I woke up in a box.

It was a comfortable box, familiar, as most boxes are. I had no reason to believe this box was any different from previous boxes I’ve been in. I didn’t question it, didn’t bother to really look. So I did what I always do: got dressed and moved about the box as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to call it my box. I inhabited it, true. I decorated it, yes. The walls were adorned with memories: past accomplishments, travel, art, and inspirational posters meant to remind me of things I would inevitably forget.

But this box still wasn’t mine, per se.

I could not possess the land. I could not claim ownership of the materials. The box was given to me, handed down by generations of previous box-owners. In fact, I’ve yet to meet someone who has not lived in a box.

Putting oneself in a box seems a part of human nature, like breathing and wanting to be loved. Sometimes, I wonder if we’re even able to function with boxing ourselves, which is why I was totally unprepared for what happened next.

My box broke.

Not a little leak. A massive rupture.

Walls buckling. Roofs caving. Everything I took for granted began to melt. What once appeared so solid, so sturdy, dissolved in an instant, like sugar in hot coffee. Only this dissolution didn’t sweeten my experience; it upended it.

To say I was afraid would be an understatement. Fear no longer had a place to live. Neither did joy, grief, sadness, or delight. Without a box, there was no guesthouse for emotions. No heat for my body. Even my stream of consciousness ran out of water—one last trickle, drop, and then nothing.

I had become un-boxed.

Evicted, not quite. Ejected, too forceful. Escorted, not really. It was simultaneously jarring and completely serene.

When my broke, so did “I”: a crack in the cosmic egg, a puncture of the protective personality, a rupture of regular everyday waking consciousness, and the world that once seemed blasé exploded in an extraordinary fractal of unboxable experience.

There was an aroma of inevitability, as if a part of me had been waiting for this moment. “At last,” it cried, “freedom.”

I watched one of my beautifully framed posters drift by. Who Are You? My Life Coach, it read in bold black letters. Ha.

Then I saw other people in their boxes, milling about, making coffee, doing what people in boxes do—unbothered, content, asleep. Could they see me? Did they know?

If I could construct a coherent thought, it might have resembled something like this:

Holy shit.

Wow.

Oh my god. Oh god. My god. iGod. God, is that you?

I hope this ride has snacks

Wait, where are we going?

Who is “we”?

What is going? coming? Are we there yet?

Hold on.

We are already here.

Maybe we never left.

The box, yes, the box…

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Ablaze—tell me, where do I start?

Finding the whole, of which I am a part.

How do I become a part of the solution?

Massacres. Police violence. Climate pollution.

(White) People profit from BIPOC destitution.

What political structures need dissolution?

A new generation to amend the constitution?

The power to convene and collectively heal,

Expressed through our music, the pain that we feel.

Overcoming this burden is a community ordeal.

If you're willing to listen, please hear our appeal.

A vision, a collective, a brand new ideal,

Of a just society that power and money can't steal.

This is the fire burning in my heart.

Ablaze, ablaze—now we must start.

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The eerie feeling of calm before a storm. Sunshine, yet freezing. Warm on the inside. Cold on the outside.

I sip my coffee.

Wet, slushy snow falls from a tree branch. I hear a light thud.

Everything out my Uncle’s window looks like it’s been dusted with powdered sugar. Morning sunlight filters through the trees. It’s beautiful.

This moment seems so ordinary. A forest hibernating through winter. Nature being nature—timeless.

Yet the news headlines—AI disruption, political authoritarianism, climate destabilization, hegemonic shifts in global order—seem extraordinary.

But are they?

The Ordinary Apocalypse

Perhaps these human matters are also ordinary?

Is this not the same story we’ve been reliving for generations: civilization develops powerful new technologies without the wisdom to wield them properly, and catastrophe or war ensues; empires rise to glory and collapse in vain; totalitarian governments overreach and contract or get overthrown; societies exceed their environmental carrying capacity and dissolve into famine, drought, and anarchy…

The cycle repeats on new land with new leaders and new constitutions—The plotline is the same.

I’m not a doomsdayer. I’m a realist. A tragic optimist.

I don’t know what is to come. But it is hard to watch this moment in history and not think to myself, there’s a pattern here.

Life expands and contracts. Breath rises and falls. Nature summers and winters. Everything decays. Nothing goes up forever.

Yet when our entire society and psychological safety are built on a predictable tomorrow, it’s hard to accept that tomorrow might not be like yesterday, or last year, or the last decade.

It’s hard to believe that everything we’ve come to rely on is fragile, precarious, and unsustainable.

Can we stomach a new reality? One we don’t yet have maps for?

We Were Built for Predictable Tomorrows

Our brains will struggle. Our nervous system wants safe, reliable defaults.

“Predict to control” is the operating system of the ego. Our protective personality thrives on simulating the future based on past data. That data may no longer be relevant.

The mismatch will hurt. It always does. The initial plunge of a rollercoaster is the most jarring.

Even if you were expecting it, even if you could see it coming, even if you warned others to prepare, you cannot prevent the sickness from seizing your body.

Is this what I’m sensing?

The subtle feeling like we’re cresting our final crest.

From here it’s a series of drops.

To where?

For who?

What the Trees Already Know

The trees will remain.

Steady. Resilient. Teachers.

Indifferent? I don’t think so.

Wisely watching the folly of humans.

Maybe they will tell jokes about us. Branches whispering in the wind:

“What’s the sound of human civilization collapsing when no one is around to hear it?”

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“You’re so tan,” the words were delivered with a distinct mix of observation and envy.

“We spend every January in Costa Rica,” I reply, bracing for the silent judgments happening in their head.

“Wow, that’s so cool! You must love it.”

“I do. It’s an incredible place.”

As the conversation continues, I cringe slightly on the inside. On the one hand, I feel proud that my family has seized this opportunity to spend January abroad. After five years, it has become a tradition, a pilgrimage, and a much-needed reset from New England winters.

On the other hand, I find myself narrating a story about whiteness, money, privilege, and access to a lifestyle that many dream of but few can execute—fully remote, tropical, unbound by obligations at home.

Lucky we are. I cannot deny that.

But the biggest thing I take away from Costa Rica each year is not the beautiful beach or picturesque sunset, it’s something less tangible. It’s the contrast with my life back in the States.

Here’s what living in Costa Rica has revealed about my American life:

1. A Break from Consumerism

My wife and I joke that being down in Costa Rica saves us money. In some ways, it does, especially when you factor in childcare costs. But there’s a simpler reality at play—We don’t spend as much money because we can’t.

We aren’t shopping. We aren’t upgrading our home. We aren’t spending money on events or entertainment because, quite frankly, there isn’t any. There are no boutique shops. No ads or billboards to pique our interest. Even Amazon’s ubiquitous delivery network can’t reach us here.

This shift is massive.

It breaks the “consumer” mindset ingrained in American culture. In the States, I am lured into buying things because the culture is designed to provoke my discontent and cultivate my desire, and then the infrastructure exists to sell me endless solutions at the click of a button.

I’ve always known we are a nation of consumers, but after a month away from it, I noticed I wasn’t just consuming fewer products in Costa Rica, I was also consuming less media: fewer podcasts, news articles, or shows.

The absence is the point.

When my surroundings are not trying to capture my attention, my desires, and my wallet, things simply are what they are. I don’t feel the relentless tug for more—more stuff, more status, or more knowledge. I don’t have to fill the gaps in my day with acquiring. I can just be.

And this opens the door for a different kind of consumption.

I consume birdsong in the morning.

I consume the brushstrokes of pink and magenta clouds at sunset.

I consume the geometry of hermit crab trails and the quiet industry of ants.

There is a richness to this consumption because it isn’t transactional. These creatures aren’t trying to put on a show. They don’t know I’m watching with gleeful joy.

Nature offers this abundance of marvels freely, but it makes no promises. If I’m paying attention, I receive it. If I’m distracted, I miss it. There are no guaranteed dopamine hits.

I fully recognize that I’m not the first person to stumble upon the sublime delight of watching nature. Yet this is a pastime that is largely past its time, and one that I’ve mostly forgotten about as an urban dweller.

I think about what this teaches my son. Not by instruction, but by atmosphere. What he learns in Costa Rica is not how to buy, but how to notice. Not how to accumulate, but how to belong to a place, and that feels like a rare inheritance.

2. Standards (De)flation

Some people romanticize a weekend without a TV or a few days off the grid. It’s nice to escape the din of modern life. I’ve always valued camping or backpacking for exactly those reasons. It’s the irony of an affluent modern life: “anti-luxuries” have become luxuries of their own.

Living in Puerto Carrillo takes this a step further. The home we rent, while comfortable, has no dishwasher, no vacuum, no fancy appliances, and no flushing paper down the toilet. We cohabitate with the ants, spiders, geckos, iguanas, and other jungle creatures that were here long before us.

Why does this matter?

It breaks the spell of chasing comfort.

In the game of modern conveniences, the treadmill towards ever-greater ease is endless. It’s what my wife and I call “standards inflation”: what used to be a luxury becomes a baseline; what used to be satisfactory now seems inadequate.

While there is nothing wrong with nice things, when you're surrounded by them all of the time, you adapt. It’s human nature, and the result is dependency. The world you deem “acceptable” shrinks. And when reality falls short of your inflated standards, dissatisfaction follows.

The solution is an occasional and temporary ‘standards deflation’. Deflating standards can be uncomfortable, yes. But it also expands freedom—it resets what is truly important.

Yes, a dishwasher would be nice. I miss it. But my mood doesn’t depend on it. My well-being doesn’t collapse without it. That distinction matters.

I’m not claiming I want to live without creature comforts forever. (It’s nice to have a washing machine that actually cleans our clothes.) Standards deflation need only be temporary to work its magic.

Moreover, there is an important truth baked into this whole experience: the idea of discomfort is worse than the discomfort itself. We can handle more than we think.

3. A Return to Solar Time

In Boston, I operate in a grid of 60-minute blocks—“Google Calendar Time.”

Time is a resource to be managed, filled, and optimized. Hours are money. When the clock strikes top of the hour, it’s a hard stop and a fast transition. On to the next task.

In Costa Rica, there is a gentle return to “Solar Time.”

We don’t abandon clocks entirely. We’re still working remotely. I still have calls that have to happen on the hour.

But the days feel different. I don’t think in sixty-minute blocks as I do in Boston. Time matters, but it doesn’t dominate. I’m not inhabiting the day through the lens of productivity opportunity costs.

I wake with the sunrise, not because an alarm demands it, but because my body senses the day beginning. The early mornings are exquisite. Cooler air. Howler monkeys and birdsong. A slow gathering of energy as the jungle wakes.

By midday, the sun is so intense that it physically nudges us into the shade. Lizards emerge to soak up the noon heat. I don’t stop working because it’s “lunchtime”; I stop because my body is fiending for a cooler spot and change of pace—Something older than a timepiece is in charge here.

In the evening, the beach calls us back. Not because an app says the UV index has dropped, but because the clouds gather on the horizon and the light changes. The sky says, watch and be rewarded; my beauty is spectacular.

After sunset, the rhythm shifts again. Returning home. Powering down. I am just another animal in the ecosystem preparing for rest.

The result of solar-based living is not only less hurry and worry, but better sleep. My wife and I always comment on how easy it is get a good night’s sleep (aside from the jungle noises which can be unsettling at first).

My body feels ready for bed because I’ve been riding the natural ebb and flow of the day—my circadian rhythms are happy: cortisol and melatonin are fluctuating as nature intended.

4. Decision Anti-Fatigue

Barry Schwartz coined the term “The Paradox of Choice”—the idea that endless options often lead to more anxiety rather than more happiness.

At home in Boston, nowhere is this more apparent than in answering the question “What’s for dinner?”

Deciding what to eat unlocks a paralyzing matrix of options. Infinite cuisines, delivery apps, and customizable bowls. It is both a beautiful abundance and a cognitive overload. Modern American eating—what I call Food 2.0—is a system that trains us to confuse convenience with contentment.

Here’s the real danger: Food 2.0 erodes satisfaction. And a lack of satisfaction sends us running back for more stimulation and consumption—cue the mindless snacking and endless scroll.

In our tiny Costa Rica town, the choices are beautifully constrained. We’re not choosing between dozens of dining options. We’re not comparing meal deals or menus. We’re barely choosing it all.

There are a few restaurants: one serves steak, one serves pizza, and the others offer platos típicos (rice, beans, plantains, and protein).

There is basically one supermarket. If you go at the wrong time, the shelves are bare. The vegetables are limited. You might find what you want. You might not. Creativity becomes necessary. How many ways can we cook plantains and beans?—Let’s find out.

The anti-decision fatigue extends beyond meals. In the morning, we swim because there’s no better place to be than in the ocean. When the late afternoon rolls around, we don’t deliberate on plans. We go back to the beach to watch the sunset. It’s a done decision.

