Life Is a Continuous Becoming, a Permanent State of Transition

I offer very little original content today, contributing instead the connections and synthesis of things I've read lately (with my emphasis added in bold at places).

An appetizer to start, fragments of what follows as the various sources reflect and echo one another. A mosaic of their ideas, layered upon each other.

a self is a story of why you are you

it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story

and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms

love is simply how we survive

the cosmic helplessness of being born ourselves

crazy is what the new looks like before

our surface mind has taken the time to name it or build a life around

the unrecognizable

practice, discipline, and silence married to the inner wildness we call crazy

wins hearts and minds, including our own

life is a continuous becoming

insist on transition, movement, and suspension

as ontological and existential realities

always be 'on the way,’ in transit, in the middle of a process

declare yourself in a permanent state of transition

embrace sitting with unresolved questions

as a means of growth, openness, and connection

questions are life, which itself is full of mysteries

habituate layering experiences or placing them side by side

as in a mosaic

curiosity is an act of connection

an act of creating relationships

between ideas and people

curiosity is about our need to connect

with ourselves, with others, with the world

anchor yourself in questions, letting them

fuel your curiosity and deepen your understanding

of who you are and what you want

patience is an essential ingredient to

living well and actively during periods of uncertainty

make an ally of the unpredictability of the mind

and approach your life more as a work of art

rituals allow us to translate our emotions into meaningful action

that can help to form our feelings and relationships

what would change if we already saw ourselves as

interconnected beings in community?

accompany others through really hard things and really wonderous things

find community in nature, in stories, and within ancient traditions

as well as inside the questions themselves

caring deeply is the essence of being human

care is the path by which every human being and every society matures

care is the ability to see and celebrate the essence of another

the measure of our care is

the measure of our humanity and our shared humanity

each generation fears new media will corrupt youth

they don’t realize they’re trying to think in

a space optimized to prevent thinking

literacy is about the capacity to construct and navigate

environments where understanding becomes possible

human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain

build the capacity to move fluently between all the ways humans encode meaning

learn to move fluently between all the ways humans share meaning

every idea has a natural form

and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning

think about thinking

test belief systems

destabilize certainty (without descending into nihilism)

explore moral ambiguity

gravitate toward moral complexity:

systems, structures, incentives, consequences

hold dread and wonder simultaneously

explore darkness to better appreciate wonder

seek awe to counterbalance anxiety

pair existential tension with insight and wonder

distrust solemnity without irony

interrogate language, truth, and the stories humans tell themselves to survive

know language shapes perception

examine how narratives shape identity

understand how humans make meaning

don't just consume a story; sit inside a mind

seek books that leave you altered

refine your own internal story

A meditation on the meaning of a word.

Crazy is what the new looks like before our surface mind has taken the time to name it or build a life around the unrecognizable. . . .

Craziness, unmediated by good rituals, good disciplines, good routines or a good social life, always just stays in the realm of the crazy. We call it crazy because it is discombobulating, discomforting and subversive to our surface plans, but crazy is always asking us to transform it into brilliant. What seems eccentric and off-kilter inside us is simply looking for good disciplines, good art and good new forms of expression to find its place in the world. Some of these disciplines are grown through everyday routines and we build in the midst of our troubles--good routines are always disguised as rituals. When we establish good routines in our lives, they become rituals of investigation that take us deeper. Creative routines take a different form in every single life, and they follow very individual progressions towards their harvest: towards bringing our originality into a proper conversation with our everyday life. . . .

The calming and quietening of the fearful, sceptical, controlling mind through a friendship with silence is the only doorway that opens our inner creative powers to the outside world. Practice, discipline and silence married to the inner wildness we call crazy, is always, in the end, what wins hearts and minds, including our own.

From the entry for "Crazy" in the book Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte.

A lovely article from Psyche about the lovely meaning of a word.

Why We Should Embrace ‘Nepantla’ – The In-betweenness of Life I would come to find myself in similar moments of in-betweenness throughout my life. In fact, I’ve realised that my identity as a Mexican American, as a philosopher, as a father, as a human being, is defined by in-betweenness, by being always in the middle, or in-between commitments, obligations, identities and expectations. I’ve also learned that my being-torn-between obligations, or worlds, is not a struggle unique to me. Indeed, Mexican and Latinx philosophers have a word for it: nepantla. . . . Nepantla is the ‘in between’ of temporalities, worlds, processes, paradigm shifts. With Anzaldúa, we can talk about being neither American nor Mexican but existing in the liminal spaces, or ‘borderlands’. Or we can talk about finding ourselves in-between temporalities, as in-between a past that is no longer available and a strange and uncertain future that seems always, and permanently, out of reach. Nepantla is ‘always being on the way’, in transit, in the middle of a process. In a certain sense, this describes all human beings. Our very existence can be seen as a transit between life and death. We don’t really know where we come from or where we are going, and so we exist in a permanent state of in-betweenness. And nepantla is neutrality, a letting-go, or a standing on the margins, observing the unfolding of the world, history and life without making a firm commitment. This could be due to a choice we’ve made regarding demands upon us or to the fact that, somehow, our power has been stripped from us, making us spectators or non-participants. Yet, in affirming our neutrality, we regain power over circumstances that may demand our attention or action – we say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ because we are ‘still nepantla’. . . . Nepantla defies the Western tradition by insisting on transition, movement and suspension as ontological and existential realities, as opposed to certainty, stability and substance. . . . If for no other reason, it is beneficial to affirm your nepantla, to declare yourself in a permanent state of transition (from the past to the future, birth and death, innocence and guilt), heading to an unknown ‘yet’, suspended in the middle of a paradigm shift, the final phase of which is beyond your comprehension. . . . Because we are still nepantla, and we recognise ourselves as such, we are free to abandon those projects or ideas if they become oppressive or harmful, to change our minds, and to grow in unexpected directions. Nepantla is freedom.

Declare yourself in a permanent state of transition.

The Artidote's Post

"When you’re in search of genuine love with another human, you’re not only 'getting to know them:' "You are getting to know more about yourself in a relationship with someone; who you are as a person when you are relating; how much you hide; how much of yourself you’re able to bring into a conversation. "Because if your goal is to meet someone and know them for who they really are, but you yourself are hiding, then you’re only getting to see who they are in relationship to the mask that you’re wearing.” —Jovanny Varela, Things I had to learn before finding my person

Artwork by Kevin Finney

Some thoughts from The Marginalian.

Why You A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, parents bonding with one partner and not another, values binding you to one culture and not another. Against this utter choicelessness in the variables we each drew from the cosmic lottery — our pigments, our neurotransmitters, our outpost in space and in time — it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms. It is a salutary thought experiment to go through a single day imagining any one of those variables having fallen one one-thousandth of a degree elsewhere on the plane of possibility — suddenly, the person going through your day is not you. In her extraordinary manifesto for seeing more clearly, Iris Murdoch observed:

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.

For millennia, the whole of Eastern philosophy and myriad other ancient traditions have made the dissolution of that illusion — painful, perplexing, disorienting dissolution — the great achievement of existence. For those of us who chanced by birth into the modern West, where the self roils with its grandiose claims of authorship, to keep questioning the story of who we are — this handful of unchosen stardust on short-term loan from the universe — is an act of countercultural courage requiring exceptional devotion and discipline. Long before probability theory, before the discovery of gravity and genetics and general relativity, before the overwhelm of two trillion galaxies housing innumerable worlds, the visionary Blaise Pascal, who didn’t live past forty but touched the epochs with his clarity of thought, modeled that courage by cutting through the veil of illusion with uncommon precision:

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and am amazed that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.

