I was a drizzle and he was a hurricane.
We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.
Most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning.
You can choose your endings and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t get to decide what is in the picture, but you get to decide on the frame.
I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?
We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.
I’ll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them – and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.
I am thoughtful – full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless – acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine.
You can’t see the future coming – not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.
When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding.
For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.
Humans are not the protagonists of this planet’s story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight. But in the age of the Anthropocene, humans tend to believe, despite all available evidence, that the world is here for our benefit.
It’s no wonder we worry about the end of the world. Worlds end all the time.
Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.
We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.
It is May of 2020, and I do not have a brain well suited for this.
I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive.
History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
If you can’t be of utility to people, the second best thing you can be is cute.