Storytime

I sat down earlier this evening to think a little bit.

I do a lot of reflecting these days - a habit I started (due to a combination of necessity and lack of meaningful alternatives) early in 2019 - but this session was different.

I have been introspective for most of my life, but mostly in bursts or short stints, until 2019. I've written before about what that year entailed for me and what came from it. Until today, though, I've looked at my own story as a sort of thread of continuity - a consistent but sometimes distant or distorted voice of experience across three decades of life.

I've traced the path of that thread many times before, mostly noting the significant turns, snags, tangles, and interesting changes in direction. But until today, I'd never really attempted to look at the larger context of everything around that thread - not merely at the places where I have gone, not even the places I could have gone - but the total setting of everything else that was going on around it all.

A few nights ago I wrote a short summary of major life events that I titled "things I survived." It was just a sentence, maybe two, about each thing that seemed like a serious ordeal, either at the time or in hindsight - the kind of things that would make me viscerally shiver in empathy if someone else mentioned a similar experience.

The list was just over three pages of dense prose when I stopped writing from emotional exhaustion. The final paragraph trailed off with a string of allusions to "lesser" experiences that, if I'd heard someone else mention, would still at least summon a heartfelt wince.

By itself, the exercise seemed interesting, but somehow lacking something. I resolved to never show it to anyone, because it almost seems too made up to be true. After some more consideration, I resolved to never show it to anyone, because - in all honesty - it feels self-aggrandizing, or like fishing for pity, or maybe one of those otherworldly tales where someone just remains unfathomably pure and optimistic in spite of almost caricatured hardships.

In the face of current events, with all the undeniable attention aimed at the sheer inertia of systemic racism, with the inescapable focus on longstanding oppressive cultural, political, and economic norms, and the very real loss of life and perpetuation of suffering in the world, it felt unspeakably trite to share my own list of "stuff some white girl lived through" - despite much of that list being rather horrific in its own right.

This evening, I realized what was missing from that exercise. The list is not important. What is important is that the list is about much more than who I was then, or who I am now.

The story of my life has taken thousands of turns - some larger than others. Some have been for the better. Others have not.

I don't want this to sound like some sort of sermon about how I always wound up making the right decisions and some kind of strength of character guided me back to being a reasonably good person. I don't think that is true. Many of the more intense twists and turns in my story reflect some of my worst decisions and mistakes.

What matters, I think, about this story is that it is not a monologue. It cannot be told with a cast of one character, and it cannot be told authentically without spending generous amounts of stage time with the endless line of people who have, at one time or another, called me on my bullshit.

Say what you will about temperaments and personalities, very few human beings ever truly exist in any meaningful degree of isolation. Quarantines during a pandemic don't count. Perhaps more pointedly for the current moment, imprisonment doesn't meet the criteria for true isolation either: imprisonment (unjust or otherwise) could not occur if there was nobody to put people into prison in the first place.

Like it or not, we cannot escape the fact that our lives are interconnected. In perhaps more flippant terms, everybody has parents, at a very minimum.

I've wondered a lot, since April of 2019, about what it would ultimately look like to tell "my story." After tonight, I don't think I should - at least, not like that.

But I would very much like to tell a story - one in which I have had a part, to be sure, and also one with so many more parts than I could ever properly capture on the page.

My life is riddled with interventions and interactions, major and minor alike, that served more to steer the "thread" of my experience than anything I ever could have done on my own - elementary school teachers, friends, colleagues, writers, thinkers, musicians, others dealing with similar experiences in their own lives...

I feel, now, that what I really want to do with this project is to help people find ways to discover alignment - the shifts and steering that change our individual courses, whether that means from day or day, or across our entire lives.

I have sensed, on several noteworthy occasions in my life, a sort of feeling in the air of uncertainty, of tension, of stagnation, of perhaps even hopelessness. Sometimes those moments give way to collapses, and sometimes they are revealed - in hindsight - to be the gathering of immense energy that just needs somewhere to go.

That ambiance has, for me, usually been contained to a relatively small set of circumstances. What I've felt this past week seems to literally touch the entire world.

Life, for each of us, is going somewhere. We may like the direction, or we may not. We may see good possibilities, or we may feel trapped. But one thing I can say for certain: in any group of people, no matter how big or how small, when people begin to move in the same direction, things get interesting.

Find people who are clearly moving in a direction that seems better. Move with them, even if it is slow or hard or seems pointless. If you can, point others to that alignment, that activity. Give the energy a direction.

The momentum builds, and perhaps far more quickly than any of us ever really expect - even people like me, who have seen this pattern many times, and even been a part of directing that momentum before. Nothing is ever quite as surprising as the sheer power of people pushing in the same direction.


So let's all go somewhere lovely.

Together.

Choose Your Fuel Wisely

I'm not going to link the news. If you aren't already seeing it, I want it to be your choice how much to engage with it.

But regardless of your views on what is going on right now - especially in the U.S. - and regardless of your choices in how you react and respond, I think there are some things I want everyone to hear.

What we do, in the next days, weeks, and years, will define the course of history. And that means what every single one of us does, or does not do.

We are seeing unprecedented awareness of the broken, unjust, and corrupt nature of the world we live in. It is not new, and it is not a secret. If the past week has felt like a surprising discovery to you, please take a moment to understand that many people in the world have never had the illusion that things were OK.

People have known about the injustice, the corruption, the bigotry, the hatred, the greed, the bias - and, for the most part, primarily those directly affected have been paying attention. Because they have never had a choice to ignore it.

Many of us have been able - either through deliberate turning away, or simply the "privilege" of busy lives - to not see the totality of the problems the world faces before. This opportunity will be increasingly rare in the time ahead. We no longer can ignore what the world is doing to other people who are "not us." And we must not ignore it.

But before we act, before we choose our responses, I believe it is vital that each and every one of us take time to choose our fuel wisely.

"You Get Out What You Put In"

There are aphorisms, wise sayings, quips, quotes, legends, stories - any myriad number of ways in which this wisdom has followed all of human history. The basic idea is simple to say, but perhaps immensely difficult to fully appreciate: when we act in violence, aggression, hatred, or fear, we create a space for things to continue to be violent, to continue to spark aggression, to continue to breed hatred - and more people will, as a result, live in fear.

Make no mistake, some things must change in this world. The process of change might be difficult and unpleasant - but we must, at every opportunity, strive to undergo that change wisely. Carefully. Calmly.

We know that certain intense emotions - anger, fear, being threatened, and so on - actually starve the brain's ability to think clearly and wisely. "Take deep breaths and count to 10" is good advice for a reason. "Step away, cool off, and come back to the discussion later" is good advice for a reason.

I will not ask anyone - especially if you are affected by the utter horror the world inflicts on people every day - to not be angry. I will not ask you to not be afraid. I will not ask you to turn away from demanding that things be made better.

I will, however, ask you to carefully consider the larger picture at work in these sorts of changes.

Power Vacuum

Suppose, for a moment, that the institutions, behaviors, and maybe even specific individuals responsible for "all this" (whatever your choice of "all this" might be) were removed from the equation.

What if it all just went away? What if the problems were forced to stop?

Something else will take their place. There will be a vacuum to fill, and make no mistake, it will be filled.