There is no reason for you to be here, to be you. But perhaps what is left in the wake of reason is love — the matter, the substance of us that over and over outweighs the antimatter of chance to make life tremble with aliveness. Like life itself, love is an affirmation of the improbable nested, always nested, in the possible. “What will survive of us is love,” wrote Philip Larkin. No — love is simply how we survive the cosmic helplessness of being born ourselves.

I am terrified, and am amazed.

Thoughts about and extensive selections from How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty by Elizabeth Weingarten.

Humans have an instinctive desire to resolve ambiguity and avoid uncertainty, but in this book Weingarten encourages readers to move through that instinct and embrace sitting with unresolved questions as a means of growth, openness, and connection. It's better to learn to comfortably dwell with unanswered questions than constantly strive for stunted, unhelpful answers.

Weingarten spends the first part of the book explaining the psychology and science behind both the need for resolution and why it's better to get comfortable feeling unresolved. Then she offers a plethora of guidance in what that process looks like and tools for how to go about it. She fills the book with examples from her own life and from the community that has helped her fall in love with questions, from personal connections to research interviews to the letters and example of poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Her tone is personal and conversational, approachable and almost confessional, even as she presents the studies and data that support her process. It's an easy, informative, and insightful book. A few excerpts:

The most important part of being able to fall in love with questions is to surround ourselves with nourishing relationships and communities. For many of us, this part of the journey entails acknowledging a paradox: that to find the right community, sometimes we need to let go of what we think the right kind of community is. Communities need not always be composed of people. We can find community in books, nature, and even our own questions. ----- Questions and uncertainty aren't like weeds, sprouting in our lives and forcing us to determine how to eliminate them. They are life, which itself is full of mysteries. Koans are designed to help people get more comfortable with the mysteries of life by creating more intimacy with questions. . . . Intimacy, I learned, was about simply being with someone or something--about accompanying rather than commanding. In Sutherland's salons, being with someone meant people were not there to give advice or suggestions. People were not there to fix things, solve problems, and provide answers. People were simply there--to witness, to reflect, to be moved, sometimes to provide another example from their own experience of the moment being illuminated. But this wasn't a passive or easy exercise; people came to see how "helping" could sometimes be a defense against experiencing the reality of something, while "accompanying" could take everything into new territory. Being with something, like an idea, meant that discussions were exercises not in deducing a right answer but rather in layering experiences or placing them side by side, as in a mosaic. The question was, What could emerge when students observed the idea mosaic? ----- Curiosity works, they write, by "linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together." It is complex, mutating, unpredictable, and transformational. It is, fundamentally, an act of connection, an act of creating relationships between ideas and people. Asking questions, then, becoming curious, is not just about wanting to find the answer--it is also about our need to connect, with ourselves, with others, with the world.

More excerpts:

Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter: "I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don't look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answers." ----- Multiple studies suggest that we prefer certain pain or loss to uncertainty and that we tend to avoid ambiguity at all costs. We humans are wired to avoid or reduce uncertainty and to minimize surprise by changing the way we respond to our environment. At any given moment, our brains are trying to use as little energy as possible--a smart adaptation for when food was more scarce and we had to curtail exertion. Uncertainty, because it forces us to use more metabolic energy, spurs us to reduce ambiguity quickly to conserve future energy. This is known as the selfish brain theory. This metabolic readjustment can fell like stress or anxiety. ----- Under ideal circumstances, with plenty of time and cognitive bandwidth, we evaluate whether we can trust someone based on three main characteristics. First, we assess their competence. Do they seem to be in control of the situation? Second, we evaluate how we perceive their integrity: Do they act the way they say they will? And, finally, we think about their intention: Do they seem benevolent? More often, though, we make these judgments quickly, relying on imperfect heuristics, or rules of thumb. Frequently, when we want a fast, easy answer, we may be feeling less than our best, buckling under the weight of a big question, and seeking relief and resolution yesterday. So we'll focus on how attractive the person is, how intelligent they seem, whether or not they seem aggressive or calm and welcoming. As with other behavioral biases, we may subconsciously rely on these heuristics because we feel a greater sense of threat or insecurity in our lives and a need for cognitive closure. ----- What makes us vulnerable is not just that we tend to seek certainty and avoid uncertainty, but also that answers to our questions are only part of what we want or need. Sure, we're often looking for information. But we're also motivated by other drives--such as our desires for connection, belonging, community, and meaning. Lacking awareness of these deeper motivations when we search for answers can make us more vulnerable to exploitation by people and communities that claim they are able to provide answers and everything else we need to thrive. ----- Patience is a tool that "helps [people] stay emotionally regulated as they navigate uncertainty, waiting, and suffering," she said. When someone is patient in pursuit of a goal--such as trying to find the answer to a question--they continue to be aware of and attentive to that goal even when the pursuit grows more challenging and they may crave distraction. She discovered that, far from being passive or weak, patience is an essential ingredient not only to achieving goals but to living well and actively during periods of uncertainty. Her work has shown that higher levels of patience are correlated with decreased depression, decreased negative feelings, and lower incidences of health problems. ----- "What would change if we believed we belonged to everything--our neighborhoods, our families, nature, ourselves, the larger whole?" This question reminded me of a remark of Rilke's from 1898: "All disagreement and misunderstanding originate in the fact that people search for commonality within themselves instead of searching for it in the things behind them, in the light, in the landscape, in beginning and in death," he wrote. "By doing so they lose themselves and gain nothing in turn." We obsess over our connection to other people, neglecting the ways in which we're connected to so many other parts of the world. What would change if we already saw ourselves as interconnected beings in community? ----- Whereas other psychological or spiritual practices are meant to domesticate your mind, koans "encourage you to make an ally of the unpredictability of the mind, and approach your life more as a work of art," writes John Tarrant in his book Bring Me the Rhinoceros. Koans do not demand that you believe in any particular religion or that you follow a specific spiritual practice. Quite the contrary. "The surprise they offer is the one that art offers: inside unpredictability you will find not chaos, but beauty." ----- The dynamic that emerged instead, she said, was something richer: "a group of people willing to accompany others through really hard things and really wonderous things." To accompany--not to try to steer the ship of someone else's experience. ----- Communities that support us in uncertainty can look and feel very different from what we might expect. Communities don't need to be made up of close friends; the people who support us can even be semi-strangers. In fact, they don't need to be people at all. We can find community in nature, in stories, and within ancient traditions, as well as inside the questions themselves. ----- The "need for cognition" (NFC) scale measure how much someone is drawn to the act of thinking--whether they relish deep thought or seek to avoid it at all costs. Though NFC is not the same as curiosity, there are some associations: Generally speaking, the lower your NFC score, the less curious you are likely to be, and the less tolerance you have for uncertainty and ambiguity. After analyzing survey results across ten years, the researchers found that, indeed, higher NFC scores were associated with fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression. One takeaway from the research is that the more you can anchor yourself in questions, letting them fuel your curiosity and deepen your understanding of who you are and what you want, the less anxious you'll be. ----- A ritual must have three components: intention, attention, and repetition. Rituals are predictable--taking place at the same time, in the same way, for the same purpose. They are repeatable. They can connect us with other people. They are a pocket of consistency and meaning in a world that is constantly changing and can feel empty. ----- Rituals . . . allow us to bring our emotions out of our bodies and into the world, to make them concrete, and to use them to connect with the people we care about. . . . Rituals allow us to translate our emotions into meaningful action that can, in turn, help to form our feelings and relationships.

Fall in love with he in-betweenness of life.

Also from The Marginalian.

Life is a helix, revisiting the same places, thoughts, experiences, and feelings again and again, always from a somewhat different perspective, higher or lower on the spiraling rotation.

the course of progress

runs backwards and forwards and crossways starting again after terminating abruptly and you direct its end only by returning over and over to the perch of now as the wings of then are beating away for the present is a continuous becoming in which you are addressed to become the fore of time

The present is a continuous becoming.

