I was fresh out of school and desperate for work.

The winds of change were blowing, both at home and abroad.

Malaysia was transitioning from an agricultural economy to the much-hyped NIC - newly industrialised country.

Michael Jackson, Blondie and Pink Floyd were top of the Billboard charts.

After decades of animosity, Egypt and Israel established diplomatic relations.

Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in El Salvador.

CNN launched as the first 24-hour news channel.

Somewhere in England, Tim Berners-Lee began working on what would eventually become the World Wide Web.

66 countries boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

And then there was me.

Looking for a job. Looking for meaning.

A tiny spot in the vast galaxy of existentialism.

The First Spark

The only qualification I had was the MCE - the grand equivalent of a high school diploma.

The local labour office was equally helpless in helping me secure a job.

They told me I was either overqualified or under-experienced for every job being advertised.

Desperate, I landed an entry-level job at the power station near my home - which at that time, was the second largest in the country by capacity.

That was how, forty six years ago, a motley crew of twenty of us reported for work at the oil-fired plant.

All of us were clueless about power generation. A few had some prior work experience. I had none.

It turned out exactly as it suggested - boring, menial, rewarded with minimum pay.

About a year into the job, for some reason, a kind soul took me aside. He didn’t teach or preach. He showed me how to see things differently.

Those meaningless tasks suddenly weren't so meaningless anymore - they were essential parts in the larger story of how electricity was generated - taking tons of heavy fuel oil and transforming it into the electricity that powered factories, lit homes, and lives.

A spark had ignited - at the power station. Funny now, but, I think I had been entertaining an angel unknowingly.

Echoes From the Bulk Cargo Terminal

Every workplace, has its own quirks, stories - short and tall. That power plant was not short of its own too.

Every couple of months, oil tankers would berth at the nearby bulk cargo terminal and unload “black gold” - crude oil for the power plant. For us that meant overtime. Hard cash.

On standby at the terminal and the storage tanks, we listened to the port traffic crackling over our walkie-talkies because everyone was on the same frequency.

Watched fishing boats quietly ferry women to the moored tankers after Customs had left.

And, engaged with the cooks, deckhands, and engineers on duty. If you were lucky, you could even get a free meal from the cook. Cigarettes and beer too if you were really lucky.

Looking back, it feels like a world that has almost disappeared.

That old power station was demolished years ago and replaced by a modern combined-cycle plant.

But some things survived.

The friendships, laughter, and most of all, the memories, flaws and all.

My Second Classroom

That oil fired power station taught me far more than electricity.

It taught me about people.

For the first time, I encountered prejudices I hadn’t grown up with.

Racial and religious tensions. The divide between urban and rural mindsets. Language. Unfair promotions. Workplace politics.

Home and school had been idealized worlds.

Work was reality.

I had to grow up quickly.

Sometimes I succeeded.

At other times, I found myself mired in the muddy waters.

But those early years planted something important.

The habit of seeing the bigger picture.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. - Aristotle

The Road Usually Travelled

1984 arrived.

I got a promotion and a transfer out - perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I was genuinely excited to explore new places. It took me a while to understand why - they were married, settled, had families and a hundred things to worry about; I was single and free.

I spent the next twenty one years moving through northern Malaysia’s electricity industry, from generation to distribution, transmission, office administration, and eventually the control rooms of high-voltage substations.

Each move expanded my world.

I found new friendships, and survived heartbreaks.

Found purpose through church and youth ministry.

Learned to value quiet towns as much as busy cities.

Most of all, I discovered that leaving home wasn’t the end of belonging.

It was the beginning of becoming.

The More Things Change...

Forty-six years is a long time.

Politically.

Economically.

Technologically.

Culturally.

Almost everything has changed.

Yet Alphonse Karr’s famous observation keeps haunting me:

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

People still long for dignity at work.

We still seek friendships we can trust.

We still wrestle with injustice.

We still hope for peace, financial security, love, and a life that matters.

Our tools may have changed dramatically.

Our hearts and yearnings haven’t.

Another Unfamiliar Room

Looking back I see a common thread running through those years that I never noticed then.

That first job. The unexpected mentor. The transfer that liberated. The friendships that endured. Even the disappointments.

None of them made complete sense at the time.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard

At 18, I couldn’t have imagined where that first step into a power station would eventually lead.

But understanding often arrives years after the initial experience.

Today I’m back to work - even though I wasn’t planning on it.

The reality is that I’m now probably busier than ever before. Apart from the regular job I have - there is the solo business I’m building on my own time.

Feeding my hobbies - writing, photography, exploring emerging technology, learning about natural, and holistic health and well-being, you get the idea.

Why am I so interested in AI at this stage of life?

The answer surprises even me.

Because it feels familiar.

When I first walked into that power station in 1980, I understood nothing about turbines, boilers, or generators.

Today, I feel the same way when I see AI.

The initial confusion.

Curiosity.

Then understanding.

And once again, a little education changes everything.

Only this time, I’m not learning from the unlikely mentor standing beside me on the power station floor.

But through conversations with people from all over the world - writers, creators, technical wizards, researchers, and curious minds connected by wonder.

The classroom has changed.

The learning hasn’t.

I’ve come to realize that the greatest lesson from that old power station wasn’t only about electricity.

It was about learning.

Learning turned a job I disliked into something I grew to enjoy.

Learning turned unfamiliar places into home.

Learning turned uncertainty into confidence.

Perhaps that’s why I keep writing.

Because whether we’re forty-five or sixty-five, whether we’re learning AI or simply learning about ourselves or the world or our health, the journey never really ends.

The road was long and winding.

It still is.

And I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

One Question to Carry with You

Every journey begins at a point of departure, often somewhere ordinary, overlooked, maybe even unwanted.

What ordinary, overlooked moment in your life right now might be the beginning of the next one?

What if AI was never really about technology?

What if it was always about us - but we just didn’t want to look?

Every civilization, somewhere along the way, has asked this question:

What, or Who are we, really?

We were the first humans to set off from Africa in search of possibilities.

We built the great pyramids of Egypt.

We made huge medical breakthroughs, created art and literature, began space exploration.

And now we have built AI.

And just maybe, in building it, we have built something that is forcing the answer to that oldest of questions.

Who are we, really?

Here’s another thought.

What if the most important thing AI ever does has nothing to do with efficiency, productivity, or profit?

What if its real purpose, intended or not, is to hold up a mirror?

And, what if we don’t recognize the face looking back?

Which brings me to a figure I’ve been thinking about.

There is a god nobody prays to.

Not because they are forgotten, though they are, mostly, but because nobody has ever particularly wanted what they offer.

The god of mirrors.

They have been present since the first still water caught a human face and reflected it back.

Since the first polished bronze showed someone not the person they imagined themselves to be, but the person they actually were.

They have never had many worshippers.

The gods who promise power, love, victory, harvest - those gods have always had full temples. Long queues of the faithful. The smell of offerings.

The god of mirrors has a smaller setup.

Just one clean room.

An open door that almost nobody walks through willingly.

From time immemorial, the god of mirrors has watched humans develop a range of strategies for avoiding what the mirror shows.

The fleeting glance - looking just long enough to ensure the superficial has hit home, then looking away before anything deeper surfaces.

The flattering light - arranging the reflection so carefully that only the most favourable version is ever visible.

Surrounding themselves with people who confirm what they already believe.

Reading only what they already agree with.

Living inside a carefully curated environment so that the mirror has been replaced with an image of themselves at their best.

And the most sophisticated strategy of all - the one the god of mirrors has watched humans perfect over the last several decades with ruthless efficiency.

The strategy of busyness.

If you are always moving, always producing, always optimising, you never have to stop long enough to ask the question the mirror is waiting to ask you.

Who are you, actually, when there is nothing left to do?

Why did we build AI?

We built it for the efficiency, productivity, the automation of the tedious and the hastening of its results.