The history of every single human conflict, be it an argument or a war, can attest to the reality that the aftermath will only be as good as the "something" that steps into the void.

You can have a yelling match with a friend, and make up, and a few weeks later all is well; why is this? Because the good aspects of that friendship are already strong enough to grow over the gap created by the conflict.

Personal feuds, even national or cultural wars have perpetuated for generations or even centuries in human history, because there was insufficient goodness to grow new peace around.

Conflict, unfortunately, may not be avoidable. I'm not asking anyone to be conflict-averse. But all of us - no matter where we stand - can choose to strengthen the goodness that we all wish to see fill the void that we're starting to see opening up before us as a species.

Many awful things need to go away from our world. That removal may be ugly and unpleasant; I certainly hope it will not be, but I am not foolish enough to believe that it will be a smooth road. These things must be excised. But what will replace them?

Change, But Change Carefully

What we practice gets stronger.

What grows always grows outwards from that which is already alive.

We all have different roles to play in our lives; it is not for me to tell you what to do. But I will implore you to be careful what you allow to grow, in whatever areas of life that you can access.

If we sit only in anger, fear, or despair, those will be the things we practice. Those will color everything we feel, and ultimately, what we do (or choose not to do). The more people who allow those things to grow, the more we feed the very problems we want to fix.

Practice other responses - caring, compassion, support, encouragement, solidarity.

If you are angry, good. The world is full of awful, cruel things.

If you are fearful for the future, good. Turmoil is here, whether we like it or not, and the future is absolutely uncertain.

If you want to act, good. Action will be needed, desperately, and lots of it.

But please, do not stop there.

Refine the anger into focus - what really needs to be changed? What needs to be different? What is working that we can trust and rely on, so that we can be effective in that process of change?

Allow the uncertainty to give way to caution without paralysis - we must be wary of the temptation to let things "go back to normal" or to "blow over." Normalcy is the polite name of game over, we lost. If it "blows over," maybe some of us are "ok again", but the actual victims of the world's illnesses will only pay the price more dearly.

If your need to act feels uncontainable, there is one act of radical rebellion that is needed more than all others right now:

Reach out and love someone. Especially if they do not look like the kind of person you would normally reach for.

Meta-Tangles

There are, periodically, moments in my life where I feel an uncontainable surplus of words - a sort of incessant need to say things. It's taken a lot of life experience (and more than a few "well now I feel silly" moments) to realize that this is generally a sign that I need to write.

Most of the things I feel I have to say are smallish in magnitude: a quick journal entry, a blog post, maybe a several-hour conversation with a dear friend. Lately, though, the journal entries, the conversations, all the quiet contemplation... it just seems to suggest that there is even more I need to say than usual.

This will be the first attempt of mine at starting to distill a larger cloud of ideas that has been forming for many, many years. Most of these ideas are not my own, and very few are new. The thing about ideas - especially in large groups - is that with enough sheer quantity of stuff to think about, it can often be the case that previously-undetected patterns become startlingly clear.

I'm not sure, yet, if that is what has happened for me, but it sure feels that way.

Mathematics

This essay is going to lean a little heavier on the mathematics than usual. I've spent a lot of time thinking about things in rigorous, logical, and analytical terms. These are my strongest "mental muscles" as it were.

I hope that isn't a deterrent, but I certainly understand if what follows ends up being obtuse or opaque. However, I want to express it this way first, so that eventually I can work to say these things in perhaps a more comprehensible way.

After all, to shamelessly mangle one of my favorite quotes, "nobody sits by the shore at sunset to watch the abstract geometry frolicking on the lake."

There is so much more to life, to the way we experience existence, than mathematical or scientific approaches can possibly describe. But this is the best set of expressions I have available for what I want to say, and perhaps this paves the way to richer words down the line.

Stability

I have been fascinated for many years by a concept called metastability. I learned of it while reading about chaos mechanics (a deeply important field it its own right) but it turns out - much like fractal mathematics - to appear in virtually everything in the known world.

In very simplistic terms, metastability occurs when you have a balance that is not perfectly at one extreme or another, and yet it is not necessarily motionless. The term "stable" in English tends to carry a connotation of the immovable, of solidity, of certainty.

But there is a very real phenomena called dynamic equilibrium - the ability of something to stay balanced even while constantly moving. One of the most familiar and immediately recognizable examples of this is riding a bicycle.

If you put a bicycle upright on its wheels and let go, it is extremely hard to keep it from falling over. It is not stable. Of course there are some truly impressive feats of static balance performed by people around the world (such as balancing stones) which rely on careful and precise arrangement of things to maintain balance without movement.

But of course people do also ride bicycles (and unicycles!) which means that there is a way to keep a balance while moving.

One of the easiest examples of dynamic equilibrium to overlook is simply standing on two legs. This is, believe it or not, a feat unto itself even on solid ground. Human anatomy is phenomenally complex and requires literal constant, tiny adjustments of dozens of muscles, ligaments, joints, and bones just to stay standing upright. We are not still - we simply have been trained to ignore our bodies making those subtle movements.

This formed, I think, a crucial sort of realization for me; dynamic equilibrium is all around us, all the time, and yet we are trained (more or less accidentally) not to see it.

A key element of chaos mechanics is the idea that any set of moving or changing things can find multiple different equilibria. For instance, consider a pencil. If it is well made, you can balance it on the tip, but that is not a very reliable balance - a tiny breeze will disrupt it. A much more reliable balance is to leave the pencil lying flat on a surface. It takes much more effort (comparatively) to disrupt a pencil that is simply flat on a table. So even this trivial object has multiple ways to balance - some more precarious than others.

I remember being fascinated by dynamic balancing toys when I was a kid - the egg-shaped dolls, the plastic birds that could somehow remain balanced on the tip of their beaks even when you poked them from different angles. There is far more to learn from these toys than I would have imagined.

Constancy and Change

Another fascination of mine is the field of mathematics typically known today as "calculus." More specifically, I've long been enthralled with the idea of studying the behavior of infinite combinations of infinitely tiny changes.

For a while, it seemed to me like the simultaneous inventions of Leibniz and Newton held so many resolutions to so many paradoxes. Zeno of Elea was finally given a proper answer. Calculus gives us the tools to understand how change works.

And yet, at this point in my life, I wonder how much wisdom we have sacrificed by deeming math to be the answer to those questions. Certainly, there is tremendous elegance and even power in the mathematics. The fundamental theorems of calculus are beautiful in a soul-stirring way to me. The technological and scientific brilliance and accomplishments unleashed by that mathematics are certainly testament to its effectiveness.

So why is it that, even with centuries of expertise on studying change, the world still seems so desperately unchanged?

The more things change, the more they stay the same. There is nothing new under the sun. All things old are new again. The only constant is change. You will never stand by the bank of the same river twice. Pick an era - someone had something deep to say about this fact.

The twenty-first century reaction to this idea is strange to me. We must be better than this, now. We have learned too much to think there is value in those silly, antiquated ideas. Life isn't all about cycles and repeating patterns, we're too powerful, us humans, to be imprisoned by that nonsense anymore. We don't need anything but intellectual prowess to live our best lives.

Ten years ago I would not have imagined myself disagreeing with that attitude. I was a staunch believer in objective, rational, rigorous study of the world. People's brains would solve everything, given enough time.