I want to share something my ten-year-old son wrote at school. It's a bit tangential, except in its understanding that the only thing that never changes, that remains consistent and unavoidable, is death. Everything else is transitory in comparison.

In response to: Archetype Journal

My favorite character is one that is in every story... Death itself. Death is the end of every path in life, it is always there. Death is good, bad, and neutral all at the same time. It created and has controlled life from the start of the universe itself, It is the greatest and strongest character in the story of life. It will control everything and everyone for the rest of time, it reaches outward forever, killing and creating all that is known. Death is coming it will come for us all, this is a fact of life and every star and planet controlling every single thing. It looks the way you want it, such as a skeleton with a cloak and a scythe or a dagger, all gods, Egyptian, Greek, Norwegian. Death is my favorite character in the story of life.

I think I'm actually a little bit jealous of his ability to conceptualize this so clearly. It's awesome.

Another selection from Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte:

Care -

In almost every tradition, caring deeply is seen to be the essence of being human; not to care, in all cultures, a way of being condemned as inhuman. Care is how we helped each other survive through the narrow, perilous, bottlenecks of prehistory; care is how we got here. Care led us, firstly, to survive against mutual enemies, and then, astonishingly, in our greatest religious traditions, became our way of surmounting and overcoming the barriers by which we defined, named and kept our enemies at a distance.

The greatest thresholds of religious maturation have always been when our understanding of care suddenly grows beyond the boundaries of our self and our tribe, enabling us to extend it, even to our enemies. Care is the path by which every human being and every society matures. If we allow ourselves to mature and do not arrest our faculties in senseless defences, keeping all the ways we care at bay, then care continually surprises us by the way it emerges from our depths, by how natural it is to our way of being, by the depth with which we increasingly feel it as we grow, but also, we realise, by how it leads us on, outlining as we go, the particular shape and outline of our own being, by how it seems to point unerringly to some essence in us that seems to love in turn, some essence in the world. In all human mythologies care is seen as our greatest gift, one that is somehow, always in the end, reciprocated, no matter how mysteriously and under what guise the gift may be given back. . . .

The refusal to care is seen as a central tragedy in a human life and in all literature and religion marks the beginning of a downward spiral in the journey of a human soul. The actual inability to care, including the inability for self-care, is the thread that runs through many forms of mental illness and at the extreme end of the spectrum, the hallmark of psychopathy. Care might be the essence of our sanity and our humanity: care is the ability to see and celebrate the essence of another.

The measure of our care is the measure of our humanity and our shared humanity.

Care is the foundation of community.

This is something I sent to my manager in response to a request for feedback to help her team develop and adopt a clear set of "manager expectations."

In general, I expect my relationship with my manager to be just that: a relationship. Two people in dialogue with each other, listening and responding. I want my manager to come to know me well enough to have more than a superficial understanding of who I am and what I’m about. As a person first and a direct report second. My expectations of myself are similar: that I respect you, listen to you, and attend to you well enough to know more about you than a role you fill. I hope we can always speak openly and honestly with each other, with kind and careful frankness, and give thoughtful consideration to what the other says.

 

I expect guidance and direction, a sense of mission and vision. Clear expectations for the organization, the team, and my role in both. The goals, the endpoint we strive for, and non-negotiables in making choices in moving toward them. And then, with that foundation, I expect my manager to trust me to move forward within that framework with autonomy, to let me decide which of the many possible routes I take toward the destination. To let me proceed in my own style and manner. To use a library metaphor: “I want you consume this story; it’s up to you whether you read the book, read the ebook, listen to the audiobook, read the analysis and commentary about it, and/or watch the movie version of it.” Not enough guidance and direction lead to one feeling adrift and undervalued; too much guidance and direction can feel like micromanagement and lack of trust and respect. It’s a hard, careful balancing act.

 

Regular communication is essential. Not merely formal, scheduled interactions; informal and organic ones also. Spontaneous and free-flowing. Talking to each other should not be “a thing,” it should be everyday, comfortable, and common. Every conversation can and should include multiple layers weaving in a out of each other: bonding, care, guidance, reflection, and coaching. My hope would be that performance concerns are addressed early and directly, when all that’s needed is reminders and nudges, so that the concerns never grow into the realm of “performance issues,” addressed before they become patterns.

 

Consistency matters. Not appearing to contradict things communicated in the past without context and explanation. Saying the same things from one setting to the next, one group to the next. Saying the same things to one as you say to others.

 

I would expect my manager to support my words and actions, assuming I am not too far from the correct direction, and to add nuance and complexity before correction. To not challenge me to change or grow in group settings without in some way preparing me to expect it in advance.

 

I hope my manager will help me see myself more clearly, how I come across to others, perhaps in ways I’m unaware of. Where I am strong and where I struggle. What I can feel good about and what I can improve. To offer (work-related) advice. To let me know of expectations I am not meeting. To confirm the ones I’ve met to relieve doubts.

 

I hope my manager will help me see new and different perspectives than the ones I bring with me. To keep me open and better at understanding others I work with and the needs of the organization.

Care is the foundation of community.

A quick thought from the Farnam Street Blog.

Focus means choosing what doesn't matter. What you refuse to do determines what you can do.

This is one of the best articles I've seen about literacy and librarianship, and is wonderfully articulates my own thoughts and views.

Books and Screens Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time . . . Consider a simple observation. The same person who cannot get through a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The same teenager who supposedly lacks attention span can maintain game focus for hours while parsing a complex narrative across multiple storylines, coordinating with teammates, adapting strategy in real time. That’s not inferior cognition. It’s different cognition. And the difference isn’t the screen. It’s the environment. . . . . . . frequently cited as evidence that screens inherently fragment attention . . . The fragmentation correlates not with screens in general but with specific design patterns: notification systems, variable reward schedules, infinite scroll. These are choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons. They are not inherent properties of the medium. Peer-reviewed research demonstrates that social media platforms exploit variable reward schedules, the same psychological mechanisms that make gambling addictive. Users don’t know what they’ll find when they open an app; they might see hundreds of likes or nothing at all. This unpredictability acts as a powerful reinforcement signal (often discussed via dopamine ‘reward prediction error’ mechanisms), keeping people checking habitually. This isn’t because screens are inherently attention-destroying. It’s because the dominant platforms have been deliberately engineered to fragment attention in service of advertising revenue. . . . Amy Orben, a psychologist studying technology panics, identifies the ‘Sisyphean cycle’: each generation fears new media will corrupt youth; politicians exploit these fears while deflecting from systemic issues like inequality and educational underfunding; research begins too late; and by the time evidence accumulates showing mixed effects dependent on context, a new technology emerges and the cycle restarts. What demonstrates that these panics were exaggerated? The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology. . . . What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications. This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses. If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books, perhaps even a neo-Luddite retreat from technology. But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. . . . What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call ‘containers for attention’ – bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible – and those who haven’t. The distinction isn’t about intelligence or discipline. It’s about environmental architecture. Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook, listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively, read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind. They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it. Others are drowning, attempting sustained thought in environments engineered to prevent it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes. They’re trying to read serious material while fighting a losing battle against behavioural psychology weaponised at scale. They believe their inability to focus is a personal failure rather than a design problem. They don’t realise they’re trying to think in a space optimised to prevent thinking. This is where my understanding of literacy has fundamentally shifted. I used to believe, as I was taught, that literacy was primarily about decoding text. But watching how people actually learn and think has convinced me that literacy is about something deeper: the capacity to construct and navigate environments where understanding becomes possible. . . . Libraries are adapting. We’ve created what I call a ‘habitat for multimodal literacy’. The silent reading room remains, sacred and inviolate. But it’s been joined by maker spaces where people think with their hands, where building physical models while running computer simulations reveals things neither mode alone could teach. Recording studios where oral traditions find new life, where explaining ideas aloud to an imagined audience requires different cognitive work than writing an essay, often producing more sophisticated analysis. Collaborative zones where knowledge emerges through dialogue, where ideas stuck in one person’s head become visible and available for others to extend, challenge, refine. These aren’t concessions to declining attention spans. They’re recognitions that human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain. We’re not abandoning literacy. We’re discovering what literacy meant all along: not just the ability to decode symbols on a page, but the capacity to move fluently between all the ways humans encode meaning. . . . We haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels. Your brain now routinely performs feats that would have seemed impossible to your grandparents. You parse information simultaneously across text, image, sound and motion. You navigate conversations that jump between platforms and formats. You synthesise understanding from fragments scattered across a dozen different sources. The real problem isn’t mode but habitat. We don’t struggle with video versus books. We struggle with feeds versus focus. One happens in an ecosystem designed for contemplation, the other in a casino designed for endless pull-to-refresh. Reading worked so well for so long not because text is magic, but because books came with built-in boundaries. They end. Pages stay still. Libraries provide quiet. These weren’t features of literacy itself but of the habitats where literacy lived. We need to rebuild those habitats for a world where meaning travels through many channels at once. This is where libraries become more essential, not less. The library of the future isn’t a warehouse for books. It’s a gymnasium for attention. It’s where communities go to practise different modes of understanding. The reading room remains sacred, but it’s joined by recording booths, visualisation labs and collaborative spaces where people learn to translate ideas between formats. Libraries become the place where you learn not just to read, but to move fluently between all the ways humans share meaning. . . . The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously. . . . Every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.