We built it the way humans build most transformative things: solving an immediate problem without fully understanding what we were creating.

And in building it, without planning to, without any of the philosophical intention it deserved - we built the most honest mirror in human history.

Because AI can write your report.

It can compose your music.

It can analyse your data, draft your strategy, pass your examinations, generate your creative work, replicate your results with an ease that ranges from impressive to unsettling, depending on the task and how much you have invested in believing that what you do is irreplaceable.

In demonstrating with relentless capability what it can do, it has asked a question that the busyness strategy can no longer drown out.

What is left that only you can do?

Not what you are trained to do.

Not what your job title says you do.

Not what your carefully scripted LinkedIn profile describes.

What is unmistakably, inimitably you?

The god of mirrors has been waiting to ask that question for a long time.

We may have just built something that finally forced it into the open.

Here is what the mirror is showing us, if we are willing to look.

Not that we are replaceable, though we are and care to admit it in some contexts.

Not that human work is becoming worthless.

It’s that our idea of what makes human work valuable is changing.

And that is uncomfortable, especially when we have built our identity around what we are good at.

What the mirror is showing us is something more ancient and more basic.

It is showing us that for a very long time, perhaps since the industrial revolution began training humans to think of themselves as productive units, we have been confusing what we do with what we are.

We are not what we do.

We are not the sum of our measurable KPI’s or the efficiency with which we convert effort into result.

Those things are real. They matter. They are part of us.

But they are not the deepest part.

And the deepest part, the part that thinks and feels and wonders and loves and grieves and reaches toward meaning in the dark, that is the part that AI cannot replicate.

Not because of a technical limitation that will eventually be overcome.

But because it is not a function. It is not a result. It is not a capability to be trained toward.

It is the thing that stands in front of the mirror.

It is the face looking back.

The god of mirrors doesn’t ask you to like what you see.

They don’t ask you to find a neat answer or leave their temple convinced that you need to reinvent yourself.

They ask only one thing.

That you look.

Really look.

Not the quick glance. Not the carefully curated reflection that shows you only what you already know.

The full, honest, uncomfortable, occasionally disorienting look at what is actually there.

Because the question AI is asking - what is left that only you can do? - is not a threat.

It is an invitation.

Probably the most important invitation most of us will receive in our lifetimes.

An invitation to finally answer the question the mirror has been holding for you since the first still water caught a human face and refused to look away.

Who are you?

Not what you do. Not what you’ve achieved. Not what you’re afraid of losing.

Who are you?

The god of mirrors has a very clean room.

And an open door.

And all the time in the world.

image credit: miajam

“The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words invite reflection. He famously said that older people are valuable because they possess deep wisdom, having gained knowledge and skills through a lifetime of experience.

There is at least one former Prime Minister, who at the ripe age of 101, refuses to fade quietly into the background.

Love him or disagree with him, Mahathir Mohamad continues to write, speak, debate, and influence the national conversation where I live. He still believes he has something to contribute.

Then there’s June Squibb.

For decades she was a respected character actress.

Then, like a shot in the dark, at the age of 94, she became the unlikely action star of Thelma - not playing someone’s grandmother in the background, but carrying an entire film on her shoulders.

And then there are the immortal words of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

In hindsight, I think I misunderstood Thomas’s words when I first heard them.

Today I don’t think they speak only about resisting death.

I think it’s more about refusing to surrender to irrelevance.

About refusing to surrender curiosity or purpose.

Or the possibility that our finest work may still lie ahead.

That raises a question I (and maybe you too) quietly wrestle with as the birthdays accumulate.

What does it really mean to age well?

For too long I tended to nod along something like this:

Youth is for dreaming. Midlife is for achieving. Old age is for remembering.

Then there are the timeless sayings:

“Age is only a number”. “You are only as old as you think.” You get the drift.

So, what is the real story, though?

Is it true that the second half of life isn’t about winding down… but about becoming different?

The Loyola Spirituality Centre states that “the second half of life is a developmental stage that begins around 40 years of age. It is not just a “mid-life” crisis that returns to first half of life spirituality. It is a transition to a much deeper understanding of one’s ultimate purpose and consequently is deeply spiritual.”

If growing older is inevitable, is aging well intentional?

Time

None of us can bargain with time.

Every birthday reminds us that we are moving in only one direction.

We actually start dying the moment we are born, though biologically, our bodies are building and growing in the first twenty five years or so.

In an oxymoronic way, we are both growing and dying.

Somewhere along the way, we pick up the idea that once we reach a certain age, our most important contributions are behind us.

I don’t think we have to believe that story anymore.

Even physicists are no longer sure time moves the way we assume it does.

If it were true, why are so many people beginning second careers after retirement?

Why do some of the most vital chapters - a business, a book, a public life - start when everyone expects them to be winding down?

John Thavis, the New York best selling author, wrote that in the run up to the last election of the Pope, “the cardinals are much less likely to turn to papabili who are under the age of 65, and much more likely to look at candidates in their late 60s or, even more probable, in their 70s.”

Maybe the question was never how much time we have left, but what we still choose to do with it.

Health

The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness as “the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health.”

If I understand it correctly, it means growing healthier is a practice more than anything.

For much of my life I never really thought of aging. That’s the ignorance of youth. And sometimes ignorance is good.

I did not wonder what was going on inside my body, or how much time I had left, though I was physically active and has some sort of a spirituality.

Life chugged along. Single life turned into marriage and family, work, and various responsibilities.

Then, out of the blue came the first wake-up call. I ended up at the emergency room, only to find out it was due to hypertension, and that I would be on medication for the rest of my life.

It was somewhere along that point I started believing that aging meant inevitable decline. And what I saw around me confirmed that I was not alone in thinking that. Many were in the same predicament as me.

But today, science is telling a more hopeful story.

Our bodies are constantly repairing, adapting, and responding to how we live.

Research affirms that the body is designed to heal, that cells replace themselves daily, the liver regenerates its tissue, the gut lining renews completely every few days, and the immune system is constantly monitoring, clearing, and repairing. It’s not just me who believes this. Mark Hyman, MD believes so too.

If that’s true, why then do we spend more time “fighting age” than “supporting health”?

I see the battle against ageing as largely focused on aesthetics - beauty and youthful looks. It’s largely driven by fear, fuels the demand for expensive products, and encourages people to go to extreme lengths in the pursuit of a longer life. I think we’re fighting a losing battle.

Supporting health lies on the opposite side of the spectrum – coming from the desire to feel good and live well.

It focuses more on function – how to keep the brain, muscles, heart and energy stay strong. It’s about practicing good habits: proper nutrition, adequate rest, moving the body, staying connected to community, living with some sense of spirituality.

Supporting health doesn’t worry about the effects of ageing, rather it enforces the idea to help the body work at any phase of life, knowing very well, that one day, everything will come to an end. Aesthetic or not.

It’s not the length of time we have left – rather what we do in the time we have been gifted with.

Staying curious about that time, especially as the world changes around us, can turn out to be its own form of health.

Curiosity

Is keeping up with technology a necessity?

When I was in studying commerce in school, we were taught that there were only three basic human needs – food, shelter and clothing.

Today, that list has expanded to include the mighty mobile phone.

Once I could travel overseas without a phone in my pocket. Today I would be helpless without it. It carries everything I could possibly need - calls and texts, banking, travel details, flight tickets, insurance, hotel accommodation, and more. A computer in my pocket. Who would have thought that just 20 years ago?

Every generation has had to adapt to change. That is a fact.

Today, more than anything else, this generation happens to be staring artificial intelligence straight in the face, with all its promise and all its imperfections.

The reality is that there will always be people who fall between the cracks. Not because they are unimportant or lack effort, but perhaps because adapting to change is not always easy for everyone.