But first I discovered the work of Benoit Mandelbrot; and then I discovered the work of Kurt Gödel.

Fractals and Paradoxes

My journey into the mathematics and logic of these two thinkers started with the work of a genuinely phenomenal author, Douglas Hofstadter. But it was not the mathematics that I think captured me so fully - it was his connection between the rigorous thought and the undeniable artistry of J.S. Bach.

For years I found Hofstadter's slowly-evolving thesis compelling. It is certainly poignant and almost perfect for me - a lifelong nerd with fascinations in music, mathematics, logic, analogy, and computing. I devoured his writings whenever I could.

And yet, after endless contemplation of his work, and following up on half a dozen other brilliant thinkers via his various bibliographies, I came up empty. Something did not quite fit yet. I saw in his work - and that of many others - a sort of decades-long flailing, a late-career despair and exhaustion that reminded me of philosophers from many other approaches to thinking about life. Nobody found answers they were completely happy with. Nobody ever solved "everything." A few lucky souls found contentment in chasing new questions, revising old answers, pursuing thought as far as they could.

I walked away, time and again, with an uncomfortable question about it all. The question was simple, and the answer even simpler - except I'd already decided that I didn't like the answer, so I stopped asking the question:

"What if we can't simply think our way to solving everything?"

Problem Solving With Intuition

Part of what I do for my career involves working with very sophisticated and often unintuitive computing systems. Thinking about these things is, ostensibly, a vital part of the job.

I learned early on, however, that "thinking" is actually not a very good way to create software. Even now this feels like a slightly heretical thing to say (snark about the quality of computer software notwithstanding) but I think I finally have a way to articulate the intuition that I started gathering even as I dabbled with programming at home as a school child.

What most people would describe as the English word "thinking" involves a ponderous amount of words. Many people describe thinking in images, or sounds, or even emotions; and yet, for the sake of communicating with others, we all eventually need to turn out thoughts into words on some level.

I remember learning about mathematicians who made massive discoveries because they did not follow the rules. Young Mandelbrot was certainly famous for not obeying the processes by which most students were expected to answer exam questions, and yet he scored brilliantly and went on to pioneer some of the most important mathematics of human history. The entire idea of non-Euclidean geometry (which almost immediately revolutionized cartography, and eventually made it possible to derive Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, along with an endless list of other revelations) came about because someone dared to break the rules.

Even calculus was a testament to this: the rules of algebraic mathematics could not answer certain questions. They were considered deep mysteries that the learned experts of the age despaired of ever answering. Today, high school students solve them routinely as part of their course work, often without ever knowing how terrifying those questions were a few hundred years ago.

The common thread is actually very well documented and any good math teacher will explain it as part of the history of the field: every revolution of thought, in mathematics, has come about because someone changed the rules.

What is less-often discussed is how people found the inspiration for how to change the rules to begin with. It is not haphazard, it is not random. There is something that people are capable of that provides an insight - an intuition, perhaps - that on those lucky occasions gives someone the right set of tweaks to make, and a new discovery happens.

Certainly it is possible to just slap together arbitrary sets of made-up rules and see if they work; most often, they do not. Ask anyone who has constructed a nontrivial system of axiomatic logic. It is frustratingly easy to end up with nonsense. Also, thank Gödel for finally revealing that it simply isn't possible to make a logical system of any significant level of interest that does not eventually give way to either nonsense or simply leaves some questions permanently unsolvable.

At some point, trying to understand things through systems of rigorous, rule-based thought simply cannot be enough.

It is a great (and tragic) irony, to me, that mathematics - arguably the most pure distillation of thinking as a practice - has conclusively proven its own inability to completely answer its own questions and yet people widely remain convinced that thinking will solve everything.

If so many great advancements in thinking originate in something closer to intuition or imagination, why do we prize the thinking so highly, at a time when our problems feel unsolvable?

My job, as I mentioned, often includes things that could rightfully be called "unintuitive" - and yet I think this is actually a mistruth.

Distributed network systems, parallel (or concurrent) computer programs, and realtime systems have a very strange set of behaviors if you train your intuitions with a certain type of thought and form certain expectations.

What I have discovered, over two decades in the field, is that it is possible to have an intuition that perfectly understands these systems. As a younger programmer, I often felt amazed and profoundly awed at people who could look at what seemed like an intractable problem and simply know what was wrong as if by magic.

The more time I spend in the field, the more I realize that I have developed that magic - because, now, much of my job involves teaching other people the things that I can simply intuit about software on account of having been immersed in it for so long.

How did she know that? is a common question I overhear at work. These are not unintelligent people. Many have been programmers for nearly as long as I have, and some have far more time in the field than I do. All are excellent thinkers in their own right. And yet I can often join in with solving a challenge and land on an answer almost immediately; often the answer I start with is not a good one, but after a couple of (what must seem like random) attempts, it inevitably gets people un-stuck.

It's an evolved form of a pattern I first noticed a long time ago, one that almost anyone who does a lot of thinking can recognize: if your thinking is getting nowhere, take a break. Do something else.

There is something of a trope in math and software problem-solving: sleep on it. More people solve fascinatingly complex problems overnight than you might believe.

Call it the power of the subconscious, or the refreshing effect of relaxing and coming back with a fresh mind; either way, anyone who has struggled on hard thought-problems knows the experience of getting smarter by not thinking.

Even my first teacher of the electric bass guitar was fond of reminding me to not play for a few days, every now and then - and, much to my confusion at the time (and delight now), I often come back to the instrument after a few days of not playing and find myself a better musician for it.

The World

It's no secret the world has problems: inequality, injustice, violence, hate, failing systems of economy and government, prejudice, ignorance, sickness, climate destruction.

Many people spend a lot of time thinking about how to solve these things. And, in some areas, there is a lot of success. The past century has seen serious advancements in our global recognition of human rights. We have a scary long way to go on that front, but we are moving forward. For all the progress and improvement, though, it feels like other things have gotten worse - certainly the climate of the planet is not trending towards "better" over the past century. Economic and governmental problems are thrown into sharp and terrifying clarity by events like the the current global pandemic.

Worse, it seems like every time we try to solve one problem, some other issue takes its place.

This is not just a perception. It is real. I believe that the reason for it is simple to express but intensely difficult to understand... if one is trying to think about it.

In Buddhist traditions, it is often said that everything is interconnected. Up cannot exist without down. Nothing is isolated. Theoretical quantum mechanics tells us the same thing: a tiny change here can affect something seemingly unrelated in a distant galaxy. Chaos mathematics has the exact same lesson in its own words, distilled into the popular "Butterfly Effect" idea.

All the problems we see around us - those I have named, those I have not, those which I personally am unaware of - are interconnected.

In the language of the mathematics, the problems we see form a metastable dynamic equilibrium. Pull on one thread, and you don't unravel the knot - you simply create room for a different thread to join the tangled mess. It may seem to change, to get better, to get worse again, to evolve; but the core problems are not gone.

Politics is maddeningly cyclical in the United States: every few years we see a pendulum-swing of partisan nonsense, each side struggling to undo the efforts of the other. Anyone who looks at complex systems recognizes the trends here over the past century: this is a system that is thrashing, whose pendulum is increasingly erratic and wild. It is a system that any engineer would recognize as on the edge of complete overload and breakdown.

