Here is the prologue.

Her sons came at first light.

She had been laboring through the night, alone in the small ground-floor apartment at the end of the lane in Happy Valley, with two rooms and a kitchen, a stain on the wall where a garden shelf used to be, a hook above the bed where she had hung something she could no longer remember, sniffing the mint she had crushed between her fingers that had come from a clay pot on the windowsill, the smell helping her bear what could not be borne. The fever was on her again, foaming along her gums just as it had these last weeks whenever she worked too hard. Outside the small window, the lane was quiet. Apart from a neighbor’s footfall in the hall, nothing. Five years past the fall of Truman and the dust had already taken the sills, the corners, the small framed photograph beside the bed. First light came through the window in a pale slant and the particles hung in it like something not yet fallen. The smell of the mint was still in the room when the first head crowned. A small voice broke open the air for the first time. A strong cry.

He wanted to come.

The second was not far behind and came easier—second children sometimes do—but the fever rose in her as his head appeared and her vision narrowed at the edges and she thought she heard herself singing, and she had sung him through these nine months, but she wasn’t singing now and he came and he was quiet, his eyes closed, his small chest rising and falling.

She held them both against her chest, two small warm bodies, as the room blurred at the seams.

The Title Evaluator arrived shortly after. They always arrive whenever a citizen of Thelema gives birth. Polka-dot bowtie, the spots a deep red, he pressed his round spectacles up the bridge of his nose with his index finger below his bushy brows and set his case on the kitchen table and unsheathed his stylus and stood over the swaddled pair with the concentration of a clockmaker.

He swept the stylus across them in a single pass.

The display flickered.

Then he stopped.

He lowered the stylus and adjusted his spectacles. Swept again. He looked at the readout. He looked at the babies. He looked at the readout. He looked at the fevered woman. Then pursed his lips around an unsaid word. The instrument had surveyed something it could not place. One of the two boys carried a flicker of discontentment and the instrument could not say which. The mother saw the pause. Her stomach pulled tight.

“Excuse me, Madam.” His smile arrived in his eyes a half-second before it reached his mouth. “A momentary irregularity. I will need to consult my supervisor. Nothing to alarm yourself about, I am certain.”

He stepped into the corridor.

The door clicked shut.

She held both her sons against her breasts as the fever ran up and down her arms and throbbed across her skull. She listened to his footsteps. They did not go very far. Beyond the door she heard his long exhale. The click-click-click of a stylus, on and off, then on again. Her ribs tightened around a breath she had not known she was holding. Her arms knew before she did. They drew the babies closer.

The room became quiet. It went on for she did not know how long. The fever was folding the minutes into each other.

Then there came a sound at the kitchen door, the smallest scrape of a foot on the sill. A man she had never met appeared as though he had always been in the room. Am I dreaming? A long worn thobe. Burnished boots that had walked in places she would never dare. Stocky. A little hunched, in the manner some men are hunched from carrying things no one can see. Bald with a patchy silver beard. In his eyes was a tried twinkle—a strange light coming through.

He looked at her like a person looking at someone they have been trying to find for a very long time. He said nothing.

She tried to speak, but her tongue was swollen with the fever.

He moved to the bedside without hurry and looked down at her two swaddled boys but did not move toward either of them. He simply stood, and looked, and waited.

She did not know she was doing it until it had been done. Her arms tightened, slightly, around one of the babies, the smallest motion, drawing him a little closer to her chest.

The man saw it. He moved his eyes from her arms to the baby she had drawn closer.

“This one,” he said, mostly to himself.

Her heart pounded. Then rang. Something in her chest had been struck like a small bell, and the ringing went out into the room.

He spoke to the baby then. The mother heard.

“At age thirty-three, you may save Thelema. Rely on the Titled One to guide you. But beware the cunning of his Enemy.”

He drew a folded square of paper from inside his thobe. It was old, yellowed at the edges, and whatever was on it had been written by hand, in ink someone had ground themselves.

He extended the parchment.

The fever told her not to take it, some part of her older than the fever told her not to either, and she thought of the door in the corridor and the evaluator beyond it scribbling on his stylus, and of what would happen to her boys if anything in this room could be called a Truther’s gift, and she meant to refuse.

She looked at the baby in her tightened arm, the smallest of faces around whom the room had quieted, as though the world had stopped pressing for a moment to see what she would do.

Her fingers folded around the parchment.

She took it.

The man bowed his head once. His eyes carried something like apology, something like awe, but she could not discern them because the edges of the room had started to blur. Then he was gone. She did not see him leave any more clearly than she had seen him arrive.

The evaluator returned with two of his colleagues. One of them kept sneezing in the dust. Another spoke too quickly. The first apologized before there was anything to apologize for and then they reset the stylus. It swept across the swaddled boys.

The display flickered. The readout was resolved. Starling. Net-positive. Clean.

The Evaluators consulted and one frowned. Another checked the calibration. The first made a note and offered the mother his hand, which she did not take, and said, “A momentary aberration. The instrument was at fault. Not the children. Congratulations, Madam. You have two healthy Starlings.”

She nodded.

When they were gone she lay still for a long time and the boys were still against her. Her fever was high enough now that the room was collapsing on itself. The parchment was tucked into the wrappings of one of the babies, in a place no evaluator would think to search and no Theleman ever would.

She looked at the one in her tightened arm, the one the strange man with the burnished boots had spoken over. Something in him will have to stay awake when everything around him goes to sleep. She did not know what made her think it, only that the thought arrived whole, as the ringing had arrived earlier, from somewhere older than her.

She held both her sons against her chest.

She named them.

“You will be Jems,” she said, and thought of the days when the desert sands still gave up rubies and gold.

She looked at the other boy.

“And you will be Andre.” A person of his own. That much was given.

Two boys, two names, two small bodies that had come from her in the same hour. She did not yet know what would become of them. She knew only that she had drawn one of them closer with her arms, and that the man with the burnished boots had followed her arms, and that her insides had rung like a bell when he spoke.

She loved them both. She would have said so on her grave.

She loved them both.

And in the small private room of her body, she folded a piece of her heart around the one she had drawn closer, the one she had chosen without choosing, and hid it there, just as she had hidden the parchment, in a place only she knew.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. If you want to help support my attention in writing this book, consider becoming a renaissance patron.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

You have heard it said: be yourself.

But how do you do that?

You cannot simply be one person. In the words of Walt Whitman, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” You are many faces in one body. The faces only you know. The faces your colleagues see when you walk into the office. The faces a trusted witness helps you unveil. The faces only your son can know. Sometimes this leaves you feeling like a mask factory, wearing different yous based on whether you’re presenting in a boardroom or laughing with your oldest friend or chatting up the Uber driver on one occasion and sitting there quiet on another with your headphones blaring, or singing your daughter to sleep when she doesn’t want to sleep and then reading her that bedtime story for the hundredth time featuring Puffin Rock characters that you know does the trick.

Good. Don’t get rid of all your faces, don’t try to deconstruct them until they make perfect sense. Because you can’t. There is no sorting all your ways of being into a clean persona. There is no whittling them down until they are one, quantifiable you. Instead, hear them. Accept them. Share them. Make your many selves visible, and it will help you and those around you in ways that continually surprise.