On the other hand, my then 80 year old mother learned to use the smart phone without too much of a fuss. More surprisingly, she was one of the first in the family to be excited about Bitcoin when I first explained it to her.

We can complain about technology. Ignore it. Or become curious.

If we flip it around - what if learning AI at 60 is no different from learning to drive at 18?

It’s simply another reminder that the human brain was always designed to keep learning.

Maybe we have to change our mindsets first.

And maybe changing our mindset is itself the deeper work of becoming.

Becoming or Being

Growing into the person we were meant to become.

This is how I see it: the idea of becoming - that we are constantly changing, in a process of growth and transformation, that is active and fluid. Mere being, by contrast, gives the impression that it’s passive but stable.

The belief that we can defeat ageing by clinging to youth remains a widespread myth.

I think it’s more about letting go of everything that stands in the way of becoming ourselves.

The ego that needs to win.

The fear that needs to control.

The comparison that needs to measure.

The ambition that has outlived its reason.

I like how Muhammad Ali put it:

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did when he was 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

Change is good.

Life teaches us new lessons every day.

Sticking to the same ideas over the years does not necessarily mean consistency; it could also mean an unwillingness or stubbornness to let go, to learn, and discover.

Final Thoughts

101 year-old Mahathir reminds us that purpose has no retirement age.

June Squibb reminds us that our finest chapter may still be unwritten.

Dylan Thomas reminds us not to surrender the light while it still burns within us.

Maybe growing older was never about resisting change - it’s about staying curious enough to keep learning, and honest enough to keep letting go.

Maybe aging well isn’t about adding years to life. It’s about adding life to our years.

On a personal level, I retired from one career and reinvented myself - or at least, I am still in the process of doing so. I embraced AI, began writing publicly, and I’m still learning every day.

I don’t know where this is going, or even if it would be a victorious adventure - but I want to.

And this is what keeps me going.

If you are entering your own second half of life, what is one thing you are choosing to keep growing, learning, or moving forward with?

Tell me about it in the comments.

Or better still, subscribe and we can explore together!

image cr: Google

image cr: miajam

A friend recently asked me how to start a Substack after reading one of my posts.

It reminded me that many people have stories worth telling - they just don’t know where to begin.

Perhaps you’ve been thinking about sharing your thoughts, hobbies, life experiences, or the lessons you’ve learned along the way.

The good news is that starting a Substack is much easier than you might think.

Here’s how to get started - without overthinking it.

Step 1: Create a Free Account

Go to

https://substack.com

and click Start Writing or Sign Up.

You can sign up using:

• Google

• Apple, or

• Your email address

It only takes a couple of minutes.

Step 2: Name Your Newsletter

Don’t overthink this.

Choose a name that reflects you or something you enjoy.

It could be based on:

• a hobby

• travel

• photography

• gardening

• cooking

• books

• your personal reflections

• anything you’re passionate about

Remember, you can always change the name later.

Step 3: Write a Short Description

In one or two sentences, tell people what your newsletter is about.

For example:

Sharing my journey through photography, travel, and the little stories that make life interesting.

Or:

Thoughts, ideas, and lessons from my adventures in gardening and everyday life.

Keep it simple. You can always update it as your newsletter evolves.

Step 4: Add Your Photo

Upload a profile photo and, if you like, a simple banner image.

Don’t aim for perfect. Aim for authentic.

People subscribe to people, not perfect profiles.

Step 5: Write Your First Post

Click New Post.

Write about something you know, something you’ve experienced, or something you’ve been thinking about.

Don’t worry about writing a masterpiece.

Your first post is simply the beginning of a conversation.

Step 6: Publish

Click Publish.

Congratulations - you now have a newsletter!

Step 7: Share It

Send the link to a few friends or post it on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Your first readers are often people who already know you.

Step 8: Keep Showing Up

The secret isn’t writing one brilliant article.

It’s writing consistently.

Even one thoughtful post each week (or any other time frame) builds trust over time.

Remember, you don’t need hundreds or thousands of subscribers to begin. If one person is encouraged, informed, or inspired by what you write, you’ve already made a difference.

Bonus Tip: Read Before You Write

Subscribe to five or ten newsletters that genuinely interest you.

Notice how other writers:

• choose their titles

• begin their stories

• use images

• structure their articles

• connect with their readers

Don’t copy them. Learn from them.

Over time, you’ll discover what resonates with you and gradually develop your own unique voice.

One Final Thought

Don’t wait until everything is perfect.

Your writing will improve.

Your ideas will become clearer.

Your confidence will grow.

The important thing is to begin.

As the old saying goes:

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.

Your first post won’t be your best.

Neither was mine.

But every writer has one thing in common: they started with a blank page.

So open the page.

Write the first sentence.

The rest of the journey begins there.

Happy writing.

P.S. If you do start a Substack after reading this, leave a link in the comments. I'd love to be your first subscriber.🤗

image cr: miajam

Jude’s Typewriter is about one question, asked from a few different angles: what does it actually take to keep becoming, not just older in a world that’s changing faster than most of us signed up for.

I write from inside that question, not outside it.

So if you stay a while, this is what you will be reading: not a curated feed of AI headlines or wellness tips, but one person’s real-time attempt to stay whole, sharp, and human while everything is in shift mode.

If you’re new, start with these five pieces. They’re not in the order I wrote them, but more in the order that’ll make the rest of the newsletter add up.

1. The Foundation
Living In Silos v. Living Holistically
My philosophy of personal growth - the thing everything else here is built on.

2. The Body
What Your Body Has Been Trying To Tell You
My health perspective, and why I don’t separate the body from the rest of this.

3. The Emerging Future
When The Crowd Boos The Future
Where I try to make sense of AI without either fearing it or worshipping it.

4. The Bigger Picture
What Happens When We Stop Fighting Growth
The overarching theme that ties the other threads together.

5. Where This Is Going
Every week, I explore one human question through three perspectives: personal growth, health and well-being, and emerging technology. That’s the whole newsletter, really. Everything else is just the specific question changing.

I’m writing this looking forward, same as you’re reading it. Let’s see what we can figure out as we go along.

First time at Jude's Typewriter? Drop by my About Page to find out exactly what goes on behind the keys.

When I was young, I chased opportunities. In midlife, I juggled responsibilities. As I grew into my 50’s and beyond, this next question and versions of it kept coming back:

How do I continue to flourish in a world that keeps changing?

I don’t think the answer is in trying harder.

Rather, it’s been more of “when to stop resisting.”

Personal Growth: Growth Can’t Be Forced

There is a temptation to believe that every problem can be solved with more effort.

Work harder.

Read another book.

Watch another video.

Set another goal.

Life’s deepest changes don’t happen just because you force them.

What if they happened because you created the right conditions and gave them some time?

Constance Dierickx explains how anyone can do this in 3 steps:

Like a seed, growth is often invisible before it becomes visible.

Perhaps maturity is less about becoming someone new and more about becoming who we were always meant to be.

Health & Well-being: The Body Knows More Than We Think

That same lesson has been teaching me something about health.

Our bodies are remarkably clever. Every day they repair, adapt, and recover in ways we rarely notice.

Healing isn’t something we construct. Much of the time, it’s something we support.

Good sleep. Nutritious food. Movement. Rest. Lower stress.

These don’t force healing - they create the conditions for it.

The body has been quietly working for us all along.

Emerging Technology: Even AI Learns Through Patterns

The hottest word probably today - artificial intelligence - offers an interesting contrast.

AI doesn’t wake up one morning and become brilliant.

It improves by recognising patterns over time, learning from countless examples.

Progress comes through revision, not instant perfection.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here for us.

Whether it’s a machine learning a task, a body repairing itself, or a person growing in wisdom, meaningful change rarely happens overnight.

It happens one small step, one quiet adjustment, one faithful day at a time.

One Question

Maybe flourishing isn’t about taking control of everything.

Maybe it’s about learning to cooperate - with life, with our bodies, with change, and with the person we’re still becoming.

