The tuk-tuk driver pulls off the marshland road into a small dirt lot. I walk through an adorned gate, roof the color of clay. On the other side is a walkway leading up to a large stupa, similarly adorned. On the outside, it appears solemn, beautiful. On the inside: bones.

Next to the stupa, the guide says, is where they brought them. It would have been a small shack, and the soldiers would take people off the bus and leave them there for the night. Sometimes it was longer than a night, the guide says, when the soldiers simply couldn’t kill people fast enough.

Here, the guide says, is where the graves were. It was little more than a large ditch. The guide says that when these graves were found, they were more like mounds. The gas from so many decaying bodies caused the earth to bulge.

Next to the grave is a sugar palm tree, young, still sprouting from the earth. The area is peaceful now, flanked on one side by a quiet lotus pond and enclosed by broad canopies. The guide says that instead of knives, the soldiers used the serrated edges of sugar palm branches to cut their throats. The Khmer Rouge thought that using a bullet would be a waste.

As I walk around the stupa, the guide points out the nearby pond. Researchers have gathered up as many bodies as they could possibly find. But there are still remains. When it rains, teeth still come to the surface.

Next to the path is a large tree covered in bracelets and amulets. It was not just adults, the guide says, who were brought here. Children too. The sign beside it calls this the “Killing Tree.” Here, the sign reads, is the tree “against which executioners beat children.”

Before the stupa is another tree. It looks like a bodhi tree; a sign calls it the “Magic Tree.” The name suggests an inspiring story, something redemptive in opposition to so much death. It has no such story. The tree is magic because it sang: executioners hung loudspeakers from its branches. They blared revolutionary songs to cover the sounds of the killings, the cries of their victims. The guide plays one such song. The piercing voice of a woman, thin and high, comes through my headphones. Clear, martial, striving. But this is not what it would have sounded like in the fields. No: beneath the voice comes a deep thrumming blare reverberating through my ears, the sound of the diesel engine that powered the speakers. It blares and blares, covering the voice, the two combining to make thought impossible.

Closer to the stupa, the bones inside become clear. Skulls, knuckles, all piled high into the air. The guide says it’s something like 5000 bodies inside. The skulls stare back. I think, standing there, of what they saw. How they were pulled from interrogation centers in darkness and driven out into the fields, how they probably could see nothing but their fellow victims and hear nothing but the blare of engines and a distant singing. How maybe, if they heard anything at all, it was the dull crushing of skulls against iron bars, it was screams, it was children battered against an old-growth tree.

This was one field. There were hundreds.

I go back through the gate, flag down a tuk-tuk. The city grows and swallows me in it. I find a place for lunch. The midday heat begins to rise. I order. Twenty minutes.

And while I enjoyed the book, I will say that my biggest takeaway is that it made me appreciate Masaaki Yuasa’s anime adaptation even more.

The book is still a good read, its biggest success being its cerebral, self-absorbed narrator. I’ve seen some reviewers find him unreadable or obnoxious, but the charm and depth with which he’s portrayed I really enjoy – he feels like a character straight out of an old Japanese comedy (à la Musui’s Story or some kind of modern kokkeibon), mostly thanks to Morimi’s rich references to the Tale of Genji, yokai stories, and the rich cultural history of Kyoto¹. I can also see why this book won many awards specifically for translation: Emily Balistrieri did a great job bringing Morimi’s voice to life, surely a tall task given how precise the humor and tone of his work is.

All that said, the original novel version doesn’t deliver on the parallel universes premise nearly as well as the anime adaptation does. This is where I’d give credit to Yuasa: he really cleaned up the pacing in a way that makes the comedy and absurdity of the whole thing shine. In the novel, Morimi quite literally lifts and repeats sections wholesale over and over again, such as the opening sequence, his descriptions of Ozu, the meeting with the fortune teller, the moth incident, and so on. In a way it’s a limitation of text – as the reader, I literally just skipped over a few pages at a time when this started happening after a few times. In the show, this same gag is done through visual storytelling and voice acting: characters start talking at absurdly fast paces, events get compressed, little jokes and jabs like the fortuneteller charging more money every loop of the story throw in variations every time around. These small changes make the overarching form much more digestible.

This is most apparent in how each section ends, since he essentially “gets the girl” in every single branch of the narrative, which I honestly think waters down the existentialist message that’s the high point of the show. The main character’s refusal to embrace life in the beginning iterations still kinda works out for him, which makes less sense than a world where his abdication of responsibility comes back to bite him.

All in all, I’m glad this novel walked so that the TV show could run, but if you haven’t seen or weren’t a die-hard fan of the show, I don’t know if it’s worth it on its own. Probably just go watch the show instead (and then watch everything else Yuasa has ever made, you’ll thank me later).

To be specific, many of the arguments in the latter half of the book seem to me to conflate several different diagnostic factors as roots of the “audit culture”/bureaucratic expansionism that are core to the felt experience of “centerless” corporations and purely symbolic work culture. Despite the book’s title, my sense is that Fisher is arguing more specifically that these arise from the particular expression of capitalism circa 2008, not about capital-C Capitalism as an economic system. I say this because many of his diagnoses of audit culture and bureaucracy have a host of interrelated causes. One could point to, for example, financialization and the requirements of public companies to “perform work” as part of their duty to shareholders; the rise of managerialism as a practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, which went well beyond shareholder-driven corporations to happen in schools, hospitals, and so on; or even just look at natural ossification and bureaucratic development of most large organizations as complex technologies require similarly complex organizations to develop them.

What I mean to say is that while Fisher’s diagnosis of these problems is accurate, his arguments for the mechanism is unclear and often touted simply as “contemporary capitalism” when it is likely more accurately a whole variety of causes that should be teased apart. One shouldn’t come to such a short volume and expect it to hash out the whole scope, but we should also be clear in what this work is: an entryway to future developments.

I’m guilty of being a chronic over-packer myself, always stuck with the recurring idea that just maybe I’ll need a down jacket in Hawaii or five extra pairs of underwear. It’s symptomatic of my own runaway mind, constantly thinking through infinite what-if scenarios wherein I stain ten T-shirts in three days and thus absolutely must pack fifteen.

But on every trip I’ve ever been on, the same thought occurs: I should have packed less.

There’s a phrase that originated in software development: You Ain’t Gonna Need It. The idea is to put off additional items until absolutely necessary to avoid bloat and excess. This is particularly true for clothes. In my case, I’m often gone for months at a time, and the last thing I want to be doing is lugging around some huge suitcase on subways, buses, and cramped hostels.

But lest you think this doesn’t apply to your luxury beach vacation, consider how much better the whole thing would be if you could waltz off the plane without waiting for your luggage, how simple your day would be when you don’t have to think about what to wear. Fewer options means fewer decisions.

It’s not like bringing your whole wardrobe matters anyways. Think about it this way: what was your partner wearing yesterday? And the day before? What about your best friend? Your coworker? If you’re anything like me, anything beyond a day (or truthfully, a few hours) is lost to the sands of time.