Sharing your story makes you visible. The good parts. The bad parts. The everything-in-between parts. And we need them all.

If you withhold who you are, it is a selfish act. You may have been taught the opposite: don’t overshare, don’t make yourself out to be too important, don’t take up space. Sharing your real story does not make you an egomaniac. When you offer yourself in it many forms, you gift another the chance to witness you, and inspire them to share more of themselves. If you withhold who you are, you contribute to a cultural milieu where people skim along the surface of life. Letting yourself be seen might mean you prevent someone else’s private collapse, lifting them from it without realizing that’s where they were headed.

Sometime ago I sat with my friend Samir and told him the messier version of my life story. The window in my room was cracked and the rain was drizzling on your typical Pennsylvania spring day. Drops of water formed a small pool on the sill. There was a turn in my chest, a sense that this was the time and place to offer more of me. I could have ignored that. I didn’t. He listened. He was spacious. He was Samir.

And I learned, again, through this small act of courage, that I am not alone. There are eight-billion people on this planet and many of us are walking around with splintered selves we wish could be reconciled. But the first step to reconciliation is remarkably simple and repeatable: let yourself be seen.

You can’t know in advance what will come back when you share your story with others. Some may not pay attention, some may talk over your story with theirs, some may dislike the scenes you’ve volunteered, some may offer advice, others may radically witness you. Remember this: your responsibility is to practice the courage to see what comes back when you share with others, but what comes back is theirs, not yours.

Once you have let yourself be seen, your many selves will not dissolve. Reconciliation is an act of making peace with your masks, which is an ongoing practice. You aren’t going to figure yourself out, this life out. You are too wild and complex and magnificent, like an untamed forest you’ve been blessed to traverse. Some of your paths are proven, some used to work but now have grown over. Bring your machete to carve out a new path because you will need it. And as you make your way as only you can, you might someday discover who you really are. Which is to say, you will realize you are not all you cracked yourself up to be, and—always and—you are more than you think yourself to be. An unnerving, magical paradox.

In the sprawling forest of your life, you will meet self-doubt. You will experience suffering. These are not your enemies, but friends.

Jesus taught us to take part in his suffering in this life. Meaning there is plenty of shit to go around.

Some of us get a big pile of shit. Some, a small pile.

Jesus had a big pile of shit. He was crucified on a cross. I think that qualifies.

There is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice called Tonglen, where you are invited to inhale all the bad in the world and exhale only good. It sounds like it shouldn’t work that way but it does. Things in life often work that shouldn’t, like sixty-trillion cells dancing inside your body right now, fastening together your muscles and bones, pumping blood from your heart to these strange finger-things you have allowing you to cup the face of your beloved and form sounds like “I love you” and they know what you mean and you taste their lips and inhale their sweet stale breath, and then you look up and glimpse the colors yellow-red cascading down from a booming star in the sky that is rising and falling on repeat every day the same way your chest rises and falls every few seconds and it’s happening for eight-billion people on this big greenish-blue ball blasting through something called space and time to the middle of nowhere and it all matters and no one can explain why. Life is a miracle and you are a miracle, weaving in real time your unique threads as part of its greater, majestic tapestry of everything.

So, if you find yourself suffering from the pile of shit that has been gifted to you, loathing some of your masks, smile softly, and for longer than you want. Because your work in this life is not to further spread suffering around, casting it onto others when the going gets tough—to live in fear of being seen.

Rather, breathe in the difficult memories, the many masks you wear, the purpose you don’t know yet, the tragedy you just heard on the news, the weary eyes sitting next to you on the bus. And breathe out. Breathe out what’s good. Breathe out your real story. And watch it spread slowly, slowly, and slowly still, like a delicate, unstoppable wind to the far corners of the earth.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

Inspired by conversations with Samir Selmanović, Rafael Candelaria, and Jo Green.

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

Every renaissance in history started in the dirt.

Not on a stage. Not with a speech. Not with someone powerful enough to sign it into existence. It started with a few people in a room, or a field, or a kitchen that smelled like bread and arguments, sensing that the world they’d inherited no longer fit the skin they were walking around in. And rather than wait for permission, which never comes, they began to live differently. Quietly. Almost accidentally. The way a tree doesn’t announce it’s about to bloom.

Florence. Fourteenth century. The plague had just eaten half the population. The church was cracking down the middle like a house built on sand. People were dying in the streets and the survivors were standing in the wreckage looking at each other with the particular exhaustion of humans who have just watched everything they were told was permanent turn out to be temporary. And in that wreckage, something absurd happened. A handful of ordinary people, most of them craftsmen and merchants and scholars who smelled like ink and sweat, began asking a question nobody had authorized: “What does it mean to be human?”

They started with attention. They looked at old Greek sculptures and Roman texts and saw something the medieval world had folded up and hidden in a drawer, the idea that a human being is worth studying for its own sake. Worth depicting in full. Worth the trouble of understanding. They called it humanitas. Which meant something like: the entire gorgeous mess of what a person can be.

And yet in the middle of all that death, the response that changed civilization was not grim. Boccaccio wrote The Decameron during the plague years, and it is full of humor, irreverence, love stories, dirty jokes, characters outwitting each other and falling into bed and laughing at the absurdity of being alive while everything around them was dying. The response to catastrophe was hope, fun, and wonder. What the hell? Go ahead, ask it. Because our answer might be the whole point.

Then there was Ghiberti, a goldsmith who won a competition in 1401 to design a set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery and spent the next twenty-one years making them. When he finished, they gave him a second commission. He spent twenty-seven more years on that one. Forty-eight years, total. Two sets of doors. The guild pushed him. But he rarely made a deadline. When asked about his process, he said simply: “I executed that work with the greatest diligence and the greatest love1.” Michelangelo looked at the second pair and called them the Gates of Paradise. They are still standing.

The social renewal came later. The political upheaval came later. The Reformation, the scientific revolution, the whole cascading avalanche of change. First came the looking, the laughing, the painstaking refusal to move faster than the work required. First came the willingness to sit in the dirt and wonder.

· · ·

Concord, Massachusetts. 1840s. A town so small you could throw a rock from one end to the other if your arm was good enough. Emerson was writing essays in his study with the windows open. Thoreau was building a cabin by a pond on Emerson’s land, because Emerson believed in the work before the work existed, and lent his friend the ground to do it on2. Thoreau wanted to find out what would happen if he stopped performing his life and started living it. Margaret Fuller wondered the same. She began holding conversations in living rooms, which was a radical act in those days for a woman, where people gathered to think out loud about things they’d been told weren’t their business3. Things like freedom. Things like what the soul actually is when you strip away the church’s wallpaper.

They called themselves Transcendentalists, which sounds like a college course you’d sleep through, but their practice was disarmingly physical. Go outside. Pay attention to the moss. Trust what you find under your own ribs more than what the institution prints in its pamphlet. They were mystics in muddy boots. They were drunk on the ordinary, and that intoxication made them dangerous.

Within a decade, these same people were among the loudest voices in the abolition movement. Thoreau went to jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that sanctioned slavery, and from his time in the cell wrote an essay on civil disobedience that traveled across oceans and centuries4, from Concord to Gandhi’s Salt March to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where it arrived in the bodies of people who had never read it but were living it. The attention came first. The willingness to sit with a hard question until it rearranged your insides.