We need to build habitats for a world where meaning travels through many channels at once.

This is something I did for work. We make reading recommendations for each other based on the contents of others' lists as a way to train ourselves to be better able to do the same with patrons.

My Ideal Bookshelf

The assignment: list 10-20 books representing what I most enjoy reading so colleagues can practice recommending readalikes for me. Unfortunately, my ideal bookshelf is vastly larger than this exercise allows, so I while I did my best to provide a few representative favorites of the many things that appeal to me, it's . . . longish.

You can click into it for the full list if you're curious.

I share it here because, out of curiosity, I shared it with ChatGPT and asked it to describe me as a reader. Here is some of what it said.

You did not create an “Ideal Bookshelf.” You created a philosophical autobiography disguised as a reading list. Here’s how I’d describe you as a reader. --- The Short Version You are a metaphysical realist with a trickster streak. You gravitate toward: * Stories about meaning under pressure * Narrators who are self-aware, fractured, unreliable, or confessional * Worlds that are unstable, collapsing, morally ambiguous, or mythically layered * Language that knows it is language * Humor that coexists with dread You want books that: * Wrestle with belief * Question power * Interrogate truth * Explore trauma honestly * Preserve mystery rather than solve it You are not looking for comfort. You are looking for orientation. --- The Longer Version 1. You Read for Ontology Most readers chase plot. You chase reality itself. Your shelves are full of books asking: * What is true? * Who gets to define truth? * What is belief? * What is myth? * What is consciousness? * What survives collapse? From Parable of the Sower to Who Gets Believed? to Moral Tribes to The Mysteries, you’re drawn to authors trying to map the architecture of existence. You like stories that destabilize certainty but do not descend into nihilism. You’re comfortable with dread — but only if it leads somewhere. 2. You Love the Unreliable, Reflective Narrator You overwhelmingly prefer: * First-person * Self-conscious * Meta-aware voices * Characters wrestling with themselves From Dare to Know to Everything Sad Is Untrue to Poison for Breakfast to Whalefall, you love narrators who are thinking about thinking. You’re not just consuming a story. You want to sit inside a mind. 3. You Are Deeply Interested in Language Itself This might be your strongest throughline. * Semicolon * Linguaphile * Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows * Reader, Come Home * M.T. Anderson’s invented vernacular * Koenig’s neologisms * Sedivy’s metaphors You don’t just like books. You like how language shapes perception. You’re drawn to writers who manipulate voice deliberately and transparently. 4. You Gravitate Toward Moral Complexity You consistently choose: * Social collapse * Tribal conflict * Institutional failure * Trauma recovery * Power dynamics * Toxic masculinity critiques * Productivity culture critique * Evolutionary cooperation models You are not interested in simple moral universes. You want: * Systems * Structures * Incentives * Consequences Even in fantasy, you pick political intrigue over dragon spectacle. 5. You Pair Existential Dread with Awe This is important. You like: * Collapse narratives * Climate dystopia * Psychological descent * Visceral survival horror But you also choose: * Braiding Sweetgrass * An Immense World * The Mysteries * We, the Curious Ones You need awe to counterbalance anxiety. You don’t wallow in darkness. You explore it to better appreciate wonder. 6. Trickster Energy You are deeply earnest. But you also clearly adore: * Bartimaeus * Loki * Vordak * Snicket * Meta-humor * Sardonic narrators You trust writers who wink. You distrust solemnity without irony. --- If I Were to Reduce Your Appeal Profile Tone: Darkly atmospheric, intellectually playful, morally serious Pacing: Patient or immersive, unless it’s adrenaline + introspection Character: Self-aware, flawed, reflective, often isolated Themes: Belief, collapse, identity, power, trauma, truth, meaning Style: Lyrical but accessible; conceptually ambitious; voice-driven Emotional effect: Existential tension paired with insight and wonder What This Says About You as a Reader You read to: * Understand how humans make meaning * Examine how narratives shape identity * Test belief systems * Explore moral ambiguity * Hold dread and wonder simultaneously * Refine your own internal story You are not escapist. Even your fantasy is interpretive. You want books that leave you altered. If I Were Writing Your “Reader Description” for Colleagues Degolar gravitates toward character-driven, voice-forward books that explore belief, identity, power, and meaning—often through unreliable or self-aware narrators. He enjoys dark or atmospheric settings, existential tension, and morally complex worlds, but balances them with wonder, humor, and philosophical reflection. He is especially drawn to works that interrogate language, truth, and the stories humans tell themselves to survive. Whether fiction or nonfiction, fantasy or realism, he prefers immersive, intellectually ambitious writing that wrestles with big ideas while remaining emotionally grounded.

I have to say I definitely enjoy and resonate with those descriptions--and this puts me in better conversation with those books as a part of my community.

a self is a story of why you are you

it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story

and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms

love is simply how we survive

the cosmic helplessness of being born ourselves

crazy is what the new looks like before

our surface mind has taken the time to name it or build a life around

the unrecognizable

practice, discipline, and silence married to the inner wildness we call crazy

wins hearts and minds, including our own

life is a continuous becoming

insist on transition, movement, and suspension

as ontological and existential realities

always be 'on the way,’ in transit, in the middle of a process

declare yourself in a permanent state of transition

embrace sitting with unresolved questions

as a means of growth, openness, and connection

questions are life, which itself is full of mysteries

habituate layering experiences or placing them side by side

as in a mosaic

curiosity is an act of connection

an act of creating relationships

between ideas and people

curiosity is about our need to connect

with ourselves, with others, with the world

anchor yourself in questions, letting them

fuel your curiosity and deepen your understanding

of who you are and what you want

patience is an essential ingredient to

living well and actively during periods of uncertainty

make an ally of the unpredictability of the mind

and approach your life more as a work of art

rituals allow us to translate our emotions into meaningful action

that can help to form our feelings and relationships

what would change if we already saw ourselves as

interconnected beings in community?