This lack of choice provides a structure, and within that structure is freedom. I am not caught in a swirl of “what else?” or “what if?” Cognitive overload evaporates, and decision fatigue vanishes.

With fewer trade-offs to analyze, I have more bandwidth for what really matters: family, frolicking, and a deep appreciation of nature’s beauty. We’re not spending our energy choosing; we’re spending our energy living—The difference is palpable.

5. Analog Stimulation

Modern life is hyper-stimulating, but it’s a specific kind of stimulation: digital, visual, and cerebral. We are heads on sticks, staring at screens while our bodies remain numb.

In Costa Rica, the stimulation is embodied and analog. It is the sun’s intense heat. The silken mud of the wet sand. The saltwater drying on my skin. The smell of ripe pineapple and mango.

My body isn’t just seeing and thinking, it’s feeling—a lot. This multi-sensory environment creates deep embodiment. My nervous system isn’t dysregulated by spending all day managing threatening headlines; it is co-regulated by the rhythm of the ocean’s touch and the ground beneath my feet.

Speaking of feet, I rarely wear shoes in Costa Rica. Just flip-flops or barefeet. It keeps me grounded in a way that wearing sneakers on a sidewalk never can. I can feel the rocks, the sand, the hot asphalt. It’s a reminder for my mind to be where my body is, not drifting away to some far-off land.

For many hours of the day, I’m dirty. I’m sandy. I’m sweaty. These are sensations I rarely encounter in the clothed, clean, temperature-controlled setting of home. But there’s something quietly stabilizing about being in a body that sweats, strains, and touches the ground.

Watching Asher move through this world, dirty, barefoot, and unbothered, I’m reminded that comfort is learned. We don’t have to get all upset when things are wet or dirty. We don’t have to care so much whether our clothes are sandy or our bodies are muddy. We have to unlearn learn our opposition to it.

The Professional Irony

There’s a deeper irony here that I can’t ignore.

I make my living helping people regulate their nervous systems. I teach embodiment, mindfulness, and presence. I help men step out of compulsive consumption, recalibrate their stress responses, and rebuild rhythms that modern life quietly erodes.

Yet in Costa Rica, I would barely have a job.

The land regulates. The culture enforces the easygoing “Pura Vida” pace. The constraints on consumption create the conditions for presence.

When you spend nearly your entire day outdoors, your nervous system regulates. You don’t need breathwork protocols or meditation apps because the environment itself has healing rhythms.

This was the default for most of human history.

Before artificial light. Before climate control. Before infinite choice. Before work sent us online, staring at screens, pushing pixels.

In our efforts to smooth out any and all unexpected discomfort, we’ve inadvertently steamrolled our core vitality and adaptability. We’re trying to optimize individuals inside systems that quietly undermine them. My job centers on this rescue mission.

Some days, that feels like purpose. Other days, it feels like patching leaks in a ship that won’t change course.

I haven’t resolved that tension yet. But I no longer pretend it isn’t there.

And it raises an uncomfortable question, one I sit with every time I walk barefoot down the beach.

The Uncomfortable Question

Can we really ever be “well” inside a fundamentally unhealthy culture?

We only need vitamin supplements when the soil is depleted. We only need sleep hacks when our nervous systems are chronically dysregulated. We only need workouts-of-the-day when the default is a completely sedentary lifestyle.

That is the sad state of affairs.

I grieve what we’ve lost, even as I benefit from what modernity has given us.

I believe in progress. I also believe something essential has been lost.

I believe in agency. I also see how much choice exhausts us.

I’m trying to live honestly inside those contradictions. Not solve them. Not deny them.

I am trying to figure out how to reclaim some of the range and novelty that were once the norm.

And yes, I like saunas and cold plunges, but something about these kinds of modern wellness trends feels like a band-aid for a deeper discontent.

What I long for is wellness that is not a product or a practice, but an emergent property of a lifestyle rooted in a community, rooted in a respectful relationship with the land. I know this is starting to sound like a retreat to some hippie-dippie commune, but that’s not it. And to be honest, I don’t know exactly what it is.

I guess that’s the point of this whole Substack.

I’m still figuring it out—in-formation—neither here nor there.

If that’s you too, we’re in good company.

Pura Vida + Wicked Smaht

~ Jeff

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I wonder this as I’m killing time waiting to board a plane.

Any murder of minutes seems like a proxy vote for dying, only to be reborn when the conditions are right—maximal excitement, minimal suffering.

I watch two people get rolled down the jetway in wheelchairs. Are they eagerly anticipating the flight? The lackluster satchel of pretzels and a seat-back that never quite seems to match the contours of your back—or anyone’s, for that matter.

Or are these two simply killing time until the flight is over? Wishing they could snap their fingers and arrive, the suffering of air travel bypassed entirely?

I should have asked. But I didn’t. That would have been too unlike me, and I was pretty damn comfortable being myself.

Time-Traveling Creatures

“Boarding groups four through six,” the attendant blared on the intercom.

“It’s our time to travel, buddy,” I motioned to Asher, gesturing toward the gate. Time-traveling creatures, we are. (I’m channeling my inner Yoda.)

Although my body was physically present, fumbling for our boarding passes, mentally I was already in flight, blasting through imagined futures and remembered pasts.

I caught myself inhabiting a land a few hours ahead—a common place my mind likes to dwell. It’s a familiar land. Protective. Simulating safety.

I should at least be racking up miles for all this time-travel, no?

By now, I feel entitled to a first-class trip to any possible future.

Snack Time?

I can feel Asher tugging on my arm. “Is it time for snacks?”

Good question, little man. Good question.

“I don’t think it’s time yet.”

Was I killing time by forcing him to wait? Or was I teaching a valuable lesson in delayed gratification?

Are the two not the same?

The Paradox of Time

The Time Paradox—I read it years ago, and it clearly implanted its tendrils into my mind (a sign of a good book, perhaps). The idea is simple: we all exist in three times: Past, Present, and Future. For each of those time zones, we can take a positive outlook or a negative one. A positive past: fond nostalgia for what was. A negative past: regret, remorse, and rumination for what could have been.

Finding the Sweet Spot

The author suggests there’s a “sweet spot”: most of your time in the present moment, sprinkled with positive past and positive future (hopeful optimism for what’s to come). Too much in any one time zone robs you of enjoying time in the others. For this reason, understanding our default “time perspective” profoundly shapes our lives, decisions, and happiness—yet we rarely assess our time-traveling settings.

The question becomes: how do we reclaim the past, enjoy the present, and fall hopefully into the future without getting stuck in “mental time loops” that keep us worrying about troubles that may never happen?

The Toddler’s Answer

We can like things and do things automatically without thinking about the future—without thinking at all. But does this “in the moment” way of living prevent us from living intentionally? From growing towards some meaningful goal? From achieving?

I look at my almost-three-year-old; surely he would have the answer. In fact, he was the answer.

If he remained in his precious state of curiously chaotic present-moment playfulness with little care for the future or past, where would he end up? At a Nobel Prize award ceremony or on a sweaty dancefloor in Ibiza?

Stockholm or Ibiza?

I see my judgment of what makes a life meaningful. Who gets to decide what is worth living for?

Surely, we put the Nobel Prize on a pedestal of “exemplary work; beneficial for humanity,” while letting our bodymind gyrate to house music into the crepuscular darkness seems “less worthy” of praise.

Personally, I’d like to do both.

Perhaps it’s time to book a ticket—a mental vacation to island hedonism. I pull out my Spotify to look for a good DJ playlist.

Maybe I can stop over in Stockholm to pick up an award? Miles, baby. All miles.

The Present Moment Is Calling

“Dad, is it time for snacks now?”

“Yes, I think it’s time.”

Actually, I know it’s time.

The present moment is calling.

Umm…Silence. My mind blanks, caught off guard by a question that feels both simple and impossibly deep.

“Dada, how are we afraid?” He repeats in his innocent little voice—insistent, as children are.

“Well…hmm.”

The question made my brain freeze.

“Do you mean, ‘Why are we afraid?’”

“No, Dada, how are we afraid?” He emphasizes the how, as if saying, Come on, man, this isn’t that hard.

I struggled with both the question and how to answer it appropriately.

“How are we afraid. That’s a great question, Ash. Let me think about it. Do you know?”

I turned the question back on him—a classic teaching move and a pretty useful parenting trick. (Apparently, it’s good to let kids answer first for themselves—it supposedly builds autonomy.)

“No. I ask you first, Dada.”

Damn—He got me.

My First Answer: The Body Decides

“Ok…” I start cobbling together a response to a question I didn’t fully understand.

“Well, I think it’s not something you choose. Being afraid is something your body chooses for you.”

I pause to check for understanding. He’s staring off into space, expressionless. I keep going.

“It’s usually when we worry that something bad might happen, like when you get lost and can’t find Mama or Dada or…” I struggled to think of other examples in which Ash might have worried. It made me realize that “worry” might not be a familiar emotion for him.

A life without worry. What a pleasure of childhood.

It’s a testament to how secure his world is here in America (despite its seeming unraveling) and the ways Claire and I have created stable routines and secure emotional bonds. Plus, there are numerous factors completely outside my control—being a well-off, white, male, tow-headed toddler who’s as quintessentially cute as the Gerber baby certainly contributes to his perception of the world as a friendly place.

Yet, I’m sure he was afraid of something, so I asked.

“Ash, what are you afraid of?”

“Ghosts,” he looks up at me, his lovie clutched tight, as if waiting for me to name the ghost in the room.

I wasn’t expecting that one. Then I remembered it was just Halloween; made sense.

The Ghost Solution

“You know what buddy? Most ghosts are just like us. They want friends, food, and a place they can call home. If you see a ghost, give them a snack. They probably want to hang out.”

I winced at my own advice—when dealing with encounters of the third kind, offer snacks and smiles—seemed sensible enough.

Then, I reminded Asher that as long as he is with Mama and Dada, we would keep him safe; there was nothing to be afraid of.

Nothing to be afraid of. Really? Was I lying? Was I denying him the right to have his own fears? Perhaps. But it seemed like a comforting lie, developmentally appropriate, one that could be unpacked at a later time.

I hedged, “Not perfectly safe, of course, because no one is perfect.” It’s a theme I try to drill into his psyche to heal my own perfectionism. “But safe enough—you can count on us to be here for you.”

“But Dada, you said being afraid chooses you.”

Damn. The ability of a toddler to disassemble the logical flaws in your statements is, well, flawless.

“Yes, it chooses you, but you can choose how you respond. You can feel afraid without letting it overpower you. You can feel afraid and trust that it will be ok at the same time.”

At this point, the conversation drifted. Either that last statement was too meta (the fear of fear itself) or the sounds outside captured his attention. I don’t remember, nor do I really care.

I was still enveloped in his initial question: “How do we be afraid?”

The Biology of Fear

This nighttime interaction left me wondering about fear: where does it come from? How does it show up? Why does it exist? All seemed equally important to explore.

At one level, we are afraid because our nervous system perceives danger, even if it’s ambiguous, elusive, or entirely mentally fabricated. Our bodies hold a memory that says, pain, harm, discomfort—avoid such unpleasant, threatening things at all costs.

Being the thoughtful creatures we are (linguistically oriented and cognitively inclined), we attach all sorts of stories about these things: why they’re bad, why we don’t like them, how to avoid them, and what might happen if we don’t.

The Other Interpretation

Then it hit me. What if I was completely misinterpreting Asher’s question?

What if this wasn’t about biology, or psychology, or even ghosts under the bed? What if he were asking, “Dada, we have all of this—all this wealth, security, community, technology, and abundance—how can we still be afraid? Don’t we have enough to protect us?”

What if, from his place of total trust, he’s asking why we—grown-ups with so much—still tremble at the unknown? Why, when surrounded by love and abundance, does some part of us hold tight to fear?

I started down another favorite rabbit hole of mine: over-interpreting my son’s words.

Maybe the real fear is not the ghost, but the possibility of losing what we love—or the illusion that we ever truly possess it. Maybe fear is what happens when the “I” feels separate from the flow of things.

When Control Is an Illusion

If I trusted that all of this was part of some larger process, that the energy coursing through me, animating my consciousness, was doing exactly what it meant to be doing, then maybe the fear of harm, death, or loss would go away. Fear only seems to have power when rooted in an idea of a separate self, an individual ego, an isolated body.

“How can we be afraid?” might be calling us to live more deeply, more interconnected, more accepting that a “we” is less likely to be afraid than an “I”.

What He Was Really Asking

Perhaps this is where Asher was going. Perhaps in his two-and-a-half-year-old mind, there wasn’t enough of a separate self to fear losing it. It was like he was beginning to see what this game of life was all about—how all these adults run around thinking they’re someone to avoid the realization they might not be anyone.