The world will continue to change. Technology will continue to evolve. Our bodies will continue to age.

The question isn’t whether change will come.

The question is whether we'll learn to grow with it.

One Question to Carry This Week

Where in my life do I need to stop forcing growth and start creating the conditions for it?

Image credit: miajam

image cr: miajam

The older I get, the more I realize the less I know.

That has been the sobering truth.

Life is not black and white.

Neither is health, healing or modern medicine and traditional practices.

Over the years I’ve swung between both camps like a man who can’t commit to a barber. I have taken prescribed medications and been grateful for them. I have sat in doctors’ offices nodding solemnly at advice I promptly ignored for another six months.

I have also explored Traditional Chinese Medicine and other approaches rooted in wisdom passed down through generations, along with a few supplements because an ad sold me.

And today, sometime in the last few years, in the aftermath of the Covid19 pandemic, I find myself discovering something else entirely.

The remarkable capacity of the human body to heal itself.

Not always completely or magically or instantly.

But more than I once imagined it.

Perhaps age has taught me to be less certain and more curious.

It has also taught me to read the label before I swallow anything.

There Was a Time I Wanted Instant Answers

When I was younger, I thought I was right about most things. Loudly, if given the chance.

Life has a way of humbling us. It humbled me - repeatedly - sometimes, in front of others.

Modern medicine has achieved incredible things. It saves lives and relieves suffering, and in emergencies it is nothing short of miraculous. I have no argument with that.

But even the best doctors will admit medicine has limits.

Not every illness can be cured.

Not every symptom can be explained.

Not every patient responds the same way, which is annoying, because from listening to others in the same boat, is that we’d all very much like a formula.

We are, it turns out, wonderfully complicated creatures who don’t come with a manual, only a warranty that expires the moment we turn forty. Mostly, not always though.

My Body Is Not a Machine

I don’t think I ever really understood my body. It was just a body. Where I lived. I treated it the way some treat their cars. Ignore it until it makes a noise, then panic.

The older I got, the more I realized the body isn’t a machine you can just service. It’s a living system, and healing involves far more than treating symptoms.

Sleep matters.

Movement matters.

Food matters.

Stress matters.

Relationships matter.

Faith matters.

Peace of mind matters.

Purpose matters.

And somehow all of these work together in ways science is still trying to understand and in ways I understood even less at 3am scrolling wellness articles instead of sleeping.

Prevention Is Not as Exciting as Intervention

The truth is, prevention isn’t glamorous.

Nobody applauds you for eating better.

No headlines get written because you walked every day.

No one throws a party because you managed your stress, drank more water, or finally learned to slow down.

I have never once received a trophy for going to bed on time, and frankly I think that’s an oversight.

Yet these unglamorous, unphotographed things may be the most powerful investments we can make.

Good health is built quietly.

One meal.

One walk.

One night’s sleep.

One good habit.

One day at a time - which is a deeply unsatisfying answer for someone who would prefer a shortcut, a hack, or at minimum a very good supplement stack.

The Body Wants to Heal

Healing isn’t something doctors do to us.

Nor is it something herbs or therapies do for us.

Ultimately, healing is something the body itself does.

Doctors support it. Medicine supports it. Nutrition supports it.

Traditional practices support it. Rest supports it.

My long walks after work, in the evenings, support it.

But the healing itself comes from the astonishing intelligence with which we were created.

Perhaps our role isn’t always to fight the body.

Perhaps it’s to learn how to work with it - the way you’d work with a stubborn colleague rather than trying to win every meeting.

One Size Does Not Fit All

There’s an abundance of health and wellness approaches on the market today -supplements, protocols, philosophies, each with its own charismatic spokesperson and a very confident tone.

How do you decide which one is for you?

What works for me may not work for you. And that’s perfectly fine. Although it took me some time to come to this truth.

Some people thrive with a certain approach. Others find benefit in another.

Some need surgery. Others need rehabilitation. Some respond well to medications.

Others discover improvements through lifestyle changes and complementary therapies.

There’s no prize for belonging to a camp. I’ve come to accept - grudgingly - there is no medal for winning the argument on someone’s comment section. Health isn’t an ideology.

It’s deeply personal.

We are all just trying to find what helps us live better, suffer less, and flourish more - and not trying five things at once so we never really know which one worked.

I Have Become Less Bullheaded

So here I am, in my sixties, less interested in being right and more interested in being well.

Less keen on wellness but more on wellbeing.

Less interested in debates. More in wisdom.

Less engaged by labels, more intrigued by results - which is a dignified way of saying I’ve stopped arguing about diets with others.

I no longer see modern medicine and traditional medicine as foes.

I see them as tools. And like all tools, each has its place.

Neither has all the answers. Both have strengths. Both have limitations.

True wisdom, I think, lies in knowing when and how to use each, and in admitting when you’ve been using the wrong one out of stubbornness alone.

Keeping an Open Mind

Growing older hasn’t given me all the answers. It’s done the opposite.

It has taught me humility.

It has taught me that healing is often bigger than medicine.

That health is more than the absence of disease.

That wellbeing is a lifelong journey, not a six-week challenge with a discount code.

And that keeping an open mind may be one of the healthiest habits of all.

So I continue to learn. I try and listen more. I continue to experiment carefully, and, yes, sometimes foolishly despite my best intentions. Mostly, I continue to ask questions.

I marvel at this extraordinary body that, despite all the miles, all the mistakes, still strives every day to balance and repair this life, mostly without my help, and often in spite of my decisions.

Perhaps that is one of God’s quiet miracles.

Not that we never break.

But that we are created with an incredible capacity to heal, adapt, and begin again.

Perhaps all we have to do now is learn how to cooperate with that miracle.

And maybe, once in a while, get out of its way.

If the idea that the body wants to heal, whether I cooperate or not resonates with you, you may find When You’re Ready, This Is How You Heal by Brianna Wiest a meaningful companion.

Through 45+ reflective essays, Wiest explores healing as a journey of letting go, rebuilding, and rediscovering who we truly are after life’s difficult seasons.

It is a gentle reminder that healing is not a single moment, but a process of becoming whole again.

A thoughtful read for anyone navigating change, loss, burnout, or a season of personal transformation.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn a small commission if you purchase through my affiliate link, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting my writing.

Thank me later 😉

See you in two weeks, or so.

image cr: miajam

About a month ago, I wrote about the largest doorway since fire. If you missed it - you can access it here.

It was about thresholds.

A threshold is the point or level at which something begins, changes, or takes effect. It can be a physical entrance (like a door) or a figurative boundary.

What happens in between the before and after. And how once you cross them, you can never go back.

That is why I am writing this.

The most important door you will ever stand at is not technological.

It is the door between the noise of the world outside and the voice inside you.

It is a door we walk past every day.

And today it starts with a number: 11 million.

I didn’t know the human body sends an average of 11 million bits of information to the brain every single second.

Eleven million. Out of all that, your conscious mind handles about forty.

Forty.

This means right now, as you read these words, your body is running a huge operation.

It regulates. It signals. It adjusts.

And you and I are aware of almost none of it.

It happens without you. Or at least, without the part of you that you call “myself.”

Just to be clear, the body is not a dark mystery either. It is just a very busy machine. That is always on. 24/7. That works harder than any of us ever could.

Yet most of us treat these messages like the fine print on a phone update.

We know it is there. We know it matters. Yet we scroll past it anyway and hit agree.

Why do we do this?

We are not lazy. We do care. So why?

And, the people who are the worst at listening to their bodies are often the smartest people I know.

They pay close attention to everything outside themselves. But little attention to what is going on inside. I am including me in that group as well.

So - why?

I think it’s because we have forgotten something basic - life’s lessons.

Because, when we were younger, we knew.

Hunger meant crying. Tired meant sleeping. Hurt meant screaming, loudly, without apology.