But it does not break - it seems bizarrely resistant to change. Nearly 100 years after the advent of women's suffrage in this nation, we still struggle to be permitted the legal right to reproductive health-care. After decades of overt civil rights struggle and some unquestionable improvements in those areas, we still see racism and bigotry literally embodied in the highest offices of the country. Why does this not change?

Put simply, the political system is not in isolation. It cannot be separated from economic power. It cannot be separated from cultural inertia. It cannot be separated from the collective unspoken experience of what technology has done to our lives - both the good and the bad.

More importantly, despite the deeply-ingrained nationalist attitudes of many influencing people in this country, it cannot be separated from the situation of the rest of the world. Many of the most catalyzing and profound changes in the way life unfolds in the US have been the result (directly or indirectly) of things happening on the rest of the planet.

Any one single problem we see can probably be solved in isolation, given enough thought and effort. But we do not have that luxury. Our problems are not in isolation, our problems are interconnected, and they reinforce each other.

At this moment, it may be tempting to feel a sense of hopelessness, a sense that we can't possibly think our way out of this.

I believe that conclusion, as painful as it is, to be correct. But it is not the whole story.

Slow Down and Live

People have lamented for decades the way technology has affected the "pace of life." We all feel busy, rushed, constantly in a hurry, always need to do something. Of course, culturally this is reinforced by dismissing this attitude as that of "Luddites" - don't fight the pace of change, stop living in the past, forget that old-fashioned silly stuff.

It should give us pause that the youngest generation, who have never experienced that "old fashioned" life first-hand, tend to be the most vocal opponents of the frenzied need to Do Things - and the most disillusioned by the incessant expectation to have an education, a career, a family, a retirement. They have never known any other way of life and they still recognize, on some level, that it doesn't work and cannot possibly work. Anyone fortunate enough to remember the world before the Internet - or, even rarer, life pre-Internet with no TV in the house - would do well to take notice of this. We're all telling each other to do more; the emperor is not the one with no clothes. We are all taught to compliment each other's figurative wardrobes to distract from the reality that we're all roaming around naked. The world has created a set of patterns that make it feel impossible to escape - and layered on top of this, we're taught to believe that we should not want to escape.

For most of us, trying to "do nothing" is an instant recipe for unrest. It feels wrong, feels bad, feels lazy. Others are quick to reinforce this emotional response: I don't want to pick up your slack. For me, I spent years trying to be more efficient. Do more with less. Work smarter, not harder. A perfect mantra to ensnare a computer engineer.

And it snared me - but it didn't work. I never could do "enough."

What has finally gotten me to begin to relax, to feel like I am not simply "doing enough" but in fact doing phenomenally well, has been slowing down.

It is incredibly tough. Nothing about the world I live in suggests that this is OK to do. So I started out by undermining the my system of internalized stigma against laziness using the tools of accomplishment as a scalpel.

I set myself a goal of spending at least an hour doing something "not productive" every single day: watch a show, read a fiction book, awkwardly try to learn to juggle, anything. If it did not smell like productivity, I wanted to do one hour of it a day. At first I did not even try to do a solid hour: ten minutes here, five minutes there. Add up to an hour and I can reward myself with something at the end of the day. Any link of the "dopamine hit" to inactivity would work.

It didn't take long to get hooked. Watching short videos gave way to longer shows, then movies. Reading a few pages turned into "just one more chapter." Even playing games became a way to undermine the need to do things: "how long can I take just messing around instead of finishing this part of the story/this level/etc.?" I no longer tried to play games to finish them or get "achievements" - I started playing just to time how long I could spend not playing by the rules but still having fun.

Within a week or two, I no longer felt bad about not being productive. More tellingly, I actually got more done - as corroborated by my long habit of journaling and writing down lists of things I have done every day, as well as observations from my colleagues at work.

And then the next phase: spend ten seconds, eyes closed, just staying still. Once a day, maybe twice. It was also intensely hard at first. Ten seconds of silence and motionlessness was almost impossible - but after a couple of days, I couldn't resist the urge to get better. The need to "do things" transformed into a need to break a personal record.

Sit still for one minute. Two minutes. Five minutes. Just stare out into the yard and watch the sunlight in the trees for one minute. Two minutes. Five minutes.

Listen to music and do nothing. Ten minutes. One album. Build on it.

Yesterday I fell asleep, curled up in my beanbag chair, listening to music. I did nothing meaningful, productive, or "significant" in the eyes of the world for nearly two hours. And I want more.

Relinquishing the urge to do has started to create room, in me, for an utterly unexpected but massively welcome change in motivation. It isn't a problem to spend two minutes "doing nothing" - so now I can spend two minutes simply drinking a glass of water. Two minutes "doing nothing" while also trimming my nails. The time isn't relevant as much anymore, so I can use that time more richly.

I still have difficulty not falling into old habits, but tiny slices of time are manageable, and I can already see the spans getting longer and longer as I practice. The shift is hard to describe, but unmistakable: from the outside, I have not stopped doing things, but from my own perspective, I have started living.

When I get carried away by the need to solve things, to think, to accomplish, I get tired faster. I get cranky. I get bored. I get upset by the state of the world.

But somehow, when I slow down and can manage - even if it is just a few times a day - to spend a minute or five doing "nothing", or just pouring my limited and flighty attention into a single activity for as long as I can... I do more, and I enjoy what I do. I have better ideas, clearer insights, more energy, and more of a sense that things can change, somehow. I sat down early this morning to spend five minutes recording some bullet-point notes in preparation for writing this entry, and the rest just spilled out as if by sheer momentum; two hours later, I'm ready to post a completed set of thoughts.

We can solve the inter-tangled mess of dynamic equilibria that underlie the problems around us, no matter how big, how small, or how knotted together they may be. We won't fix them with thinking.

We'll fix them by living.

Slow down, and live. Create the space for something different to happen. The most radical act of self-care we can perform, in the world as we occupy it right now, is to be alive - especially if we've been told we're not doing anything in the process.

Mosaic

I turned 34 years old yesterday.

As may be obvious from the contents of this site, introspection (often leading to the public transcription of those thoughts) is a deep part of who I am and how I live. A birthday - especially the first birthday I have ever actually voluntarily observed (let alone celebrated) - is a fantastic occasion for introspection.

On many levels, I am ridiculously fortunate. I have friends, an astoundingly and unexpectedly supportive family, an amazing career, and considerable financial security to go along with a heaping pile of assorted privilege.

In the waning hours of this birthday, though, something finally broke free - a sort of lingering half-realization that has tried to breach the surface many times before, but only now has actually become something that I cannot avoid any longer.

To really explain it, I need to talk about some things plainly. I must stress that I am keenly aware of how this may sound, and that is in fact why I have to say it. My own fear of being perceived as arrogant, prideful, or even self-assured has long prevented me from owning this in the way I need to now.


In virtually every connection I have with someone (or within a community) that lasts more than a trivial amount of time, I end up trying to take care of people. More importantly, the longer I interact with anyone - or any set of people - the more I tend to become a strong source of support for them.

