It takes work to get to a dark night sky.
But once you’re there, you see differently.
You’re living outside the algorithm.
Intuition runs deeper than ego and lasts longer too.
Your life isn’t brittle.
You see people dedicating enormous time to performance systems and losing. It’s mercifully optional.
What matters is knowing who and what to ignore.
The most uncomplicated return: back to the work itself.
(Thank you, Lilian and Julie!)
What's it like to be an adult?
To live in constant paradox. Despair and joy, same room, same sequence of events.
Childhood, adolescence, adulthood—all now. You're every age.
Fear and not-fear often go together.
Loving means losing or the risk of losing. Always has.
Feeling and thinking, which shouldn't be hard but somehow are.
Fully grateful. Fully sad. Fully joyful. Not taking turns—all three.
Feeling scammed and also aware that you can cut corners. You did today.
Your desire to be right and your comfort being wrong. Limited by the normal set of factors. The walls you build inside your own brain.
Being an adult is living inside something that refuses description. Like a wild animal. Try to name it and it bolts deeper into the woods. Like two crayon-colored circles that overlap and coexist.
Dear Anna,
Don’t get lost in smoke and noise.
Come back home.
Outrage is used as a tactic.
Your participation is voluntary.
Be wiser than the smoke and flares.
Calm yourself.
Bring the wise voices from history into your thinking. Elie Wiesel and Marcus Aurelius await.
Get out of the endless “I.”
Get out of main character syndrome.
Don’t get lost in a sea of unconvincing ego claims. If there’s no conversation, if there’s no real discourse, there’s a problem—no matter what side someone is on.
Engagement with the truth means a duty to cut through noise and find signal. Find the signal.
Humility is where you begin.
Love, Anna
