake inside something that only runs while you’re asleep.

Everything you do, you do because you want something. Strip a life down to its engine and that’s what’s running—not thought, not willpower, want. The thought is downstream. The reach is downstream. Even what you call duty, even what you call have to, is a want in a costume. Desire is the floor. There’s nothing under it.

That’s why this one awareness outranks all the others. You can examine your thoughts for a lifetime and stay asleep, because the thought was never driving—the want was. But catch the want, say it in your own voice, and you’ve put a light on the engine itself. There’s no deeper room to walk into. See what you want, the moment you want it, and you’re awake at the one place a human being is ever moved.

This is what unwinding want actually means. The thesis is merciless and simple—what you do, and allow to continue, is what you want. The mind survives by hiding that from you, dressing every reach in I have to. Say I want, and the disguise has nowhere to stand.

And the claim does one more thing: it tells you which kind of feeling you’re facing.

Because not every reach is a scratch. We are moving, feeling creatures, and the test was never the activity—it’s whether the action answers the feeling or hides from it. Claim it as a want, and listen for whether it holds.

I want a glass of water holds. No collision—the feeling was a signal, and you’re supplying exactly what it asked for. I want to ride my bike holds too, but differently. The restlessness wasn’t pointing at an object to fetch; it was a state, the body activated, energy with nowhere assigned. And energy wants to move. The bike ride doesn’t supply a missing thing. It completes the state—gives the activation somewhere real to go.

And sometimes the claim reveals a real problem with a real fix. I want to make that call holds, because the call is the answer—the feeling was a signal all along, pointing at something you can actually do. So make the call and watch the feeling resolve, the way a signal does when it’s met.

That’s the third move, and it’s the one the scratch counterfeits. A signal wants an answer. A state wants completion. You move, walk into the trees, make something, turn toward another person—not to escape the feeling, but to give it somewhere to go. Done honestly, the state isn’t muffled. It’s spent, on the very thing you were built for: to sense, to move, to engage, to create, to connect.

And the scratch? I want to scroll until I disappear won’t hold. Neither will I want a drink to make this dread stop. You don’t want the scroll, and you don’t want the drink. You want the feeling gone. Even the ride can fail the test: pedal to outrun a dread that has nothing to do with your body, and you’re not completing a state—you’re fleeing one. A more athletic crossword.

That’s the test. Completion holds, because you genuinely want it. Evasion collapses, because you don’t want the reach—you want the absence.

Now run it the other way, to the place the mind least wants you to look. Suppose the experts have already spoken. The accountant has shown you the numbers—you will not run out of money. Or the doctor has shown you the scan—you have six months. In the first, there is nothing to fear. In the second, nothing to fix. Either way, nothing to solve.

And still the mind says: solve this. It runs the same loops over a problem already answered, or already sealed. And here is what it costs. Every hour it spends solving is an hour stolen from the only life you have. You can feel it draining—the morning passing unseen, the face across the table gone blurry, the remaining time bleeding out into rumination. You feel it. And the mind won’t stop.

So tell it the deepest truth there is. I want to be doing this instead of living. I want to spend my one wild stretch of time solving what cannot be solved, rather than tasting the coffee, hearing the birds, holding the hand in front of me.

Say that, and listen for the silence after.

Because that is the one want no one can hold. The mind that was so sure it was protecting you hears, in your own voice, that its protection is the theft. And it has no answer. There was never anything to solve. There was only living, waiting the whole time to be done.

People call this meditation, and it is—but watch which one. You can sit to feel what’s here, or you can sit to make it leave. Same posture, same breath. One is reading the feeling. The other is the most patient scratch there is—make it stop, now in robes. The word won’t tell you which you’re doing. Only the reach will.

What’s left, when the solving stops, is the feeling itself. The state, unscratched. And now—only now—you can do what you couldn’t while you were running. You can let it be what it is. What is this, before a thought arrives to name it? The dread, looked at directly, stops being a prophecy about your life and becomes what it always was: a sensation in the body. A state, not a message. And a state, given nothing to feed it, moves—far faster than the thoughts you built to outrun it. Sometimes it asks to be felt all the way through. Sometimes it asks to be spent on a walk, a canvas, a conversation. Either way, it was never the thing to fear.

We were not built to escape ourselves. We are feeling creatures—shaped over millions of years to sense, to move, to engage, to play. Hand us nothing but our own untamed thoughts and a body we never learned to read, and we panic. We reach. We scratch. We mistake a state for a signal, a guess for a fact, a thought for a desire, and a desire for our own voice—and we spend our lives curing an itch we never once stopped to feel.

The caged animal paces because it cannot run.