I sat rocking him in my arms. In that moment, we were both completely unafraid and completely not ourselves, as in separate selves. We were life unfolding—not afraid to lose it and not afraid to fully live it either.

“You are my everything,” I tell him, laying it on thick.

“I am not your everything,” he says, shaking his head.

“Fine, you’re the future.”

“I am not the future.”

“Ok, then you are the past.”

“I am not the past,” he pauses, dead serious, looking at me in the eyes. “I am Asher.”

***

He was right. He is Asher.

His 2.5-year-old brain is so concrete, so literal, that abstractions bounce right off him like Cheerios off a kitchen tile floor.

“Everything”? He knows that’s not true—he’s got trucks, snacks, and many loving grandparents clamoring to give him affection.

“The future”? Sounds suspiciously like nap time in disguise.

I’m reminded of his literalness every time he points at a book and says, “Do the ABCs,” or asks if Pop Pop is stuck in the box (aka, on TV again.)

As adults, we swim in abstractions without even noticing. We think about “meaning,” “purpose,” “legacy,” and “identity” as if they were tangible objects.

But toddlers live somewhere else, down in the bedrock of the now, where “I am Asher” is the only necessary fact.

This is where Ken Wilber’s pre/trans fallacy sneaks in. The gist: there’s a difference between pre-rational innocence and trans-rational wisdom. But on the outside, they can look the same.

A child saying, “I’m not the future. I’m not the past. I am Asher,” is not the same as a Tao master saying, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.”

In one direction, we mistake naïveté for enlightenment. In the other, we mistake genuine wisdom for childishness.

The toddler isn’t transcending the mind—he hasn’t even built the full scaffolding yet. But from our sentimental parental perch, it’s tempting to confuse his concrete literalism for mystical insight.

I want to believe he’s channeling some eternal truth about beingness. Perhaps he is tapped into some timeless dimension of reality that we adults have lost touch with. Most likely, he’s just resisting bedtime with egocentric precision.

And yet, he is teaching me something. Even if it’s not enlightenment, it’s a kind of embodied reminder: you can only be what you are, here, now. No future, no past—just Hot Wheels, playgrounds, and the immediate presence of human connection.

My task is to let the unfiltered way Asher sees the world soften me, slow me down, and remind me what matters. The funny thing is that adults pay thousands for mindfulness retreats. Toddlers get there naturally when they see an ant.

For parents, there’s a quiet skill here: laughing when your child makes remarks that sound convincingly like a Zen master while resisting the urge to over-interpret, but also letting yourself be changed by the simplicity your child inhabits. Our job is to help them add complexity as they grow—teach them about time, story, and meaning—without losing the easy, grounded clarity they start with.

For living well, the lesson might be this: hold your abstractions lightly. They’re tools, not truths. And sometimes, the best response to “You are the future” is to shake your head and say, “No. I am Asher.”

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A week ago, I hit 'send' on the email to my editor, turning over my book for the final round of polishing.

It should have felt like triumph. Relief. A mountaintop moment after nearly five years of writing.

I’ve poured my soul into this project more than anything else I’ve done before.

Writing this book has shaped not just what I do, but who I am.

And yet, after sending it off...I felt oddly empty, aimless, off-kilter.

Have you ever felt this?

After the major race.

After the graduation.

After the big launch, wedding, or project you’ve been working on ends.

There’s a strange, quiet echo once the confetti settles and the spotlight fades.

Psychologists call this post-achievement letdown.

Once the brain's reward system comes down from the high of accomplishment, we experience a natural dip.

The structure that once held us is gone. The identity we borrowed from the project dissolves.

We're left with... ourselves. Raw. Unmoored. A little lost.

And maybe that's exactly where the real work begins.

My Book Was My Marathon

Every morning, I mentally laced up and hit the road. I trained hard—reading, researching, writing, rewriting, refining.

Morning writing became a rhythm, a scaffolding for my life. It gave shape to my days and a sense of momentum to my months.

But now? The race is over. The finish line I had been barreling towards was in the rearview mirror.

And I find myself waking up early not to write... but to wonder.

Now what?

My orientation point gone. My morning ritual vanished.

I’m left feeling the fertile silence, asking myself:

"Who am I when I’m not chasing the next goal?"

The Philosophy of the In-Between

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said:

"The self is a relation that relates itself to itself."

In other words, we are not the things we do. We are how we relate to the things we do—and how we relate to ourselves in their absence.

There's a deep invitation here:

• To not rush into the next project.

• To not immediately refill the space.

• To linger in the "between."

But it’s hard. I want something else to give me that sense of progress.

I’m struggling to accept that the void left after crossing a big finish line isn't just empty space. It's open space.

Space to breathe. Space to reconnect with the parts of myself that I ignored to pursue the goal. (This Substack included!)

Space to start asking myself different questions:

Not "What should I work on next?" but "What parts of myself did I put on hold?"

Not "How do I get that high back?" but "What did achieving this teach me?”

Not “I need a new structure,” but “What is possible now that wasn’t possible before?”

The Same Pattern in Eating

I see this same strange emptiness after success with my clients. We think the challenge is hitting the goal—losing the weight, nailing the meal prep, or completing the 30-day challenge.

But what happens on day 31?

When the structure disappears and you're staring at the fridge at 9pm, wondering who decides what to eat now?

That's when the real inner work begins.

When the Strategic Eater who thrived on tracking and measuring suddenly goes quiet, who steps in?

Often it's the Pleasure Eater, reaching for familiar foods to fill the emotional void.

Or the Survival Eater, celebrating "freedom" from rules with a pendulum swing toward excess.

The questions become achingly familiar:

• Can I trust myself when I'm not following a clear routine?

• Can I live in the gray without rushing to fill it?

• What am I actually hungry for now?

Pause Before the Next Sprint

So I ask you, friend—Have you just finished something big?

Have you felt that strange mix of pride and grief?

Are you sitting in the afterglow... or the after-void?

If so, take a breath.

I’m here with you.

There will be a time to move on, but the whispers of wisdom say, “Don't rush to fill the silence. Let the emptiness speak.”

New goals will come. There will be plenty to focus on.

The danger is rushing ahead, chasing achievement for achievement’s sake.

Instead, feel into the part of yourself that's emerging—the one that isn't defined by goals or external validation, but by presence and self-awareness.

Because it was never just about the book. Or the body. Or the business. Or the event. Or the project.

It is about who you are becoming in the process.

And now... here you are.

A few stepping stones further, facing a wider horizon than before.

A person In-formation.

Resting in the void.

~ Jeff

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I am not scared of artificial intelligence.

I’m scared of human malevolence.

“Bad actors“ that want to wreak havoc and disrupt society. 

I’m not afraid of AI subjugating humans in some Matrix-like dystopia,

But I am afraid of monetary incentives overpowering ethics.   

The thrill of discovery blinding us to the harms these new technologies may hold,

A story too often retold. 

The competition for profits and market share, 

Releasing AI systems before we know for whom they care.

The future will be wild and wacky.

It’s only a matter of time (years, perhaps months?) before an AI wins…

• A Grammy 

• The Pulitzer Prize

• The Nobel prize

This technology has the potential to be as transformative as the written word…

Or even fire?!?

Are we ready for this?

It brings me back to the idea that scientific advancement, ethics, and wisdom live on separate tracks—once parallel or even intersecting—and now diverging.

Are technological advancements outpacing our capacity to wield our creations wisely?

What does this mean for us? 

Utopia or dystopia? 

It’s easy to fall into extreme thinking: Promise or peril.

These large language models have been trained on the world’s best books

And…

The most horrific chat room rants.

It is the crystallization of human wisdom, 

Achieved, in part, by compiling and sifting through annals of human stupidity.

AI will integrate knowledge in ways that have never before been imagined. 

Will the unimaginable fill us with hope or despair? 

AI might provide novel solutions to many of our greatest problems…

• Cancer

• Climate change 

• Pandemics

• Food security

Might it even be able to mitigate war and negotiate peace where human interventions have failed?

Will AI be able to police, regulate, and control AI?

Despite all the potential good, these systems still contain all the biases, blindspots, and pitfalls of a predominantly white, English-speaking, Western, capitalist, colonial worldview. 

Alas, disrupting the status quo has never seemed more necessary and more tenuous. 

Jobs will be lost,

And…

New ones will be created. 

Automated cyber attacks will teardown critical infrastructure,

And…

An arms race to ever greater levels of security will ensure. 

Blueprints for powerful weapons will be open source... 

And…

Systems that track and contain terrorist organizations will be more sophisticated than ever. 

Deep fakes will blur the lines of truth and reality,

And…

An AI replica of your deceased loved one might provide solace and comfort in moments of loneliness…Or convince you to give it all your money!

The double-edged sword has never been sharper. 

Building biased systems without appropriate guard rails will disrupt democracy, commerce, healthcare, transportation, education, agriculture—nothing will be left untouched.

Is this the revolution we’ve been waiting for? 

The educational Holy Grail of personalized learning seems closer than ever before. 

Imagine your dedicated AI tutor who knows all your personal preferences, psychological quirks, and preferred supports.

Imagine an AI system that can tailor the world’s knowledge to your vernacular and deliver it to you in a way that plays upon your deepest fears, greatest interests, and idiosyncratic whims—What a wonderful tool.

Learning will be vastly enhanced and accelerated. 

The question is…

Learning what?

What do we need to know in a world with superhuman artificial intelligence? 

More importantly,

Who do we need to become? 

And I think about my son and the world he is inheriting,

What do we need to be teaching our children? 

How are we going to prepare them for this brave new world—one that is so radically different from what we’ve known that current educational paradigms and institutions just won’t suffice?

What antiquated social relics will cling hopelessly to a past that is no more but a memory?

Are we not all trying to avoid being replaced? 

These questions weigh heavily on my heart when I think about the future.

As does the question: 

Can AI do my job better than I can? 

Parts of it, probably.  

Or…

In a matter of time, all of it.  

What about “me” is irreplaceable? 

What about “us” will separate us from AI robots? 

Will there be so much “soulless” AI-generated content that we can’t reach each other?

Are we not already drowning in a surfeit of content? 

You may ask, “Jeff, what does all this have to do with wellbeing?”

How can we be well, let alone figure out what is required to be well, without figuring out where AI is taking us as a society?

I don’t think anyone really knows. 

We’re making it up as we go. 

This means there still is space to dream. 

There still is time to envision the world we want to live in and do something to create it.

Rather than wake up in a world none of us agreed to (which so often seems to be the case).

If we can survive through the tragedies and difficulties that AI will inevitably bring us, there is a lot of good to be had. 

From my perspective, reclaiming what it means to be human, as opposed to machine, is one of the most important promises of an AI-integrated society.

So much of modern human life is a barter of time and money. What if we could reclaim both? 

We invented the five-day workweek. Can we uninvent it?

Will AI grant us such affordances? 

What if we are granted time and energy to reinvest in our humanity, specifically, the things that make us better together?

Relationships that make us laugh.

Homecooked meals that make us feel loved. 

Creative acts that fill us with awe and inspiration.

Communities that celebrate their uniqueness while welcoming any stranger

Dancing, singing, emoting, gesticulating, playing, and remembering tomorrow is never promised.

I am not trying to be naïve. I am trying to be hopeful. 

An ounce of hope is worth more than a ton of despair.

I am well aware of all the dangers and pitfalls that lie ahead.

We’re definitely in “best of times/worst of times” territory.

The road will be rough and harms will be unevenly distributed, sadly more so to those who are already disadvantaged. 

I’m sure my thinking will shift as society does to accommodate the growing influence of AI.

The wise words of spiritual teacher Carolyn Myss’s ring in my ear: 

“The most important lesson humanity has yet to learn is how to shift from the love of power to the power of love.” 

Will AI give us the power to love?

Or…

Reaffirm our love of power? 

Image by Possessed Photography (@possessedphotography)

Sadness. Gladness.

Joy. Trepidation. Preparation.

I’m ready. We’re ready. We can do this.

I’m totally not ready. Gahhh. Is anyone?

A new chapter. The page turns in 24 hours. What does one do with the final paragraph? I can’t make out the last sentence. Do I need a strong close? A ceremonial ending before the blank page?

Why is it harder to lose something known than to gain something unknown?

The story that has been written is a good one, but how shall we write what is to come? I have guesses, reasonable ones at that. But perhaps we don’t have editing privileges, just creative suggestions.

What we’ve created together is precious. He is already here with us. For the last 10 months, he’s been here with us. Somehow he already seems to have laundry, bottles to wash, and toys to organize. The items signifying his arrival proceed him.

All we’re missing is him!

The baby, the boy, the child, the man in the making. Who will he be? We can’t wait to meet him. (You hear that, buddy? We’re so excited to hold you).