The friends I have are, to a soul, stunningly wonderful human beings. From the light but genuine acquaintances in various online communities, to the childhood friend who still stays up late into the night talking on the phone with me about all manner of random nonsense; from the internet-equivalent of long-term penpals to the colleagues who have become close traveling companions in life.

There is not a single person I'd consider a friend of mine who I have not, at some point, tried to help in some relevant (and often significant) way. I have helped them all with money, with life advice, with career guidance, with time and physical labor, with arranging connections to other people when I cannot personally provide what is needed.

I've done the same for my family, even in years past when we barely interacted at all. Even on the brink of total estrangement.

My job is something I try to keep fairly contained, for a number of reasons, so I will be slightly vague on this point - but it is no exception to this pattern. I am constantly looked to for advice, for key decisions, for technical expertise, for managerial expertise, for snap judgments in the middle of urgent situations, and for long-term strategy that affects hundreds of people and their own jobs and lives.

On any given week I will be involved in every single one of those areas of work, and any one of them is demanding enough in isolation. The mental gymnastics needed to handle that broad of a range of skills - especially to fluidly move between years-long planning and down-to-the-moment incident response - are nothing short of exhausting; and I am, unfortunately, a consummate perfectionist. Screwing up is not an option I often permit myself.

I have, at several points in my adult life, been completely broke - zero money, overdue bills, cancelled utilities, foreclosure and eviction threats. That's all a long ways behind me now, and I am constantly on the lookout for ways to help people who are not as materially fortunate as I am. Budgeting techniques and habits I once cultivated out of harsh necessity are now tools I use to determine how much I can give away.

Like I said, this is not something I usually would say so plainly. Nor is it something I would ever spell out all in one place. I am not the kind of person who likes to talk about my positive attributes, my success, or my patterns of behavior in the realm of trying to help people.

I have long insisted (privately to myself, of course) that I would prefer to simply do the things I find important, and let everyone else reach the conclusion on their own that I must, in fact, find it important to help when I can. I still stand by that.

The advantage I have gained from thirty-four years of life experience is the realization that I have left enough data in the world now that nobody is going to read this and think I'm making shit up.

This is me.

There is an old wisdom about buildings on fire and sinking ships: until you have found yourself in a situation like that, you never really know how you will respond. For many people, it will never be more than an impossible thought exercise.

I have neither been through a fire nor on a failing boat, but I've been through enough analogous disasters to know exactly how I would respond. I'd go back for whoever was left - because that is what I always do.

I doubt that part of me will ever change. I know I wouldn't want it to change anyways. But through all of that, there is a single consistent thread of heartache. Most people see only small subsets of who I am and what I do. My friends outside of work are generally not aware of the kinds of things I face on the job - sometimes that's because they aren't interested in the technology side of things, but even for those who are, the realities of confidentiality make it impossible to really be specific in the first place. And because of the nature of my role, there is a necessary distance between my colleagues and my personal life.

Even outside of that, I have very distinct pockets of community: groups around mutual interests, or common experiences, or just accidents of history where we stayed in touch afterwards. There are overlaps between many of those circles, which is certainly a nice way to feel interconnected - and yet it also highlights a crucial flaw in how I have approached community so far in my life.

Compartmentalization is a very powerful defensive response to certain forms of trauma and stress in life: separate the damage until it is safe to try and heal it. This happens on both a physical and mental level for wounds of all kinds. The body is remarkably adept at isolating damage, allowing us to easily sustain certain kinds of injury until they can be treated properly. In fact, sometimes the natural protective behavior of our bodies is so effective it can actually hide the existence of any form of damage at all.

The mind and heart are much the same. Trauma care providers have long understood that sometimes the worst stuff has to be buried for a while until it is safe to address it. Often, that requires distance from the bad circumstances, as well as time to personally grow stronger.

Much like repeated bodily injury produces excessive scar tissue, excessive emotional trauma inevitably produces compartmentalization habits in other, non-problematic areas of life. Separating things, keeping them in safe little containers and never letting them mix... it's a habit that, on a deeply intuitive level, we know works for protection and preservation. So it becomes something we simply do all the time.

Problem is, after a while, nobody gets to see a person anymore. All they get to see is carefully selected masks, fragmented subsets of who we really are.

That's the situation I find myself in now. I learned as a child to present myself differently in different circumstances: a small white kid in Asia needs to behave in one way. A small white kid coming back to middle school in the suburban United States needs to stop speaking foreign languages and act a different way. A nerd with a passion for computers and video games needed one operating mode around friends in high school, and a different and more guarded demeanor around everyone else who used those interests as fodder for what frankly can only be described as abuse.

Even now, the mental switch is a strong and well-practiced habit. We have been working from home for a few weeks, which has made the contrast in my behavior incredibly hard to miss. I can walk away from my home-office desk and within seconds be acting like a completely different person. All the professional context just melts away. Being able to "turn off work" is incredibly important as a skill when "work" is in the same room as the rest of your life.

For a long time I didn't even bother trying to contemplate this kind of pattern in my life. Even recently, it has been hard to think of it as anything besides a useful trick. But for all the temporary protection it may have offered in the past, it's time for those compartments to go away.

Whenever I am only a subset of myself, regardless of the circumstances or environment, I am - by definition - losing something. And it is abundantly clear, now, that often the things I am not accessing are things that would be incredibly useful in situations where I typically do not allow them to be present.

I think it is telling that I am tempted to express this in terms of how I can better help other people. But that's the wrong direction. In truth, that's exactly what I need to not do right now.

I know I'd go back into the building, fire be damned, and pull people out. I've known that for a very long time. What I have only recently begun to realize is that, in many ways, I'm the one stuck in the burning building. If I could get out, by myself, I would have. The fact that I am still here leads to one inevitable and scary conclusion.

I need help - far more of it, and far more often, than I suspect anyone could ever know.

Being only a portion of myself means that I can control how much fallibility and fragility people see in me. Showing a subset of who I am is - and always has been - a way to hide weaknesses and vulnerability.

Three decades of habits, developed in response to often violently-learned lessons, will not go away overnight. But it has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is right here, right now.

The art form of mosaic is something I know almost nothing about, save for one crucial aspect of how it is practiced. A masterwork of mosaic is a larger perspective composed of thousands of tiny pieces. If you look very closely at individual pieces, you may see lovely stonework, ceramic, metal - any number of exquisite building blocks. Glance the tiniest bit in any direction, and you see breakage, the lines and gaps that distance the blocks. From inches away, a mosaic can be an incomprehensible or even heart-rending jumble of shattered beauty. To really know what the piece is about, you have to see the whole thing.

It is time to stop showing only the polished, cut, and crafted pieces. It is time to stop guiding the eye away from the gaps and missing, unfinished patches.

This is me. All of me.

Viral Hope

It's currently just after noon on a Saturday, but I have barely left the house in any meaningful sense in over two weeks. My area is currently facing severe restrictions on movement and daily life due to the global pandemic situation, and I've been fortunate enough to have a head-start on the physical isolation aspects because my employer was proactive and cautious even ahead of the (admirably responsive) local government.

I also have experience with life in less-than-convenient circumstances. Going weeks between opportunities to obtain groceries or supplies is not unfamiliar to me. It's been many years since I needed to draw on these skills, but after a little bit of dusting-off, they're still sharp and effective.