The body spoke and we responded. We had not yet learned to care about other things.

Then came the world with its rules. Schedules and expectations.

It told us that what happens out there matters more than what happens in here.

We did what children tend to do to survive.

We turned down the volume on the inside channel. And turned it up to the outside world.

Maybe that’s why by the time we grow up, we can read a room perfectly. But we seem clueless when it comes to ourselves.

For those of you who have been following me, you would know I have been writing about health for some time time. I know some of the terms. I know a little about the somatic practices.

Those are good. But I had an awakening when researching something on Quora. It stuck.

Imagine your symptoms have a narrator.

Not a sickness. Not a broken part. But a storyteller.

Someone whose only job is to translate what your body knows into something your mind can hear.

Someone who has done this since the day you were born.

In the beginning, it was just whispers. Over the years, the narration got louder.

If that narrator could sit across from you tonight, after forty years of trying to reach you, this might be their words:

“I want to start with the headaches.

You think they are your enemy - the splitting pain. You take two pills, gulp down some water, and force yourself to keep going.

But the headaches were just me. I was raising my voice above the noise of your life. I was saying: stop, look here.

The headache was not the problem. It was just the volume I had to use so you would hear me.

But you shut it down and kept walking.

Then - the tiredness that sleep cannot fix. It took me a long time to build that for you.

Normal tiredness is too easy to ignore. You just say you work too hard.

But a tiredness that stays after eight hours of sleep - a tiredness that sticks to your bones like bad weather - that may mean something else. That says: this is a hurt that rest cannot touch.

You searched for it online. You found seventeen dark reasons. You worried for five minutes. And then you got distracted.

And the anxiety in your chest on Tuesday morning while you sat in traffic.

You blamed the idiotic drivers because it is easy to have something to blame. You turned up the radio.

I want you to know something. I have never been punishing you. Not once.

Every pain, every ache, was an act of filial loyalty.

I am loyal to you in a way nothing else in this life is.

I work without a single day off.

The body does not betray you when it hurts.

It is calling for you. By your name.

That is all it has ever been.”

Now, back to earth.

I know that Tuesday morning. I know the snarling traffic and the tightness of the body and the turned up radio dial.

I know the midnight Google over-exploring.

I know what it is to be aware in everything except myself.

And I think you might know it too. Not because there’s anything wrong with either of us.

But maybe, because we were taught, very early on, that the world outside deserved our full attention but the world inside could wait.

And It has been waiting. It is still waiting. With extraordinary patience.

Here is what I’ve learned though - when I start feeling the tension in my shoulders, the fragmented 3 am wake-ups, or the low mood that comes on for no apparent reason - before I do anything else, I try first to simply notice it.

Not analyse it. Not fix it. Not Google it.

Just notice it the way you’d notice a friend trying to get your attention across a crowded room. Acknowledge the signal before you decide what to do about it.

I don’t have a nice conclusion to offer here.

What I have instead is a question that I want to leave with you.

Not to answer immediately. Just to carry for a while and see what it shows you.

Don’t answer it now.

But the next time something in you speaks - the tightness, the tiredness, the mood change, try pausing before reaching for the remedy.

Just long enough to ask: what is this, actually?

The body has been sending that message for a very long time.

It will not mind waiting a little longer.

After all, eleven million bits of steady loyal information are communicating inside you right now, every single second.

You don’t have to catch all of them. Just try listening to those forty bits.

I think - it will be quietly, immeasurably glad when you do.

Image cr: miajam

Resilience

It is not toughness. It is not pretending that pain does not exist.

Resilience is the quiet capacity to keep going when life has knocked the wind out of us.

It is the ability to find meaning in suffering, hope in uncertainty, the ability to keep going in the midst of setbacks; to remain open to life even after being wounded by it.

But don’t take my word for it.

Here are 3 authors. 3 stories. 1 sentence each.

Rumi: The wound is not the end of the story; it is where the light finds its way in.

Viktor Frankl: Between what crushes us and how we respond lies a space and in that space lives our last, unassailable freedom.

Wendell Berry: To stay when everything urges leaving that is the quiet, stubborn act of a life rooted in something real.

Three voices. One theme. Different roads leading to the same truth:

Which voice speaks most deeply to you today?

If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been cautiously optimistic: curious about Gemini’s ability to hold an entire conversation’s worth of context, intrigued by NotebookLM’s way of helping me think through my own research, and both excited and intrigued about what all of it means for how we learn and work.

Then I read the news. And the cautious optimism got a little more complicated.

A graduation speech and a very loud crowd

Eric Schmidt - former CEO of Google, one of the people most responsible for the digital world we live in, was giving a commencement address at the University of Arizona.

He told graduates that AI would touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every relationship. He urged them not to fear it.

They booed him.

Not politely. Loudly.

According to the news report, it wasn’t an isolated moment.

Across the country this spring, executives and AI boosters have been meeting the same reception at university ceremonies.

A music industry CEO at Middle Tennessee State University tried a different tack - “you can hear me now or pay me later” - and got booed too.

I asked myself: “What exactly are they booing?”

The Gap those Boos reveal

Here is what the polling says, plainly:

• 70% of Americans think AI is moving too fast.

• Over 50% hold negative views of it. And just 18% of young people feel hopeful about it.

That last number is the one I keep returning to. Eighteen percent.

The story being told in Silicon Valley, and in graduation speeches by the people who built Silicon Valley is one of liberation.

AI will free us from drudgery.

It will unlock creativity.

It will solve problems that have stumped humanity for generations.

That story is not wrong, exactly. But it is incomplete in a way that has become impossible to ignore.

Because here is the other story, the one the 18% are living:

• They borrowed heavily to earn degrees in fields that AI now threatens to make redundant, before they’ve had a single year of employment in which to recover that investment.

The productivity gains being celebrated in boardrooms and keynote addresses will accrue largely to the companies deploying the technology not to the workers whose labour it replaces.

This is not fear of change.

This is a financial problem. And it’s entirely rational.

What public anger actually mirrors

I’ve been thinking about this philosophically, which is the only way I know how to think about uncomfortable things.

Throughout history, transformative technologies have always created two simultaneous and contradictory realities: the reality of what they make possible, and the reality of what they displace in the making.

The printing press democratised knowledge and put scribes out of work.

The industrial revolution created wealth and created slums.

The internet connected the world and local economies suffered.

In every case, the people who designed and deployed the technology experienced its possibilities first and its costs last, if at all. The people who bore the disruption experienced it the other way around.

The boos are not technophobia.

They are a very human response to feeling that the costs are being distributed downward while the gains travel upward.

And the research supports this: a Gallup poll shows that AI data centres the physical infrastructure of this transformation are now less popular than nuclear power plants, with 71% of Americans opposing them locally compared to 53% who oppose nuclear facilities.

• Nuclear power carries decades of accumulated public fear.

• AI infrastructure is already less popular.

A remarkable fact.

The political weather is changing

I don’t know how it is in other countries but this is happening in the United States.

Interestingly, there’s also been a shift in the Trump administration’s posture.

This is an administration that came into office rolling back Biden-era AI safety requirements, framing regulation as a constraint on American competitiveness.

In recent months, it has reversed course: it now wants to vet AI models before release, has urged Congress to adopt nationwide regulations, and has held discussions with China about AI guardrails.

When a politically AI-friendly administration starts hedging, it is not doing so out of philosophical scruple.

It is reading the same polling everyone else can read.

AI is becoming a voting issue.

That is an eye opener.

It looks like public resistance has now reached a scale where it is reshaping political cost at the highest level.

That is different in kind from the concern of individual researchers and ethicists.

It is the technology arriving at a reckoning with democratic accountability.

The irony I can’t shake - and the question I’m left with

Here is the thing I find most striking, and grappling with.

I’m in my 60s. Retired, before launching into writing some 18 months ago.

