The weight of once is almost unbearable when you’re actually paying attention. We live most of our lives in the comfortable illusion of repetition, as if today were a rehearsal for tomorrow. But sometimes the veil lifts, and we see the terrifying beauty of singularity.
Why do we waste time we know we don’t have? Maybe it’s because acknowledging the scarcity would make every choice feel impossibly heavy. We live in elaborate denial of our own mortality, not because we don’t know we’ll die, but because we can’t function while constantly calculating how much life we have left.
The realization came slowly, like developing film in a darkroom. That phantom presence I’d been feeling during moments of indecision wasn’t anxiety—it was the imagined disappointment of my older, wiser, more accomplished self. Maybe the future self worth considering isn’t the disappointed judge but the understanding witness.
This is the magnificent human comedy we’re all starring in: the collective pretense that everyone else received the instruction manual for life that we somehow missed. We walk around performing certainty about mortgages and career decisions and parenting strategies, all while secretly questioning whether we’re qualified to make any of these choices at all.
The Archaeology of Silence: Excavating Our Buried Truths We are all walking museums of untold stories, libraries of experiences that will never be checked out, archaeologists of our own buried truths. In the quiet spaces between what we say and what we carry, entire civilizations of secrets have flourished in the dark. This morning, sitting
Why is it that we save our deepest honesty for people who don’t know our names? With strangers, we’re free to be human without context, to reveal ourselves without the weight of history, expectation, or consequence.
I realized I had been living in a world of my own creation, where everyone else possessed some secret confidence I had been denied. But here was the truth hiding in plain sight: everyone is insecure about something. Our insecurities don’t make us defective—they make us human.
When did busyness become our most acceptable form of hiding? We’ve created a culture where constant motion substitutes for meaningful direction. Scratch beneath the surface of all this urgent activity, and you often find a person running from the uncomfortable work of actually living.
There’s a peculiar grief in education, in the accumulation of truths that dismantle the beautiful stories we tell ourselves about how things work. Each fact learned is also an innocence lost, each understanding gained is also an illusion shattered.
The World Isn’t Fair. Now What? The news arrived on a Thursday: my friend Sarah, who had never smoked a day in her life, who ran marathons and ate vegetables and visited her elderly parents every weekend, had lung cancer. Stage four. Six months, maybe eight if she was lucky. Meanwhile, my neighbor—who chain-smokes on
Curated insights, thoughtfully delivered. No clutter.
