Blog

I love personal websites and blogs. The idea of having a little chunk of the internet that is wholly yours, where you can post, and create, and make completely on your own terms is really cool to me. I’ve loved creating content that way the last few years. And I’m also finding that I really like consuming content from people who create that way. A blog on a personal website tends to feel so much more deep and well-thought-through than a Tweet, or Mastodon/microblog, or any other social media content. It feels very high signal, which I value. ...

When it comes to communication, there’s two extremes we can take: We can hope that those we’re interacting with just magically are in tune with us; we can communicate as little as possible, hoping that they’ll fill in the blanks with what we meant… or… We can put in the effort to be crystal clear about what we mean to say. To say things that we might think are obvious, but may indeed not be. To realize that the person we’re communicating with has lived a different life than we have, and so, brings different assumptions to the table. To think through where ambiguities about what we’re trying to communicate might pop up, and rephrase/reformulate our message until it’s as receivable as possible. We can either under-communicate, or we can over-communicate. ...

A friend showed me this video yesterday. I really, really appreciated it. Seems like a reminder that’s needed in a lot of places around the world in this season.

Something appearing impossible isn’t, on its own, a legitimate reason not to try.

When a new project, decision, or chapter-of-life comes our way, there also quite often seems to come a simple but nearly-invisible choice for us to make: We can chose the easy path, where we proceed “the way we’ve always done it”, going forward well-founded on the ideas and knowledge that we’ve already acquired and tested over the years… Or, we can chose the more scary path that forces us to learn new things — the path that requires we get stretched in our knowledge, skills, and understanding — the path where not growing and adapting, or not learning that new tool or process, would mean that we simply don’t succeed. ...

Today marks two months since the February 6th earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria. I’ve been finding it difficult to believe that. It feels like just few days ago that I woke up to dozens of messages from people around the world checking in to see if we were safe. It feels like just a few days ago that we filled up vehicles with as many supplies as we could fit, and drove the 12+ hour route to try to help some of those hardest hit and least helped by the quakes. ...

I’ve been pondering generosity a lot lately. There’s a lot going on in the world to make one feel lack. Natural disasters, economic crisis, war, huge accidents resulting in ecological devastation, bank collapses, unemployment threats and spikes due to new unprecedented technologies… And that was just these last 3 months. It can be tempting to become stingy in the face of such situations. If we live in a universe of scarcity, then hoarding and stockpiling feels like the logical thing to do. ...

We all know the rules — don’t cross the line; stay in line; don’t get out of line. Whether it came from our education, our parents, or just the factory-based industrial economies that our cultures have reformed themselves around these last 200 years, we know that to be a good worker (and, maybe, a good person?) means to respect the line. But, the world is changing. And with it changes our relationship with “the line”. ...

I’ve been continuing to put my efforts towards seeing more toilets rolled out to those effected by the February earthquakes. In that process, there has been a surprising amount of managerial work that has needed to be done. First, beyond the obvious stuff of bringing the materials to be able to physically build these toilets into the earthquake zone (which was a project itself), we needed to create a poster with instructions on it so people could learn how to use these toilets safely and effectively. ...

It’s easy for us to get caught up trying to constantly deal with the deluge of problems we face day-to-day, putting out each fire as it arises. There are times where that “always on” mode of dealing with problems is indeed necessary. But it seems to me that the problems we face day-to-day are many times the direct results of different up-stream problems that we don’t always recognize. These are problems that cause other problems. You could call them “meta-problems”. ...