accompany others through really hard things and really wonderous things

find community in nature, in stories, and within ancient traditions

as well as inside the questions themselves

caring deeply is the essence of being human

care is the path by which every human being and every society matures

care is the ability to see and celebrate the essence of another

the measure of our care is

the measure of our humanity and our shared humanity

each generation fears new media will corrupt youth

they don’t realize they’re trying to think in

a space optimized to prevent thinking

literacy is about the capacity to construct and navigate

environments where understanding becomes possible

human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain

build the capacity to move fluently between all the ways humans encode meaning

learn to move fluently between all the ways humans share meaning

every idea has a natural form

and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning

think about thinking

test belief systems

destabilize certainty (without descending into nihilism)

explore moral ambiguity

gravitate toward moral complexity:

systems, structures, incentives, consequences

hold dread and wonder simultaneously

explore darkness to better appreciate wonder

seek awe to counterbalance anxiety

pair existential tension with insight and wonder

distrust solemnity without irony

interrogate language, truth, and the stories humans tell themselves to survive

know language shapes perception

examine how narratives shape identity

understand how humans make meaning

don't just consume a story; sit inside a mind

seek books that leave you altered

refine your own internal story

The Wisdom of Patterns and Flow

We are fluid, cyclical, rhythmic. We flow.

Physiologically we do not need to breath in, we just need to breathe out fully and the in-breath follows as natural as the body's natural wish to go on living. We are tidal creatures; always giving and always waiting to receive; always arriving and always about to say goodbye: we begin in some form of silence, live through the breathing exchange of a given life and end again in another form of silence. We are here and we are somehow not quite, a coming and a going, and in every religious inheritance, breath is the essence of that understanding, of our passing through, of our poignant transience, the way we appear and disappear. Breath is the essence of prayer.

From the book Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte.

I am fond of saying "cooperation is self-interest." I have shared that statement often in many contexts on this blog, shared many books and articles that support its truth. I absolutely endorse this idea and believe it needs to be loudly proclaimed--particularly in our current context, where competition is held in especially high regard.

I have also shared here a number of books I've read that are based on or support the notion that competition and inequality are due to the change in human lifestyles brought on by the advent of agriculture. While I appreciate the logic, it's never sat quite right with me; it seems overly simplified and idealistic.

This article offers an insightful counterpoint.

We Cooperate to Survive, But if No One's Looking we Compete

An age-old debate about human nature is being energised with new findings on the tightrope of cooperation and competition

[Of "the modern dispute about whether humans are fundamentally cooperative or competitive"] . . . Our collective predilection for exploitation, deceit and competition is equally important to cooperation in the story of human evolution. We evolved not to cooperate or compete, but with the capacity for both – and with the intelligence to hide competition when it suits us, or to cheat when we’re likely to get away with it. Cooperation is consequently something we need to promote, not presume. . . . 

Put someone in a game where identities are hidden and consequences are explicitly ruled out, and you remove many of the ordinary pressures that govern cooperation – reputation, ongoing relationships, the possibility of retaliation, the cost of being seen to take too much. What you end up measuring, in other words, is not ‘how cooperative this person is’, but how they behave in a stripped-down context where cooperation and betrayal carry very different risks.

That basic insight runs through decades of work on the biology of cooperation. . . . Cooperation, from this perspective, isn’t something we can simply assume; it’s something social life must make possible – and worth sustaining. . . . 

Much as any person might cheat a partner when the likelihood of being discovered is low, so are we wrong to assume that anyone who cooperates in one game is likely to cooperate in every game. Cooperating is not the same thing as being a cooperator. . . . 

There are plenty of examples of people dodging moral responsibility through credentialing (touting past good deeds), rationalisation, and plain opportunism. In aggregate, the belief that you’re a moral person because of the principles you profess or the good things you’ve done before can make it easier to rationalise seizing the opportunity to act unfairly now. . . . 

The egalitarianism so often noted in small-scale societies . . . may then represent a lack of opportunity for free-riding, rather than an evolved propensity for fairness. Knowing everyone in your camp, choosing to live with relatives, and a collective expectation that people will follow local norms, maintains cooperation . . . 

The idea that we lived in a state of equality until the invention of agriculture is mostly a myth that I think helps us feel better about human nature. . . . 

Rather than attributing our problems today to competition between groups and the structure of our societies, the governing rule for any social system is to expect exploitation where it is possible. Every group, society and culture, no matter its size, has weaknesses that some people will try to exploit for personal benefit. The question is how those weaknesses affect culture more broadly, and whether we live in a society that rewards fairmindedness – or cleverness, subtlety and opportunism.

In the modern world, as with our evolutionary past, the answer is the latter. All that’s changed since the advent of agriculture is the number and varieties of opportunities for free-riding and exploitation. Consequently, as technology improves and groups increase in size, we should expect people to develop creative ways for defecting more effectively – with evolution favouring those who do it best. . . . 

This requires adopting a realistic perspective about the kind of animal that Homo sapiens is. First, we are not inherently cooperative but have the capacity for cooperation – just as we have the capacity for exploitation and selfishness. What matters at the individual level is the way we choose to behave towards others.

Second, just as there is no such thing as a cooperator, there is no such thing as a free-rider. These are behaviours that we apply in models and experiments for convenience. How people behave – and critically, how we describe social behaviours – is a matter of circumstance. The same person who behaves ethically in one circumstance may not do so in another, as research into moral credentialing shows. Our behavioural plasticity, or ability to adapt the way we act to context, is one of our defining features. The evolved psychological processes driving our decisions cannot be captured by simplistic models or games. Anyone can be an invisible rival.

That is precisely why local social norms matter so much. If cooperation isn’t a fixed trait but a fragile, context-dependent outcome, then the real question is what kinds of environments make it easier to do the right thing – and harder to get away with quiet defection. . . . Just as organisms evolve immune defences against selfish cells that quietly undermine the whole, societies need norms – and the institutions that uphold them – that can detect and restrain rivalries that flourish out of sight.

Fostering community-level interdependence – and the norms that evolved to help them function cooperatively – is therefore essential for combatting the exploitation that results from invisible rivalry. Never try to enforce cooperation from above. Instead, just as the economist Noreena Hertz argues we should replace ‘greed is good’ maxims in the capitalist framework with a community-oriented, cooperation-promoting mindset, appreciating that we are all better off when we work together is the critical insight needed for building a prosocial and equality-focused environment for the future.

Education is where this begins, not as moral uplift but as collective self-knowledge: it helps us see our own temptations clearly and translate that insight into practical scaffolding – laws, schools and civic rules that reward cooperation and raise the costs of exploitation. Cheating will never vanish, and some people will always look for an edge, but our distinctive intelligence lies as much in recognising exploitation and organising against it as in exploiting in the first place. Invest in that knowledge and in the local institutions that make fairness both appreciated and rewarded, and we will widen the space in which cooperation and equality can endure.

The bolding for emphasis is mine; those are the key ideas I want to highlight, and provide the rest for context so they make sense.

I've requested my library purchase the book this author wrote expanding on these themes, Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World by Jonathan R Goodman, and hope to read it soon.

I find this an extremely helpful framing. Often we debate whether humans are more fundamentally good or bad, cooperative or competitive. The answer, of course, is that we are both in equal measure and that we constantly alternate between them. It's always, in every moment, a choice which way we lean. We decide based on mood, needs, context, and other changing circumstances.

So if we want to see humans be more cooperative, make more benevolent choices, we need to create more circumstances and structures that encourage it.

I find this idea a freeing one--we don't need to focus on what is fundamental to human nature and thus out of our control and unchangeable, we need to focus on choices and contexts, moments and environments--all things that are more permeable and within our power. "Make good choices," not "be a good person." "Good person" isn't even a thing; only what you do moment to moment. Neither is "bad person" a thing, merely an accumulation of bad choices--but always still open to change and redemption.

