When you are getting older—wisdom is not a warranty card—you tend to become calmer. If not, you are wasting time and energy. The crux of growth is to achieve peace in essence (not just mind). The same old situations aren’t supposed to rattle you again and again and again. Your ancestors grew from their mistakes and so shall you. You are not a reel running on loop. You are a person. You can’t keep doing the same shit and expect something new to happen. At the end of the day, you tell yourself—no more surprises, I’ve got this.

Animals survive and act and react but only humans can opt out of this cycle and into the higher realm of inactivity. Just as silences make music more beautiful and pauses make conversations richer in meaning, it is inactivity- that is the moving beyond doing into being- that makes life human. Responding to stimuli alone, satisfying needs as they arise alone makes life nothing more than a cycle of biological survival.

Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.