So I have avoided the panic buying sprees, the crowds, the unrest. It's brutally hard, as an extrovert, to not be able to see people right now, but video chats and phone calls help immensely.

I recognize both the financial and life-history privileges that make it possible for me to sit here, in the midst of an urban area being essentially locked down, and feel optimistic. I also recognize that optimism is inaccessible for most people right now. Hell, treading water feels out of reach for many.

So here's what I want to do: I want you to see what I see.

Human Interaction

The depth, reach, sincerity, and responsiveness of human compassion in the past few weeks has been breathtaking. You won't see news segments that really capture it. You won't read about it in articles. Because people are too busy being out there making a difference. And besides, hope doesn't sell advertisements.

Physical isolation does not need to imply social separation. If anything, this is the time for as many of us as possible to lean on the technology we have access to and benefit from, and make our social connections as deep, rich, and extensive as we possibly can.

I have my toes in a number of different online communities, and through each of them, I see a steady stream of people rallying to action. We may not be able to gather in large numbers, but we cannot be stopped from talking. And the conversations are fascinating.

Support

There are many kinds of response necessary to endure a crisis. All of us will need emotional and social support, as much as we can get, in the coming months. Now is the time to be cultivating those relationships in any ways we can.

But support is not enough. There must also be perspective. Support can keep a group of people alive and managing - and it can last a long time, through incredible strain, if the relationships are strong. Eventually, though, hope begins to dwindle, energy is exhausted, and support is no longer enough. It may be days, or it may be years, but support cannot sustain hope indefinitely.

Perspective is what allows people to see the possibility of the crisis ending. If nobody thinks we're going to make it, we end up in despair: the belief that action is not worth attempting. Perspective allows those who see the possibility of hope to encourage those who do not. This is a crucial fuel for support.

Even that, though, is not sufficient. Perspective without factual backing becomes false hope. False hope quickly turns to poison and undermines support. Cheerily looking for the bright side, when the positive outcomes continually do not occur, is a recipe for quickly losing credibility in a dark time.

So perspective must latch on to real positive events. Hard data. Facts. This thing happened and it was good.

Because of this, we all need to take a part in reinforcing perspective. Signal boost and relay every ounce of positivity you can muster. It may be huge or it may be a funny picture or it may just be talking about watching birds through your window. Talk (or think) about something good as frequently as you can. If you cannot, find someone who can support you and offer perspective.

Action

Even positivity will run out eventually. The crisis does not solve itself. Someone has to act. This is where trust becomes an essential question.

In modern life - for the people who are most likely to be able to read these words - we trust the wrong things (and people) far too much.

We trusted the infrastructure of the world to keep people safe and healthy. It has failed us.

We trust governments and law enforcement to solve the problem. In many ways, they are doing heroic amounts of good. In others, we are at a critical juncture. Not that long ago, it was popular to talk about anti-fascism and the importance of stemming the tide of repressive authoritarianism. Many used to talk about being in Germany in the 1920's and what they would do.

I had family in Germany in the 1920's. Some became fascists. Others became resistance fighters.

This is no longer a thought experiment. Police-enforced lockdowns are already reality in many places and that will only continue as the efforts to curtail the pandemic ramp up.

You are not in 1920's Germany, but you are on Earth in 2020. Make your choices, and take your actions.

There is no such thing as too small of an action. If all you do is read this, agree that the world needs help, and talk about it in your own way in your own social circles, you are taking action. That action will add up.

But there is so much more that can be done. If you are able, I encourage you to do what you can. If you are not, you are still valuable, you are still important, and you are still loved. We will fight for you - who need it most.

Systems

I want to shift gears for a moment and talk about social, economic, and political systems.

I am a computer engineer. I work on some highly advanced software technology and among some truly brilliant programmers, network architects, and tech leaders. I have been unstoppably curious and mischievous my entire life, and I work on a product that is a mildly appealing target for information-security attacks.

If there is one thing I know from that experience, it is this: every system can be broken. Most systems, especially complex ones, contain the very keys to destroying themselves. (Fascinating side note: formal logic itself contains the tools to dismantle the idea that logic can be used to explain/understand most of reality. Research the work of Kurt Gödel and the "incompleteness theorems" for more.)

Societies are often thought of as systems. So are economies and governments.

Given sufficient stressors, all systems break. This is an inescapable truth of life.

When a system breaks, the natural response is to replace it. Strengthening a failing system can suffice for many things, but in a global crisis, we cannot make the systems strong enough fast enough. Things are already breaking down - jobs are at risk, livelihoods are in danger. The economy of the planet is taking a serious beating and the political responses are verging on dictatorial already.

So how am I sitting here being optimistic?

There are two kinds of approaches to replacing a failing system: we can try something that is basically equivalent but a little better ("upgrading") and then there is revolution.

Humanity is not unfamiliar with revolutions. We see them frequently in technology and culture these days. Not so long ago, a revolution was something that happened every few lifetimes. Now they happen every few years.

We are on the cusp of a revolution - not necessarily a violent, dark, unpleasant one. A hopeful one. Here's what I see.

Assumptions

We've all been given a tremendous gift: the opportunity to question our assumptions en masse. All of us, at once, are facing the same kinds of questions: how does the world work when we cannot leave our homes as much as we are used to? How do we take care of each other in this kind of situation? How do we deal with the dreadful projections that this mess might last over a year before it gets better?

The assumptions here are interesting in their own right.

The first question assumes that leaving our homes, or being in large groups, is vital to life. Is that really true? It may be vital to a certain way of life, but that way of life is (at least temporarily) not an option. Life can, in fact, be rich and enjoyable and worth living even with these restrictions.

The next question assumes that we can only use the existing means of social interaction (minus physical gathering) to offer care to each other. But since people can invent new things, find new ways to thrive socially with this strange new constraint, is it really useful at all to assume that we won't adapt?

The third question assumes that the experts modeling the pandemic and human behavior are correct in their timeframes and predictions. But here's the thing: a model is just a mathematical system. Describing what people do is fundamentally important, but predicting what people do is fundamentally useless.

People have free will. We have autonomy. We can take action. And we can be unpredictable.

Predicting human behavior requires mathematical systems. Every system can be broken. Break the predictions: we can make this turn out better than anyone could predict right now. And that includes exceeding the predictions from people like me, optimistically envisioning a hopeful future.

Incentive Structure

Systems are fragile. Making a system resilient in the face of stress is incredibly difficult to do from an engineering perspective.

And yet, we see millions of different forms of life all around us - life that can survive incredible natural disasters, incredible abuse at the hands of human conquest and greed. Life that can exist for unfathomable eons and somehow just get stronger and better the whole time.

All systems can be broken. The antidote to a system is an organism. Organisms are not isolated, contained in simple rules or processes. Organisms interact. They intermingle. They spread and affect the world around them. The most resilient technology does not resemble a set of rules and processes so much as it resembles something living, breathing, adapting.

Humans may face a temporary difficulty in physical interaction, but you're here reading this, which is a monumental testament to our ability to continue interacting and being alive even if we are given a harsh set of constraints.

Creativity always blooms brightest when there are uncomfortable constraints. The most brilliant, passionate works of human art and genius have come from some kind of awkward (if not outright awful) limitation of circumstance.