It feels to me how I felt after learning about the theories of Ibram X. Kendi when I wrote Ideas Make Me Happy in 2019. A part of what I shared:

The Anti-Racist Revelations of Ibram X. Kendi

[Kendi] thinks “racist” should be treated as a plain, descriptive term for policies and ideas that create or justify racial inequities, not a personal attack. Someone is being racist when he or she endorses a racist idea or policy. . . . 

In Kendi’s analysis, everyone, every day, through action or inaction, speech or silence, is choosing in the moment to be racist or anti-racist. It follows, then, that those identities are fluid, and racism is not a fixed character flaw. “What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who — we are,” he writes. In studying the history of racist ideas, Kendi has found the same person saying racist and anti-racist things in the same speech. “We change, and we’re deeply complex, and our definitions of ‘racist’ and ‘anti-racist’ must reflect that,” he told me. Those who aspire to anti-racism will, when accused of racism, seriously consider the charge and take corrective action. They will not claim to lack any racist bones.

We don't have to worry about whether a person "is" or "is not" a racist. That's not a thing. All we need to consider is whether each choice, idea, or action is racist or anti-racist. Everyone contains some of both and will implement some of both. The goal is to tip the balance in the right direction.

Don't worry about whether you are good or bad; focus on trying to choose more good than bad. What matters at the individual level is the way we choose to behave towards others. Try to make more prosocial and equality-based decisions, take more prosocial and equality-based actions. That's all that matters.

We are tidal creatures; always giving and always waiting to receive; always arriving and always about to say goodbye. We are here and we are somehow not quite, a coming and a going, and in every religious inheritance, breath is the essence of that understanding, of our passing through, of our poignant transience, the way we appear and disappear. Our behavioural plasticity, or ability to adapt the way we act to context, is one of our defining features. We are fluid, cyclical, rhythmic. We flow. Choose to flow benevolently.

I love this.

World Politics Is a Shared Myth, One We Can Change from the Bottom Up

Stories become myths not because they lack factual accuracy but because they convey significance. They meet a human need for order, transform chaos into cosmos, and offer coherence in moments of uncertainty. They are collective stories, told and retold across generations, subtly shifting over time and place. All narratives convey meaning, but only myths convey the significance that shapes our understanding of the world, explaining we live as we do and helping us make sense of the world around us. Political myths are powerful because people act as if they are true, whether or not they are.

Myths are not new. They have shaped human societies since the first civilisations and remain central to religion and politics. Consider ancient Greek myths, from the age of heroes to the Trojan War. These events did not unfold as recounted but this is not what matters. What matters is that the telling of those stories, those myths, shaped political imagination and action for contemporary audiences. They conferred legitimacy on some authorities, justified certain actions, and delegitimised others. Social, religious, and political life were ordered within a cosmos defined by myth. Crucially, myth is not a thing of the past. Human beings, as existentialist Hans Blumenberg argues, have never overcome the need for significance and are unlikely ever to do so. From the audiences of Ancient Greece to those of today’s overwhelming media landscape, people seek to understand their world through the stories they tell and retell. Myths persist, even as their form and content change.

At this interregnum, where we see many of our seemingly long-established global norms beginning to falter, our concern lies with political myths about the international realm . . . What is unusual today is that the formal institutions remain, yet the myths that gave them meaning have eroded, and new ones have yet to form. . . . 

A new age of myth is taking shape. The global order is being reinterpreted through a profound shift in its symbolic foundations. . . . 

From Donald Trump’s talk of territorial acquisition, whether Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, or Gaza, to Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine, imperial aspiration has returned to public discourse with force. These developments signal the erosion of long-standing commitments to equality, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, alongside the collapse of liberal myths that once shaped global politics. . . . 

These stories do more than describe the world; they shape it. . . . Contemporary narratives of imperial resurgence and liberal decline are not neutral observations. They participate in a wider process that gives collective meaning and direction. . . . 

Talk of a new age of empires does more than describe events. It reshapes global politics. It makes territorial expansion seem reasonable and revives older ways of imagining space and power, such as spheres of influence and buffer zones. These ideas belong to the vocabulary of nineteenth-century imperial politics, and their return signals a deeper shift in how power is conceived today. . . . The power of this story comes not from its truth but from its capacity to shape imagination and guide action, much as Cold War myths once did. . . . 

They are not simply top-down narratives; they are collective stories that confer meaning and shape the world we inhabit. . . . within this void lies the possibility of creation. We are called to decide, to assert new myths that give form to the chaos, to will new values into being, and to prevent the logic of great power politics and the age of empires from setting the horizon of what is possible.

If we want structures, environments, and contexts that support more beneficial cooperation and less destructive competition, we need myths that lead to them.

A glimpse into current events via Rebecca Solnit.

When Love Thy Neighbor Is a Cry of Resistance

At the very heart of almost all our crises is a conflict between two worldviews, the worldview in which everything is connected and the world of isolated individualism, of social darwinism and the war of each against each. . . . 

Really the contemporary right would like to divorce cause and effect from everything. Theirs is an anti-systemic worldview in which they deny that, for example, poverty and poor health are very often the result of how the system is organized rather than personal failure, so they preach personal responsibility while denying collective responsibility and their own responsibilities, deny the collective overall. Margaret Thatcher famously said "there is no such thing as society," but we now know that societies exist even in the absence of human beings as forest ecosystems, ocean ecosystems. . . . 

At the very heart of the conflict raging in the United States is a conflict about human nature, a deep moral and philosophical conflict. I believe the isolationists will lose in the long run because they are not only out of step with the majority but they are out of step with reality and because theirs is an impoverished version of who we can be, walking away from the possibilities of love and joy and the sense of abundance and connection from which generosity springs.

In the opposite of the ideology of isolation, we recognize that everything is connected. . . . this cosmology of interconnection has grown more powerful and influential over the past several decades, thanks to many forces seen as separate but that all move us in the same direction . . . 

Responsibility sounds dismally dutiful, but reciprocity begins by recognizing that nature has given so much and therefore responds with gratitude and love, which makes the work not just giving, but giving back, a beautiful and natural response to abundance. (You can contrast that with the sense of scarcity and the manufacture of scarcity that underwrites capitalism's logic.) . . . 

This cosmology of connection comes from many directions. . . . the resurgent power of indigenous worldviews . . . Buddhism has come to the West in a big way and brought us many visions of interconnection . . . 

Contemporary biological sciences, from planetary ecology to botany, zoology, and neuroscience, have documented that we are all in dependent co-arising, that we are all part of systems and relationships, that each of us is not so much an individual but a node on a network, a plural being whose body is made up of billions of microorganisms as well as what we call human. There's a wonderful new field of biology called processual biology that looks at the world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing into each other. It proposes that it is more useful and accurate to think of ourselves and most of what we call things as events. . . . 

For the survival of our democracy and our planet, understanding that interconnectedness, that capacity to relate and the abundance, joy, love that spring from it, are no longer abstract topics but an urgent political matter.

Myths, worldviews that cultivate cooperation. Reciprocity.

Wonderful analogy and imagery for understanding a complex idea.

Can You Rewire Your Brain?

The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board.

‘Rewiring’ is a risky metaphor. It borrows its confidence from engineering, where a faulty system can be repaired by swapping out the right component; it also smuggles that confidence into biology, where change is slower, messier and often incomplete. The phrase has become a cultural mantra that is easier to comprehend than the scientific term, neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and form new neural connections throughout life. . . . 

Unlike electrical wiring, which follows rigid, fixed paths, the brain’s connectivity is dynamic and constantly changing. Neurons form and prune synapses – the connections between them – in response to activity and environment, a process governed by complex biochemical signalling rather than simple rerouting. Even when we can map the parts, the picture doesn’t explain the self. . . . 

