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.
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.
Thanks for sharing this, Jordan Soliday. A truly poetic and poignant piece that brought me into that brewery with you and then took me on a curious journey. 🙏