And when you’re traveling, this is only exacerbated. Other people in whatever city or resort you’re visiting are focused on their own lives and aren’t looking at you, and even if they were, it’s not like you’ll see them again. You’re allowed to wear the same shirt twice.

Aside from overthinking, another reason we overpack is that we forget. We forget the last trip we took, or the one before that (or the one before that) where we had to wait for an hour while baggage was delayed at the airport, or where we had to sit on our suitcase just to get the zipper to close. We forget all those moments against the backdrop of a lovely vacation, and we doom ourselves to repeat this cycle again and again.

Even in recent months when I struck out with only a single (admittedly large) backpack, I still regretted bringing as much as I did. I’m still narrowing this list down to the essentials, but I’ve calculated out all the mainstays in my current rotation¹ with excessive amounts of detail over on Lighterpack.

And yes I know this seems extreme. But you don’t have to start here. Instead, the next time you pack, try switching from two bags to one, or from a giant duffel to a carry-on. Try taking only three extra shirts instead of five. See how it feels. If you’re anything like me, it’ll still feel like you packed too much; just take note of what you have and what you needed, then update your packing list for next time.

Another thing that’s worth noting is that packing less can in some ways be an infinitely long journey, and it’s worth asking what’s worth it and what’s not. There’s hundreds of backpacks to try, whole markets catering to people trying to shave off a few grams here and there. But this is a practice in paring down, and that means that buying something new generally isn’t the answer. I’ll use the bag I’ve got until my old one wears out, and then I’ll pick a better one next time.

Packing less isn’t just a practical exercise either. Sure, maybe you save some money on airfare, but it’s also about getting by with less, about seeing that part of you that demands more, demands unreasonable levels of security, and letting it go. There’s something freeing about not being beholden to worry and our infinite plans. Life can be heavy enough as it is – no need to add even more to it. I won’t harp on about it here, but it’s something to check in on.

That’s really all this is – check in, pay attention, and be deliberate about what you really need. Use less, pack light, try something new. What if everything works out?

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion, The White Album

“Can we talk, for just a moment?” He pokes his head down from the top bunk. He is wide-eyed like a young doe, youthful innocence under gray hair.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Oh, nothing.” He turns away and looks down at the floor. He had found someone to talk to but nothing to say.

A deep breath. He wants to move here, to Santa Barbara, he tells me. Bring his wife and kids out from New Jersey. He speaks solemnly, reverently, as if in confession. He tells me how he loves the city and how he wants to experience it all. All of it, he stresses, meeting my eyes.

“Be careful out there,” the ranger says. “Some of the sign posts out towards the end of the trail fell over.” I had long since passed these but thank her for the warning – the bright orange poles with black spades on top like playing cards, nearly all of them had fallen into the sand against the heavy desert winds.

I knew the posts had fallen because I had been watching the man in front of me, always at the edge of the next dune, as he tried to raise them back up. Every one he passed he’d pick up, dig a bit further down where it had been posted, and shove it into the sand. He’d walk away in victory, having done a good deed, only for the post to tumble behind his back.

Every hundred yards another post. I followed his trail of failed attempts.

“If you don’t see the next sign, it’s probably time to turn around. Out here, the wind will blow away your footsteps.” She sweeps her hand through the air. “No trace.”

“Yeah we’re just waiting for Greg, want to take his place? You can be Greg.”

The two were stretching their legs at the trailhead. I wasn’t sure who Greg was or how to be him. All I knew was that he was late for their hike. The man on the right was handsome in an almost unsettling way. Strong profile, wavy hair unmoving in the mountain winds. Any moment of silence plowed through with banter with almost psychopathic intensity.

“Oh and we were thinking of going to the church service just up the road. At 6, if you want to join us.” They tell me all about a Greek Orthodox hermitage a short drive away, tell me how beautiful it is in its humility.

“And here’s the crazy thing,” he says. “It’s a nunnery. They’re all nuns.” He leans on the words as if they were impossible.

“Isn’t that just wild?”

Across the campsite, two boys are choreographing a sword fight. This is a film set, for them – they run through the routine again and then stop to talk, deciding on some modifications. The younger boy had a mullet, and from a distance his round face hardly looks boyish at all. He looks like Arya Stark after her hair was cut short.

The two had whittled the bark from their swords, blades of pure white wood. They paced around each other in a circle, swinging their weapons in full circles by some imaginary hilt.

The older of them thrust his arm to the side, KkTschzzzzzzz. This time he had a lightsaber. The younger brother looked up and nodded. He began singing “Duel of the Fates”: Dun dun dadila, dun dun dadila. He sang, faster and faster, and went in for the kill.

These images stick themselves in my mind. Sometimes I imagine myself seeing like the eidetic Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse-Five, seeing all time as all time: “They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

But I’m glad that I don’t see this way. I’m glad that each moment exists as a flash, not bound to a known end. I’ve never understood why people read the plots of movies before they watch it. Moments like these are precious: uncut diamonds.

I’ll keep this first one brief – I’m shooting for these to be bi-weekly, and in them will be updates on what I’m up to – mostly all the bits and pieces that haven’t explicitly made it into the travelogues, of which there are many – and also whatever writing I’ve been doing in the meantime. Also possibly just some Cool Stuff that I think is worth sharing, like other folks’ writing, music, film, and so on. And if you’ve got some cool stuff to share, send it my way! This’ll all be way more casual than the writing than I usually do, and everybody gets enough email as it is, so I’ll try my best to make it worth your while and to keep things brief-ish.

This is mostly just another way for me to pull my personal updates off of Instagram. I started using IG to keep everyone posted on what I’m up to day-to-day – and to be clear, I’ll still be doing so for now – but I simply don’t like using it. Photos are great, but they are really not the right medium to convey what I’m up to, although I’m sure everyone appreciates the nice nature photos and all that. But pretty nature photos aren’t really the point, in the end, so I thought it’d be fun to experiment with alternatives.

This past week has been a busy one. I took a bit of a detour from my National Parks route and stopped by Los Angeles, primarily so I could swing by an event for the release of Craig Mod’s newest book Things Become Other Things (it’s excellent! read it!), which I reviewed (and still want to read for a second time, and probably then a third).

Despite living in California for several years, I had never been to LA. I spent maybe a week or so in the nearby San Bernadino Mountains, but LA itself never drew me in. San Francisco is comparatively compact – only 7 miles long and 7 miles wide, small enough to walk end-to-end in a day – and only by the time I left did I feel like I had a foothold there. In contrast, Los Angeles is a behemoth: the highways are sprawling, and it could probably more appropriately be described as 10 cities in a trenchcoat. I found getting anywhere to take at least an hour due to seemingly perennial traffic. (That almost always makes me hard pass on a city – it needs to be at least kinda-walkable, have excellent public transit, or ideally both.) It’s also perhaps due to me picking the cheapest accomodations possible and thus staying in Hollywood, but the constant presence of Scientology – I saw the Scientology center, the celebrity center in Los Feliz, the L. Ron Hubbard memorial building, and about a thousand advertisements in my few days there – gave me the ick.