So here's what I see: it is time to change the incentive structure of people as a whole. If you're not sure that we need this, keep in mind the Ebola virus - and the fact that it was considered incurable until recently - now has an effective vaccine, which was developed in defiance of capitalist incentive structures.

Capitalism has thrived for far too long on the ideas that the economy is important. If we can't spend money and buy stuff, our life ends! I remember this rhetoric hitting fever-pitch just after 9/11 - not quite nineteen years ago. The assumption still deserves to be challenged.

Buying stuff is a way of life that many of us have never seen an alternative to; but in the human scale of history, consumer capitalism is a footnote. Other modes of life were all there was until around two hundred years ago, when industrialization kicked off - you guessed it - a revolution.

Capitalism controls our incentives. Do well at work, get more money! Why do you need more money? To spend it on things, of course!

If there is a severe inability to work, then there is no way to get money. And if money is necessary to have shelter, food, and health care, then of course anything that risks the success of the economy seems dire.

The economy is a system. It has already been broken - for a very long time. The only thing that this viral pandemic changes is that now we have no choice but to confront how broken it really is - and that frees us to begin building alternatives.

Collective action has been recognized for decades as an immensely powerful means to effect change - so much so that the entrenched wealthy power-holders of the world go to massive lengths to stigmatize it. "Unions are bad" and such propaganda has been effective (in the United States at least) at preventing people from taking collective action for longer than I have been alive.

Nothing can possibly stop humanity from collective action now. The only question is, what will our actions be, and what changes are we trying to accomplish?

Hope

If we didn't need to spend money to get basic food, shelter, and medical needs addressed, capitalism would erode overnight. The only reason it "works" is because of the stranglehold on human necessities.

So fight it.

Sharing food and shelter is a serious risk right now, and most people are not equipped to provide medical care. But that doesn't mean we are powerless. Organisms that are weak in one area shift the burden to some other, stronger parts to get through stress, injury, and crisis.

Think about how you can lessen your impact on the strained organism of human life right now. As the saying goes, flatten the curve.

We can do more than just that, though. We can share ideas, provide support, offer perspective. And most of us, as hard as it may seem, can still act - on behalf of those who cannot.

And many of us will act.

When the virus settles down again, I intend to live in a country where people have embraced the collective understanding that doing nothing but fueling the economy is a waste of human life. I intend to exist in a world where the value of being alive and being able to interact with each other are no longer concealed by the ever-present need to make a paycheck and then spend it again on things we cannot live without.

Change the incentive structure in your own world. Tweak what you can control. The enemy of hope is despair; despair is the belief that action cannot effect change. Defy the predictions, and replace the systems - not with upgrades, but with revolutions.

May the human organism thrive after all this is said and done.

Log Entry: 2020-02-22

A number of years ago, in the midst of a particularly difficult psychotherapy session, my doctor said something to me that caught me completely off guard - and has stuck with me ever since.

I had just finished recounting something - maybe a story, an anecdote, or a description of a reaction I'd had to something that had occurred recently. I don't remember what led up to the moment.

All I remember is her tilting her head to the side, clearly working to maintain the requisite balance of professionalism and human empathy that is so crucial to doing well in the field of caring for people. I'd been in therapy and mental health circles long enough at that point to know something momentous was coming - and, thankfully, I had a strong enough relationship with this particular doctor to know it wasn't going to be one of the all-too-common "well, time to find a new shrink!" experiences I'd had in the past.

But even still, it floored me when, after an uncharacteristically long and thoughtful pause, she told me, "Your degree of self-awareness is probably the hardest thing you have to fight against, and probably the only reason you've survived through everything that you have."

Undergoing something like a transition is basically a completely immersive, inescapable, all-encompassing exercise in juggling self-awareness, while trying to develop new skills for dealing with so many things changing at once.

Some things seem to change too fast, and others can't possibly get done changing soon enough.

I've remarked, many times in fact, that I feel like transitioning in my thirties is actually pretty good timing for me. I've accumulated plenty of life experience and skills for managing stress, change, and uncertainty. In a lot of ways, the past year of change has only been different from the rest of my life in one major, defining way: this is the first time I've ever undergone drastic life changes that seem like they might actually stay stable now.

After moving homes seventeen times in my life, I now see no real reason to ever want to move again.

I've settled into a career I love and a position that continues to excite me and provide opportunities and challenges beyond what I ever imagined it could have.

Many things are still changing in my life, but many more are locking into place, and every time I ponder what's happening, all I can think is, I did well for myself with a lot of volatility and upheaval in my life; what can I imagine accomplishing with such a strong core of stability for the first time ever?


Looking over all the things that I've weathered in the past, it's sometimes tempting to wonder how things could have been different. And for much of my life, I spent excessive amounts of energy and generated endless angst trying to think about how things "might have been."

But now, having gotten a taste of what actual stability and certainty can do, I've simply stopped thinking of it that way.

At work, I spend a lot of time talking to people about problem-solving - looking at various challenges, things that have succeeded, things that have failed, things that need improvement. A sentiment that I draw on a lot in those discussions is best summed up as "I don't care why it happened; how do we make sure we can do it again (or not do it again if it was bad)?"

It often catches people off-guard at first. What do you mean, you don't care why?

But the phrasing is important: getting caught in "why" is usually a recipe for endless tail-chasing. "If this team had done X, if that hadn't happened at that moment, if only, if only, if only." This almost inevitably gives way to blame. "That team or person dropped the ball. That supplier is too hard to work with. Somebody broke a contract." And so on.

By framing the conversation around what we do in the future, it instantly transforms the tone of what can often be a nasty, mud-slinging meeting into a collaborative effort to fix things. It's the same set of problems to solve, but focused on action in the future. Just a change of tense and timing.

Don't tell me what could have been different. What will you make be different next time?


After the past year of personal rearrangement, I find it oddly comforting that techniques I've drawn upon for years in my professional life have formed the basis for re-establishing my life out side of work.

For three decades, as soon as I left the office, I didn't know what to do besides fret about what could have been different in my personal world. And now I don't care anymore.

If things need to be different, I go make them different. And I have an unspeakably wonderful network of people who can support those efforts - people to learn from, people to struggle alongside, people to try to help by relating what I've managed to learn so far.


Close to 14 years ago, I wrote something uncharacteristically vulnerable and personally revealing for me (at the time). I talked about the aspirations I had, how I wanted to change things, to improve the world, to fix what I felt like were serious problems. I had no shortage of things to do.

I just never did them. So in a late-night moment of exposition on the internet, I simply pleaded with the question, why?

It was only a few paragraphs, but the angst was palpable, and even now, reading the words is haunting. They feel like they belong to someone else (and in many ways, they did) and yet all I can think is I know how to answer your question.

At the time, I lacked both the situational stability in life, as well as the certainty of identity, to really do anything. I floundered, a lot, for many years on end, and somehow managed to occasionally do something that seemed to work.

The rest of the things - the failures - I got good at quietly burying. Until I was alone, late at night, trying to figure out what could have been different.