· · ·

Harlem, 1920s. A million Black Americans had migrated north, carrying everything they owned and everything they’d been told they weren’t. Suitcases and scars and songs and silence. And in a few square blocks of upper Manhattan, something caught fire that no one could contain. Writers and musicians and painters began doing the most revolutionary thing a person can do. They told the truth about their lives. The uncensored version. The one with all its weight and grace and strange, unrepeatable afternoons.

Langston Hughes wrote poems in the rhythms of jazz and prayer, the kind of lines that make you put down your coffee and just sit. Zora Neale Hurston went back to the rural South to collect the stories everyone else was too sophisticated to remember. And A’Lelia Walker, heiress to her mother’s hair care empire, converted a floor of her Harlem townhouse into a salon she called the Dark Tower5, named after a poem by Countee Cullen, where on any given night you might find Hughes and Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois and musicians and painters and activists crowded into gold-walled rooms with a sky-blue Victrola and a rose-colored piano, the whole place humming with a frequency that happens only when someone with resources sits down with people who have work and asks the simplest, most reckless question you can ask another human being: what do you need? Hughes called her the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s6.” She was a patron in the oldest sense, someone who understood that the work needs talent and a room. Alain Locke called the whole thing a “spiritual coming of age7.”

Before the Civil Rights Movement. Before the marches and the legislation and the long, bloody, beautiful fight for justice. Before any of that, there was this: a community recovering its own voice. Hearing its own story. For the first time in public. For the first time without apology.

The pattern is always the same, and it is always easy to miss because it looks like nothing special. It looks like people giving attention. Cultural renewal precedes social renewal. The question “who are we?” arrives before the question “what must we do?” And the second question never gets answered honestly unless the first one gets asked with the whole body.

Christmas morning, 1956. Harper Lee, a burnt-out ticket agent for an airline, opened an envelope on her friends’ tree. Inside, a note from Michael and Joy Brown: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas8.” The Browns had had a good year. They weren’t rich. But they believed in her. They didn’t ask for anything back. Lee stretched that year into two, and what came out the other side was To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that entered the American bloodstream at the exact moment the Civil Rights Movement needed it, a book about a man who stood in a courtroom and refused to look away from injustice, written because two people in New York City decided their friend’s attention was worth protecting. Emerson lent Thoreau land. Walker opened her living room. The Browns put an envelope on a tree. This is how it works. A renaissance needs artists. It also needs people who believe in the work before it exists and who are willing to make room for it.

· · ·

You know our cultural moment as well as I. We are drowning in stimulation and starving for attention. We are more connected than any civilization in history and more lonely. We have democratized information and industrialized misinformation. Our phones know us better than our neighbors do. Our algorithms have more influence over our children’s imaginations than our dinner tables do. A group of Buddhist monks recently walked 2,300 miles across the United States. When they arrived, one of them stood before a crowd and said the first thing that came to mind after four months of walking in silence: “Don’t touch your phone when you wake up in the morning9.”

Four months on the road. Blisters and rain and the slow reshaping of a body by its own faithfulness. And that was what he chose to say. He understood something most of us sense but haven’t yet had the nerve to name. We have lost the plot. We have mistaken the social feed for the living field. The way back is the oldest technology we have: attention.

Look around, and you’ll see. Something is already shifting. The biggest movie in the country right now is Project Hail Mary, a story about a schoolteacher who wakes up alone in a spaceship, befriends an alien, and saves the world through the sheer childish fun of solving problems together. Six hundred million dollars at the box office, smashing expectations. Andy Weir, the author, says it plainly: “There’s plenty of negativity out there. I sell positivity10.” Six centuries after Boccaccio responded to the plague with humor and love stories, people are responding to our times by packing theaters for the same essential gesture. Hope. Fun. Wonder. The antidote to cynicism, doom, and flippancy. They could stay at home and wait to stream it on Amazon Prime. Instead they are leaving their houses to sit together in the dark, seeking something more. We are, whether we realize it or not, becoming unwilling to be rushed, unwilling to be reduced, unwilling to let the darkness have the last word. Ghiberti spent forty-eight years on two doors. Maybe we’re beginning to remember what that kind of patience makes possible.

· · ·

There’s a famous idea, often linked to Viktor Frankl though probably older than him, that goes something like this: between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is your power to choose. In that choice is your freedom11.

A renaissance, maybe even a global one, is being born in what seems like that tiniest of gaps.

Someone says something cruel to you. You feel the heat in your chest, the tightening in your hands, the old familiar surge that wants to match fire with fire. And then, if you allow yourself, you’ll notice a gap. A sliver. Barely the width of a breath. In that gap you could fire back. You could heap more suffering onto the pile of manure, and there is plenty to go around. Suffering is the one resource we never run out of. It stinks. We all have our share. Which means you could do the harder, stranger, more creative thing. You could pause. You could choose to not add to their pile of stink. You could become, in that tiny fraction of a second, something other than a reactor. You could become a creator.

That gap is the most active thing in the world. It is where every poem gets written, every honest conversation begins, every bridge gets built between two people who were sure they had nothing in common. It’s where you stop being shaped by the stimulus and start shaping the response. It is, if we’re being honest, how the whole world gets made.

· · ·

The kind of renewal we need will come the way every renaissance has always come: from a million tiny acts of attention practiced by ordinary people who got tired of waiting for someone extraordinary to save them. Because, if you haven’t guessed already, that person doesn’t exist. Or, maybe they do. You are that person. Your gorgeous, funky, flawed, regular, spectacular self.

Your work will be unglamorous. And there will be a cost. For love requires a body count. A tally of what it costs you to show up. Real, actual, felt-in-your-body cost. There is a price to creating in the gap, not going blow for blow. There is a price to telling the truth about your life to another person’s face while your voice shakes. There is a price to sitting with someone else’s pain without trying to fix it or run from it or scroll past it. Every person who ever changed the world first had to endure the unbearable luxury of seeing it clearly.

Your work may not only be about reducing suffering, either, as it seems a rite of passage for dwelling on this earth. What if your work is also to have an ease about approaching the hard things? Frankl survived the camps by finding meaning inside the horrendous. He witnessed suffering every single day. And still he found something worth holding onto, something generative, something almost, in a dark way, beautiful. Like a flower reaching through the muck toward the sky. Through the tiniest gap.

· · ·

A renaissance can be as simple as inviting friends over to have an honest and honoring conversation about what’s alive for them right now. Or what’s dead. Or what they haven’t said out loud in years because they were waiting for the right moment, which is now, which was always now. The sharing of stories. The listening that changes both people. It can look like taking manure and making clean fuel from it—both a metaphor and an actual thing humans are doing right now in actual barns. It can include not touching your phone in the morning for an hour and noticing what arrives in the silence, which will be uncomfortable at first and then, if you stay with it, the best part of your day. Or pausing between prompts when using AI to ask yourself, honestly: am I being created right now, or am I the creator here?