But there were absolutely some bright spots. The Getty is an incredible museum, not only for its unreasonably good collection but also for its service as a small oasis for when I was sufficiently road-raged and needed a break. I wasn’t expecting to go there and be amazed by a bunch of Renaissance art, but I absolutely was. There was also a small celebration for Craig’s book release at Firstborn, a newer restaurant in Chinatown with a killer tasting menu.

But I was ready to get back into a nature after a week in the city, and man, Sequoia is incredible right now. The snowmelt has the waters running hard, and my campsite is right next to one of the park’s many rivers, so I’ve got my own natural white-noise machine to thank for my much-needed mid-day naps.

And since the park is so high up, the weather is perfect. I’ve been constantly driving through the scorching desert and feeling like the sun would turn me into leather for these last few weeks, so the cool alpine air, the nice 70 degree days, the giant-eared deer that graze in the campsite – these make me happy.

Recommendations

• Looking for Alice – I’ve found myself brought back to Henrik Karlsson’s blog Escaping Flatland lately, and so much of his writing is wonderful, but “Looking for Alice” remains one his best works. “I knew I had to say those exact words. Because I know the heart of men.”
• Joan Didion’s “The White Album” (both the essay itself and the essay collection of the same name) is so far fantastic. Didion has this unnatural ability to pick just a few words from someone and have it unravel their entire soul on the page
• Pinegrove’s last (for now? ever?) release Montclair (Live at the Wellmont Theater) made its way back on my playlist this week. Highly recommended for blasting at top volume while blaring down the highway

With that, I’ll let you get back to it. Thanks as always for reading. Drink water, sit up straight, give someone a hug, all those good things. Catch you soon.

Love,

-R

“I hold on to the hope that contrition is fixed within the steps of the very walk itself. Each step, an apology. A million apologies. I want to kiss the foreheads of everyone I see.”

A quick story of my own before we get to the book:

I can barely feel my legs. The day started with a vertical march: five kilometers of hills. Hills so steep that even hundreds of years ago, when pilgrims far tougher than I walked these routes, they nicknamed it the “body-breaking slope.”

At that point of exhaustion, with a heavy back and legs shot even before starting, my mind burns so hot with pain that it becomes empty. It almost inverts itself to the pain: the more miserable I am, the simpler the world becomes. The cool January air stings my lungs. Everything pares down to its plainest form: pressure, sensation, heat.

An hour later, a sign marks the top of the pass. I threw down my pack and leaned back against one the many cedar trees that populate the interior of the Kii peninsula. I put my hands on its trunk. Trees can grant you a little boost of energy, if you ask nicely.

Mom used to do that too, put her hands on tree trunks, giving them a hearty pat. She spoke to plants like friends, offering them help when they drooped or whispering sweet nothings when they bloomed. I started doing the same on these hikes. Every time I think of her.

There against the cedar tree, I see her walking in front of me, hear her whispering to the trees, her voice merging with the soft murmur of leaves. I remember her at every shrine. I place coins down in her memory, bowing slowly.

Up ahead, the path flattens out, taking me across the top of the ridge. A sign marks it as the abode of the dead. I heard that souls pass through here, that they come to Amida-ji a short ways away to ring the temple bell before moving on. I don’t know how, but I see her there, passing over the ridge just beyond the collapsed teahouse. I know that much to be true.

I pick up my pack and continue on my way. A temple bell rings in the distance. And again. And again.

Sometimes, a book feels like it was written just for me. Not just for my particular interests, but for me right here and now, with whatever suffering and joy and heartache is there. A book just for me-right-now: Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things.

TBOT follows Mod as he embarks on a long journey across the Kii peninsula in Japan, walking ancient pilgrimage routes and meeting kissa owners, farmers, fishermen, and loud-mouthed children. Along the way, he experiences an area in decline, harkening back to his industrial hometown.

This book is really an extended letter to Bryan, Mod’s childhood friend murdered decades before but whose memory, in the quiet persistence of many weeks of walking, rises up and imprints itself. The trail, the people, old memories all intertwine, flow into and out of each other, forming vignettes depicting how places adapt — or fail to adapt — to economic decline, natural disasters, and the ever-shifting sands of time.

I also hiked this area – albeit just for a few days, a small piece of Mod’s total journey – in January of this year, so the experience was fresh on my mind as I flipped through. Like Bryan’s memory, I kept remembering Mom on this walk. Reading this book is a wonder in its own right, but for me personally it felt serindipitous, a sort of recontextualization of my own walk, a way of returning clear-eyed to the grief and love that bubbled up on those same footpaths.

Throughout the book, we meet a wide cast of characters. Some we glimpse for just a moment: an inn owner remembering his late wife, weather-beaten farmers enjoying a bath, an okonomiyaki shop owner who welcomes death. Each and every one of their perspectives articulate the contours of a world constantly undergoing change. Mod handles all of them with care. On this front, it’s especially refreshing that Mod describes their actions and translates their speech completely without pretense, without the awkward othering and mystique that’s often used by Westerners to describe life in Japan. Every person we meet appears in full-color:

As the husband drives me down off the mountain, back to the Ise-ji path, he breaks our silence by saying, She ain’t … our daughter.

[…]

She just appeared seven years back. Wanderin’ the country, needin’ a job, somehow … found us. Not a daughter, but like a daughter. Time passes, life moves, and that’s what happens: Things become … other things.

Brief conversations like this – in the car, ordering food, walking past a rice field – illuminate a group that, despite its decline, is supported and seen. Their lives can be hard, absolutely. Once-bustling kissas are now empty (save for Mod with a plate of pizza toast), fishermen’s hauls get smaller every year. But there’s never a sense of not-enough. The inn owners still feed Craig huge stacks of pancakes and send him off with five loaves of bread, small shops get picked up by the family’s next generation. Things continue on, become other things.

If only Bryan could have seen all of this. Maybe, Mod writes, their lives would have been different. The sense of scarcity so absent from Craig’s walk was by contrast a defining characteristic of his childhood. He recalls fights, drugs, the boys’ desire to buy a gun. He recalls one of his classmates: “We knew a kid who got a plastic sandwich bag thick with hash for Christmas, carried and unveiled it proudly. I visited his house once. They owned no furniture.”

This world turns and turns and the more I move my feet the more I believe in things we never understood. Life, irrepressible, it billows over the top of the pot, man. Let me be your eyes as best I can. I’ll bear witness to this wonder you never got to see.

And so Mod balances these two worlds, the memories in his mind binding together with the roads under foot. He threads one word throughout these chapters: yoyū, “the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance.” This heart-quality, this space is what facilitates healing. It’s what allows communities to bend and not break. Something those two young boys never saw.

And it’s through all of these lenses – abundance, loss, decay, penance – that Mod connects his past and present. The monotony of the walk, one foot in front of the other, gives rise to new worlds, to hope and joy and a deep, wide love. I went to an event for this book’s release, and the final question of the night from the audience was “What’s the secret to an interesting life?”

Craig smiled and leaned in. “Full days.”

But alas: this book left me wanting a lot more.