The logic of neuroplasticity isn’t the same as swapping one wire with another. It’s more like a living forest where paths are gradually worn or abandoned based on use. It involves changes at the cellular level and can occur in response to learning, memory, sensory input and trauma. Importantly, while neuroplasticity is a lifelong feature of the brain, it is more robust during youth and becomes more effort-dependent with age.

This capacity allows the brain to adapt to new experiences, recover from injuries, learn new information and compensate for lost functions. Neuroplasticity is real, but it’s not magic. It has limits. It requires effort. And it doesn’t always result in perfect recovery or transformation.

Unlike rewiring a machine, plasticity is not as simple as replacing parts. It’s a gradual process and is often inefficient. Synapses, which pass signals between neurons, strengthen or weaken. New dendritic branches – neurons’ treelike extensions – grow while others retract. Entire networks shift their activity over time, but only under the right conditions, and these changes accumulate to support new patterns of function while overall mechanisms become less efficient across the lifespan.

Plasticity happens throughout life, but it’s shaped by many factors: age, environment, repetition, rest, nutrition and emotional state. . . . 

The old pathways aren’t necessarily erased. They remain in the background, potentially reactivated under stress. The idea that the brain is ‘rewired’ to function in a healthier way may offer hope, but it oversimplifies the reality. We build new trails, but the old ones don’t necessarily disappear. . . . 

The fact that neurons can expand their reach means that, if some of them die, others may broaden their territory to make up for lost processing. In general, the more connections a neuron has, the more it can shape behaviour. . . . 

While neuroplasticity resists shortcuts, it does respond to sustained engagement. Across the lifespan, brains that are challenged – cognitively, socially, physically – tend to retain greater flexibility than those that are not. This is not because any single activity ‘rewires’ a specific circuit, but because varied, effortful experiences repeatedly recruit overlapping networks: attention, memory, movement, emotion. Learning a new language, for example, activates distributed regions across both hemispheres, linking auditory perception, working memory, and executive control. Playing a musical instrument does something similar, coupling fine motor coordination with timing, prediction, and emotional recall. Over time, these demands encourage structural and functional changes that support what neuroscientists call cognitive reserve: the brain’s ability to compensate when injury or degeneration occurs.

The same principle applies beyond formal learning. Singing engages breath, rhythm, language and affect in ways that ordinary speech does not, which is why it can support recovery in some stroke and Parkinson’s patients. Physical activity – especially aerobic exercise – improves cerebral blood flow and is associated with changes in the volume of the hippocampus, a region critical for turning short-term memory into long-term memory. It’s also one of the few brain regions where new neurons are generated in adulthood. Social interaction recruits emotional and linguistic circuits simultaneously, offering a kind of neural cross-training that solitary exercises cannot. Even seemingly modest skills, such as learning to juggle, have been shown to induce measurable changes in grey matter after weeks of practice. None of these activities function as targeted neural ‘fixes’. Their value lies instead in repetition, novelty and sustained effort – the slow conditions under which plasticity operates. They do not override biology but work with it, nudging the brain toward adaptation rather than transformation. . . . 

If not ‘rewiring’, then what? Perhaps the better metaphor is not a machine being repaired but a landscape being reshaped. Neuroplasticity resembles erosion and regrowth: some paths deepen, others fade, and change unfolds unevenly over time.

Neuroplasticity is a remarkable capacity. It offers real hope for recovery, adaptation and growth. But it requires patience, structure, repetition and support. It is not a quick fix. It is a lifelong process that demands sustained engagement.

I made reference to this article recently in a conversation about early childhood literacy and the development of young brains, that some activities and practices lay the foundations for the paths that ultimately become reading.

Your nature is not inherently competitive or cooperative, you are not fundamentally good or bad. You are constantly, in every situation, making choice after choice to be more one or the other. Those choices accumulate. They shape the neural landscape of your brain. The choices that occur most often, repeatedly, grow and strengthen certain mental pathways; the ones that occur less have pathways erode and fade. You are not all good or all bad, all cooperative or all competitive, but what you choose most often reshapes your brain in ways that make it more likely to happen again.

It is a lifelong process that demands sustained engagement.

When you realize you are never going to be your ideal self that you will always be a mix of good and bad choices, you are able to plan for it.

Want things to go well? Plan like a defensive pessimist

So often we underestimate the time and effort required to reach our goals. You can avoid that trap with realistic planning

So often, we plan as if every day will be our best day. We plan as if we’re the non-procrastinating, energy-filled, mind-like-a-steel-trap people we want to be, and when the time comes, it turns out that we’re just our normal, well-intentioned but fallible selves. . . . 

Even those of us who believe that planning is important could often use some help doing it more realistically and effectively. Fortunately, psychological research has identified some of the most common planning pitfalls, as well as effective strategies for overcoming them. . . . 

Defensive pessimism is a strategy that involves assuming that things will go wrong (that’s the pessimism part) and thinking through what might go wrong in concrete and specific detail (that’s the defensive part). . . . 

What defensive pessimists do for themselves fits with what other research has shown about goal-setting and planning processes. . . . 

Key points:

• Optimistic plans often go awry. There are many planning pitfalls, but you can avoid them by being more strategic and considering how things could go wrong.

• Start with setting clear goals. Break abstract or vague goals into smaller, more concrete pieces.

• Give yourself a chance to make easy progress. Often, getting started is the hard part, so make the first steps of your plan easy to take. Then you’ll have momentum on your side.

• Write down your plan, if you can. Describe the steps, on your phone or on paper, to offload cognitive effort and highlight your progress.

• Think about how long your plan will really take. Avoid the ‘planning fallacy’ by envisioning what each step will actually require.

• Get feedback on your plan. Ask someone who knows you – and understands what you’re trying to do – whether your plan seems realistic.

• Anticipate obstacles and make backup plans. Ask yourself what could get in your way and have alternative courses of action at the ready.

• Remember who you are. Make plans that account for your preferences and limitation, rather than pretending they don't exist.

When you make plans for your realistic self, you are creating situations that are more likely to produce the choices and results you want. You are shaping your environment in ways that help shape your neural landscape.

Of mental landscapes.

It Pays to Be a Space Case

Are our moments of distraction—the daydreams and memories, the anxieties and reflections—really such a bad thing?

I called up my old colleague, neuropsychologist and author Ylva Østby, to find out. “Mind wandering is the opposite of control: It’s free,” she explains from her home in Norway. “In some situations, it is important to be able to control your mind and to focus on the task at hand, but that does not mean that mind wandering is in itself a negative thing. We just don’t recognize the situations where mind wandering is useful.”  . . . 

Studies find that mind wandering can play an important role in planning for the future and solving challenging problems, for example. Some psychologists have even found that it can help solidify memories, much like sleep does.  . . . 

“[Mind wandering is a] fundamental aspect of how we think,” says Smallwood. “People do this all the time and are permanently using it to think about the future, or other people in their lives, or goals they haven’t completed.” . . . 

 . . . he’s fascinated by the relationship between mind wandering and creativity. Much of his work has centered on the idea that losing control of our thoughts is not only normal, but desirable. . . . 

When our minds wander, they generate thoughts that are relevant and useful—at least to ourselves. We reflect on our actions from the hours gone by and ask questions about the days ahead. We think about our families and loved ones, our goals and personal challenges. And sometimes—if we’re lucky—we come up with solutions that are truly original. “If you want to do anything different in your life,” says Fox, “you need to create space for ideas.”

Studies that connect mind wandering with creativity often center on the idea of the incubation period. The concept is simple: by taking a break from a difficult problem, we can give our minds time to work through our challenges unconsciously—to let our ideas “incubate”—while we focus on other things. When we finally return to the problem again, we often find that the solution has suddenly become obvious.