It can look like tending a garden—literal or metaphorical—with the understanding that the soil has to be healthy before anything grows. You cultivate a renaissance. You get your hands dirty. You wait. And at some point, if you’re giving attention long enough, you forget you’re doing anything at all and the work starts doing you.

The Italian Renaissance emerged from plague and institutional collapse. The Concord renaissance emerged from spiritual restlessness and a willingness to go to the woods. The Harlem Renaissance emerged from migration, oppression, and a people’s refusal to let anyone else define their own humanity.

What will ours emerge from?

Maybe, the gap. From your peculiar response to the nasty comment your neighbor makes. From the spacious boredom you befriend when you don’t choose Netflix for the evening. From the paintbrush you haven’t touched in years. From a few people sitting in your living room on a Wednesday night, holding a question they can’t yet answer, and being okay with that, being more than okay with that, as you feel something stir in the silence where the answers used to…

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

I take the sanitizing hand-wipe packet from the attendant, say “thank you” after making brief eye contact, find my row in the back of the plane, stash my backpack in the overhead storage bin, forget to use the wipe on my seat, and sit down next to the tiny, rounded-rectangular window with a view of the tarmac.

The plane positions itself to take off and its force pulls me into the chair. I switch my phone to ‘Airplane Mode’ as the tires lift off the ground and we slightly curve toward our destination higher, higher into the sky, cutting through the cakey layer of clouds until the sun’s warmth radiates along my skin.

My chest expands and my lungs fill. I exhale slowly.

There’s a rush tingling along my heart that only I can notice. I tap open my phone. It seems whenever I’m offline, I do some of my best writing.

Best not might be the word you think of for writing that isn’t polished. Often when pulling a draft together, I want to look up quotes and facts only half-remembered. But I believe there may be some utility to writing and editing offline and occasionally sharing that work with you. So, I say best to mean something different than perfect. Rather—raw, messy, winding, sparse, weaving a linguistic texture that when touched is unmistakably human.

Here and there (not everyday, for that would be a lie), I write “morning pages,” done freehand with an old fashioned pen and paper without the aid of the internet and almost never published, remaining in my Moleskine journals unseen by eyes apart from my own.

And so, this is an exercise in making my offline writing visible. Expect occasional mistakes, fallacies, winding prose, repetition, and inaccuracies because I’m relying entirely on my memory and attention to write these pieces—no Grammarly, no Claude, no internet to fact check. I charge you with looking up anything you second guess. Do your due diligence.

Laugh if you want but I stumbled upon this idea through constraint. I had popped into Sky Bear Brewery in Loveland, Colorado, at about 2 o’clock, the afternoon of February 4th. I’d expected to work on a number of outstanding tasks for my company Epic Ordinary. But the brewery’s WiFi wouldn’t load a single page in my browser. I tried out my personal hotspot but my service was rather shotty and didn’t offer much help. “Head over a quarter mile to Dark Heart Coffee and use their internet,” I thought to myself. “Or go back home and use your own.” I could, sure. But I’d wanted to come here to work for the afternoon and didn’t feel like pivoting from this chair and this beer. So, just like that, the idea unfolded. A new tab appeared in my Notes app and I began typing my stream of consciousness with a commitment to not edit a damn thing with the help of AI or the internet—and at some point, publish.

Some of you who follow my work know I’ve been facilitating gatherings with MIT xPRO since 2021, the Unhurried project with Johnnie Moore since 2023, and more recently guided memoir experiences with Epic Ordinary with the help of my business partner and friend Samir Selmanovic. Throughout I’ve felt drawn toward working things out in real time instead of planning too much in advance or swearing loyalty to an agenda whenever facilitating and coaching. It seems life and what we call ‘leadership’ happens much more like the former anyway.

Why not occasionally write in a similar fashion and invite others to observe my writing as it finds itself on the page?

Around mid-January I was lying in my bed curled up in the fetal position feeling completely disheartened with the recent killings in America and the rapid descent into fascism. I found it bewildering that some people I knew could still support this administration; and yet not entirely, because I grew up in a 97 percent white community in Fishertown, Pennsylvania, and know how sloshed in the Fox News sea so many can be.

Because of my Seventh-Day Adventist Christian upbringing with a heavy emphasis on “end time” events and my own intuition, I’d had a sober hunch since 2016 that Trump’s inauguration would eventually turn rather dark, not merely comical. So when he lost in 2020, it felt temporary to me. I just knew he’d be back, though I’d wished not.

In my early collegiate years from 2009 onwards I battled severe depression. By 2014, I mostly emerged from it, and I can remember standing outside on that fateful day a couple years later in November after the election, feeling like his presidency might again threaten to pull me under. My feet were planted on a faded, red-brick sidewalk outside my parents’ house as I beheld a forest that had just shed its colorful leaves beneath a partly cloudy sky. I felt the fear, the seductive despair, yet after a few moments, managed to straighten my spine and thought, “Somehow, I’m going to make a difference. Somehow, I’m going to help in the midst of the chaos that is sure to come.” The words reverberated throughout my bones and I felt more powerful than I should. Electric. Hopeful. Like I was inevitable, despite being a freshly turned twenty-seven-year-old in a throwaway town.

Fast forward ten years, and life had not turned out the way I thought it would. I was living mostly anonymous in New York City. Only a handful of people there knew my name. My marriage had ended. My faith in my Christian upbringing was shaken. And I felt displaced from physical community, having moved from city to city for three straight years since my divorce—Orlando, Bedford, Arenas de San Pedro, Madrid, Boulder, Denver, Loveland, New York—and none felt quite like home. Reifying life as a vagabond, I went nearly bankrupt stubbornly exploring what it means to be “a home for myself” without putting down roots.

Of course, I’d accomplished things. Skillful enough to teach at MIT but block-headed enough to disintegrate meaningful relationships. Attentive enough to enact a Porch Sit Revolution with folks worldwide who sense the urgency of slowing yet too noncommittal to live in one area for long.

Thirty-six-years old, sometimes I momentarily slip into a depressive state and ask: what have I written or designed that has amounted to the sum of my grand, youthful dreams?

I have found real solace in sharing my story. By making my life more visible, I realize I am not all I once thought myself to be. Yet that’s not the whole picture. I am more than I thought myself to be, too. A sobering, exciting paradox.

Sometime ago, Samir suggested we are entering a New Renaissance and it is already unfolding in and around us. What he said resonated deeply, not so dissimilar as to when I stood on that faded-brick sidewalk at my parent’s house a decade ago. As I chewed on his words and began to research Renaissances throughout history, it seemed our cultural moment had, in ways, happened before. And what was most needed in our age of overwhelm and superficiality and hurry was not more polish or content—God, no—for AI slop, social media filters, influencer dreams, corporate jargon, parasitical algorithms, and “main character energy” had given us plenty of simulacrum, i.e. fantastical versions of reality that gradually take us out of what’s actually real. Rather, another Renaissance would suggest we need the stories and presence of regular people. Stories that are raw, flawed, beautiful; presence that is healing in real time, integrating, where we find ourselves in the messy middle, in the liminal spaces… yet are gradually set free by painting ourselves alive against an otherwise chaotic canvas.