Sanderson’s gift, by far, is writing a compelling plot in a huge, imaginative world. The various stories of Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar all weave together neatly, and the mythology backing the expanses of Roshar gives the setting a depth that lets the individual stories remain in conversation with tales going back thousands of years. He is skilled at building a world that’s rich and complex, dusting his prose with references to the world’s native plants, currencies, languages, peoples, and religions.

His particular gift for plot is in its clarity — I always felt clear on characters’ motivations and goals, and scenes are lined up with care to always make the reader feel well-equipped to understand what’s going on. He constructs his plot the way a magician constructs a magic trick, pulling your attention one way while the mechanics of the world operate unseen, just outside of your field of vision. If anything, Sanderson has characterized TWOK is being difficult almost precisely because there’s so much information given in the first half of the novel in order to equip the reader with enough context, background, and lore to fully dive in to the back half where the action really gets going.

But personally, that’s about as far as my interest went. I really wanted to love this book, but as I crossed the halfway mark — the area where Sanderson clearly wants to crank up the heat — I sensed my interest losing steam. Where things started to come together, in a way they felt almost too straight-laced, and the characters began to fall short of the depth I was searching for.

I will fully acknowledge at the top of this more critical section that I am not an avid reader of fantasy, and most of my notes here were written right as I was finishing the book, so take any specific details with a grain of salt. Likewise, from hearing Sanderson talk about this book, it’s clear that many aspects of it are designed to play out on timelines far greater than a single book, and that dedicated readers are most rewarded for reading through the full series, which I haven’t done. So take that as permission to take from this review what you find valuable and leave the rest.

That last bit about Sanderson’s sight lines being lined up for a multi-book epic is actually one of my biggest gripes. The first four parts, which make up the entire primary storyline, left me wanting something more, as I’ll discuss soon. But Part Five then introduces future plot lines that sounded orders of magnitude more interesting and complex than what’s broached in TWOK, and as I closed out the last page of the book, I was left only with the feeling that all the work of completing this book was more like pre-reading for another, better one. I don’t know if these 1200 pages justified themselves fully on that front; in my mind, they should have stood on their own two feet.

One idea that threads through pretty much every comment I read on this book is that his characters, and more specifically Kaladin, are The Greatest Thing Ever. I found this opinion extremely surprising: while the characters are varied and purposefully-crafted, I never latched on to any of them, and for the most part I’d characterize most of them as “flat,” imbued with a particular set of characteristics and personality traits that serve the plot well but at the expense of conveying real humanity or heart. Indeed this flatness is probably the primary reason that I started to peel away from the book in the second half. Good characters are “juicy,” and most that we encounter felt rather dry.

What is most missing to me is real, meaningful backstory. Flashbacks in this book are just more plot, filling in details and holes about, for example, Kaladin’s preoccupation with losing those around him. They don’t, however, illuminate much about why these characters have their preoccupations in the first place. We see that Kaladin took responsibility for Tien’s death because he volunteered for that expressed purpose, but other aspects of his backstory, like the advice of his father, suggest that he was raised with the lesson that you can’t save everyone. So why is he so inflexible and insistent on being the savior for every single person on a battlefield? That’s perhaps his central character flaw, yet the narrative just shrugs and says “that’s just how he is.”

In Sanderson’s annotations of TWOK, he describes Kaladin as an “all-around awesome guy,” and so he felt that our first exposure to Kaladin should be from the third-person in order to make that awesomeness more believable. That’s all well and good for the first exposure — and I agree that that was the right move! — but we then have to follow him directly for the next ~1000 pages, and I don’t think we see enough not-awesomeness from Kaladin — he’s simply Stormblessed, which seemed from his notes a trope that Sanderson was attempting to avoid. Yes, he fails to save people, but for the most part, he didn’t play a terribly large part in their deaths — he just was not quite god-like enough to save them, which makes most of his preoccupation with protecting them actually come off as self-centered¹.

Kaladin has flaws, but those flaws are primarily stem from a single source of hubris: he cares too much. That’s basically the equivalent of going into a job interview and stating that your biggest weakness is that you work too hard.

Bridge Four, on the other hand, was the group of characters I felt more affinity for, perhaps only because individually they’re given less limelight and thus leave more open to the imagination. They’re a foil to balance out Kalidan’s savior-like description. They’re scrappy and more fully explore the space of changing from downtrodden bridgemen who’d thrown in the towel to soldiers who truly embrace “Life before death.” Characters like them, if given more room to breathe and weren’t subjected to essentially being Kaladin’s supporters, would really have shined.

While I mention earlier that Sanderson’s gift is for plot, I suppose what I mean is that his gift is for action. Every scene feels like it has a particular purpose for what’s happening — someone needs to hear some bit of information or get their hands on an item, and all of that happens. “What could possibly be wrong with that?” I hear you asking. The problem is pacing.

Plot can be manipulated and enriched in so many different ways². There’s all sorts of axes on which to make these adjustments: playing with time, speeding up sections to watch whole years or generations zip by, or by slowing it down and freezing the action to eek out every detail of an important moment; creating interesting plot forms by creating symmetries across scenes or by intertwining different time periods; or conveying information by threading in particular sounds, colors, tastes, or any other recurring element. Plot is more than just “the stuff that happens;” it’s also the way in which it unfolds, the way in which the author unfurls the tapestry of events.

Compared to the world of possibilities on that front, the plot of TWOK feels like a march. Yes, there’s a few flashbacks to the past and strange visions during high storms, but these are all essentially in service of this highly linear narrative form. Linear narrative is fine, but linear narrative for such a thick book made me want a palate-cleanser at some point. While earlier I mentioned that Sanderson telegraphs future events without losing suspense, I would also argue that the highly linear structure does mean that such foreshadowing does make big moments have less payoff when they do happen. Everything is structured as to always make sense, but that comes at the cost of misaligning the expectations of the characters and the audience, despite the narrator generally sticking to individual characters’ perspectives in each chapter. I would have liked to be more surprised by Sadeas’s betrayal or Jasnah’s fake fabrial, but the seeds of those “twists” were laid out sometimes hundreds of pages in advance. Part Five largely avoids that criticism — but it’s also almost entirely setting the stage for later books, so it’s hard to count that as any justification for reading the 1200 pages leading up to that.

Based on his own notes, Sanderson seems to worry a lot about readers not having enough information for later passages to make sense, so his solution is to front-load the novel with information about the world. Personally, I feel like this led to large portions of the book being redundant, unnecessary, or almost overbearing in its unwillingness to trust readers to figure things out. I would have much rather been on the edge of my seat trying to guess what could happen, but instead I was mostly thinking to myself by the end of most chapters that it was time to move things along.

All in all, TWOK had so much potential, and I was hoping for the moment when the stars aligned to make everything worthwhile. The ending was nearly that for me, but I don’t think that 5% of the novel was enough to justify the previous 95%. For such a sprawling world and for the many pages spent creating it, it felt too flat: I wanted more from the characters, more from the narrative form, more juice. All the impressive worldbuilding and crafted storylines if the characters don’t expose anything about what it means for them to be alive. I’m intrigued by what’s discussed in Part Five that lays the groundwork for later books, but it remains to be seen if that will get me to maintain interest through more of this series.