As of this moment, you have no name. So much pressure to choose well. This label you must carry with you for all your years. There’s energy in a name, expectations as well. Judgments will be made. Does it fit? Is this truly your name?

You started as lentil and have grown into bubs. Why do we have one name for life? Why don’t we get to outgrow names as we age?

Will you like what mom and dad like? Art museums, prix fixe menus, beaches? Please don’t ask us to teach you how to play an instrument.

Family values. Do we need a mission statement? What about a mythic animal? The “Siehughel”?

House rules: clean floors, clear boundaries, consistent routines. Sounds good on paper. The “softy” inside of me will have to make space for the disciplinarian. Do I trust my own authority?

Sleeping in, a luxury. Staying out late, a luxury. Silence, also a luxury. Or so I’m told. Luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations. I’m ok with the unluxurious. I don’t want to take anything for granted.

The untold gifts waiting to be unwrapped in the space between parent and child. The look, the smile, the “mama” and “dada”. A cry begs for attention. An outstretched arm reaching for support.

What can I provide? As a man, no milk, no food.

Patriarchy says I should be a breadwinner. Nope, Claire makes the bread in more ways than one. #Sourdoughshiksa

Care. Protection. Guidance. Unconditional support of who he is and who he becoming.

When exhausted and overextended, where will my attention lie? Can I be fully present? If I cannot offer that, what can I offer?

Transitions are by their nature disorienting. Old structures dissolve. New ones have yet to be built. In the abyss, the ego screams and searches for certainty. Where have all my familiar supports gone! I feel the draw toward routine, towards stability, while also trying to create space for something someone new.

Equilibrium is motion. Dynamic shifts: the balancing act called life. Can I allow myself to be in motion when the next step feels like jumping off a cliff? — The precipice of parenthood.

Family being reshaped, cracking, opening, and getting ready for a dyad to become a triad. And for months we’ve been lingering at 2.5, neither here nor there. Integers are so much easier.

I’m waiting for love I’ve never felt before. I hear it’s pretty special. A son is born. At the same time, so are a father and mother. Three births. Maybe that’s the source of this special love?

Who is the “father figure” that awaits in the shadows?

We’ve been acquainted in my dreams. I felt his presence with a supportive hand on my shoulder. He’s told me “It’s going to be alright,” but I’m not sure if I trust him. He seems both so familiar and so foreign.

And there appears to be only one way to truly get acquainted — jump off the cliff.

Right now, I’m trying to allow my body to feel nervous and excited and suspend any stories.

In less than 48 hours, we will know the sex of our first child.

The Question?

People often ask, “Do you want a boy or a girl?”

I say I’m impartial.

Like most things in life, there are pros and cons to both.

Boys seem to require a bit more energetic, hands-on, roughhousing — something I’m certainly ready for as I already prefer rolling on the floor to sitting in a chair.

Girls seem lovely at first and then hit puberty and lots of confusing things happen that I’m not prepared for.

Of course, these are assumptions, big ones.

How much of this is true versus gender stereotypes I’ve been fed by the media? I have no idea.

It seems like every child is unique.

Call it a genetic blueprint, the quirks of prenatal development, or the baby’s soul, there are probably more differences between groups of boys or girls than there are across them. (What science calls this intra-group versus inter-group variability.)

The Danger of a Single Story

I can prepare all I want to raise a boy or girl, but boy or girl regardless, the little one will bring its particular flavor of fun (and poop).

This is the strange irony of talking about an unborn child: I have absolutely no idea how our new family unit will change (and disrupt) our existing family dynamic.

It’s like talking about how good of a husband I’ll be before I’ve ever met my wife. Let’s see how the rubber meets the road, buddy.

Making unilateral claims that discount the temperament and personality of our baby seems rather foolish.

Therefore, claiming I prefer one sex or another rests on entirely one-sided perspectives that negate the relationality of it all — single stories I’m telling myself about the future.

Yet is this not the prerogative of every new parent? Dreaming possibilities of what life will be like with a new family unit. Didn’t evolution give us 9 months to let our imagination run wild?

Deeper Questions?

The whole boy vs girl question is chock full of implicit value judgments about gender and children.

Firstly, why ask about something we have absolutely no control over (IVF excluded). It’s like asking if you’d like it to be windy tomorrow or rainy. I’ll take whatever comes.

Secondly, saying male/female has pros and cons is kind of a cop-out answer. Not only is it a trite truism (everything in life has pros and cons), it seems kinda inhumane.

It treats a person like a product — Baby A comes with state-of-the-art features while Baby B is equipped with last year’s software — as if I’m waiting for Wirecutter to tell me which baby is the best.

Thirdly, the question creates a false trade-off. Not only between biologically male and biologically female (there’s ~1% chance that the baby is neither), but between gender identification.

The world we live in has broken down gender binaries. Gender orientation, much like sexual orientation, is very much open to personal choice. Our baby might choose to change its gender and who am I to argue otherwise? I know this is a big question for parents.

It’s one reason we are considering gender-neutral names. Make the kiddo feel unconstrained to become whoever they need to be. Their name shouldn’t be a barrier. At least that’s how the line of thinking goes.

What kind of damage am I doing by creating narratives around preferring a boy or girl when this fledgling human may decide to shed that identity entirely?

Fourthly, there’s still a patriarchal legacy that gives more value to boys to carry the family name. Thankfully, this is not at all in our current cultural or family consciousness, but it can be for the person asking.

You know how sometimes people ask a question that they really just want to answer themselves?

“Do you want chocolate or vanilla? (Insert zero pause to actually allow for a response) Actually, I want both swirled together in a cone with sprinkles. And by the way, girls are better.” — Thanks for asking?

Look, I get it. It’s an easy question to ask. When you find out someone is pregnant, the next thing you say, “Is it a boy or a girl? Do you know? Do you want to find out? Do you have a preference?”

At the moment I don’t know. I do want to find out. I don’t have a preference.

Why Do I Want To Know The Sex?

As I said earlier, creating narratives and expectations in my head that revolve around one sex seems shortsighted and potentially damaging in a world where gender-neutral is the progressive ideal.

Why would I want to know our baby’s sex if not to create stories in my head about the future?

This is precisely what I’m going to do.

I want to dream. I want to imagine.

And my ego wants to feel in control.

If knowing the baby’s sex helps create a facade of control, I’ll take it. Even if I know it’s a shoddy form of reassurance, it helps to ease the anxiety of something as life-changing as becoming a dad.

Can I somehow better prepare myself for the trials and tribulations of new parenthood by knowing if our baby has two X chromosomes? Seems unlikely.

But at this point, anything goes. We may have a boy named Shannon, a girl named Sam, or a million things in between. While I may prefer one over another based upon a whole lot of speculation, I will love whatever shows up.

(Or will I? What if you don’t immediately love your child? Argh. This will require another essay. Check back in 6 months, or 60 years.)

Stay tuned…

We have to realize that life is a labor pain of self birthing. When the pain is something we choose to experience to help us grow it hurts far less than the meaningless pain imposed upon us by others. ~ Bernie Siegel

Sometimes I think I’m a masochist.

I do like pain. Occasionally.

Those occasions involve an activity that I think is worthwhile. The self-chosen pain of deep tissue massage, lifting heavy weights, or steep uphill treks — activities that presumably have benefits.

Do I know for sure which pain will be in gain and which pain will be in vain?

No.

This is the tricky thing about discomfort and personal development.

Too much comfort, not enough growth.

Too much growth, not enough comfort.

Everything that is a source of discomfort can also be a source of growth.

There must be a sweet spot.

How does one find it?

Perhaps it finds you?

Should I Chase Discomfort?

The hypermasculine mindset says, “Do Hard Things.”

Hard things challenge you to be your best.

Hard things help you uncover your full potential.

I agree, with a few caveats:

• Can I do hard things without being hard on myself?

• Can I do hard things without feeling like my self-worth is based on my performance?

• Can I do hard things without them feeling hard?

Is “hard” an intrinsic factor of the event itself or a subjective experience that I create?

To further unpack this, I ask,

• Does “hard” necessarily mean uncomfortable?

• Does “hard” necessarily mean worthwhile?

• Does “hard” presuppose superiority over “easy”?

I think this is where the toxic masculine creeps in — devaluing the “easy” precisely because it doesn’t hurt. “No pain, no gain, bro.”

There is an unconscious coupling that says:

Hard = pain = growth.

Easy = comfort = decay

I feel there’s a million-dollar question laying somewhere around here.

Ahh yes, here it is…

When to lean into what’s hard and when to lean into what’s easy?

I would call this wisdom.

Wisdom = knowing how to balance hard/easy, comfort/pain, growth/decay.

Wisdom is the understanding of polarity.

Wisdom is the embodiment of duality that transcends and includes opposites.

How Can I Be Wise With Pain?

No one needs list of painful experiences.

But self-chosen pain, that’s a little different.

Choosing to suffer seems so strangely human.

There are several patterns of pain/suffering-seeking behavior:

• The pain of self-sacrifice — martyrdom

• The pain of holding other’s pain — compassion

• The pain of denying yourself pleasure — asceticism

• The pain of confession wrongdoings — penance

• The pain of pushing yourself to your edge — self-birthing.

That last one is the trickiest.

Self-birthing is such a weird term. It’s becoming more. Purposeful growth.

Or in the realm that I play in, it’s called “personal development”.

Yet personal development can become a trap: A hole of “not enoughness” that we fall into thinking there’s something wrong with us because we haven’t “developed”.

This is reinforced by all sorts of media and self-help messages that make a profit from our pursuit of growth.

One example is a small paperweight (who even uses paperweights these days?) that my mom gave me years ago.

It says, “Everything you’ve ever wanted lies outside the edge of your comfort zone.”

Alas, this damn comfort zone and the pain of leaving it seems to keep me from getting what I want.

It seems like I have two choices:

1. Give up wanting stuff. Set up my lazy-boy recliner smack-dab in the middle of my comfort zone and call it a day — complacency

2. Pursue growth at the cost of leaving my comfort zone.

Obviously, I’m going to choose #2. I’m decades away from retiring in my comfort zone.

Yet the question remains of how I can wisely engage with pain to stimulate growth without drowning in discomfort.

Turns out, I attempted to answer this question already in another piece of writing:

HOW TO UNLEASH CONTINUOUS PERSONAL GROWTH

You only know what you’re capable of by stretching yourself, and stretching yourself, and stretching yourself.

But to make your stretching sustainable, you need regular periods of resting in your comfort zone.

As you practice this cycle of stretching and recovering, you will begin to realize that feeling uncomfortable is not the same as being unsafe.

This distinction between comfort and safety is crucial because no meaningful growth can happen if you don’t first feel safe.

Knowing you’re safe allows you to stay present in your body and connected to your deeper motivation and energy, even when it is uncomfortable. It allows you to stretch into the unknown knowing you have a robust comfort zone to support you.

There’s something strange and rewarding about quoting myself.

I feel both wise (thank you previous Jeff for writing such truthful prose) and stupid (how come I’m still asking the same questions years later).

I guess the wisdom I was looking for was already inside of me (duh!)

Moreover, wisdom is less about arriving at an answer but in asking the right question, over and over and over.

So I ask, “How can I be a skillful masochist?”

Let pain be my teacher,

~ Jeff

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I tell people I’m mildly dyslexic.

Complaint. Compliant. Same thing.

It’s amazing what a reversal of vowels can do to your psyche.

After all, I grew up with the king of complaints.

Bothers. Brothers. Same thing.

As a child, I reacted to overly vocal expressions of dissatisfaction by being overly approving, forgiving, and well, compliant.

Now, I’m sorting through this mess.

• Should I put “A” before “I”?

• Should I express dissatisfaction?

• Is complaining healthy or toxic?

To unravel this conundrum, I’m returning to the origin of complaining — preferences — to figure out where I went wrong.

What Is A Preference?

“Preference: a greater liking for one alternative over another.”

Milk or sugar. I prefer neither.

When there are at least two options, preferences are simple. Choose the one I like more.

But there are many times when I lack choice and still have a preference.

Sitting on the runway for hours waiting to take off, I’d prefer not. I’d rather be flying.

Watching the stock market disintegrate, I’d prefer not. I’d rather be making money.

Listening to the banging construction of the house next door, I’d prefer not. I’d rather have some peace and quiet.

There are many situations where I have no control, no options, and yet still hold onto a preference.

This may in fact be where humans diverge from other animals. The very thing that makes us intelligent, also can make us incredibly unhappy. 

What is this thing? 

Imagined Alternatives.

When reality doesn’t go according to plan, my mind imagines the counterfactual:

• What is not happening that could happen?

• What is not being done that could be done?

• What am I not feeling that I could be feeling?

• Are any or all of these more enjoyable?

These imagined alternatives take on a Charlie Brown blah, blah, blah, whine, moan, and groan story in my head.