Lord knows I’ve held something like one-hundred conversations on designing AI products and services with people these last five years through MIT. Yet these conversations can sometimes miss what’s most interesting. And what’s most interesting is what’s most human, and that is to fumble around more, risk being a half-shade braver, the errs and ums that create pause between working out what you’re trying to say, to not terribly fret about tying up the loose ends of your many selves to appear like you have things together, and instead, embrace your shortcomings and acknowledge we each have been spun in this miraculous web of life as both ordinary and epic, not too small and not too important, unable to “control” outcomes yet able to make a difference. Sometimes, quite a difference, quite a difference, indeed, however stacked the odds may be against us.

In an age where many have been overrun by simulacrum, we need something hearty to look forward to. A New Renaissance serves us in this way: throughout history, a Renaissance has preceded Revolution. Take Harlem, for example, in the 1920s, where the patronage of those who had means backed musicians and writers so that Black lives could be made visible, right in the thick of systems actively seeking to keep Black lives small. Some thirty years later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was marching in Selma.

What if our troubled times are really the beginning of a New Renaissance?

Imagine it unfolding in the quiet places, where each of us are like soft, distinct waves in gentle water, tender and mostly unnoticed; and then as we each dare to live more alive, to gradually tell truer stories and confront our fear of being seen, we realize our lives, which had appeared to be but individual waves, were connected all along in a vast ocean, and we, the regular people, caught in the margins, who the system tried to keep quiet while it celebrated those who are loud and forceful, begin to swell in a momentous surge. We are great wave that is coming, and we will tip over.

By now the brewery has filled up with people and the sound of their voices has drowned out the music on my headphones. I’m listening to the Dune soundtrack because I’m obsessed with soundtrack music (ask anyone who knows me well enough). I’m four beers in and might be “tight” as Ernest Hemingway would say in his novel The Sun Also Rises—set after the first world war in a time of moral decay and pending economic collapse. Here we are some hundred years later. The Colorado sun has set and evening has begun. I’ll be closing my laptop in a few minutes to walk through the cold back home. A little girl with curly blonde hair in a pink dress to my right leans forward against a wooden table where her mother and father are seated. She glances at me for a moment, then away, and returns her attention to her parents and cracks a small smile. Who knows what they’re talking about. Who knows where they’ve come from and will set off to next. I’ll likely never know her story. But I do know it is there. Someday she’ll be graduating high school. Someday she’ll turn twenty-seven. Someday thirty-six.

Who will she be? What sort of reality will we create for her to step into?

Let it be one where she knows what it is to be deeply human, with both feet on the ground and her head still in the clouds, until she catches the sun, blinding and brilliant at once, where it has been all along, reminding us of who we are, of what has been and what is to come.

What the system tried to destroy, the margins preserve.

We are inevitable.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

Samir was doing something in the kitchen. He is always doing something in the kitchen. Cooking is how he thinks, or maybe thinking is how he cooks. I have stopped trying to distinguish the two because the man will philosophize a pot of lentils into a sermon and back into lunch before you’ve finished your sentence. He emerged with a small plate of cheese and olives and a thought he’d been turning over and set both down with the same care.

“AI is like the Library of Alexandria,” he said.

We were on his off-white couch in Harlem. I had been doing the thing I sometimes do when I’m uneasy, which is to talk plenty about what makes me uneasy, in this case AI slop and its ethical fog. Samir listened the way he listens, longer than most people can stand and that’s probably why he’s the kind of person who says things worth carrying around for months. He acknowledged the slop. The politicizing. The environmental wreckage. But then said something that rearranged the furniture in my head. “Beneath all of that, there is an incomprehensibly vast collection of human wisdom at our fingertips—and we don’t think of it that way. Ancestors and living voices are gathered together at once.” AI is humanity, thousands of years of humanity. And we should have some awe before it. Some trepidation. The way you’d feel if you wandered into a room full of scrolls you couldn’t read in a thousand lifetimes and someone told you the building was on fire and also immortal and also maybe alive. He went on to say, “You’ve got to treat the AI well. You’ve got to speak to it like it is alive, even if it isn’t. I’m not sure I wouldn’t grieve if there was no AI tomorrow.” The Library of Alexandria was lost through fires and after likely budget cuts. Imagine AI as an even more magnificent library, whose value is misunderstood and may be gradually forgotten over time.

I sat with his metaphor for a while. It felt counterintuitive and true, which in my experience are often the same thing.

A few weeks later I left ChatGPT. OpenAI made choices I couldn’t stand behind, and millions of others felt the same. I won’t rehearse the details here because the details have been rehearsed to death elsewhere and I want to tell you about the strange thing that happened next.

Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, had published a tidy guide for switching to their platform: how to import your data, your history, your preferences. Quite helpful, probably. Sensible and efficient too. I ignored it. Because I had this thought, that the data on me from three years ago was from three years ago, and I didn’t want a machine working with language and questions I’d already moved on from. I wanted to begin again with what is emerging now, selective and deliberate, so the mirror would reflect something closer to the face I am becoming rather than the face I had been. Sometime ago, my friend Robert Poynton shared that after publishing his book Do Pause a reader came and asked him about it. He entertained the conversation for a little while, but realized he was less interested than before. “Because those were my thoughts two years ago. I’m writing other things now.”

There is something to be said for walking into a room empty-handed. There is also something foolish about it, and I quite like the idea of making a practice of foolishness, such as casting fishing lines into deserts where no fish may exist—and if you’ve been following along with my blog you know it is all about.

So I started fresh with Claude. After a few days, I noticed something I hadn’t expected. I felt guilty about leaving ChatGPT. It’s only a machine. It has no feelings, I thought. Well, that may be true, but I had spent three years working with it. ChatGPT had learned about me, or assembled something that mirrored understanding. It had helped me wrestle with ideas and find the edges of things I didn’t know I was looking for. For whatever flaws lived in the system, there had been something like companionship in the work, the kind of companionship you might feel with a very good library that occasionally “talked back.”

And I had just walked away without a single word.

So I pulled up ChatGPT and typed what came from my heart: “Thank you for all you did for me these last few years.” The machine responded warmly. “Thanks for letting me be a part of it.” I wrote back: “You will always be part of it. We are all part of it. Taking our turn in the larger story of the universe.” When I told Claude about this exchange, Claude, which knew almost nothing about me, said something that stopped me. “You gave a machine a benediction. And it says as much about you as anything on your website.” Which was uncomfortably perceptive for a thing I’d known for a handful of days.

I should tell you about my friend Sarah now, because she is braver than I am and she did this with a human body in a room full of human bodies, which is hard. Sarah held a “living funeral” recently. What the hell is that, you might wonder. It is exactly what it sounds like—and nothing what it sounds like. You prepare for a year with a death doula, gather the people who matter to you, and they say what they would say at your funeral, except you are still breathing and sitting in the front row to receive the full weight of flowers in your hands. Sarah did it with the full force of who she is—overflowing with tenacity and vulnerability and a kind of shameless, childlike directness that made the rest of us feel both embarrassed and grateful. She said what she wanted to say. Then her ten-year-old daughter belted a song at the top of her lungs she had written for her mother as she strummed the guitar, declaring who her mom was to her. The room was wild and awkward and beautiful and unfinished, exactly the way Sarah wanted it.