Out in the desert, the mind is pulled, over and over again, back to its survival instincts. I was near the campground and dozens of visitors with food and supplies, and yet a small part of my brain was continuously calculating how much water I had, when I needed to eat, listening for new sounds: a background task that slowly syphons away my mental battery.

The voices gradually made their way up to the overlook. A group of college guys from the campsite — I had seen them earlier across the road, cooking on a charcoal stove and shouting some friendly bullying and having drawn-out arguments about a mutual friend. They didn’t seem to be aware that in the quiet of the desert night, their voices could carry for miles, the only competition being the soft susurration of long grass and the Rio Grande’s gentle whisper.

They were friendly, of course, but on their ascent my Survival Background Task was still churning. Perhaps it’s because my only mental model of desert survival is almost entirely cribbed from Breaking Bad and Blood Meridian, but all my mind had to offer was a violent tension, the ever-present possibility of resorting to whatever means necessary for self-preservation.

The group made it to the top of the overlook and we exchanged quiet nods, settling in to watch the stars overhead.

The sky above Big Bend National Park was divided into two: one half all stars slowly arising from the darkness, the other half dominated by a glaring full moon. For all those strange swirling emotions, my conscious mind instead kept returning to one of my all-time favorite passages from another Cormac McCarthy novel, All the Pretty Horses:

They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pasture-land. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

They rode not under but among them. This was what I felt up on the outlook, high above the desert plains below, floating.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with space. I had memorized astronaut names and mission crews, distances between galaxies. I spent my free time flipping through this book called Earth and Space, which despite being for kids still taught me all about galaxy clusters and theories behind wormholes.

The surest way I know to have an out-of-body experience is to sit out under the stars. I sit there and just consider where those stars are, how far away they might be. How long would it take me to walk there? What exists in all that vastness? I think about the 93 million miles it would take to get to the sun, and then the 25.2 trillion miles to Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighbor star. Numbers so large as to feel meaningless. I lay on my back and think about the hours and hours it has taken me to drive the thousand miles between Birmingham and Big Bend, and to do that 93,000 times just to get to the sun, and then to do that about 270,000 times, traversing through empty space. In the time it would take to get that far even with our fastest spaceships, individual lives are just a blip, whole civilizations rising and falling, any conception we may have of our collective future just a footnote on the annals of Earth’s history.

And all of that distance is just space, void, stories playing out on scales beyond comprehension. I feel small, but not in a way that causes any sense of anxiety or dread. I have my role in this cosmic drama. From that perspective I view the whole cosmos playing out in front of me, my tiny perspective so hilariously focused on paying the bills and planning for imagined circumstances while the whole time galaxies are colliding, stars being born and dying, my sense of what’s possible impossibly small by comparison.

The desert has a vastness of its own, incomparable to space but still so large as to feel strange on a human scale. Driving out of Big Bend, I go for hours, blazing at 90mph¹ on the wide-open highway, not another soul in sight. The deserts of the American Southwest are probably the only place I’ve ever visited where I’m absolutely certain a person could disappear and never be found. I could park my car on the side of the highway and start walking, gone in the sands.

And in all of that vast space is pure strangeness. Something about the desert — the solitude, the endless beige, the Survival Background Task — stirs the mind to strange ideas. This is most evident by what’s been left behind in the abandoned buildings, dilapidated RVs, and empty stores that seem to outnumber actual populated buildings in West Texas. The desert is a burial ground of towns that once may have thrived but now remain little more than caved-in roofs and piles of rubble surrounding a single still-standing tire shop. What remains is always fascinating, their stories likely long-lost: the Art Deco storefront whose only remaining signage was a hand-painted Walmart logo, dozens of cactus farms hundreds of miles from any possible customers, the recreation of a Prada store² — real Prada bags included! — on the highway roadside. You see a sign here and there for towns with names like Truth or Consequences and wonder if you’ve lost your mind.

I can see these mechanisms first hand. Even on a long drive in the comfort of my car, I can sense the fine line between beauty and confusion playing out. Outside the dry air sucks the moisture right off your tongue. Sweat evaporates so quickly as to be almost unnoticed. No shade, no protection from the harsh sun. The body’s resources deplete in secret. One begins to see why the Desert Fathers secluded themselves in a place like that: it is the ultimate form of asceticism, not merely away from society but in a place hostile to your survival.

But the desert’s hostility is what makes it a wonder. It is unlike anywhere else with its quiet, its expansiveness, its inhabitants’ quiet determination towards life. It is a place that succeeds in spite of itself.

I believe I’ve finished my greatest bouts of desert driving, at least for a little while. I’m now in El Paso, and the nearby cities are much shorter drives than the long hauls taking me through the expanse of West Texas. Next up is some quick trips through White Sands, Guadalupe Mountains, and Carlsbad Caverns, all just an hour or two away from each other.

I stopped by a coffee shop in the morning. A small sign in the corner boasted the shop’s weekly open mic poetry reading, which it claimed was the longest-running poetry reading in the country – a claim I cannot help but find dubious, but part of me really wants to believe that record is actually nested in a tiny shop off a side street in Hot Springs. I wanted to stay and read for a while, but I could see the clouds darkening overhead and figured I’d hit the trails before I got thoroughly rained out.

The hiking trails are a nice stroll just above the main street, with some nice overlooks and a lookout tower in the middle. The walk was brief, but with the clouds overhead, the smell of rain, and the breeze rustling the long grass up on the mountain, it was enough to get me to those precious moments of calm and solitude out in a quiet corner of the trail.

I always like looking over the many names variously carved around the park, on trail markers and signs and rock walls. Families memorializing their trips, the classic lovers’-initials-and-heart carved into a tree trunk, the occasional prayer.

But the rain cut my outdoors time short. I did make it into one of the famous bathhouses before I left, which was both pleasant – a nice warm bath is a perfect respite after getting caught out in the rain – and made me a bit sad that the US doesn’t really have a bathing culture in the way that some other countries do. This is perhaps a case of suffering from success, since historically bathhouses often developed during periods when homes couldn’t easily have access to hot water, and much of the construction in the US likely happened at times when most people could have hot water heaters directly in their homes¹.

In other parts of the world, like Turkish hammam, Japanese onsen and sento, or Korean jjimjilbang, bathhouses are just as much a social experience as they are for health and cleanliness. People may stay around for hours if the bathhouse is large enough. While their numbers seem to be dwindling pretty much across the board, they’re still regarded as a staple of their respective communities, and many cities have rallied around their local bath to keep it alive. It’s not explicit or acknowledged, but I think there’s something important about people of all ages and groups stripping (literally) their various accoutrements and experiencing a moment of connection and community.