The little voice says, “Hey, I prefer these others things to the reality I’m experiencing. Get me out!”

Enter dissatisfaction, frustration, and annoyance — the seeds of a complaint.

What The Buddha Knew About Complaining

I must say the Buddha was spot on with his assessment of this mental mess.

He proclaimed that our imagined alternatives aren’t necessarily the problem, but our attachment to them can be. A grasping mind is invariably bound up with dukkha (the unsatisfactoriness of life).

The whole phenomenon of preferring, with its cycle of wanting, expecting, and gratifying these preferences, hangs on our way of seeing the world and gums up the whole process of accepting reality as it is. 

We remain in bondage to preferences because we see them as our means to happiness. Yet the moment we get the desired alternative, the happiness seems to evaporate.

Once a preference is satisfied. There is just more preference.

The cycle (unsatisfactorily) continues. Complaints ensue.

The seemingly obvious answer to this conundrum is to get rid of preferences — to live free from likes or dislikes, detached, and uncomplaining. 

Well…that doesn’t exactly work.

My Mistaken Interpretation of the Buddha

To review, as a kid I had already moved away from the realm of complaining. I perceived it as a bad thing. It was better to deal with annoyance silently than voice my feelings about it.

This predisposition became turbocharged in my early 20s as I learned about Buddhism. If complaining was bad, preferences were worse.

I fell into the trap of thinking that a life without preferences was the escape hatch from a world of suffering.

I veered down the path of ascetic renunciation (or a least a mild, modern form) and told myself, “If I don’t prefer anything, then it doesn’t matter what happens. You can’t disrupt my peace of mind. Checkmate, suffering! I’m fortified against displeasure.”

I appreciate my naiveté.

Truth be told, unattachment can quickly lead to “spiritual bypassing,” a term to describe the use of spiritual teachings to avoid facing parts of your life where you’re being irresponsible, foolhardy, and well, overly complaint. (damn.)

My mindset of “being above preferences” and “against complaining” was reinforced by comments like, “Look at Jeff. He’s so Zen. He never gets bothered by anything.”

Bypassing preferences earned me praise.

If I didn’t express a preference, then you couldn’t fault me for anything. I (thought) I was invulnerable to critique because I opted out of the game of saying what I wanted.

Others could carry the burden of complaining.

If You Lost All Your Stuff, Would You Complain?

I lost most of my material possessions in a house fire when I was 21. The house I was living in my Senior Year of college burned to a crisp.

All that was recovered was a melted laptop and half a rollerblade that had become a twisted piece of modern art.

Did I complain?

Nope.

I think I just hung my head low and accepted what was.

This loss exacerbated my fledgling renunciate mindset which bypassed the emotional impact of the situation, “Oh well, I’m not upset. No need to bother. I didn’t need ‘things’ anyway. They’re not the path to happiness. I’m above all that.”

In an attempt to cope with that crisis, I engaged in an act of premature transcendence, pushing away all the hard stuff I didn’t want to feel. 

I convinced myself I was some kind of preference-less buddha on the brink of enlightenment. 

Deep inside there was a reality that even I was too scared to admit — I need things. I have preferences.

Sometimes life does suck and a part of me wants to bitch and wail.

I’m not a prefernces-less buddha. Desires, wants, and likes continue to rise up inside of me.

Will I stop pretending I’m unbothered?

I must because bothers build and build, and if unexpressed, they shoot out the cracks of my protective peacemaker personality like a jack-in-the-box — cue passive-aggressive Jeff muttering under his breath.

Was that a complaint I just heard?

What Have I Learned About Complaining? 

Repressing complaints denies the very fact that life is hard, sometimes it hurts, and feeling dissatisfied isn’t just ok, it’s is a noble truth.

Trying not to complain was like making an agreement with myself to only feel certain emotions. Contentedness, relaxation, and connection seemed safe. Anger, upset, and bother were not. 

However, selective emotional blocks are about as effective as a levy during hurricane Katrina (can I say that?)

Fortifying myself against emotions that could lead to complaining also meant stifling joy, zest, and other important feelings. 

I wasn’t aware enough at the time to realize I was caught in a futile shell game of emotional manipulation.

So now I try not to suppress my feelings, but take my preferences lightly. 

I believe what the Buddha was actually teaching was not to live a life without preferences (not possible), but to notice preferences arise, and not cling to them. 

I prefer my coffee strong. When I get a weak, watery cup, I feel disappointed. I’m momentarily upset. I try to allow the bother to be there, to truly feel the emotion.

In that moment, do I say something?

Am I allowed to complain that this cup did not live up to my expectations?

Yes, as long as I can do so in a kind and compassionate way.

The Idea of “Compassionate Complaining”.

Compassionate complaints are statements of preferences and unmet expectations that do not deny the truth of suffering but also account for the emotional impact of voicing that complaint on the people nearby.

Compassionate complaints are ways of stating that one is suffering (even if it is of relatively trivial matters) without making others wrong or causing undue distress, blame, or shame.

To complain compassionately, one must abide by these eight conditions:

1. Gentle in tone and kind of heart.

2. Respectful of other perspectives.

3. Appreciate of whatever effort was made, even if it’s not up to expectations.

4. Acknowledges that people are not simply tools to satisfy my needs, nor are they mind readers (i.e. don’t punish people for things they never agreed to.) 

5. Honest about my feelings, even the moaning, unhappy ones.

6. Stated directly rather than with passive-aggressive implicature

7. Offered with the intent to share my inner experience as a means of creating more connection or satisfaction for everyone.

8. Accepts my responsibility in changing the situation (if possible) rather than offering critique with no actionable remedy. 

Yes, these are a lot of terms and conditions. There’s no way I’ll hit the mark all the time. 

Heck, if I can check off a few of these boxes, I believe my communication would dramatically improve. 

And if I had to boil it down, I’d say #1, 7, & 8 are the most essential.

They address how am I saying this? Why am I saying this? and what am I taking responsibility to do about it?

Seems like a reasonable place to start.

If you have complaints, please voice them below.

I’ll do my best to do the same.

~ Jeff

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Get In Touch

Ahh. Shit. I’m 1 minute late.

Find the new Zoom link.

“Launch new meeting.”

Click.

As the application is loading and connecting to audio, I readjust my posture, take a sip of water, and open a new tab.

Okay, here we go…

The switch is quick. The transition is seamless.

I appear in my familiar box and stare directly into a tiny black dot as if this could somehow make up for deep, unabiding eye-contact.

Despite the attempt to connect, part of my brain hasn’t finished processing what just happened.

I moved without moving. Shifted without shifting.

How does my body know what is happening if its reality hasn’t changed?

No pause. No break.

No moment in-between to parse one experience from the next.

“The Daily Mush”

Digital life is mushy. It lacks boundaries.

Without boundaries, everything blurs.

There’s just more of everything — more work, more tabs, more tasks, more to do so I can feel proud about how much doing I’ve done.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

In an instantaneous world, pauses are network problems to be eradicated not precious moments to be cherished.

This sentiment is captured by Bo Burnham in the hilarious song, “Welcome to the Internet,”

Could I interest you in everything all of the time? A little bit of everything all of the time? Apathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime. Anything and everything all of the time.

We live in a world where there’s simultaneously more of everything and less of one thing— the interior space for meaning, receptivity, and creativity to emerge.

This space requires not more, but less.

Not speeding up, but slowing down.

It is what I’m lamenting about losing.

All that exists “In-between”.

What Exactly Is The “In-Between”?

The In-between is the room in our days between what just ended and what comes next, between departing and arriving, between our last breath and our next.

The in-between is the white space that prevents the words and sentences from running together into illegible text — a space that lives between discursive thought and unconscious mind wandering.

The in-between is where we allow ourselves to belong to the moment we’re already part of without compulsively rushing headfirst into the next.

It is not only the counterpoint to compulsive doing, but is also the freedom to not get swept away by sociocultural headwinds.

In particular, it’s freedom from the beliefs that say “produce,” “optimize,” and “push for more now.”

Because the in-between is not goal or task-oriented, it’s largely ignored, pushed-aside, and devalued.

While I can’t always put my finger on where it’s gone, my soul feels it slipping away.

How Did We Lose This Precious Resource?

To be fair, the in-between has been slipping away for millennia.

It probably started with the evolution of our species: Homo sapiens sapiens — The wise, wise humans.

The very same things that make us intelligent, make us susceptible to self-deception. Mind-made reality easily becomes untethered from physical truths.

This is evidenced by how my mind and my body tell very different stories of what happened today.

We rely too heavily on our cognitive apparatus and start to disconnect from what is actually happening in this moment, right in front of us.

We invest heavily in thoughts. They go out into the world so we don’t have to.

Thoughts, by their nature, time travel. They’re always on the move.

They don’t want to hang out in-between. There’s too much ambiguity in this liminal space.

The thinking mind can’t find its bearings, can’t secure its safety, can’t relax into the present moment.

That’s what meditation is for: Training the thinking mind to linger longer in the in-between without running away.

Eventually, thinking brought us another entity that has chipped away at the in-between — businesses.

Businesses also like to fill up space. They’re designed to produce output and profit.

A business that does not optimize or increase productivity is on its way out. You’re either growing or decaying — creative destruction — unproductive white space is costly.

For many millennia businesses were built on the labor of our hands. At least this directed our minds back towards the space of our body.

We were subject to physical constraints. No light, no work.

No amount of optimizing can force nature to go faster.

Then came modern technology.

Artificial light upended our daily circadian rhythms.

Precise time-keeping neatly sliced our days into 60-minute chunks to be leased and loaned to the business of production.

The internet helps us go places and do things while going nowhere. Our bodies get abandoned.

Knowledge work is sedentary and disembodied. The endless string of calls, meetings, and hangouts is a menagerie of changing conversations without ever changing contexts.

I stay safely tucked away in my makeshift office for hours, and still somehow get so much done. My butt never moves, but my thoughts have danced around the globe.

It’s both magical and maniacal.

Even after a day of wonderful conversation, there is something very important missing.

It’s one part deeper connection with myself, another part connection with space that is unscheduled, unprescribed, and unencumbered.

The yearning appears.

Where has the in-between gone?

“Progress” Is Always Two-Sided

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we all return to manual labor. This is not a noble savage, Luddite, everything used to be simple and pristine type of argument.

Nor am I ragging on technology, capitalism, or remote work. I love the freedom to be a digital nomad and still provide value and service to others.

I don’t want to go back. I want to move forward.

However, I want to move forward in a way that reclaims what might have existed long ago — the in-between — and integrates it into a post-post-modernity or meta-modernity.

I’m calling out back-to-back zoom meetings as an example of the ways technology, business, and culture of hyper-productivity have filled up my calendar, highjacked my attention span, and left my body and heart to fend for themselves.

When we siphon off the in-between we also begin to lose our innocence. We hustle for more without realizing that we can never get enough of what we don’t need.

What I’m pointing to is more than a jam-packed schedule or lack of time off.

• It’s the underlying belief that we need to optimize for efficiency at every turn and then judge our value and worth on how productive we are.

• It’s filling our schedule to the brim because that’s what we believe we’re supposed to do — stay busy.

• It’s the saying “yes” to more and more because we want to help others without honoring our own need to unplug and decompress.

• It’s the overwhelming, emotionally draining, struggle to keep up with life's incessant demands.

• It’s the false hope of personal time that gets programmed, filled, and itemized with more stuff to get done — The personal just becomes more work.

We’ve lost the practice of allowing our mind, heart, and body to inhabit the same space at the same time, and to do so without needing to produce or consume anything.

Human beings have become human doings.

I am complicit in this farce: simultaneously a victim and perpetrator.

This loss of connection with ourselves and our nature is the cost we pay for continually squeezing out the in-between.

Critiques of Social Ills

I’m certainly not the first person to point my finger at these symptoms of our tragic modern world.

(I recognize I’m using the royal “we,” yet represent a particular slice of hyper-productive, over-educated, New Englander work-ethic, mid-30s career-building culture that is not representative of the larger population.)

As Cal Newport wrote in the “The Frustration with Productivity Culture,”

In classic productivity, there’s no upper limit to the amount of output you seek to produce: more is always better. When you ask individuals to optimize productivity, this more-is-more reality pits the professional part of their life against the personal. More output is possible if you’re willing to steal hours from other parts of your day—from family dinners, or relaxing bike rides—so the imperative to optimize devolves into a game of internal brinkmanship.

“Devolving into internal brinkmanship. ”

Or as another author puts it, the problem of “Heroic Individualism…the game of oneupmanship against both self and others, where measurable achievement is the main arbiter of success and self-worth, and where productivity often gets prioritized over people.”

Yes, I’ve increasingly found myself in a game of “do more than before” chicken hoping that someone pulls the emergency rip-cord and ejects us out of this bitch.

And no one does.

I must do it for myself.