By every logic, I should be the anxious one - the late adopter, the reluctant convert. Instead I’m exploring these tools with curiosity, writing about them in public, finding them useful - with all the grey areas, while perhaps understanding 5% of what AI entails.

Meanwhile, the generation that AI companies are building for - young, digitally native, supposedly fearless about technology, is the one painting the 18% hope numbers. The one doing the booing.

I don’t think this is an accident.

There’s something real about the difference between approaching a technology as an explorer without a career on the line, without too much debt, attached to a credential that might be obsoleted, and approaching it as someone whose livelihood and future are directly in its path.

Maybe all who are writing on the subject can afford the curiosity - to a certain extent.

Many of the younger ones most probably - cannot. That’s the crunch.

Where this leaves me

I’m still learning these tools. I find them useful for my writing and research.

The tools are real. The usefulness is real. And the anger is also real, and pointing at something that deserves a better answer than “don’t be afraid, embrace the change.”

I see one way to handle it - hold both dimensions in equal tension.

And which has led me to the question that AI has not yet answered - the one the boos are asking - is not can you do this? We can see that it can.

The question is: who benefits, who pays, and who decided?

Until that question gets a serious answer, the boos will keep coming.

And honestly, I think they should.

This is the second part of a series of reflections as I learn about AI in public. If any of this resonates, I’d love to hear your own thinking in the comments - especially if you disagree.

The original news article on which this post is based can be accessed here

I want to be honest with you from the start: I am not an AI expert. I’m not a technologist.

I’m someone who spent decades working, retired, and then, started writing and almost by accident - found myself pulled into the orbit of artificial intelligence.

Last week it was a video by theMITmonk on YouTube.

He was talking about two tools - Google’s Gemini and NotebookLM - as a foundation for learning with AI. I watched it not as a seasoned user but as someone with a philosophical bent wondering:

What does it mean that we’ve built this?

I don’t have any clear cut answers. But I’m grappling with the questions. And I thought I’d do that here, in public, in case you’re somewhere similar.

A Machine That Remembers More Than I Do

Gemini - Google’s AI assistant, can hold up to two million tokens of information in a single conversation.

Ok. First I had to look up what a token was. Roughly speaking, it means Gemini can absorb and work with the equivalent of several full-length books at once, and then reason across all of it.

My head spun. Not because of excitement. More of vertigo.

Because here’s what that raises for me philosophically:

If a machine can hold more context than I can, research and analyse faster than I can, and connect the dots I’d miss, what exactly is the irreplaceable thing I bring? Is it judgment? Intention? The fact that I care about the outcome?

I’m not afraid of AI replacing me. I’m far more curious about what it reveals about who I actually am.

I don’t think these are exaggerated questions. They are open ones. And often, I find that more interesting than unsettling.

NotebookLM And The Nature of Knowledge

NotebookLM works differently from Gemini.

You give it your own sources - documents, articles, PDFs - and it builds a private knowledge base from them.

Then you ask it questions, and it answers only from what you’ve given it, citing its sources as it goes.

On the surface, that sounds like a very good research assistant.

But the more I used it, the more it raised an older question:

What does it mean to know something?

The tool has a feature that generates an audio podcast - two AI voices discussing your documents conversationally.

Sometime earlier this year I had created this podcast from one of my Substack posts:

https://judestypewriter.substack.com/podcast

I noticed something strange: I seemed to understand the material better afterward than when I’d read it directly.

Was that learning? Or was it the illusion of learning - the comfort of familiarity dressed up as comprehension?

Philosophers have argued for centuries about the difference between knowing and merely believing.

I wonder if AI tools introduce a new category: the feeling of knowing, efficiently delivered. That’s not necessarily bad. But it seems worth noticing.

What I’m Genuinely Uncertain About

I’ve been playing with these tools for a while now, mostly for my own writing and research. Here’s what I haven’t resolved:

• Is using easy tools for research, analysis and creating content making me think less, or does it actually free me to think about ideas I would never have had time to do?

• When AI fills in the grinding labour of finding and organising information, is what remains more human, or less?

And then there’s the ethics question, which feels the most urgent and I feel, the most neglected in the enthusiasm around these tools.

• These systems were trained on vast amounts of human-generated content - content made by people who weren’t asked, who weren’t compensated, who may not have consented. That’s a debt that exists whether we acknowledge it or not.

That’s worth grappling with before we celebrate too enthusiastically.

I ask this not to be a critic of AI - I’m clearly using it and finding it genuinely useful, enjoying it even. But I think philosophical honesty requires holding the gratitude and the unease in tension at the same time.

Where I Stand (for now)

I’ll keep learning. I’ll keep writing about it here, imperfectly, as I go. That feels more true to where I actually am than pretending I’ve arrived somewhere I haven’t.

The tools that caught my attention - Gemini at gemini.google.com and NotebookLM at notebooklm.google.com - are both free to use at a basic level. No technical background needed. Just something you can be genuinely curious about.

If you’re on a similar journey - uncertain but curious - I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about it. Not the polished version. The real one.

And don’t miss out theMITmonk channel on YouTube. It’s worth every minute of your time.

This post is part of an ongoing series of reflections as I learn about AI in public. Not an expert. Just a curious person asking questions. If that resonates with you, consider subscribing - new posts land whenever I find something worth thinking through together.

I’ll bring questions, updates, and whatever’s on my mind. You jump in whenever. Think of it as the back room: less formal than a newsletter, more real.

I’ve been writing into the void long enough. Come say hello.🤗

Join chat

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If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs - you've clearly missed the news;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

You haven't been paying attention, like I choose;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting

Try waiting for a church to change its mind;

Or being lied to, and still quietly stating:

"Well, that's the forty-seventh time this kind."

If you can dream and not make dreams your master,

You've learned that dreams have excellent PR;

If you can think and not make thoughts your master,

The thoughts tend anyway to wander far;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same

Well, you've had both, and frankly, the disaster

At least made for a more amusing tale to claim.

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves at every Sunday pew;

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And find you don't much miss them funny, who knew;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one more hopeful throw,

Then lose, and note it calmly: "back to beginnings"

You've done this before. The knees, though. God, the knees.

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or sit with family dinners, which is worse;

If neither foes nor loving kin can hurt you

Well, they can, but you've rehearsed the universe

If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of sitting still,

And think: there's nothing much particularly in it,

But here I am. I'm warm. I always will.

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be sixty-five, my son;

Which isn't much, but let us be specific:

It's better than the rather obvious alternative, when all is done.

(after Rudyard Kipling who wrote the original at 32, which explains a great deal.)😉

I haven’t personally taken the course I’m about to share with you. I’ve taken others like it though - enough to know what good looks like. I’m telling you this because I think that is the only reason you should trust anything I put in front of you.

So why am I sharing it at all?

Because sometimes the evidence speaks clearly enough that you don’t need to be the last person in the room to verify it.

“Eight years on the market. Thousands of sales. A track record most course creators never come close to.”

The course is called Email Autoresponder Magic: The System That Sells For You, taught by Jen Perdew at NAMS, an online business training community that has been running since 2005.

This is the third version of a course that has sold consistently for eight years. Not a flash launch. Not a new creator finding their footing. Eight years of people buying it, using it, and coming back.

That kind of longevity in the online education space is genuinely rare. Most courses have a launch week and quietly disappear. This one keeps selling because it keeps working.

The reason it cleared my bar for sharing with you comes down to three things.

First, the AI component.

What I write about sits at the crossroads of personal growth and emerging technology and this course has AI prompts built into every step of the process.

Not as a gimmick. Not as a chatbot wrapper. But as a practical tool that helps you think through your email system at each stage: planning, writing, sequencing, optimising.

For those of us exploring how AI can actually reduce cognitive load rather than add to it, that’s worth paying attention to.

Second, the sustainability angle.