I've enjoyed rock climbing - both freestyle bouldering and basic belaying - for a long time. I love the analogy of a good climb. When you first start out, even a fifteen foot training wall can be intensely intimidating - it's a difficult physical challenge, but also a brutal mental challenge. If you get halfway up and get stuck, you have to let go and either fall onto the mats or trust the ropes to get you back down.

Bouldering routes are often even more intense for that - if you do get all the way up, you can rest for a bit and celebrate, but then you still have to get back down.

Climbing without experience and guidance can be treacherous - just like life.

To know if you can do a climb, you need a few key things: you need to know yourself, your body, your capabilities, and your mental limits. I've found many climbs physically trivial but mentally insurmountable. In a gym, you can benefit from the deliberate design of the courses, and advice from others.

Bouldering in the wild is a vastly different experience. You often find yourself attempting a climb that nobody present has ever done before. It becomes an exercise in improvisation - within the limits of yourself, factoring in the advice of anyone else around, can you piece together a satisfying climb?

Climbing alone is generally considered inadvisable, even for highly trained and practiced experts. The safety check of additional perspective is essential, even without the importance of having help in case something goes wrong.


When I first began climbing, I'd look at people effortlessly gliding across a rockface and wonder how they did it. If I could ever be like that. It was tempting to just walk away and say, "nah, I can't." Someone had to coax me into the first harness, talk me into that first short ascent. By the time I wrapped my exhausted fingers around the "success" marker at the top of that wall, I knew I was hooked.

(I'm still, all these years later, no good at it; but it's still a huge amount of fun.)

Knowing that it's possible is a big prerequisite. Someone else just climbed it, so clearly it can be done.

With help, practice, and training, that becomes something all of us can own: I climbed that one, so maybe I can also do this other one.

With any practiced skill, knowing that there is room to be better is important for motivating the desire to get better.


And life is really no different. There is so much room for things to be better.

The answer to my questions from 14 years ago is really the kind of thing that sounds so simple to say, but I suspect can't possibly really resonate without the first-hand experience of the life I lived in between.

Life is a climb, but there are resting points. There are hard routes and easy routes, and we don't always get to choose which ones we have to travel. The journey is never predictable and often hard and painful.

The good news is, we get to decide what we consider to be success. We get to decide who to take along for the journey. We get to seek traveling companions who can point out a quicker route, or a more interesting vantage point to rest at.

Know who you are. Know what you've got. Know what you can trust, and what to take with you.


And when you reach a resting point - on a small anchor drilled into the rock, or a tiny shelf, or a full-blown base camp with the comfort of a fire and a good night's sleep - take the time to think. Tell me your story of the preceding leg of your journey.

But don't tell me what could have been different.

Tell me what you will make different next time.

Know It In Your Heart

Something I've come to treasure at the end of a day is the opportunity to just sit and reflect - sometimes on the day itself, but often about much more as well... the past, the future, all the things in the present that seem to deserve a little extra attention and appreciation before I tuck all my thoughts in for the night and fall asleep.

There is a powerful magic in the still moments of a late evening, when things are slowed down and restful. It is an ancient and often tragically elusive truth that when your consciousness approaches stillness, it is easier to be aware of more of reality - a sort of grander incarnation of the temporal principles of relativity in physics. The less you move your mind, the more your mind can apprehend.

I've been fascinated with thought for so long I can barely remember when I first started turning my brain in on itself. Self-reflection is a vital resource for anyone, but through obsessive practice, I long ago warped the skill into a kind of crippled philosophical blinder through which I insisted on experiencing everything.

On June 10, 2019, I wrote something that seemed interesting enough at the time, but in hindsight, turned out to contain far more insight than I could have understood. There's half a paradox and half of a deep truth in there, but first, a (slightly simplified) excerpt from the journal entry itself:

One of the reasons I take my transition desires seriously is that they are very different from other things I want.

What should I get for lunch? Oh, hmm... maybe a sandwich? Do I want a sandwich? What kind of sandwich? The place that makes that kind of sandwich is further away, but you can get this other, less appealing sandwich closer - and cheaper! Is that compelling enough? Or should I take the hit and get the first kind? Maybe I don't even want a sandwich at all. Do I even want lunch?

Give me a decision to make, and I'll find a thousand questions that are somehow all super important for making the actual choice. If I don't know much about the decision, or the implications of various choices, it gets even worse... first I need to understand all the ramifications of all possible outcomes, and then I will ask a thousand annoying questions about all of that.

I over-analyze the ever-living shit out of literally everything.

In general, I have a lot of trouble just wanting things. And then there's gender expression matters. Everything just feels like the polar opposite of my usual process. Would I like to have long hair? Yes. Am I content with the color of my hair? No. Jet black or bright blue with purple highlights. I have never had appreciably long hair or any kind of coloration. I have no point of reference here, no anchor from which to understand the impact of these desires.

And I don't fucking care. I feel no need to ask questions, to weigh options, to consider consequences. When I am suddenly insistent on not analyzing things at all, I think that's a pretty good sign that the feelings are real.

What actually prompted me to remember all of this was, in fact, a moment of completely empty-headed absent-mindedness.

I realized, earlier this evening, that lately I have been making an astounding number of decisions almost entirely on what I've been referring to as "instinct." It's a sort of highly abstract, incredibly information-dense thought process, with impeccable logic forged through an incredibly deep supply of life experience, and yet I've just been doing things without "thinking" in the classically word-centric way that I used to feel trapped in all the time.

I've been on hormone replacement therapy for almost exactly five months. I'd heard that it does miraculous things for the mind, to finally have the neurochemical mix that actually works properly for the brain itself.

As much as I desperately wanted to know how that could work, I couldn't have possibly imagined how well it works.

I used to know a lot of things with just my brain. I hope that doesn't sound arrogant or self-obsessed. I've always loved learning things - I own hundreds of books, almost entirely non-fiction, many of which I've read multiple times. At one time in my life I literally had to impose "no Wikipedia hours" so that I could tear myself away from the endless fascination of "well, maybe I'll just click one more interesting link. I'll go to bed before 4AM this time, I swear."

I've never been able to resist just accumulating bits of knowledge, of wisdom, of insight and stories from other people. Occasionally I find some small thing of my own to contribute back, but only in the interests of finding another thing to learn next.

I still "know" all the same things. If anything, my memory is actually functional for the first time in my life. A year ago, nobody who'd ever been around me for more than a few hours would have questioned my ADHD diagnosis. Today, I constantly remember things with ridiculous clarity and accuracy that some of my closest friends and family can scarcely recall - until I start prompting them.

In a way, I know these things better than I ever could have with my brain.

There's a kind of ownership of truth that goes beyond knowledge; the sort of thing that comes from living, from having a personal and visceral experience. It stops being conscious awareness and simply bakes its way deeper into the mind.

And, now, I finally am beginning to feel the infinitely broader, richer, and more powerful kind of truth - the kind that comes from not simply experiencing and understanding, but from actually wielding properly functional emotions at the same time.

It goes beyond data, beyond awareness and analysis and thought itself, beyond the reaches of logic and language and even the kind of communication that can be accomplished with images and movement.

I know I'm a woman. I have come to own this truth - not merely by thinking about it, or contemplating it; to be sure, I've done plenty of that. But this is no longer a mere fact. I couldn't possibly "know it" to this extent with my brain.

I know it in my heart.