Writings

We have within each of our skulls an inbuilt technology that allows us to take our very thoughts — no matter how simple or complex — and through either rhythmic vibrations of air molecules propagating in waves between our mouths and our recipients’ ears, or through multiple series of lines of chaotic squiggles, dots, and shapes representing those vibrations in visual form, we have the capacity to transmit our very thoughts from our brain to someone else’s brain. ...

“Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. İt is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. İt is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free.” ~ Common Prayer: A Liturgy For Ordinary Radicals ...

My phone’s camera isn’t great at capturing the full beauty of the skies at night. But, they say “The best camera is the one that you have with you.” Here’s a photo of the Aurora Borealis — the Northern Lights — I took this week while traveling the highways of Saskatchewan, Canada!

It’s much better to be in a bad place but working in a good direction, than to be in a good place but heading in a bad direction. Your current situation may feel like the most significant and important thing in the world right now. Much more important, however, is what you choose to do with the moment you’ve been given. Optimizing for forward momentum is almost always more useful than fixating on the difficulties of the moment… or the failures that brought you there in the first place. ...

Sometimes it’s easy to lull ourselves into that comfortable mindset that our day-to-day decisions only impact us — that it doesn’t really matter what we do, because the effects of our choices start and end with us. I think, with rare exception, that’s actually pretty far from the case. Many of choices we make day-to-day have very real impact on others. For examples, in no particular order: Choosing to like and share a piece of spurious content (unverified news claims, convincing misinformation, etc.) might end up steering dozens or hundreds of people’s worldviews further from Truth when your recommendation shows up in their feed. Choosing to bring cloth bags to the grocery store instead of using single-use plastic can play a part of preventing microplastics buildup in others’ bodies, potentially preventing future disease. Choosing to stay up late instead of getting proper rest may result in you being exhausted and missing the opportunity to speak a word of encouragement that might otherwise change somebody’s day/life. Choosing to ride a bike instead of drive your car can help slow damage to our atmosphere, which can help ameliorate a potential future refugee crisis. Choosing to put in the difficult emotional and administrative work of abstaining from culturally accepted but toxic “normals” (Social Media? Gossip? Whichever other socially accepted but harmful addiction of many you want to name), can unlock the capacity in those around you to step into the same freedom when they hear your story. In economics, these otherwise unmeasured second-order side effects are called “externalities”. They’re very real effects, but hard to measure because they’re not immediately visible to us when we look at the direct impacts of an action. ...

“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.” ~ Brandon Sanderson in Oathbringer Been loving this quote I read few weeks ago. I’ve found it can so applicable, both for helping us approach ourselves with grace when we don’t show up the way we need to, and for approaching others who don’t appear to be acting in line with their stated values. There are indeed times when hypocrisy needs to be called out for what it is, because one’s words and one’s deeds are blatantly contrary, actively pointing in opposite directions. If there is no evidence someone wants to rectify a clear hypocrisy in their life, that is one thing. ...

You’re creative. Whether you feel that’s true or not, you have a creative gift that is uniquely you. So, here is a challenge for you: Go, create something, today. Bake something, write something, draw something, design something, build something, record something… and put it out there! There are people who love what you do and want more of what you’ve created in their lives. There are people whose day would be better for them reading, listening to, watching, tasting, using, or simply having something that you created with them in mind. ...

“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” ~ C.S. Lewis in his 1939 sermon, Learning in War-Time

“For myself, I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use to be anything else.” ~ Winston Churchill, 1954

I’m not a big fan of WhatsApp. While it does indeed work well as a messaging app, it also feeds into Facebook/Meta’s technological hegemony, isn’t open source, tracks who you message and what you do on your phone, and does some other creepy stuff that I’m not a fan of. But, WhatsApp is also currently the most popular messaging platform in the world, 1 and a majority of people I contact regularly are only reachable through there. As such, even though I’ve purged the vast majority of Attention Extraction services from my life, I still have kept WhatsApp around (though, I prefer and recommend Signal or Matrix/Element). ...