You scratch because you have never learned to sit—or, when sitting isn’t the answer, to move toward what’s alive instead of away from what hurts.

So the next time it rises—in the coffee line, at the red light, in the dark of an early morning when the dread arrives before you do—try the one thing the mind will hate.

Don’t refuse the want. Claim it. And see what it’s made of: a signal to answer, a state to spend, or a story to set down.

Then live the life it was costing you all along.

The feeling was never the enemy. It was your aliveness—asking to be felt, or moved, or finally heard.

So let it in.

The same aliveness that’s been there your whole life is still there, still asking. And the moment you stop scratching long enough to feel it, you’ll find the itch was never the problem.

It was life.

Leave a comment

Share

Stay passionate!

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” ~ Maya Angelou

The word courage comes from the Old French corage, which originally meant “heart”—not the organ, but the seat of your deepest values, desires, and character. To have courage was to act from your heart. To encourage someone was literally to put heart into them. To discourage was to take the heart away.

Subscribe now

Over time, we’ve distorted the meaning. We’ve turned courage into a battle with fear—the heroic effort of feeling the dread and pushing through anyway. We’ve made it something rare and exceptional, something only certain people possess. We treat courage like a prerequisite, a quality we need to develop before we’re allowed to follow our natural intelligence.

But here’s what’s strange: when you’re actually living from your heart, when you’re being true to yourself, it doesn’t feel like a battle. It doesn’t feel like anything you had to summon. It feels like you have no choice.

The same year I was born, a young senator named John F. Kennedy published “Profiles in Courage.” The book examined eight U.S. senators who each faced a defining moment: compromise yourself for political safety, or follow your heart knowing it would cost you everything—your career, your reputation, your future.

They all chose heart.

What strikes me now, reading Kennedy’s profiles, is that none of these senators felt brave. They felt trapped. They felt like the only option was to act according to their convictions, even though doing so would destroy the carefully constructed lives they’d built. As Kennedy describes it, they weren’t performing heroism. They were simply unable to live with themselves if they didn’t act.

Think about what this means. These men knew exactly what they were losing. They could calculate the cost. And they did it anyway—not because they felt brave, but because the alternative was unbearable. Because staying silent would have required them to become someone other than themselves.

That’s the real paradox of courage.

When people call me courageous—for leaving security, for doing things I have no business doing, for taking risks that don’t make logical sense—I don’t feel brave. I feel like I’m being myself. Which isn’t always a ringing endorsement. But the alternative—staying safe, performing, twisting myself to fit—would actually require the kind of courage I don’t have. It would require me to become someone else.

I couldn’t do that. Not because I’m fearless. Because I’m not capable of that kind of compromise.

So which one is actually courageous? The person acting from their heart—or the person staying safe, protecting what they have, maintaining the carefully constructed identity, scared the whole time that it’ll slip?

We’ve gotten this backwards.

Are you actually scared when you’re acting from your heart? I don’t think so. You’re scared when you’re posturing—when there’s a gap between who you are and who you’re pretending to be. The fear is the gap.

Real courage doesn’t feel like courage. It feels like necessity. Like you’re out of options. Like being yourself is the only choice you can live with, even though it costs you everything you thought you wanted.

Performing, on the other hand, feels like effort. The tension, the struggle, the constant vigilance of holding up something that isn’t you. That’s where the fear lives—in the maintenance, in the dread of being found out.

So if you feel like you’re being brave, you’re probably performing.

The senators Kennedy wrote about weren’t thinking about how their actions would look to history. They weren’t performing principled stands for an imaginary audience. They were simply unable to betray themselves, and the cost was paid in real currency—lost elections, destroyed relationships, political exile.

The fear was never on the heart’s side. It belongs to the performance—to everything you’re holding up that isn’t you. Acting from the heart isn’t fearless because it conquers fear. It’s fearless because there’s nothing left to protect.

That’s what Kennedy’s senators had. Nothing left to defend but themselves.

And that isn’t rare. Most people have it. They just ignore it. They explain it away. They tell themselves it’s not practical, not realistic, not worth the cost. And then they spend their lives performing someone else, scared the whole time, waiting to feel brave enough to stop.

But you don’t need to feel brave to follow your heart. You just need to be unable to live with yourself if you don’t.

That’s the whole secret.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only question is what you’re willing to pay. Not whether you feel brave, but whether your need to act from your heart is stronger than your need to be safe.

Kennedy’s senators paid in full. Lost elections. Lost influence. Lost the futures they’d imagined.

What they kept was themselves.

That’s what courage looks like when you stop performing and start being. Not a feeling. Not a virtue you summon. Just a heart you finally refuse to betray.

Leave a comment

Share

Stay passionate!