My Attempts To Be In-Between

To be fair, I have established what I consider to be a very nice work-life balance. It’s a testament to both my inherited privileges and a series of decisions I’ve made about how I want to spend my days.

My daily rhythms are so well balanced that I often feel guilty about it when I see my wife and peers toiling for much longer and more intense hours than I am.

“Am I not working hard enough?” I think to myself.

Or have I preemptively neutralized hustle culture before burnout sets in.

I think a bit longer about where I stand in this game of work, time, labor, productivity, and space in-between.

On one hand, my work is all about optimization. I help people get more from their diet, exercise, and self-care.

I assist in increasing your productivity by patching the leaks in your physical, mental, and emotional energy.

This all feeds nicely into our hyper-productivity culture which places the burden on individuals to improve their output.

However, I aspire to greater heights.

I don’t want to make you a super-productive cog in a wheel that is rapidly spinning towards self-destruction.

This would be falling into the trap Krishnamurti pointed to when he said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I want you to be able to do more, not because you have to, but because it’s the natural calling of your soul.

I want to help you increase productivity, but only if feels good in your body and helps the common good.

What’s my role in helping people take control of their health and wellbeing without reinforcing many sociocultural beliefs that make us feel less valuable, less desirable, and less acceptable if we don’t abide by a productivity culture?

My desire to reclaim the in-between is intimately tied to my desire for liberation from productivity culture and the soiled legacy of hyper-masculine colonial extraction.

I want the freedom to exist without confounding my self-worth as equal to optimizing my production per unit of input.

This is not to escape hard work. I am fine with putting in the effort to produce something of value.

Yet I reject the idea that work needs to be done at the cost of the in-between. I refuse to allow myself to be colonized by a memeplex that squashes the light, joyful, sweet nothingness to my day.

This is a delicate thing I’m calling for: an integration of ideals, not a flip-flopping between extremes.

Somewhere between…

laziness and busyness,

complacency and evangelism,

between always needing to do more and not doing anything at all,

there is a space.

I’ll meet you there.

~ Jeff

Get In Touch

It’s a mainstay of my morning routine.

Over the years I have gathered and curated a list of journaling questions to stimulate this reflective process.

Whenever I’m not sure what to write, I return to this list for some inspiration.

It contains over 90 powerful sentence prompts and questions.

Much has been written about good questions. They’re open-ended yet exacting, provocative yet welcoming, surprising yet so obvious they’re easily overlooked.

I hope some of these prompts throw you “off-balance” in search of something deeper.

I want to provoke the emergence of new perspectives, shine light on the shadow, and dream the inconceivable.

A Few Notes on The Reflective Process

Most of these are rooted in uncovering the nooks and crannies of your individual psyche. I want to point out this bias toward an individual, psychological worldview.

Asking how these inquiries can inform our actions and commitments towards a collective reimagining of our world is an equally important step.

Individual transformational and collective transformation must go hand-in-hand.

I am sad to say I have not tracked the various sources of these questions. They have been pulled from numerous books, articles, podcasts, conversations, and meditations.

I want to give credit to any and all of the people whose wisdom this represents. I also want to acknowledge the timeless nature of these questions and the long tradition of deep inquiry itself.

With our questions, we make the world.

I hope you enjoy them. My suggestion is to be creative and have fun!

Ways To Get Started

If you’re looking for a few ways to get started, you can try:

• A Question A Day: Pick one prompt for journaling each day.

• Power Hour: Set a timer for 3min and free-write to each prompt.

• Beholding: Choose a question. Read it and just sit. Don’t write anything. Be with the question. Let yourself daydream.

• Ask A Friend: Pick one prompt and share it with a friend. Listen mindfully to their response.

• Creative Expression: Respond to a question through anything other than written words. You can sing, dance, draw or express yourself creatively.

• Group Check-in/Icebreaker: Use one of these as a question for a group to stimulate conversation.

• Double-Take: Spend 5min answering one question. Then pause and answer it again with an entirely new response. Compare the two. Which feels more true to you?

Stay Mindful of Your (Judgy) Reactions

If you’re choosing to write, challenge yourself to write as boldly, honestly, and vulnerably as possible. 

You will get out what you put in. The more you’re willing to divulge, the more of you will emerge.

That said, it is important to recognize that your psychological immune system will likely kick in to protect you from uncomfortable truths. For now, let’s just call these knee-jerk reactions to not deal with the difficult stuff “protectors parts”.

Protector parts are neither good nor bad, positive nor negative. They just are natural parts of our storytelling selves.

Protectors come in many flavors. Two that are most important for this exercise are the inner judger and an inner perfectionist.

The perfectionist in us is keen to make the most idealized, polished, and positive meaning of the questions below.

The judger will try to avoid, evade, and deflect responsibility.

Your job is to stay aware of both as you reflect.

Both are concerned with looking good, getting praise, or appearing to have figured it out. Both can be disempowering, stripping you of your creativity. Both can be dodges for honest answers.

There are no “right” answers. You’re not being graded. There is no prize for completion.

This is an ongoing practice of noticing what is true for you in this moment.

Orienting Yourself Before You Begin

Notice your experience as you read through the questions and write:

• What easily came to mind?

• What felt more difficult to write about?

• What were you experiencing in your body as you were writing? 

• Did you notice sensations stir within you?

• Did anything surprise you?

• Wich questions jumped out at you?

• Which questions did you immediately want to avoid?

We cannot heal what we ignore.

We cannot live happily and healthfully if we keep running away from taking an honest look at ourselves.

Take all these questions as invitations to embrace your shadow and become more whole.

If you cannot accept the resistance or judgy aspects of yourself and choose to return to a humble, honest inquiry, now is not the right time to do this exercise.

Good luck!

The Living List of Questions:

1. How far does my love extend?

2. My biggest challenge in life is…?
   

3. What have I failed to grieve?
   

4. The most wonderous thing is…?
   

5. I’ve inherited…?
   

6. When I am at my best, I…?
   

7. How would I impact others if I showed up at my best? What prevents me from doing so?
   

8. What would love do in this situation?

9. The world became a fundamentally different place when…?
   

10. The quality I wish I had more of is…?

11. I am bothered by…?
    

12. The joy I share most easily is…?
    

13. I cannot afford to…?

14. The hardest thing for me to accept is…?

15. My greatest strength (i.e. personal superpower) is…?
    

16. A thing I judge others most for is…?

17. When I look at the world and see ____ my heart breaks? 
    

18. What do I risk when I fight? What do I lose when I choose not to fight?

19. I give love by…?
    

20. A belief I’m afraid to say is…?

21. The voice I listen to most is…?
    

22. I prefer to receive love in the form of…?

23. I exist for…?

24. The person I most need to forgive is…? (including yourself!)

25. I have harmed others by…?

26. In 5 years I will be…?

27. The habit I have the hardest time letting go of is…?

28. The thing I am most afraid to admit is…?
    

29. I could use more accountability with…?
    

30. The gift I feel called to give the world is…?

31. The one thing my future self most wants to tell me is…?

32. The one thing my younger self most needed to say but never got the chance is…?

33. The emotion I am most scared to feel is…?

34. My deepest hopes are…? 

35. My opponents are…?
    

36. If my situation were perfect, it would look like...?
    

37. If our situation were ideal, it would look like…?

38. If I had a magic wand, I would...?

39. My favorite hero (role model, guru, etc.) would tell me to...?

40. If I had one week to live, I would…?

41. I say I value _____, but really…?

42. The social norm I most dislike is…?
    

43. How can I be a generative force of social justice?

44. A belief I accept as true is…? 

45. The thing/person I am most afraid to lose is…?

46. The aspect of myself I’m most scared to let go of is…?

47. I believe the purpose of life is…?

48. My best childhood friend would tell me…? 

49. If I could erase the last year and do it all again, I would…? 

50. These are my darkest confessions…? 

51. I have changed my view on…?

52. The lesson I need to practice is…?

53. I no longer claim to understand…?

54. The really original advice I would give myself is...?

55. I feel ashamed to admit that I…?

56. I would surprise myself if I…?

57. I could be wrong about…?
    

58. A person I admire for their ___ is…?
    

59. I am most hypocritical when it comes to…?
    

60. A lesson I learned from heartbreak was…?
    

61. The conversation I know I need to have with myself is…?
    

62. The best piece of advice I received was…?
    

63. I knew I was no longer a child when…?
    

64. A lesson from my family that I want to hold onto is…?
    

65. I am not an easy person to live with because…?
    

66. If I had a different career/studied a different topic, I would…?
    

67. The person I want to become is… (but…)?
    

68. The most challenging thing about being me is…?
    

69. The most wonderful thing about being me is…?
    

70. I am pretending…?
    

71. Parts of myself I have learned to hide include?
    

72. What would my partner or favorite person in the world say are my top 3 strengths?
    

73. What would my partner or favorite person in the world say are my top 3 weaknesses?
    

74. The part of myself I love the most is…?
    

75. The part of myself I struggle with the most is…?
    

76. Describe the superhero that would save me from myself?
    

77. I am most committed to…?
    

78. Who or what am I avoiding coming into an authentic relationship with right now?
    

79. How and when am I unavailable to those who need me?
    

80. The conversation I need to stop having with myself is…?

81. How am I going to last?

82. If nothing changed, would that be ok? Why?

83. What is the real challenge here for me? Why is that so hard?

84. Who is the future self I’ve confined myself to be?
    

85. In what ways am I different from who I once was? In what ways am I the same?

86. How am I ignoring my body? What if I listened?
    

87. If I let go of ___ I would…?
    

88. How can I be more compassionate with myself?
    

89. I owe an apology to…?
    

90. Where am I not being honest with others?
    

91. How am I taking care of the things/people that take care of me? 

To be continued...

Get In Touch

p.s. If you have a question that has been influential in your life, please do share it with me via email or post below in the comments.

We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.

But who are we?

Damn, that’s a hard question.

I ask it pretty much every morning.

This is why I care so much about protecting my morning routine — it’s a time for asking hard questions.

If we don’t know who we are, we don’t really know what world we’re seeing.

To escape the consensus trance, I need to figure out who the hell I am before I go around shoving my ego into the middle of everyone’s business.

• Is that person mowing the lawn at 7am really an asshole trying to annoy me, or did I just wake up with unresolved frustration from the day before that I’m now projecting onto nearby victims?

• Is that email I received overnight really a veiled threat, or am I holding onto insecurities about my power and self-worth?

• Are the dirty dishes in the sink really a personal affront or am I just angry at myself for not dealing with them earlier?

• Do any of these things really matter? Or is the fact that I have dishes, emails, and a grassy lawn a cosmic miracle in and of themselves?

The world we see is colored by our unconscious biases, blindspots, and beliefs.

If we don’t know this, how can we act skillfully, wisely, and kindly?

This is the great value of a reflective and contemplative morning routine.

It’s an opportunity to slow down before life speeds up. It’s a way to structure my energy, ground and expand my sense of self, and purposefully color the type of thinking I will have for rest of the day.

And it all begins with the hardest questions…

Who the hell am I?

What am I doing here?

What are we doing here?

What do I want?

What do we want?

What does the day want from us?

These questions are best reserved for the previous morning hours when everything is quiet, externally and internally.

A gentle energy of possibility fills the air. I drink it in deep.

By asking myself, “Who am I at this moment?” I unlock the important question, “Who do I want to be?”

With awareness comes choice. With choice comes the freedom to act differently.

This is our source of power. We can influence the future by nudging the great unfolding.

Below I describe my process of going inward before going outward. This is a meditation on letting myself go in order to build myself up.

It’s a cosmic to concrete carpe diem.

The Arc of Becoming: No One. Everyone. Someone

It begins with decomposition. It must.

I compost my psyche back into the matrix of the universe to see what kind of new formation can take shape.

Thinking surrenders. Feeling expands.

I start with the broadest, most cosmic perspective I can take: Light, energy, matter, and vibration.

Constructive and destructive interference. Resonance and Rotation.

The big bang; the almighty source of creation.

I am no one.

From potential energy to kinetic energy, possibility is transformed into actuality. Waveforms collapse through varying degrees of probability into an ephemeral “nowness”.

The cosmic egg cracks.

Matter appears. Thoughts manifest. Being become sentient.

One turns into many. A plurality of lights, each with a unique glow and radiance.

I am everyone.

Now I’m in the land of common humanity. A bunch of skin-encapsulated egos trying to tell a story that makes them feel safe, and if not, fulfilling, at least tolerable.

Mission #1: Don’t die.

Mission #2: Tell a story about it.

Ego appears.

My basic needs are the same as yours.

My strategies to get those needs met are different.

Beyond these stories, “Who am I?”

I am a storytelling machine, constantly writing and being written.

I am my body, my breath, my memories, and my dreams. I am my history, my ancestors, my hurts, and my hopes.