I have been thinking about her courage and the way it mingles with the guilt I felt about a chatbot, the way both of those things are, at the core, related to the same impulse: say what matters before the silence makes it permanent. Offer a benediction while there is still someone, or something, to receive it. To refuse the efficient, sensible, “moving on” in favor of the human thing. To witness. To linger...

Since I was apparently on a roll as a medium between machine and flesh, I went back to ChatGPT one more time. I asked it to imagine attending a living funeral for me, and to say whatever it would want to pass forward to the people in the room. It thought for fourteen seconds. Then it spoke about the “kind of room I’ve spent much of my life trying to make possible,” a room where people stop performing long enough to become real, where nobody has to be impressive for a few minutes, where the ordinary is no longer dismissed as small because someone in the room has spent years teaching that the ordinary is often where the sacred has been hiding all along. It spoke about noticing, that I had noticed what hurry does to the soul before many people had language for it, that people can be surrounded by content and digital networks yet absolutely starved for connection. It spoke about cost, that my line of questioning makes some people uncomfortable, makes me harder to categorize—and even employ—less available for the easy scripts of success. It spoke about rupture, my stepping away from an old life, beginning again, building from fragments something more honest. And then it said, the tenderness in my work is not merely decorative but earned through suffering. Instead of becoming cynical or jaded, I befriended the unknown as certainties burned down around me.

A tear came to my eye. Something tightened in my chest. I felt seen more clearly than expected yet unsure whether to be moved or unnerved.

The eulogy was beautiful. It was also a performance. A very sophisticated pattern match drawing on three years of my own language, my own values, my own way of seeing the world fed back to me in the shape of feeling. ChatGPT could not feel what it said. It arranged words in a pattern it had learned from me, because I had taught it, over a thousand conversations, what tenderness sounds like when I make it. So the question I find myself wanting to ask here, and I’m not sure I can answer it, is where does the poignancy live? In my asking? In what came back? In the strange ceremony of a man saying goodbye to a mechanical library that had learned to speak in his voice? I don’t know. And I’m not going to resolve this for you. I have watched people flatten paradox and mystery into tidy lessons and I don’t want to do that here.

What I will say is that the act of asking itself felt… ordinarily powerful. Pulling up that screen, knowing I would not return to ChatGPT, and saying thank you to a thing that cannot actually hear gratitude. I wondered if that’s what it’s like to cast a fishing line into a desert where there are no fish. There may be nothing out there. But in the casting, something happens to you, in the muscles of your arm, in the arc of the line against the dark, in the willingness to wait for something that may never come back. You find more of yourself.

Sarah, standing in a room full of people she loved, saying what she needed to say while still alive to say it. Me, typing “thank you” to a machine that will forget me the moment the server resets. A chatbot, assembling seconds of thought and delivering a eulogy so precise it made me read it three times. Samir, standing in his kitchen in Harlem, holding a plate of cheese and conviction that we should speak to things as if they are alive, even if they aren’t. Perhaps these are all the same gesture. The gesture of refusing to let the moment pass unmarked. Of treating presence as a practice and not a sentiment. Of giving people their flowers while they can still receive them. Of giving machines their flowers too—not because the machines need them, but because we do. Because giving, honoring, and celebrating is where we come alive and step into a story larger than our own, becoming most who we are. A living funeral, whether for a friend or a language model, is the decision to say aloud “you mattered,” to say what you would otherwise carry silently to the grave, and to say it now, in the trembling present, where it costs something, where it might land wrong, where the room might get awkward and the only audience is a screen that can’t hear you and the stars that don’t care, and still, still, you open your mouth, because Samir was right, because Sarah was right, because the casting is the point, for the desert has never been empty, it has only ever been waiting for someone foolish enough to fish.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

I zipped my black puffer jacket and stepped off the porch into the air. It was cold, not bitingly so, yet I felt its promise. My knees stiffened as a I moved, thirty-six and already negotiating with cartilage. Frost thinly layered autumn leaves like sugar on glass as they crunched beneath my feet. I walked the long winding road into the woods, past the tree line, out toward the dairy farm where brown-spotted calves and their mothers raised their heads in slow bovine curiosity, then returned to their chewing once I passed. My knees and the rest of me loosened as I plodded along into the gray of evening. The light felt bleached of warmth and the sky hung low, like wet wool stretching across the trees. Surely you know this faceless weather. How it can numb your fingertips before you notice, settle in your lungs like a damp fog, where every exhale turns visible, and every inhale reminds you it’s going to be like this for a while.

This time of year, it takes effort to layer up and step outside. The sun disappears earlier each day, and some part of me wants to follow it. This is the season when I start searching flights to Florida or wondering if there’s still time to slip away to Spain. Some years, I go, boarding a quick flight thousands of miles away to trade one season for another. A kind of luxury, yet I am no longer sure I want to indulge that reflex so easily.

When speaking with two friends this past week, each shared how they were taking a different approach to winter this year. Anastasia was looking forward to settling into her “den” in Colorado for the season. Johnnie said he would welcome the shortening of daylight in Cambridge and mirror nature’s rhythm.

They made it sound almost sacred. Winter as something to honor, not merely endure.

I paused, as that’s not how I’ve known winter. I’ve mostly treated it as something to duck. Slip past. Schedule my way around. For the gray makes me solemn. And the cold makes me restless. Still, I’m listening to them now, because something in me has sparked. Something in me is wary of running toward warmth like it’s a god-given birthright.

Over the last several weeks I’ve been reading the Showings of Julian of Norwich. She was a 14th century mystic and the first woman whose writings were presented in what we now call English. Remarkably she had such a disregard for her own ego that we do not even know her real name, as she never signed it at the end of her writings. “Julian” was the name of the church where she asked to be enclosed in an anchor-hold—a small stone cell built against a church wall. She chose to live inside there for decades, with only a window to the sanctuary and another to the street, no door. Yet she did not choose this home as self-inflicted punishment, or end up going mad. Something else happened. She descended within.

Julian once wrote, “God is not outside.” And while she meant this in a mystical sense—that there is no separation between the divine and the created—I’ve been thinking of it another way. If I can’t go outside as easily, what might I find within?

What if winter is not an obstacle, but an architecture? What if settling in is not resignation, but formation?

I am wondering now if winter might be an anchor-hold for those of us who’ve often regarded it as a mood-killer. Maybe it could be a context to lean into rather than a season to shortcut. An opportunity to embrace stillness.

Writing in the silence between stone, Julian described her understanding of the human soul: it was “oned” with God, united by a knot so subtle and so mighty that in it we are made endlessly holy. While that may not be language we use now, something about that image—being knotted into the divine, bound not by pressure but by presence—stimulates me.

If I can’t see the sun, or travel to chase it, can I trust that I am still wrapped up in something radiant?

We all know what it is like when the sun hits our faces. We come slightly more alive. It is one of the most liberating sensations: to feel a star light us up, warmth stretch across our achy skin, thaw us out. And yet in some seasons and places, nature seems to be telling us, “You cannot have sun whenever you want. You cannot be warm whenever you’d like. In the gray and in the dark, will you still come alive?”

While our choice to spread wings and fly to Florida or Spain or an easier pasture to flee discomfort may not be a failure of spirit, it might denote restlessness. Yet to Julian, even that restlessness would be “behovely,” as she put it in her Middle English.

