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The thinking
Every so often I write one. Not an article, and not advice, but thinking caught while it is still moving, usually started by a conversation, or a question that will not leave me alone. Each is written to one person I love, in a city under fire, who reads everything before anyone else and keeps me honest, because nothing false survives her.
A few others, still unfinished.
Act or Avoid
People talk about waiting as though nothing is being decided yet, when a great deal is already being decided for them simply by staying where they are. You can call it patience. More often it is the discomfort of choosing without certainty, dressed up as good sense.
So what is it you are waiting to feel certain about, and has waiting ever once delivered it?
Identity and Labels
A label, once said, does quiet work in the background. It makes some futures feel sensible and others faintly ridiculous, until changing direction begins to feel like failure rather than curiosity.
What do you still call yourself out of habit, rather than out of truth?
The Illusion of Freedom
We like to believe we are free. Look closely and most of us are moving inside limits no one is enforcing, rules absorbed so early that we mistake them for the shape of the world.
Which of the rules you live by would survive you asking where they came from?
Monkey Mind: Wu Cheng'en
In Journey to the West the Monkey King is brilliant and ungovernable, until a band is fitted to his head that tightens whenever he runs wild. I used to read it as cruelty. Freedom without discipline scatters, discipline without freedom is a cage, and the band is rarely one we chose.
So the question is never whether you wear one. It is whose hand was on it, and whether you would still choose it today.
A thought I have not finished
Some people treat what happens to them as information. Others treat it as a verdict and fix the meaning at once. I keep coming back to the idea that much of what we call luck, or fate, is really about when we decided to stop looking.
Still turning this one over. More work needed.Dear Vlod, Best Vlad. A novel.
Two men who will never meet, writing to each other from 24 February 2022. Darkly funny on the surface, and entirely serious underneath. Dear Volodymyr, some of my friends will drop into Kyiv later today. I wouldn't worry, they are very friendly. Do help them park their tanks.
The novel will be finished when the war ends.
There is no schedule built to hold your attention, and nothing to keep up with. The Letters arrive when they are ready, usually every couple of weeks. Read them when you have time, ignore them when you do not, and leave the moment they stop being useful. Free, always.
One email to confirm, then the Letters. Nothing else.