Email automation is, at its core, a leverage tool.

You build a system once. It works for every new subscriber from the day they join -without you starting over every week.

For those of us thinking seriously about energy, time, and how we want to show up in our 40s and beyond, that’s not just a business concept. It’s a wellness one.

Third, it’s been completely rebuilt. E

very module, every resource, updated to reflect current email marketing methods including deliverability - the thing that determines whether your emails actually land in inboxes.

The course has history behind it and current thinking inside it. That combination is hard to find.

It comes in three versions depending on where you are: a personal use course for people who want to fix their own email system, a PLR license for coaches and educators who want to teach it under their own name, and a resell rights option for anyone looking to add a complete digital product to their business without building it from scratch.

To top it off, Jen has thrown in a 7 day free trial for the personal use license. So you can test drive it with confidence.😉

I’m sharing this as an affiliate - I earn a commission if you purchase, and I want to be transparent about that.

If you have questions about the course content itself, Jen’s team is responsive and straightforward - you can reach them at support@namssupport.com.

What I can speak to is why it landed on my radar (I’ve been connected to them for some time), why I think it’s worth your time to look at, and why eight years of consistent sales from a credible source means more to me than any review I could write after a single weekend with it.

If you want to take a look for yourself:

Email Autoresponder Magic details and pricing here: https://warriorplus.com/o2/a/fwpcld0/0

For questions about the course itself go to Jen’s team: support@namssupport.com - they’ll get back to you within a business day.

Go have a look. And if you do take it - I’d genuinely love to hear what you think. You’ll know more about it than I do, and that seems like a fair trade.

Cheers!

https://warriorplus.com/o2/a/fwpcld0/0

There is a story about a small “god of textiles”.

Not a powerful god.
Not important.
Just… useful.

The kind people remembered when they needed something practical -
a strong piece of cloth,
a garment that wouldn’t tear,
something decent enough to wrap around life’s beginnings and endings.

His work was simple.

Threads.
Tension.
Balance.

Pull too hard - it snaps.
Too loose - it falls apart.

He understood something most didn’t:

Everything holds… until it doesn’t.

As the story goes, everything changed one day.

Not because people started praying more.

But because they started thinking differently.

They began to describe reality itself as a kind of fabric.

“The fabric of life.”
“The fabric of spacetime.”
“The universe is woven together.”

And slowly, without realizing it, they gave that quiet god something new.

Not more worship.

But more meaning.

Because the moment you call something a fabric…
you are also admitting that

it needs care, tension, and maintenance.

I think about this a lot more now.

At this stage of life, you start to see things differently.

You’ve seen enough to know that life is not held together by big moments.

Not the promotions.
Not the dramatic turning points.
Not even the crises.

It’s held together by quieter things.

Small adjustments.
Daily habits.
Unseen decisions.

The way you respond instead of react.
The way you let go instead of hold on too tightly.
The way you show up - even when no one is watching.

When we are younger, we want to be the loud gods.

The ones who make things happen.
The ones who change the world in visible ways.

But over time, something shifts.

You begin to understand the deeper work.

The work that doesn’t get applause.

The work of holding things together.

Your health, for example.

It doesn’t collapse overnight.

It frays.

Quietly.

A little less movement.
A little more neglect.
A little too much strain, repeated over time.

And then one day, something gives.

But the same is true in the other direction.

A few small corrections.
A few steady habits.
A bit more attention to what your body is telling you.

Not dramatic.

But consistent.

That is how the fabric strengthens again.

The same applies to relationships.

They rarely break all at once.

They loosen.

Missed conversations.
Unspoken words.
Small tensions left unattended.

Until the pattern weakens.

And again

It’s not grand gestures that restore them.

It’s quiet repair.

Listening.
Adjusting.
Showing up differently.

Thread by thread.

Something like Kintsugi.

And maybe this is what growing older really teaches us.

Not how to control life.

But how to tend to it.

Gently.

Patiently.

Holding things in tension.

We may not be as fast as we once were.
Not as ambitious.
Not as loud.

But we see more.

We understand more.

We notice where things are pulling too tight…
and where they are coming apart.

And in our own quiet way,

we begin to do the work that matters most.

Not the work of building everything.

But the work of holding things together.

These days, I find myself less interested in big changes.

More interested in small, steady ones.

Drink a little more water.
Move a little more.
Rest when needed.
Pay attention. Engage.

Take care of the threads I can still reach.

Secure enough to accept support.

Not as a miracle.
Not as a replacement for good habits.

But as a way of working with the body, not against it.

I’ve been exploring simple wellness tools for a bit now,
the kind that aim to support circulation, relaxation, and recovery.

Nothing dramatic.

Just something you use quietly, regularly,
like tending to a small tear before it becomes a rip.

If you’re curious, I’ve shared a bit more about what I’m personally trying in the note below.

Think of it as an option from a “lesser god” 😉

Because the truth is simple.

Life is not a solid thing.

It is a fabric.

And like any fabric,

it needs tending.

And perhaps, in this stage of life,
that is our real role.

Not to be the loud force.

But to be the quiet hands

that keep the weave from coming apart.

A small reflection for today:

What in your life feels a little too tight right now?
What feels like it’s starting to loosen?

And what is one small adjustment you can make - today, to bring it back into balance?

A quiet note on Wellness

For the past 4 years, I’ve been paying more attention to how the body responds to small, consistent care.

Alongside basic habits like walking, hydration, and rest, I’ve been experimenting with a wellness device that uses terahertz frequency technology.

How it gently supports circulation, relaxation, and the body’s natural recovery process.

I don’t see it as a cure or a quick fix but another tool - like stretching, breathing exercises - something to support the body as it does its work.

If you’re exploring similar paths, I’ve left a simple overview for you to read at your own pace.

image credit: miajam

image inspired by Annamaria @Unsplash

I am the god of thresholds.

My domain is the before and the after - the rooms you can never fully return to once you have left.

I have stood in the civilizational uncertainty that has its own atmosphere, like a storm that hasn’t yet decided what size it wants to be.

I have something to tell you about the one you’re standing in right now.

The First Spark

The domestication of fire I remember clearly. I stood at the threshold and felt the held breath of the universe.

A small group lived in the narrow margin between survival and extinction.

One of them had discovered that fire could be kept. That it could be carried. Tended.

The others were afraid. They were terrified of this unpredictable force that could warm them or consume them with equal ease.

They looked at the fire, and they looked at each other, and they went through the door anyway.

The room on the other side was better in ways they hadn’t imagined and harder in ways they hadn’t anticipated.

They grieved the old room, but they adapted.

They became, incrementally, painfully, magnificently, people that the previous room could not have produced.

The Page

The printing press I remember with fondness.

The monks were not foolish men; they were intelligently afraid.

They understood that knowledge, once copied infinitely, would change what information meant.

They feared the loss of the slow, deliberate engagement that the difficulty of reproduction had enforced.

They were right. Something was lost.

I watched a monk who had spent forty years in intimate relationship with texts, watch a page come off a press. He stood very still. He watched the machine produce in minutes what would have taken him weeks and months.

He picked up the page. He read it.

“It says the same thing,” he said, to no one in particular.

He never fully made peace with it, but he found something that his particular way of engaging with knowledge could offer the new world that the press alone could not.

The doorway did not consume him. It just changed the room.

The Loom

The industrial threshold was the loudest.

It announced itself in iron and the shriek of machinery that has no interest in human comfort.

I watched a mill worker, young and far from her fields, stand at a mechanical loom.

It did in an hour what her grandmother’s hands had done in a week. She looked at it with equal parts fear and admiration.

She learned the machine. She found a new kind of dignity in her expertise. She lost the quietness of the old world, but she remained, stubbornly, recognizably - herself.

That is the pattern I have learned to look for.

Not whether people are comfortable, but whether the essential human thing, the curiosity, the adaptability persists. It has always persisted.