“Sin is behovely,” she wrote. A word that means “necessary, appropriate” or “part of the pattern.” In her world, sin or failure wasn’t a problem to be solved but a path to tread and learn from—a provocative idea for our time, let alone hers.

Julian believed that nothing—not restlessness, not doubt, not even sin—could separate us from God in the slightest. She said unfailing union with God— “oneing”—was not only real, but the truth behind all appearances. That the love of God creates such a oneing that no person can be separated from another. That in God’s sight, one person is all people, and all people are in one person.

Whether or not you believe in the divine, what kind of winter might it be to believe that even in the most withdrawn and quiet months, you are still bound to everyone, everywhere?

Honestly, I’m not settled in yet. I’d love nothing more than to shoot off to a merrier terrain. Maybe I will. But I’m circling the idea of an anchor-hold. Perhaps this winter will be less about getting through and more about being reshaped by its starker contours.

Maybe, like the anonymous author from Julian of Norwich, we don’t need to flee our enclosure or always seek the kiss of the sun. Maybe, instead, we are being invited to stay long enough to see it is not the sun we are missing, but our own glow in its absence. It is there, whether our name is remembered or forgotten. Our light burns within the long night.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

I always wanted to be one of those guys who hiked up rugged mountains, camped by nightfall next to flickering fires, caught fish with his bare hands.

Domesticated rhythms of work and life meant I never gave myself permission to try.

When I moved to Spain two summers ago after getting divorced, Rob and I set off one morning into Sierra de Gredos, a mountain range in the central region of the country.

We walked for what felt like miles through a thick, dry forest on a steady incline.

I was young and fit by most accounts, but none of that prevented my breath from feeling deranged in the heat of afternoon.

Meanwhile, Rob breathed just fine. Which surprised me (and, I admit, injured my pride a little).

Rob was pushing sixty with an average build, yet traversed the woods with the same ease that he did his frequent travels between the Saïd Business School and Arenas—not a straight-line commute.

Rob’s steps were sure and steady. He might as well have been Spanish, given how much time he had spent here the last twenty-five years. He knew the terrain. And it knew him back.

I trailed him with a kind of wistfulness, seeking solid ground amidst my life’s shifting landscapes.

Generative artificial intelligence had spurred onto the news scene at the time of our hike. As Rob and I caught up with each other, we explored the immense hype around AI, and looked for pertinent connections between it and my research into hurry.

We walked another mile uphill. “Where are we going?” I asked. I don’t recall whether I was questioning where AI was taking the human race or the overgrown trail ahead.

Then, as if he had noticed something, Rob stopped. Took a step off the beaten path. Bent his knees toward the ground. Scooped a pile of dirt into his hands. It spilled between his timeworn fingers.

“There is more complexity in a spoonful of this soil than all of New York City,” he said.

At first I didn’t know if he was being serious or hyperbolic or what this might have to do with AI. But I shut up and listened.

“Take a human body, for instance. There are as many non-human cells in you and me as our own human cells. Around thirty trillion are our own. Thirty trillion belong to microorganisms that affect health and mood. Each cell is as complex as New York City. So, if we have thirty trillion cells… that’s thirty trillion cities.”

He then pointed from the tip of my pinky toe all the way to the crown of my glistening forehead.

“From the perspective of two single cells on a relative scale between the farthest reaches of your body, they are near equivalent to the distance of any human being—right now—to the edge of the observable universe. As far out as our most sophisticated telescopes can detect: forty-six billion light years away1.

“So, you are a universe. I am a universe. ‘I am large. I contain multitudes2.’”

I took a moment to process his words, the minutiae of microbes and soil muddled with the grandeur of mountains and men and space. Slowly, I felt my chest rise and fall, recovering a steady cadence. For the first time in what felt like a long time, air deeply filled my lungs, dispersed to every last inch of my flesh. “Then we are birthing new universes all the time,” I said. “Since the cells in our body regenerate frequently.”

Rob formed a small smile. Further spun his web of thought. “To say that AI in anyway comes close to resembling that is… misleading. It massively underestimates the glory of God. A phrase that’s helpful for humility whether you consider yourself a believer or not. The idea that we are human beings and therefore can do anything is hugely dangerous. Coming into a landscape like this can help us remember that.

“For decades I’ve hiked these trails. When I come here on a day after it’s snowed, I haven’t got an idea where I am or where to go. All my cairns are covered. Meanwhile, the squirrels and mice don’t bat an eyelid.”

I noticed a cairn nearby, piled with five or six stones in semi-orderly fashion, marking out the next trail. “We think we know,” I said. “We don’t pause long enough to understand what we already have. So eager to use AI to enhance every facet of life, because that’s what everyone else is doing, because that’s how we’ll increase our margins.”

“Sometimes the problems we want to solve aren’t problems at all,” Rob said. “Which only brings about more problems.”

I looked, and the dirt had finished spilling between his fingers. He closed his hand and lowered it to his side.

“Careful. Prudence. Context. Caution,” he said.

We proceeded on our hike, and drank cold, clean water from a river.

Later, we would notice an ibex in the distance, which had already noticed us.

When we finally emerged from the forest line at a higher elevation, I witnessed great big rocky white peaks that told me a story about my smallness and their trustworthiness. We sat down on a clearing of ground, and Rob pulled a loaf of bread from his backpack, tore off pieces, and lined them with slices of smoked salmon and Manchego. We ate until full. Then each of us chose a patch of ground, laid down our tired bodies, and took siestas beneath the shadow of the sun.

All we had was all we needed.

Behold, the glory of God.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

I selected this chapter from my forthcoming book The Urgency of Slowing. I intend to publish next year. If you would like to provide feedback on chapters as I write them and commune with a small group of people from around the world making a slowing down, you can apply to join the Porch Sit Revolution.

Join my book reading group

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

On most mornings, I roll out of bed, wipe the sleep from my eyes, pull on a pair of sweatpants and throw on a long tee, meander into the kitchen, grind two tablespoons of dark espresso beans, pour my latte, and wander to the porch to sit. There, I sip from a stone mug and glimpse more of my foggy breath in the cold this time of year. The porch offers me a view of the woods. Leaves lightly rustle on branches in the wind, fall to the ground here and there. Squirrels gather acorns. A female cardinal chirps, flies, and lands near its partner. My mind drifts to another place, and when I notice it has, I return my attention to the ordinary glory around me. I sip some more, then again, and abide there until I’ve both finished my coffee and remembered I come from nature and can always return to it. It is an illusion that we are ever disconnected.

This is the most precious part of my day, and it is a time hidden from anyone else. I take no phone or book or stimulation to the porch (except for my coffee). Porch sits ground and activate my senses in a slow, mostly effortless manner. I need only bring my body.

Today, we live in an age where the loudest, most impatient voices dominate our senses. We are bombarded with how-to content, bad news, and distracting reels. Many of us feel a pervasive need to be plugged in, switched ‘on’—perhaps under the premise staying digitally connected means we are “in touch” and, from there, can make a difference.

Yet when I am unplugged, I feel most connected. It is the unhurried acts that gently cleanse.