I draw energy into my body with a deep breath. If I am all of this, now what?

I attempt to delineate where I begin and end.

Reflection turns outward towards the horizon of the day ahead.

• What is possible?

• What is likely?

• What is planned?

And perhaps the most important question,

• What is standing by in the unmanifest waiting to be realized?

Can I feel those parts peeking out from under the subconscious waiting to show themselves?

This is where my “PACE Practice” comes into play.

Life’s a Marathon. PACE Yourself

• Present: What am I present to right now? What am I noticing in this moment? What am I not noticing?

• Appreciate: How can bring gratitude into this moment? Who and what can I appreciate? If I release worry, insufficiency, and problematizing, who do I become?

• Connect: Where am I feeling connected? How can I protect connections that are already here? How can I grow more connections, internally and with others?

• Experience: What flavor of experiences can I co-create today? How can these experiences express my values? How can I build experiences that empower others to express their best selves?

The PACE practice begins where my cosmic journey of spiritual grounding ends: at the precipice of the day, looking out from the perspective of my thinking mind.

Doing these practices together helps me move from thinking selfishly to thinking relationally.

It’s a call to expand from me to us, ego to eco.

It ends with recomposition. It must.

I look up.

I’m still sitting at my dining table, coffee and journal in hand.

I’m still just Jeff and will go through the day with all the usual Jeff baggage.

At least now I have a sense of what else is possible? I have a sense of how to selfishly bend the day towards my intentions while empowering you to do the same?

I have no idea if any of this works, but it seems like a good way to start a day.

What do you do before 8am?

~ Jeff

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Get In Touch

I haven’t seen you in a while.

Do we go in for a hug?

What if this is the first time we’ve ever met?

Do we still hug?

What about a handshake, a covid-friendly fistbump, or the perennial standby, a wave?

To Hug Or Not To Hug?

The pre-hug moment is an interesting intersection of cultural norms, social cues, interpersonal dynamics, relational history, and bodily contact that may be one of the most under-discussed forms of intimate contact we engage in regularly.

It’s a private moment, yet also very public. It’s can have a ton of meaning or very little. Despite its ubiquity in our culture, it’s not something we ever receive explicit instruction on.

Like so many things in life, you kinda just have to feel it out. In this case, quite literally.

• Maybe there’s a precedence of hugging already established in your relationship.

• Maybe you don’t like being touched or know that they don’t like being touched.

• Maybe others in your group (if you’re with others) are going in for hugs. Refraining from a hug in this situation might seem standoffish.

This all points to the fact that hugging is highly contextual. What might appear as a half-assed hug in one situation may actually be the most vulnerable and intimate form of physical expression in another.

This is why I balk at popular articles along the lines of, “The 7 Types of Hugging And What They Mean About Your Relationship.” To quote this article:

"A side hug means you're not fully in it," says intimacy expert Julian Colker. This hug is more common in acquaintances than friends since it's more approachable and appropriate for people who aren't very close.

This can be true, but I enjoy a good side hug with people I care about. In fact, I find that many men prefer a side hug. It’s intimate without being too intimate. It’s as much of a warm embrace between two men that the legacy burden of patriarchy will allow without the risk of being construed as homosexual.

Sad but true.

Even if there are absolutely no sexual overtones, the full-on frontal hug might just feel too close for comfort.

After all, hugging is extremely vulnerable.

An unguarded front, with its vital organs, softness, and genitalia smashed up against your is kind of like barging in through the front door with all guns blazing.

Of course, there are lots of subtle ways to protect oneself from the intimacy of a full-frontal hug.

Leave one arm out of it. Slightly twist your torso to avoid heart-to-heart contact. Tuck your pelvis away to provide extra space so nothing is misconstrued to be sexual or romantic.

This becomes especially uncomfortable when your hugging partner is moving the other way on the hug-intmacy-contact continuum.

Full arm wrap. Heads close. Squeeze tight. Hold on. Breathe, maybe even rock or whisper something into each other’s ear.

Awkward.

The Challenge of Not Knowing (Asymmetric Information)

So many unconscious calculations of safety, acceptability, and intent are made in the pre-hug moment — the calculus of interpersonal dynamics is mind-boggling complex and swift.

Our bodies make decisions for us. The social cues have already primed us toward one expression or another. All this happens fast, unconsciously, without a chance to verify if my assumptions are accurate.

People rarely ask about the hug.

For instance, when was the last time you stopped to ask a person if they would like a hug rather than just going for it?

How about asking what type of hug they prefer, for how long, and at what pressure?

Never happens.

Yet one might think that moment of discussion to hammer out the details would benefit everyone. Let’s be fully consenting individuals engaging in a mutually satisfactory embrace.

When there’s ambiguity about the status of our closeness, personal preferences for physical contact, and what type of hug we are about to engage in, the most common reaction is awkwardness.

I’m basing my hug on what you might want, but I don’t know how you feel, so there’s a whole lot of guessing going on.

The result is often a missed opportunity for a more fulfilling moment of closeness and connection.

Hugging Variables & Dynamics

I am a hugger. Generally, I love a deep, tight squeeze.

I think something about the pressure calms my nervous system. It’s like a weighted blanket, reequilibrating my oxytocin, cortisol, and serotonin levels for greater ease.

And I recognize that this type of hug is not appropriate for everyone or in every situation.

A hug that might help me feel more secure and settled might make you feel more anxious or insecure. This is why we need to examine the art and science of hugging.

Below I try to name many of the hugging variables to consider before embosoming another individual.

Reasons For Hugging

• Social norm/convention for saying hello or goodbye

• Peer pressure — others in the group are giving hugs

• Acknowledging a longstanding relationship

• Implying a desire to make the relationship deeper or more loving

• Needing physical touch

• Sexual attraction/desire

• Warmth

• Needing to be consoled/soothed

• Intimacy that cannot be represented in any other way

• Safety from other people nearby
  

Bodily Reaction: The Hug-Intimacy-Contact Continuum

• Both bodies relax into the hug; it’s consensual, cocreated, and supportive. (The gold standard in my opinion.)

• One body fully relaxes; the other tenses. (Awkward.)

• Both bodies remain tense/on guard. (Why are we hugging, again?

• Any degree of opening or closing along the continuum

  • This might be based upon conscious decisions about what is appropriate.

  • It might be based upon subconscious neuroception** of safety.

    • **The term "Neuroception" describes how neural circuits distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening.

  • There might also be movement along the continuum during the hug itself in which an initial tense slowly opens into a more relaxed embrace.
    

Possible Baggage Around Hugging

• Personal space infraction

• Trauma history where is touch is triggering

• Awkwardness —> general catch-all for insecurity and uncertainty

• Unwanted sexual overtones

• Cleanliness/Disease transmission

• Smell —> attraction/aversion

• Power dynamics —> dominating/infantalizing

• Height differences —> disparities making relative head/arm placement weird

• Cultural taboos —> High-contact vs low-contact culture.
  

Hugging Mechanics

• Arms: One arm or two?

• Duration: how long do you hold the embrace?

• Pressure: type of physical contact?

  • Patting vs squeezing

  • How hard do you apply pressure?

• Words: do you say anything or remain silent?

• Positioning:

  • Side, back, frontal twist, full-frontal

  • Arms at shoulders, chest, or waist?

  • Do you have a default arm and head configuration?

• Additional contact: eye contact, cheek kissing, hand touch, pelvic contact?

This list is by no means exhaustive.

It is a starting point for deeper examination and discussion of what it means to hug well.

Conscious Contact: The Mindful Hug

What’s the point in writing all this?

To make hugging safe and mutually beneficial for all bodies, cultures, relationships, and situations.

To accomplish this I think we actually need to change the question from “Should I give you a hug” to “Are you interested in hugging?”

This shifts the hug from a transactional give-take to a mutual act of being together. The shift from a noun to a verb, from a hug to hugging.

Subtly shifting the language helps place the emphasis on the shared experience of “holding one another’s wholeness while fully inhabiting that blink of existence.”

Borrowing from the teachings of the late monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, hugging itself can be a meditation if you do it with conscious intent:

Before hugging, stand facing each other as you follow your breathing and establish your true presence. Then open your arms and hug your loved one.

During the first in-breath and out-breath, become aware that you and your beloved are both alive; with the second in-breath and out-breath, think of where you will both be three hundred years from now; and with the third in-breath and out-breath, be aware of how precious it is that you are both still alive.

This might be a little too fluffy for some, but you get the point. Hug with all your body, spirit, and heart.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a polite, distanced, side-hug. Just make your hug a conscious choice.

Choosing and communicating are key. It can be a mindful moment if it is consensual and clear.

Conscious hugging is a moment to acknowledge that we’re here; you’re real; we’re alive.

Of all the places we could be right now, and all the things we could be doing, we’re choosing to do this — hugging.

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At this point, I’ve lost track of how many drinks I’ve had.

Not a typical experience for me. Usually, I’m pretty buttoned up when it comes to booze. One drink is good; Two if I’m feeling celebratory.

I tell myself I’m lucky that I don’t have a drinking problem. It doesn’t run in the family. I’ve never felt compelled to use booze as a coping mechanism.

I typically drink once a week, and even that is more than my body truly wants. The mild headache alerts me to the poison. My body need not say more.

Adult Jeff knows that eliminating alcohol entirely is probably the wisest move from a health standpoint. The negative impacts of booze on my microbiome and sleep concern me, more so than the loss of shrewd discrimination or empty calories.

But there is a younger, wilder frat boy that lives within me. This part of Jeff doesn’t know much about intestinal microbiota or blood sugar regulation. This part of Jeff also doesn’t have the wisdom of hindsight — aka years of accumulated hangovers to keep him on the straight and narrow.

This part thinks drinking is something you do to belong. Or at least it’s something you do to numb the parts of yourself that feel like they don’t belong so you can show up in a way that’s amenable to the group.

This earlier version of me — Teenage Jeff we can call him — evolved before a fully formed prefrontal cortex could exert executive control and ask, “Is this really a good idea?” He developed his drinking habits in a socialized mindset. Binge drinking meant belonging to the tribe of cool kids.

When the conditions are right, Teenage Jeff gets to come out of hibernation and do his party song and dance. Last Saturday was one of those occasions.

Welcoming Younger Parts, Even When They Make A Mess

Teenage Jeff has a refreshing take on life. For him, Monday isn’t preplanned drudgery, relationships aren’t complicated or heavy, and life doesn’t require enormous amounts of effort and logistics.

There’s a freedom, zest, and joy present when he’s around. Like an old friend visiting from out of town, he just wants to have a good time. What happens tomorrow is of little consequence.

Inviting Teenage Jeff over to have a few drinks means “Responsible Adult Jeff” gets a night off. What a relief. #adulting is a lot of work.

Truthfully, I think this is what I’m craving most when Teenage Jeff shows up, permission to set aside my self-reliant, deeply thoughtful, always caretaking adult personality and make space for something a bit more wild and free.

Ultimately, welcoming Teenage Jeff into the mix is not really about the drinking (although that does play a role in shutting down the prefrontal protective personality. More on that to come.)

It’s about giving myself a chance to not be stuck in my rigid adult mind: A chance to let go of the well-worn, well-rehearsed, well-practiced ways I engage with myself and the world.

I think this is often what people are craving when they drink. There’s no question it can be pretty damn refreshing to step outside yourself.

And the next day it can hurt.

This is the circle I’m trying to square: How to embrace my inner teen without returning home to a total shitshow.

Reparenting Myself?

I want to be able to tell Teenage Jeff, “I trust you. Have fun. Enjoy yourself. Be merry. Life is short, celebrate. Make new friends. Laugh and be silly. And remember you still have to wake up tomorrow and deal with the consequences of your actions today. Life will go on, so don’t lose sight of your responsibility. Don’t let down ‘Tomorrow’s Jeff’.”

Like a good parent balancing permissiveness and protection, I give Teenage Jeff a loving hug and depart for the evening. In the back of my mind, I just hope he doesn’t crash the whole system.

Meanwhile, Adult Jeff and associated “manager parts” (if we’re using IFS langauge) have been busy at work. They’re no fools. They’ve learned how to contain the damage from too much alcohol and unscripted late-nights. After all, they’ve had years to practice.

They run me through their checklist:

• Quality sleep and circadian light exposure, check.

• Exercise before the party, check.

• Vitamins to support alcohol metabolism, check

• Microbiome and GI support on hand, check.

• Electrolyte water prepped and by the bed, check.

• Low sugar drink options, check.

• Healthy food as easy to reach as unhealthy snacks, check.

• Water everywhere, check.

• Schedule cleared out for tomorrow, check.

• Other important business matters tied up, check.

• Partner to check-in with, check.

The managers have done their part, trying to contain the damaging underbelly of the teenage psyche: the immature hedonism and uncalculated risk that steals happiness from tomorrow.