Importantly, though, these incubation periods seem to be most helpful when they allow our thoughts to drift. . . . 

Indeed, many of history’s most revered artists and inventors had daily routines that incorporated periods of mental rest.

It's not better to mentally focus or mentally drift; it depends on the context and circumstances. Sometimes one is right, sometimes the other.

Of cooperation and interconnectedness.

Spirituality Can’t Be Reduced to What’s Happening in the Brain

Spirituality wears many faces. It can emerge in the awe one feels during a walk in nature, in the stillness of a secular meditation, in prayer at a church or mosque, or even through intense and painful rituals like walking on fire. Each of these practices is, in its own way, an attempt to transcend the ordinary – whether the goal is closeness to God or simply a deeper calm and harmony with life.

Researchers increasingly recognise that spirituality is a vital part of human wellbeing, whether or not one identifies as religious. Understanding this dimension of life isn’t just an abstract pursuit; it could help people better harness the benefits of spirituality for their mental and physical health. . . . 

Neuroscience provides remarkable insights into spiritual experiences. It has revealed, for example, how meditation affects neural networks associated with attention and self-awareness, and how these experiences alter the activity of the brain’s default mode network (DMN). It has demonstrated that contemplative practices can literally reshape brain structure over time. . . . 

Brain-imaging studies, despite their contributions, often strip away the cultural and contextual richness that gives mental life its meaning. . . . Moreover, brain-centred approaches promote a narrow focus on what’s happening in an individual brain, apart from the body and world in which it is embedded. . . . 

Scientists and philosophers have developed alternative formulations of the mind that extend beyond the confines of the skull. For example, the 4E cognition framework proposes that the mind emerges through dynamic interactions between the body (embodiment, the first ‘E’), the environment (embeddedness), our actions (enactiveness), and even the tools we use (extended cognition). Each of these aspects is needed for experiences, including spiritual ones, to come alive. . . . 

The 4E cognition framework and similar perspectives, such as ecological psychology and enactivism, suggest that transcendent spiritual experiences are not simply a product of neural activity but are deeply intertwined with bodily sensations and the surrounding world. From the perspective of ecological psychology, humans experience the world like a radio tunes into signals. A radio works through alignment: it resonates with the electromagnetic patterns already present in its environment. In much the same way, perception and experience arise through a bodily attunement to the world – a dynamic resonance between our senses, our environment, and the people around us. . . . 

From an embodied, ecological standpoint, these experiences are not confined to the brain but extend into the lived reality that we share. Just as a trained musician can detect subtle harmonies that others miss, a spiritual practitioner may perceive traces of the divine or the sublime in situations where others might overlook them. . . . 

What we found is that this spiritual practice is inherently collective, with coordinated bodies playing a crucial role in accessing the spiritual state. During the ritual, participants are advised to lower their gaze toward the ground rather than look at others. Yet, the entire structure of the ritual – the rhythmic recitations, the sound of voices rising and falling together, the subtle feeling of movement in those nearby – draws them into a powerful synchrony. It’s not only that their bodies move in unison; even their heart rates begin to align with one another and with the imam who’s leading the prayer.

Like a group of radios all tuning into the same frequency, the individuals engaged in prayer aren’t simply generating private, internal experiences. Instead, they are resonating with a shared, embodied and communal rhythm. We can see this kind of resonance in other rituals where people move and feel together, and their rhythms and emotions become intertwined – rituals that appear across various religious and spiritual contexts. Brain scans alone cannot offer a complete picture of what’s happening here. To truly understand spiritual experiences requires looking at all dimensions of cognition: our actions, our bodies, our tools and objects, our relationships, and the environments we inhabit. . . . 

Part of the reason behind the contemporary emphasis on meditation is our overemphasis on the brain. Spirituality is often treated as a project of mental control – as if the goal were to calm, train or rewire the wandering brain on its own – which often downplays the roles of the body, the environment, and the people around us. This may actually make spirituality feel harder to access. . . . 

By widening the lens, we open the door to more creative, inclusive and meaningful ways of understanding spirituality and living spiritually. One can dance ecstatically like the whirling dervishes of Sufi tradition, or find release through crying in collective mourning rituals like in Shiism. These practices, rooted in different cultures, show that there are countless ways to have transcendent spiritual experiences, including ways that, for you, might feel more natural, more emotionally resonant, and more aligned with who you are.

To truly understand spiritual experiences requires looking at all dimensions of cognition: our actions, our bodies, our tools and objects, our relationships, and the environments we inhabit.

We can shape our choices by shaping our landscapes, both internal and external.

While the science behind the MBTI is perhaps questionable, I've always found the descriptions of my type, INTJ, elucidating and useful. This came across my feed in an INTJ context and it resonates.

What I bring to the table:

• Ungodly pattern recognition
• Aggressive active questioning
• Silent observation
• Real-time theory building
• Behavioral analysis
• Micro-expression decoding
• Post-conversation autopsy

I share it here particularly because it relates to the quote I want to share from a book I enjoyed recently.

My thoughts about Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi:

This book is patient. Patient, detailed, deep, immersive, and enthralling. It's a story of intrigue and manipulation set in a world of intrigue and manipulation. A world modeled after the banking families of Renaissance Italy, their extra-governmental influence and empires built on concealed, indirect power. It's the book, I imagine, Machiavelli would create were he given to storytelling. Nothing in this world is as it seems; all is lies, misdirection, deception, and subterfuge. Success--no, even survival--depends upon one's ability to never give a clue to one's true thoughts, feelings, and aims.

Davico's father is an undisputed master of this game, of faccioscuro (a loosely Italian word Bacigalupi coins to loosely mean "face-obscured"). Devonaci di Regulai heads the di Regulai family's international banking business and, through it, controls the city of Navola--though not with ease, as his enemies are many. This is the coming-of-age story of Davico's early years, growing up in his father's house as the sole heir, trained by the best minds and tutors to inherit the family empire. And of, despite that upbringing, Davico's inherent gentle nature and inability to master faccioscuro. Davico is at odds with this world he is meant to dominate and doesn't sit easily with the role that is pressed upon him by everyone, friend and foe alike.

The story itself is not a gentle one that would suit Davico; it is dark and twisted and deadly. There is much hardship and suffering. I don't think it's a spoiler to say, since he is the one narrating the tale from it's inception, that Davico manages to come out of it alive at the end. Much changed in ways that no one--not he, his father, or anyone else who tries to influence him--would have anticipated (this is, remember, not historical fiction but fantasy), but alive, so the story can carry on. For, regardless of the book's impressive length and depth, this feels like the foundation for a larger story that will follow. And I, for one, can't wait to experience the rest of Davico's story.

This is masterful storytelling.

This excerpt from the book doesn't particularly represent the book or give insight into its story and themes, but I appreciate it in isolation:

These were the patterns of men, I realized.

This was not something I knew, it was something the dragon knew. The dragon had watched empires rise and fall. It had listened to thousands of conversations of men as they made caravans and marches through its demesnes. It had seen a thousand betrayals and a thousand loyalties.

This was not the knowing of the mystical, it was the knowing of patterns. Simple humanitas, observed for millenati. Wisdom. This was wisdom. Wisdom such as the philosopher kings of ancient Ebezzu could never hope to achieve, for they lived a single short lifetime, where the dracchus had seen all of humanity, for all of time. It had seen our petty human dramas and comedies too many times for anything to surprise it. It knew the intentions of a man perhaps before the man himself knew them.

And now, while we were bonded, I knew these things, too.

The mystical wisdom of knowing patterns.

The patterns, cycles, rhythms, and flows.

Shape the patterns, cycles, and rhythms to help you flow into the choices you want to be.