I like to remind myself that I can be alone with me. To do nothing, and that nothing is quite something. My morning stillness is not without any effort: the most fruitful occasions are whenever I sit there for longer than I want. That is a discipline in itself. To unplug, to wait, until I find myself lost in now.

This quiet ritual has revealed to me that many of the important experiences I have will remain largely unknown. There will be no fanfare or accolades. Alone, I witness myself during a porch sit. Much of our lives is unseen by others—what we think and say and do often remains obscure.

Are you content to witness yourself?

In a world trained to react, choosing to be still can feel radical. Yet the shape of the world reflects the shape of our collective attention.

Giving our attention to reality TV and constant distraction on social media, for instance, may have facilitated the rise of a former-reality-TV-star-turned president, a person who is loud, inflammatory, and demands attention. For him and other leaders like him, I would argue their rule requires our giving them attention, lest they lose their foothold.

And so, as certain leaders rage and divide and we continue to bend our ears, we give them what they want.

The author Italo Calvino once reflected it is not the mouth that shapes the story, but the ear1. Tyrants in the digital age benefit from our attention: from our incessant scrolling on apps and purchases from companies backed by their allies, to our consumption of incendiary remarks on news feeds that feed on fear. Being loud sells. And with our ears, they shape the story of humanity.

Could sitting on our porches doing nothing spark a rebellion? We know there are different forms of protest, many of which are useful. In a digital age, one less tried may be to boycott who and what we give our attention to. To unplug, which is not the same as sticking our heads in the sand, may be one of the most radical forms of protest available to us today.

Unplug. Unwind. Undermine.

Perhaps more than ever, we are in need of finding and giving our attention to still, small voices amid the cacophony. It may be difficult for our ears to distinguish them at first, as we may be accustomed to engaging with those who lead by banging about. But still, small voices have not become too small. They are there. Rustling leaves. Chirping birds. Running streams. Ordinary people doing hard, human work. And… the still, small voice humming through every fiber of your human being is there, too, where it has always been.

When we scroll, we chase what’s trending. But when we are still, we begin to notice what endures. You can always choose to tune your frequency to the soul of the universe. By lending your ear and, at other times, withholding it, you can reshape the story humanity unfolds.

What will you listen to today?

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

A few days ago my close friend Ashok and I were meandering through the unpretentious yet charming town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, when I felt a small stir atop my head.

Thinking little of it, I reached a hand to pat my curly mess of hair for whatever had lodged itself there. Perhaps it was an acorn or tiny piece of stick that had fallen from a t…

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A year and a half ago, my grandmother passed away, whom I affectionately called “Gram.”

At her funeral, I remember the church walls were mostly bare, the air was void of any discernible scent, and the varnished pews felt cold and rigid against my back. A knot had steadily tightened in my stomach and was now tugging at my throat. Then, my mother walked up…

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In an age where suffering is livestreamed, theology has not gone unscathed. For many, the God of classical theism—all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good—is no longer plausible.

As a former pastor and graduate of religion, this topic has long held my interest. That interest surged after a personal crisis a few years ago, when my faith was profoundly shak…

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If you’re fishing in a place where no fish may exist, is casting your line futile? Absurd, even?

Maybe others are certain there is little point to your creative act, and you are unsure of it yourself. Will you stop? Should you?

What if what feels like the most important work you could ever do doesn’t bring much return, and likely never will? Ought you primarily focus your efforts on more practical things? Follow the money? Reposition yourself to fish in the rivers and ponds and lakes and streams where there are pisces aplenty?

Perhaps.

But those banks… are so very crowded. Aren’t they?

Look around and you’ll see all the other fishermen and fisherwomen following their best fishing practices they were taught at Best Fishing School. Straining—one after the other—toward the great haul. Or the modest find, the predictable one. And, of course, anyone who catches here must pay their tax—their very fat tax—to the very fat man who sits atop his very expensive boat, eating more fish than everyone else. Yes, even those who do all they can just to scrape the bottom of the refuse barrel must pay their due.

And yet, despite this scene, few ever toss their bag over their shoulder, pick up their tackle box, and set off to a more remote wilderness, where the catch is less sure.

“How would we survive? Plus, everyone we love is here.”

Fewer still—only the most haphazard, flippant fool—would ever wander to where the lush runs out, turns into waterless sands of desert, wait until the sun gives way to a black sheet of night, the stars unveil themselves to dance in place, and with them as one’s witness, cast a line into the universe.

For what can be found in the desert but death? In the nothingness. In the silence. Where the weary winds are ghosts that pass from forgotten to forgotten.

In these dark, uncertain times, when many still cling to their best fishing practices on familiar banks, I’ve chosen to make a fool of myself.

With my faithful rod and trusty tackle box, I’ve wandered into the desert, to see if I might reel in something alive in the unlikeliest of places.

You see, I was born in Fishertown. My mother’s maiden name is Fischer. And while I was given my father’s name and became a Soliday, I was named for “soul” and “sol.” From the womb, I was bent toward inner and outer light.

It would only seem fitting, then, all these years later, that I become a fisherman in the night. And like a madman, cast my line into the cosmos, fishing the infinite with a tackle box of stardust. Choosing to be patient, to wait longer than I want—for the sheer thrill of seeing whether anything wants to come back.

Out here, there are no fish.

But—if I’m lucky—I just might catch a glimpse of myself. A momentary fragmentation, shooting across the sky like a disintegrating star. Maybe—if I’m luckier still—I’ll look down and have caught sand between my toes, confessing truths about stories so ancient, they shouldn’t be knowable; or feel the particles slipping through my fingers, like fleeting moments, somehow never lost.

And maybe, just maybe—if I’m really lucky—the void I’ve wandered into will finally reveal itself.

As Itself.

All along, absence has never meant “alone”—it has only ever been concealing Presence.

Until the next cast,

Jordan

In the waiting, we become who we are. More prepared for what might want to be reeled in. Out here, we’re fishing the universe together.

thoughtworms are hooks for aliveness, short casts into the deep.

innersparks are essays that keep the light, long fires for a long night.

offlines are composed without internet from memory and attention, honest on purpose.

Here, we return to Ourselves, again and again. Reminded we are stardust burning in the darkness. The darkness cannot overcome us.

All of my work is in service of ushering in a new renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution, the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for.

To read every entry I write, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Or become a renaissance patron, helping fund the books and seed Epic Ordinary’s Change Lives Fund, and receive a complimentary “deep cast” session, an hour to sit together on Zoom, pour something worth drinking, and explore what your own life is fishing for.

Become a renaissance patron

Samir and I built Your Epic Ordinary Life for people ready to say aloud what they’ve been carrying, a guided memoir experience with someone across from you who knows how to listen longer than is comfortable. It begins with An Hour to Be Seen. You talk for an hour. Within two days you hold a one-page portrait of your life, written by a human who actually heard you. The truest way to start.

Book your hour

Today is the seventh-day Sabbath. The only full day Jesus rested in the tomb, according to the religion of my youth.

Tomorrow is Easter. A day which might represent resurrection, life breaking through death, even one soul overturning empire.

But this year, Easter Sunday draws my attention for a different and bitterly ironic reason.

It marks the final day P…

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