But what most stood out to me was in comparison to bathhouses elsewhere, these seemed surprisingly regimented and, for lack of a better word, prudish. While you can go nude, you are quickly wrapped by an attendant in a gigantic towel wrapped tightly around you. Your bath is private, and going between baths and saunas and so on is pretty “on rails.” It’s more like getting a personal spa treatment where others just so happen to be present instead of experiencing the whole thing with others. This isn’t exactly a surprise, since Americans aren’t exactly known for being comfortable with publicly discussing nudity or anything even vaguely sexual, but it is noticeably at odds with how bathhouses work, well, basically everywhere else: fully nude and highly communal.

But by this point, the thunder and lightning had pretty firmly uprooted any other outdoors plans in Hot Springs. The forecast was that it would be pouring for at least another two days in Hot Springs and in the nearby Ozark National Forest, so the next morning I packed up and made my way over to Oklahoma.

OKC, it turns out, is pretty rad. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Birmingham in terms of size, but it’s like an alternate history where Birmingham was steadily growing instead of shrinking². The population of OKC proper has been growing steadily for years, and much more of the metro area’s population is inside the city itself: almost 700k of the metro area’s 1.4M residents live in the city itself, compared to about 200k of Birmingham’s 1.1M metro area.

The downtown feels incredibly well-maintained: Scissortail Park is brimming with local pollinators; the nearby Myriad Botanical Garden is gorgeous, with lots of small nooks to sit and rest in the shade; and there’s several pockets of the city where the restaurant scene is punching well above its weight. The city isn’t immune to the problems of any big metro, like homelessness and the occasional overflowing trash can, but the place seems to have struck a great balance between modern amenities and classic charm.

I’m only here for a day or so, but I’ve seen OKC lauded as a surprisingly-great/affordable city enough times to pique my curiousity, and I’m glad I got to stop by and eat all of its delicious tacos and famous onion burgers.

Next off, I’m heading to Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas. I’ll have two days of driving (why force yourself through 10-hours in one day if you don’t have to?) with some camping interspersed in there. After that, I’ll be in the middle of a whole cluster of parks in the southwest, like White Sands, Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, Death Valley, and all the rest, so hopefully that means less big driving days ahead.

Catch you next time.

I have a natural inclination to wander. It’s great to spend a lot of time in a single place, to get to know its rhythms and routines, but I always feel a little spark in my chest when I get back on the move. This morning I started off down the highway, and about twenty minutes in I looked out at the tall grass along the roadside, bending in rolling waves against the wind. My body relaxed, my vision opened up to the whole landscape. Everything was right where it should be.

In a foreign country, I’m a stranger in a strange land, helpless. Like a child: unable to speak the language or navigate your new environment alone, forced to depend on the kind help of others. Everything is novel, and it’s easy to just revel in that newness. Going back home is the complete opposite. It’s familiar, and finding your way back into that newness requires effort to look beyond the grooves of daily life. I fall back into old habits, old selves.

This trip is an attempt at melding the two together, at refreshing my perception of my home country with that sense of newness. America is huge, and my current sense of it is largely confined to the 1% of the country that I’ve seen and experienced. I’ve probably seen more parts of other countries than I’ve seen of my own.

someone will remember us

i say

even in another time

Fragment by Sappho, trans. by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter

An accident caused the highway just outside of Little Rock to come to a standstill, so I took a detour. These back roads twisted between farmhouses and wheat silos, cutting through fields that stretched all the way to the horizon. Around a turn, I saw a tall cross nestled in the bushes. It tilted off to the side of the road, standing about five feet tall and completely coated with rust. It looked like one of those memorials erected in the memory of someone lost in some terrible accident. On top sat a John Deere baseball cap.

In Japan, I often saw tiny shrines or statues of Jizo at temples and along the road. Oftentimes these are donated by families in remembrance of children who passed away at an early age. People sew little red bibs and caps to put on the statues, to keep them warm as they watch over all the souls traversing samsara, the cycle of birth and death, and offer assistance to us in our struggle. Sometimes I found little Jizos in the most unexpected places, on mountaintops and in the crooks of trees, hands clasped, always smiling.

As I drove by the cross, this memory flashed into my mind. I imagined someone coming from abroad and seeing how we memorialize those who were taken too early. Perhaps they would feel that same mix of familiarity and newness, the same emotion finding a different manifestation in each place. We share the feeling of someone watching over us, remembering us when we’re gone.

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

So the road will be home for the next few months. I’ll try my best to keep things updated here as I go from place to place, at least with some photos. See you then.

There in the stacks, I come upon Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form & Emptiness. The “form and emptiness” reference first piqued my curiousity, a reference to the Heart Sutra and perhaps the most revered line in the Zen lineage (of which Ozeki is a priest):

[F]orm does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this.

The epigraphs from Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” and the personification of the narrator as The Book, its dedication and love for books as physical objects, as actors in the universe, were as if the Universe had heard my cries and placed it there for me to find.

The Book of Form & Emptiness follows teenager Benny Oh who, following the untimely death of his father, begins hearing voices and is subsequently diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. One of the few places he can find refuge is his local public library, where he meets an elderly homeless intellectual and a young street artist who take him under their wing. Benny’s mother Annabelle also mourns her husband’s death, all the while navigating a new life as a newly single mother, supporting her son through a difficult diagnosis – not to mention the trouble she has keeping an eye on him as he regularly runs off with his newfound companions – and trying to stay afloat at her job in a time of rapid automation. Juggling all of these gradually leads Annabelle to develop a nasty hoarding habit, which only bears down further on her relationship with Benny and attracts the attention of her landlord.

Perhaps the most notable feature of this novel is the fact that it’s narrated by The Book itself, simultaneously both a freestanding character as well as a voice for all books everywhere, assuming the role of some kind of Platonic ideal of The Book. It narrates its own contents in the first person, conversing with Benny directly (who also narrates some of his own chapters), interleaving action with commentary on our relationship to books as physical objects, reflections on its own plot, and the occasional finger-wagging at our world’s obsessions with consumerism and nods to real-life events like climate change and politics.

This sounds like a lot in the abstract, but it’s well-contained for the vast majority of the novel. The Book is more like an omniscient narrator than some kind of postmodern commentary¹, often helping Benny to make sense of actions as they come and offering consolation in times of need. It really is endearing, and despite much of its subject matter – mental health, self-harm, hoarding, drugs, etc. – I found most of the book feeling almost cozy.

This is one of Ozeki’s greatest skills: no matter how dark her subject matter, no matter how intense the afflictions her characters have been given, she expertly balances despair and suffering with heartfulness and compassion.

If anything, I would argue that her compassion is also one of the book’s greatest weaknesses. By the end of the novel, characters have truly been put through the ringer: Benny has been pulled into participating in a riot and is checked into the psychiatric ward, the Aleph has relapsed and given in to her addictions, and Annabelle has been fired and is unwilling to clean her home, putting her on the edge of eviction. Things are by all means looking bleak. At this point, The Book steps in and attempts to offer a little dose of reality to Benny as he sits mute in his hospital room:

We don’t want to upset you or make you feel guilty. It’s not out of malice that we’re telling you about Annabelle’s suffering. We’re telling you because, as your book, that’s our job. And even if we’d prefer to spin you pretty fairy tales and tell tidy stories with happily-ever-afters, we can’t. We have to be real, even if it hurts, and that’s your doing.