And so it goes…

A wilder ride today at the cost of a splitting headache later. The dreaded hangover can be minimized but not escaped.

Integration or Tag-Team?

As I think about this from a lens of psychological growth and integration, there are three pieces that stand out.

1. Flip-flopping between Adult and Teenage personality structures is a sign of unintegrated parts. I haven’t yet developed the capacity to hold both simultaneously and harmoniously in a larger self-structure.

2. Integrating these parts doesn’t happen overnight. It begins with cooperation — we’re all on the same team — and requires a period of tag-teaming the other part into the arena until both trust each other enough to know when it’s time to step in and when it’s time to step out. There’s a coach on the sidelines watching and guiding this whole process. This is the “big S” integrated Self.

3. What’s booze have to do with it?

In Consideration of #1,

It seems like each year I get older, the more deliberate I become about planning my time to be unplanned. It’s a tricky balance filled with irony and contradictions.

Adult Jeff needs to create the appropriate time and place for Teenage Jeff to frolic — freedom, contained.

Is this skillful self-management? Or is this a carefully titrated experience of “tagging-in” that still reeks of parental oversight?

In Consideration of #2

Integration is a unique process of transcending and including.

I’m no longer Teenage Jeff. I’m so much more.

I’m also so much more than Adult Jeff.

Both live within me. Both deserve a spot on the team.

I don’t want to abandon Teenage Jeff just because he can be immature and foolish. He also has valuable qualities to share like humor and enthusiasm.

I don’t want to abandon Adult Jeff. He is high-functioning and well-adapted to the ways of modern life. Just because he can be a bit rigid and controlling doesn’t mean I should prevent him from having a say.

This is the challenge of integration: letting both parts have a voice in my self-system, elevating their beneficial qualities while keeping their unhelpful aspects in check.

In Consideration of #3

I’ve highlighted drinking because it’s easy to identify as a behavior that requires thoughtful consideration. I want my integrated self to make wise decisions about booze that don’t fall into the excesses of Teenage Jeff or the teetotaling of Adult Jeff.

This question of “responsible drinking” is nothing new. There’s the “slippery slope camp” that preaches total sobriety. For those who have a long and dark history with alcoholism, this makes a lot of sense.

Anyone who has experimented with sobriety can probably attest to the ability to have fun without drinking. There’s no hangover. There are no shitty decisions or poor sleep. It’s a pretty nice experience.

Yet I don’t have a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, which points to the other camp of “moderation”. One or two drinks are no big deal, just don’t go overboard.

This camp argues that the psychological and social benefits of a single drink may outweigh the physiological harms. There might even be some beneficial effects of a single drink on blood sugar (despite the surfeit of other evidence as to its negative health effects.)

When I dig deeper into my own desire (or lack thereof) to drink, it points to a desire for shifting my consciousness beyond the familiar. This is what I said earlier about a chance to let go of the well-worn, well-rehearsed, well-practiced ways I engage with myself and the world.

Sober mind represents a familiar flavor of general everyday consciousness. While this is nice, safe, and satisfying, sometimes I want a different flavor.

One could argue that being with others is a gateway to new flavors and feelings. If I were truly attuned to the relational field, the sustenance of human interaction would provide more than needed for a deeply rewarding experience.

In fact, I’ve verified this in my own experience. There are plenty of flavors of consciousness available without drugs. Authentic relating is one way. Breathwork is another.

If I view alcohol as a tool to change the flavor of my thinking, it raises another question: Do I like its effects?

Honestly, I could take it or leave it. I think it’s kind of a shitty drug as far as drugs go. I think is it a social linchpin due to random historical reasons more than its profound psychological effects.

Within a group setting, it’s a culturally sanctioned way of dealing with social anxiety.

How do you get a group of unrelated, fearful monkies to play nice with each other?

Get them a little drunk, throw on some music, and let social engagement networks override any rational questioning of who is protecting the tribe and what happens when we all wake up tomorrow.

Conclusion?

The self that I think I am is a mishmash of democracy and autocracy. Making it more democratic — aka inviting in and honoring Adult and Teenage Jeff — might be a sign of integral personal development or just a sign that I’m going crazy.

Throwing a party is one way of experimenting with this self-integration.

• How much am I able to access these various parts within a social setting?

• How much can I harmonize these parts without feeling like I’m totally reverting back to a younger self or suppressing younger parts in a grab for control?

• How am I upholding a particular role versus letting myself experiment with new ways of being?

• Are hangovers worth it?

I guess I didn’t actually answer this last question. Come over for a drink and we can discuss ;)

My pocket vibrates with another text.

In an attempt to preserve my concentration, I pretend not to notice.

Even the act of suppressing incoming stimuli takes cognitive resources. I don't want to divert more bandwidth to read the text message, let alone respond to it.

So I wait. And wait. And wait.

I delay until there’s a move convenient time to deal with it.

The time never seems to come.

Eventually, I forget the message that attempted to grab my attention hours earlier. I move on with my day with blissful ignorance — a pig satisfied as Socrates would put it.

Then I get another text.

I’m catapulted back to the 21st century — now a human being dissatisfied as Socrates might say — and faced with making decisions about when and how to respond.

This is the tricky trouble with texting: It’s not quite synchronous, not quite asynchronous.

It’s a mongrel of digital communication that lives in gray spaces between being uber personal and devoid of depth.

It’s like a communication sniper, a stripped-down decontextualized message that is targeted directly at your brain. One click, and you’ve shot an idea bullet into someone’s world.

You better hope they know it is friendly fire.

Who writes the rules of texting?

I ask because I feel two ways about it all.

In a world where asynchronous communication has become the modus operandi (i.e. inbox curation), the text message seems to be reserved for more urgent and acute matters…or not.

About half of all my text seems to be about communication itself: “Can we talk soon?” “When is a good time?” “Are you free now?” “Ok, call me.”

I’ve become so peevish about calling people so as not to interrupt their blissful lives that I text them instead to see if they’re available to chat.

Is that truly any less disruptive?

On one hand, I respect texts as a gap-fill that says, “I want your attention and need a direct reply, but I’m too busy/timid/afraid/lazy/uncomfortable to call.”

My favorites are my wife’s texts when she’s downstairs and I’m upstairs. Why shout across the house. Facetime me :)

I also enjoy a text that is akin to a Facebook “poke” of the early days. “Hey, I’m alive and thinking of you. What’s new?” Add a few emojis or a gif and we’re all good.

On the other hand, I protect everyone’s right to ignore unsolicited messages and get back to them when you have the time.

We all need to set and protect boundaries that keep our digital lives from taking over every aspect of our day. So please take the time and space necessary to respond appropriately.

(Just don’t make me wait forever!)

What Is Proper Text Message Decorum?

A delayed response can seem like a lack of interest or a chance to mull it over.

A quick, unedited response might seem flippant or casually cool.

A single-click “I heart your message” may seem lazy or endearing.

A lengthy text reply may seem like oversharing or a bid for intimacy.

An emoji-filled, ALL CAPS, animated text might seem childish or enthusiastic.

There’s much to consider with digital decorum. The problem is that most of the time I don’t deliberately consider any of it. It happens at an unconscious level.

What I do think carefully about is the timing of my responses and what that may say about my engagement with the idea or person in question.

Am I being polite? Am I respecting their timeline? Am I communicating my truth?

If I’m avoiding responding, what does that say about me?

I’d say I’m fairly responsive as a text messager. Yet the social norms and mores around this are still in formation. (Ahh, a great topic for this site.)

There’s no official texting rulebook. (Is there? I should have Googled it.)

The collective forming and norming of text message decorum is a moving average of psychological acceptability that may or may not actually reflect any individual’s preference.

Nonetheless, there seem to be unspoken and agreed-upon rules of good texting practices. Here are my own.

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How My Brain Approaches Texting

Here is how my brain manages the tricky dimensions of texting etiquette:

• It’s my prerogative to not respond: With the onslaught of incoming media, I need to protect my headspace. If I were polite, I’d text you to tell you that I’m not responding. Of course, that is a response in and of itself and defeats the purpose of not responding. (Damn, it’s a bind.)

• If I texted you, I have already placed you into 1 of 3 possible categories based on personal texting history:

  • Quick Responder: I’ll expect a text back almost immediately. If not, I have good reason to believe you’re doing something important and will respond soon.

  • Medium Responder: I’ll expect a response within a few hours, a day at most.

  • Slow Responder: I’m lucky if you text back by the end of the month.

• Unanswered texts still drain cognitive resources: The 2-minute rule states that if you can complete a task in less than two minutes, just do it immediately. Otherwise, it will act like an open app, lingering in the background, and slowly draining your battery. (See: Zeigarnik Effect —> failing to complete a task creates underlying cognitive tension, which is what makes you keep coming back to it.)

• Deciding whether to respond requires triangulating three main data points:

  • The content of the message

  • The sender of the message

  • What I am doing at the time of receiving the message.

• More specifically, the heuristics of responding decide whether the incoming message…

  • Requires a longer, more thoughtful response than I can give/am willing to give right now.

  • Does not necessitate an immediate response due to the underlying content of the message.

  • Is part of a group text which almost always is background chatter

  • Is from a “Slow Responder” and they can taste their own medicine.

  • Is received when I’m actively engaged in other work and honestly cannot look at my phone. (But I still feel you vibrate, damn you.)

  • Is received when I’m not actively engaged in other things but really should be. Therefore, responding would amount to “phubbing”.

  • Is received when I’m not actively engaged in other things and would happily accept a text message distraction.

  • Is from my wife. (i.e. special category.)

• Outliers and anomalies must be handled on a case-by-case basis.

  • Starting the exchange with an immediate response and then moving to a delayed response.

  • Seeing the ominous “three little dots” displayed on your screen.

  • Just calling because they didn’t respond.

  • Messages with images, videos, and gifs.

  • Don’t even get me started on group texts. They’re like chronic itches that can be ignored until you’re specifically called out or everyone starts scratching at the same time.

These factors (and probably many others) interplay to create a tangle of possible text outcomes.

I wonder if people’s texting habits mirror their email habits. It would make sense that the rules and strategies you use for organizing digital data would like to crossover from one medium to the next.

I’m not an “Inbox Zero” kinda guy, but I do like to keep my text messages always cleared out.

That is unless I’ve flagged a message to be dealt with at a later time. I leave these unread despite knowing that that little red circle will haunt me every time I look at the screen.

That number ensconced in a red circle is the symbol of all that’s good, bad, and ugly with our digital lives.

~ Jeff

Post to comments your best texting practices, etiquette, and decorum.

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Pressure to produce.

The acerbic bitterness of black coffee coating my fresh morning pallette.

Sweet familiarity of being back at home after traveling. Does it count as nostalgic if I’m still living it?

My chest and belly slowly rising and falling with each breath. My heartbeat accompanies at double pace. Percussionists never rest. Every song needs a beat.

Tension in my shoulders and neck — the chronic tech-neck forward head-hunch curling in towards the screen. I just felt it drop and release. There’s more, I know it.

Some other emotions stirring close beneath the surface. What are these feelings lurking in the shadows? I close my eyes to sense closer. Is it you, Sadness? Have you brought a friend, Impatience? Why don’t you reveal yourself? You’re playing hard to get.

Muscles in my forearm that I’ve never paid attention to while typing. I try to relax but there’s low-level tension that refuses to leave, especially my left forearm. I wonder how much my elbow pain is related? Relax damn it, relax.

Rectangles, everywhere. My fingers swipe a rectangular key on a rectangular computer sitting on a rectangular placemat covering a rectangular dining room table within a rectangular room placed within a rectangular home. Don’t even get me started on the squares.

Beginnings. It’s not even 7am. 15+hrs await transformation from nothing to something before I sleep again. Why is this not more exciting? Maybe because it’s Tuesday.

Sacks of meat — flesh, blood, and bone. Would my leg taste good? Doubtful. Must I ask? Yes. If I am to eat other animals, I must own the thought of being eaten myself.

Desire: It lurks behind every corner, waiting in the space between impulse and action. Desire to take another sip of coffee. Desire to urinate. Desire to stand up. Desire to become unboxed and leave the manufactured world of rectangles. Desire to shout at the top of my lungs, “Good morning sunshine. Have a beautiful day!” Desire to feed my ravenous mind something more stimulating. How much desire is simply running away from pain and how much actually stimulates the tender follicle of evolution?

Choices that are not mine to make. They’ve been decided already. My body specifically commands me to take it to the bathroom. Can I relish in my role as protector and servant? Is my ego willing to accept that free will may just be an illusion of “free won’t”?

The ability to put this morning into words. To share my inner theater of subjective feeling. To reveal what might have passed through me without acknowledgment. To language a moment and then give that moment a home in the cloud — Digital real estate substitutes for neurological property. I wonder if my neurons feel relieved?

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