The Largest Doorway

And so. Here you are.

The doorway you are standing in is the largest I have witnessed since fire.

I have stood at the splitting of the atom and the arrival of the internet, but this one is different.

Previous thresholds changed what humans could do. This one reaches toward what humans are.

It enters the territory of thinking, creating, and the making of meaning.

I understand why that is frightening.

But I have something to tell you that comes not from projection, but from memory.

Artificial intelligence is the most powerful press humanity has ever built.

It can do with thought what Gutenberg’s machine did with text.

It will change everything about how thinking moves through the world.

But it will not change what being a thinking person means.

The press could not read the way the monk read.

It could not bring forty years of a particular life to a text.

The press changed how knowledge moved; it did not change what knowing felt like.

The Clearing

I see you working alongside these new tools. I see the low hum of uncertainty in your chest.

What am I, if a machine can do what I do?

But look closer. As the tools do the things they can do, quickly, capably, they are creating a clearing.

A space where you can see, more clearly than before, what the tools cannot replicate:

The specific way you notice what’s missing.

The instinct for what matters to a real human being. The judgment, hard-won and built from years of being specifically yourself - about what is true and what merely sounds true.

The tools are not diminishing these things. They are illuminating them.

The Crossing

Fear at thresholds is appropriate.

It is recognizing that the stakes are real.

But you have been through doorways before.

Your ancestors lived this disorientation at every major crossing in history, and what they brought through with them was the very thing that made them human.

The light is different on the other side. Not absent. Different.

Everything you have learned to do in the light of the old room, you will relearn it in the new light.

Some things you thought were precious will turn out to be merely familiar. Some things you took for granted will reveal themselves as the most precious things you have.

Take a breath. Step through.

I’ll be right here. That’s the job. The door is open.

It has always been open.

But also, ask yourself this:

"What is the one thing you’ve realized the machines cannot do for you?"

Which, by most measures, is not early.

For years he had opened the blank box, thought of something to say, and quietly closed it again.

Not because he had nothing but because the old voice always got there first. What will people think? Is this even worth sharing? Have I had enough coffee for this?

He had been responsible his whole life. Practical. Always waiting for the right time.

The right time, it turns out, is notoriously bad at showing up on schedule.

There had been a business he never started. A book he almost wrote. A trip that kept getting postponed until things settled down.

Things never quite did - they just swapped one kind of chaos for another and called it progress.

So he sat at his desk - the same one he had promised to replace “one day,” which apparently had not arrived yet and typed the only thing that felt true:

I used to think I needed more clarity, more certainty before I acted. Turns out, I just needed courage. I missed a few chances. Maybe more than a few. But I’m still here. And maybe that means I get one more.

Not perfect. But honest. Which, at 63, he had decided was probably good enough.

He clicked publish.

No applause. No confetti. No algorithm immediately rewarding his vulnerability with viral reach.

Just a small, true thing - finally out in the world instead of sitting quietly inside him, gathering dust next to the unfinished book.

I think about him sometimes when I’m hovering over my own send button, refreshing my drafts folder like it might magically improve itself.

How many of us are waiting for a version of ready that was never coming?

If this landed with you, share it with someone who’s been sitting on something - a post, an idea, a conversation they keep postponing. Sometimes we just need to know someone else felt the same way before they finally began.

About the author

I write about the quieter side of work, life, and the decisions we keep putting off. If you’re new here - welcome. There’s no perfect time to subscribe either.😉

image credit: LinkedIn

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" — Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

There is a garden somewhere between the door and the car park.

You have walked past it many times.

I know, because I have done the same.

A few pots. A young tree practicing its patience.

A fern in the corner growing as if it received a private memo that there is no hurry at all and decided to believe it.

Somewhere nearby, a spider plant hangs in the open air like a small green fountain, spilling over its edges the way joy sometimes does when we are not watching.

And the pink-leaved thing in the clay pot - have you seen it? Really seen it?

The way it holds its color - the way some people hold their courage - quietly, without announcement.

But habit is a strong current.

And we have been swimming in it for years.

So we walked past.

Here is what I know about attention: it is not a luxury.

It is the most urgent thing.

The body already understands what the calendar refuses to admit - that breathing comes easier near living things.

That the eyes soften at green the way the shoulders soften after a long week.

Wellness is not always the new habit or the optimized morning. Sometimes it is only this:

Five minutes beside something that grows.

No agenda. No outcome.

Just you, and the leaves doing their slow, faithful, unremarkable work.

The garden will not ask where you have been.

It will simply be there, the way good things often are - patient, unhurried, rooted.

Go. Look. Stay a little while.

Then return to your day carrying, if you are lucky, one green and quiet thing inside you. 🌿

This is what I mean when I write about Wellness. Not the supplements. Not the protocols. The moment you actually stopped.

That moment counts. More than we give it credit for.

Before you go

Is there a small garden, a window, a patch of sky in your day that you keep walking past?

Hit reply and tell me about it. I read every response. 😊

— Jude

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” — Seneca

I’ve been publishing on Substack for a year, but somewhat inconsistently.

If you’re still here after a year of that — thank you. Genuinely.

Here’s something I’ve been sitting with lately: in some ways, we are always starting over.

Not because we failed, but because life keeps moving us forward whether we planned for it or not.

Every new chapter is really just a new beginning wearing different clothes.

I know this firsthand.

I’m 64. A few years ago, I took a 90° turn. Left a secure, well-paying job because I could no longer stomach the politics.

Plunged into writing and entrepreneurship with more conviction than a plan. Scattered topics followed. No clear thread. A year of figuring it out in public.

That changes now — which is really just me saying: I’m beginning again.

And I suspect I’m not alone in this.

Maybe you’ve restarted a career, a relationship, a health routine, or a sense of purpose.

Maybe you’re in the middle of one of those turns right now.

The second half of life has a way of demanding that we shed old skins.

So that’s what this space is becoming.

I’m building something at the intersection of three things many of us keep separate but shouldn’t: Wellness, Emerging Technology, and Personal Growth.

Not as an expert. As an explorer who’s also mid-turn.

Going forward, I’ll write what I observe.

I’ll try to make sense of health, the technologies quietly reshaping our lives, and hopefully continue growing holistically - whether we opted in or not. In plain language. With honest uncertainty.

Written for people in the second half of life, though everyone’s welcome here.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to hear from you. Hit reply and tell me:

Which of the three are you most curious about right now — Wellness, Emerging Technology, or Personal Growth?

And if you’re in the middle of your own restart, I’d love to hear about that too.

I read every response. 😊

Thank you!

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

“𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝘄𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘆𝗺𝗽𝘁𝗼𝗺 𝗼𝗳 𝗺𝗮𝗻’𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗹.”

— John Steinbeck

I stumbled across this quote on my FB a couple of days ago. Kept playing in my head.

Because there’s something quietly devastating about it.

Not because it’s angry or accusatory, but because Steinbeck stated a stark fact, and we all know it.

We are the only creatures capable of reasoning our way out of conflict.

Of sitting across a table, looking another human being in the eyes, and choosing understanding over destruction. That capacity is extraordinary.

And yet...we don’t...or not often enough.

Jung wrote about the shadow - that hidden dimension of the self where fear, pride, rage, and the hunger for dominance quietly fester. Not in others. In us.

The shadow doesn’t announce itself.

It grows in silence, fed by wounds we haven’t tended and truths we haven’t faced.

And when it overwhelms the light - in a person, in a nation, in a civilization, something shifts.

The thinking animal stops thinking.

What’s unfolding across the Middle East right now is another chapter of that old story.

We send peacekeepers, write charters, and hold summits in marble halls, not that any of it has actually succeeded for long.

And still, we struggle with the oldest, most interior problem of all: what lives in the dark corners of ourselves.

Maybe the real frontier has never been territory.

Maybe it’s always been the human heart.

image cr: Google