I read this passage and expected each of these characters to get absolutely thrown into the blender.

But here is where I think the book begins to collapse under its own weight. That bit above comes from page 528 of a 546 page novel. We’re practically at the finish line here, this whole grand world that Ozeki has spun pulled tight, and yet this whole drama gives in to exactly that which it claims not to be: things end happily-ever-after. Benny literally just gets up out his chair and asks to leave, and they basically let him go. Annabelle basically hauls ass and cleans up the house, the psychiatrist who essentially instigated the entire Child Protective Services call does a 180 and vouches for them, “No-Good” Harold gets overruled by his mother who owns the building and the eviction saga comes swiftly to an end. And things end up neat and tidy². For all the preaching about taking responsibility, it doesn’t truly seem as if any of the characters actually learned to be responsible for their own suffering.

I have a variety of other quibbles about the novel: the Aleph is a bit of too much of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for my taste, the whole story of Aikon is completely unnecessary³, and in general most of the side characters were fairly flat. However, the fact that I was enthralled for 400 pages only to feel so rushed at the end is what hit me the hardest.

For all its flaws, I was incredibly enthralled for most of the book, and the creativity and deftness with which Ozeki handled some sensitive subject matter made it worth the price of admission. There’s a generosity to the portrayal of Benny, Kenji, and Annabelle that feels nourishing to read, and for that alone I feel good for having spent a few days with The Book of Form & Emptiness.

Most people¹ will go through some variation of the “quarter-life² crisis.” From the outside, these periods can seem chaotic and impulsive, from the inside confusing and frustrating. Having some idea of what to expect can be a helpful starting point – things like major psychological studies or popular books are a good way to get a foothold – but these are by nature written from a thousand-foot view.

On the other side is the individual report, the phenomenological experience of what it’s like to navigate these choppy waters – mystery, confusion, elation, and the complete reformation of personality. I thought it worthwhile to write up some “field notes,” if only as historical artifacts that I can later read through and have pity on my younger self for their misguidedness; or perhaps for others to read and maybe find some kinship in a fellow lost traveller, a stand-in for a seasoned teacher patting you on the shoulder: yes, what you’re experiencing is normal.

My story is the one that has been said plenty of times: 27 years old, a good job that payed well, had mostly figured out How to Be an Adult. Some amount of conventional success, you get the picture. These accomplishments are the last in the set of stepping stones that are laid out for us as adolescents: high school, college, get a job, and then suddenly I find myself in an open forest glade without a map:

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don’t much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.

Alice: …So long as I get somewhere.

I didn’t have a great sense of where to go, but I knew that my current situation wasn’t it. I would often be sitting at my desk trying to be a productive adult at my well-paying job and think: you are going to die someday.

Memento mori is a trite aphorism right up until it punches you in the teeth. Death is one of those things that cannot be understood any other way – much as we may wish it otherwise – except to experience the sort of wracking grief and regret that accompanies the passing of a loved one. This was certainly true for me after the death of my mother, that being the first time I had experienced the realities of loss so clearly and acutely. But if nothing else, losses like that are so far beyond words and conceptions that they lodge themselves instead into your nerve endings, embed themselves into the very way you see and experience each waking moment.

And so with these thoughts sitting at the back of my mind, I would find myself sitting at my desk, responding to Slack messages, waiting for the time when I could log off and just pray for a modicum of energy to work on my own projects or goals – which inevitably never happened, something I’d habitually realize right before falling asleep after a 2 hour stint of drinking and rewatching Mad Men for the fourth time that year – it was then that I remembered that I too would die, that I would be some frail body in a hospital bed, soon to be ash in a crematorium; or perhaps it come for me unexpected, some terrible accident that would strip away all those later years that I had meticulously planned out, all of those potentialities unfulfilled.

And I’d walk through all of these worlds, all the different sets of possibilities, and I’d see that at the end of every one of them that what I had worked so hard thus far to cultivate – money, status, and most of all a sense of security – wouldn’t mean anything. They seemed to me, sitting there, utterly irrelevant to the project of living. All I could imagine caring about in each of those moments was this:

Did I live well?

Great is the matter of birth and death

Time passes swiftly, everything is lost

Awake, awake

Do not waste your life

Inscription on the han at Tassajara

And so what does it mean to live well? There’s been enough ink already spilled on this topic to line the shelves of bookstores and fill the pews at religious institutions for millenia. My opinion on the matter is irrelevant.

What is relevant, however, is to befriend the question, to bathe in it for a while. One of the tricky things about an identity crisis is that it’s very difficult to know what you’ll know when you know it, to be comfortable with changes you do not currently comprehend. How does one know how to become something new? It’s a balancing act: to become comfortable with not knowing is a helpful skill, but doing so requires some amount of personal, emotional resources, the sort of resources that come from the stability and confidence of what you already know. Even if you find an answer that resonates intellectually, it’s still incumbent upon you to understand living well experientially, to feel it in a way that resonates in your own heart-mind.

Journaling – or more specifically, writing Morning Pages – has been a helpful routine for me. The big questions naturally came up once I start dumping all of my thoughts onto the page, and while I don’t necessarily find definite answers³ in those pages, they are helpful barometers to alert me when I am off course.

That, I believe, is really the ideal outcome of an identity crisis. It’s not to come out with a new identity, but rather to have the set of tools to effectively and continuously reinterpret yourself and adjust accordingly, day after day. For myself, I started out with a life built on a set of values and rules that were instilled in me by others; now, I’m finding myself navigating by my own internal value system.

I don’t have a succinct, pithy phrase to point to with any amount of certainty about What the Good Life is – least of all one that applies universally to everyone – but the best bet I’ve got so far is this: the good life is one in which you are entirely yourself.

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint… They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else’s experiences or write somebody else’s poems.

Thomas Merton

And so here I am, four months after having left my job and shipping off to trot around the globe for a bit. Physical distance is a good thing in moments like these. It’s that balance of the known and unknown: travel forces me to be in new postures, to do something different, but traveling solo offers me the flexibility to decide exactly how that happens adjust however feels best.

The travel has been fun and all, but the greater consequences have come from packing light. I’ve lived for 4 months now out of a backpack, sleeping on shitty hostel mattresses, and eating mostly convenience store food⁴. Living with so little makes you more sensitive to just how much each extraneous thing weighs on you. And from here I reflect back on the rest of my life. My house, my books, the art and decorations and just stuff that fills those rooms – what purpose do these all serve to me? Some of them are undoubtedly good and are things I cherish, but I’m also forced to recognize the costs (monetary or otherwise) that holding on to them has.

That healthy bit of asceticism has also seeped into my relationship with technology. That same attenuation to the costs of every marginal interaction has meant becoming hypersensitive to the state of technology today.

To put it more simply: I hate my phone now. I already disliked my phone before, at least intellectually, but now I have a sort of gutteral disgust whenever I catch myself scrolling social media. Cutting down on my screen time became less of a chore, something that I should do, and more like an assertion of self-determination.

With the reclaiming of my attention also came this insatiable desire to work. I don’t have a job, so I can work on literally anything, and as such I’m forced to aggressively cut the myriad small projects for the things I really care about, the skills that I must develop instead of the skills that are merely incidental. I’ve found myself dedicating whole days to journaling, reading, and writing in ways that I don’t think I’ve ever done before. There’s a whole new dimension that I’m actively uncovering in learning how to work – really work – how to inculcate the skills to handle larger creative projects. I certainly don’t have those skills yet, but they’re the sort of developments I can feel bubbling in my psyche.

The outcomes of all of this remains to be seen. Like I said at the beginning, these notes are intended mostly as a record of me attempting to Figure Things Out, and if something in here resonates, I’m glad this was of service. If nothing else, I’ll leave this as a reminder to check in: continue being truly and uniquely yourself, now and always.

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

I recently spent a week on retreat up in the San Bernadino mountains. On the opening night, a teacher defined wisdom as “being grown-ups about our existential condition.” At first that felt like an attack – surely I’m not being childish – but after sitting in silence for a week, letting those words run their course through me, I started to see some aspects of my own childishness.

Namely: like children, we grasp at this-or-that explanation of our existence to make ourselves feel secure. Explanations of this nature are comfort blankets for our existential dread, tools that help us navigate our deepest fears.

Our need for security is our inheritance as animals. As we grow up, we develop the confidence and capacity to work with the unknown, to handle insecurity.

Our hope is that the Final Answer of the Universe will be ultimately fulfilling. But freedom lies not in the answer, but in the question:

Will knowing the meaning of life actually help?

I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I’ve spent much of my life agonizing over questions like this: what’s this all for? Why are we here? Our place in the world is ambiguous and confusing, and I needed help navigating it all.

I hoped primarily to find something definitive, regardless of its contents. I was waiting for the universe to unveil to me its telos, to lift the curtain on a grand mechanism. Everything would be clear, concrete, unambiguous, and most importantly, secure. There must surely be a ground, it cannot be turtles all the way down. I’d finally be able to get on with my life because at least now it had a point.

But that hasn’t happened.

The primary reason for this is that for me, “purpose” was a crutch, a tool to attempt to govern the inherently chaotic. I mistook the meaning-of-life for finding meaning-in-life¹. The latter is important for happiness and wellbeing – it’s what people most often reference when they say they’ve had a “meaningful life” – but it was not the primary concern for me. The existence of that sort of meaning seemed too obvious to dismiss. You can feel it in your chest when something in life is meaningful. To call time spent with friends, the excitement of a child, or the tender care of a loved one “meaningless” is cruel and a denial of the obvious.

I was far more concerned about the meaning of life, as if going through a whole lifetime without uncovering its innate purpose would be a waste of breath.

I was scared. Scared that without a meaning-of-life, my life was not worth living.

Camus: “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land².”

My biggest fear was being a stranger in the world.

My fear of being a stranger was rooted in a naive assumption: that other people had figured it all out and I hadn’t. I grew up in a religious tradition that supplied its own answer, and so by that metric other people did have it figured out, albeit with an answer that I found inconclusive.

Meaning-of-life, framed as a form of social cohesion, becomes a tool, a means of justifying one’s own existence. Underlying this is the insidious notion that one’s existence requires justification, that the purpose of a life is to create a life worth living³. What I most wanted was not actually meaning but rather approval, a justification of selfhood so deep and so true that it could never be questioned.

But that justification will not be found. Such a search is just a snipe hunt, a neverending chase for something over the horizon. Once we achieve this or create that or get just a bit more money or recognition or power, then we’ll have enough control to be untouchable. It is the mind clawing its way to utopia and coming up empty.

Meaning-of-life is a metaphysical claim, that at the bottom of the cosmos there’s some ground floor, something woven into the fabric of the universe that is the Universal-Good or Purpose. To attempt to answer such a question requires omniscience, and yet we are mortal: a question of that magnitude is so broad as to be unanswerable⁴.

Our task is not to determine the meaning-of-life at the bottom of it all. Much ink has been spilled trying to find these answers, but this is a distraction.

Rather, our task is to acclimate ourselves to what is true, to put down childish distractions and to take responsibility: to be grown-ups.

You can liken the process [of awakening] to a gradual descent out of the tumult and the gridlock of your personal world into the free space of the unconditioned. It’s rather like lowering oneself down a rope. You have to know how to do that. It’s a matter of holding on to something you trust – even though it seems like a thin strand – then letting go a little bit and trusting the downward movement.

Ajahn Sucitto, “Awareness Doesn’t Follow Orders"

“Childish” in this sense is not derogatory. Children are plenty capable of learning and comprehending complex topics and learning to take responsibility. But one of the most striking aspects of childhood is what pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott termed the “transitional object”: dolls, blankets, or any other object used to provide comfort and reduce anxiety in unique and uncomfortable situations.

Transitional objects ease the child towards independence, helping distinguish themselves from their primary caregiver. They’re a natural part of growing up. Even adults often maintain a “comfort object” that provides a sense of safety, like favorite photographs, weighted blankets, or objects from their childhood.

But much of being a grown-up is not finding things that bring us comfort, but rather growing our ability to handle insecurity. As we develop, our capacity for handling new and diverse situations increases – we take care of a family, become more involved in community, or take on more complex work projects. And as we build that capacity, our need for transitional objects often subsides.

In this way, meaning becomes another higher form of transitional objects in our adult life. We take on new challenges and meet higher-order needs – the need for community and recognition and so on – that become harder and harder to guarantee through sheer force of will. Transitional objects are, at their core, illusions of safety. While they’re valuable tools to help us regulate, they’re still a marker of fear, something we can always control even in the darkest of circumstances.

How then do we build our capacity for insecurity? We let go of the known, little by little, finding more and more safety in wider and wider degrees of freedom.

This will be uncomfortable: our body and mind will pull out all manner of response to prevent insecurity and to continue the march towards security. Shedding the conventional boundaries of predefined selfhood, of a conventional life-meaning, requires doing something new.

In order pick up something new, we must first put down the old. We cannot graft our neurosis out onto the world, but rather must see clearly the boundaries we’ve accepted and find new ones, wider ones just past the edge of our comfort zone.

And we must do this again and again, putting down all our transitional objects and embracing new freedoms.

Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.

James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

In this constant state of letting go, we find a balance: confidence in what we know and compassion for the unknown. Others around us, we see, are on the same road, just going at their own pace. Some join us on our journey, and for that we’re grateful. For others, the road ahead is frightening, and for them we’re compassionate, for we know their pain.

Meaning, here, becomes not so much an unanswerable question; it’s simply irrelevant to the project of living. It’s a million miles away. Because here, right here before us, is the joyous freedom to be.

And in that joy, we find our freedom in wide open space. We are redeemed not by living a definite purpose, but by freeing everything else. I find resonance in the words of my childhood pastor, the words that rang in my ears every Sunday morning:

“And by the love of God, you have been redeemed, and you are being redeemed. So go in peace.”