“To truly see one’s self is a greater miracle than raising the dead.”

― St Isaac of Syria

When I first decided to dabble in backcountry hiking, for my first trip I thought it would be a good idea to drive three hours north to Algonquin Provincial Park and head into the woods alone for five nights to hike the distance of roughly two marathons with no cell phone. I remember the first two nights, laying awake in my tent, staring up into the swirling darkness, pretty sure my eyes were wide open but seeing as much as if they were shut. I remember the agitation of the night; the frenzied, almost orgiastic buzz of blackflies attacking the outside of the tent, the violent gusts of wind rushing through the pine trees, the chorus of toads croaking, the loon calls echoing off the lake. The vacant, indifferent quality of the wilderness, somehow hostile, as if the dark had teeth. I remember how sore and exhausted my body was after hiking eight hours up and down hills with thirty pounds strapped to my back, how badly my feet hurt (borrowed hiking boots, lost a few toenails in the end). But, more than anything else, I remember how intensely and impossibly lonely I felt, how stupid and stubborn and selfish I was for insisting on going alone, how badly I wish I had brought someone along. I wanted this trip to be a kind of crucible, some spiritual quest. But instead, I was lonely to the point of physical pain and terribly unhappy.

I didn’t learn anything about myself from this solo trip except that I was no good alone. I was not a world unto myself and didn’t want to be. And my default certainty that the presence of other people was some sort of infectious disease to my personal development was perhaps totally false and a little deluded.

For most of my early twenties, I assumed that to know myself better I had to pay closer attention to myself. I had to turn inwards, look inside. This resulted in a lot of time spent journaling, meditating, indulging in introspection, and even some more intense stuff like psychedelics. I thought if I only had enough time to myself, if I only found the right set of habits and routines, did that seven-day silent meditation retreat or backpacked through Thailand, I would finally figure myself out, unknot my stomach, sort out my busy head.

Reason and good sense are wholly supportive of this line of thinking. It seems logical and obvious that if we want to see ourselves, that’s where we have to look: the self. And if we put ourselves first, that should be good for us, make us feel better. If we can only prioritize ourselves consistently, even ruthlessly when called for, we will finally arrive at some sensation of calm completeness. We will finally be happy. And the reason we are unhappy, it follows, is that the world simply wants too much from us. People just won’t leave us alone.

But instead of my inner searching, really my inner staring, leading to any kind of clarity or deliverance or peace, I only became more stuck in the muck and mire of my head, spinning my wheels but going nowhere, anxious and afraid as I felt the best years of my life wasting away in a kind of disoriented, stomach-level lostness. That’s the thing. If you gaze into the abyss of self, the abyss will begin to gaze back1. Even when I wasn’t in a pit, I often just felt ambiently bad, a little nauseous, like something terrible could happen at any moment. I think there is a quiet guilt that accretes, some inner knowing that we are fundamentally not meant to live for ourselves. Some innate hunger to give ourselves away, give ourselves to something entirely, utterly, unabashedly, that gets agitated left unsatisfied. The more we hoard the self, retreat into the caves of our mind, like a dragon guarding some treasure, the more guilty and bad we feel, left only with a vague consciousness of the futility of living.

This kind of defensive posture also put a strain on the relationships in my life, relationships I would all too easily view as annoyances, problems to be solved, people to be placated until they needed something from me again. Every interruption an almost personal attack, a deliberate affront against my efforts to live a good and calm and productive life. I was around other people and had what you would call friends but, despite their physical proximity, everyone else seemed very far away. On a psychoskeletal level, I was marooned in my own skull.

Humans, despite our differences, are basically identical in our hardwiring. Part of this hardwiring seems to be a default assumption that we alone are the absolute centre of existence. If this default assumption sounds like self-centredness or blatant pride (and sets your mind on all the proud and self-centred people you know who should be reading this and not you), you’d be right—but only partly. The real truth of the matter is something elusive and much more complex; a state of seeing that is so automatic and instinctive, it’s invisible. Every human alive sees this way: through the lens of self. Everything is evaluated by how it affects me, what it means for my life, whether it makes me feel good or feel bad.

It’s hardly a conscious choice. But think about it: everything you experience, everything you’ve ever experienced, appears before your two giant floating eyeballs fixed in your big overdeveloped head, coming and going, entering and exiting, as if all the world’s a stage. (A friend in university who played more than a little too much Call of Duty used to refer to other people as NPCs, or non-playable characters, which would crack me up, but really, he’s not far off). Your life is witnessed by you and you alone, filtered through your memories from the past and your hopes for the future, frames that deeply and literally dictate what you see and what you are completely oblivious to. Consciousness is an intensely private, isolated, unshareable thing. There is so much inside of me that I just can’t express. My own emotions and worries and wants are so real and vivid and pressing and close, while the emotional realities of others often seem distant, opaque, easy to ignore—that is, if I even bother to consider them at all.

We are all trapped in the prisons of our perceptions, uniquely alone, a kind of skull-sized sovereign2.

I’m not saying people literally think this stuff, like they would mention it in conversation or even admit it to themselves. This kind of basic self-centredness is so uncomfortable to confront, it’s easiest to pretend it doesn’t exist. No one literally believes they are the centre of the universe or that the world revolves around them. No one thinks they worship themselves, or that self-worship is a good and positive thing. What we’re talking about here is this unconscious certainty, this default mode of operating, invisible as the air we breathe and equally easy to forget, that only what takes place within my own mind interests me and nothing outside of myself has any real significance. It’s got something to do with the assumption that everyone else is like me, or should be.

While it seems alluring in theory to be the most important and central thing, the reality of living as if you are absolute centre of experience is cold and miserable enough for people to spend their entire life seeking diversion, in smartphones and shopping and television and drugs and gambling and gossip and sex, recoiling from dullness or boredom, to forget the weight of that terrible truth. To deny they’re terribly, terribly lonely. Not yet dead but not quite alive; staring down the prospect of a life lived without ever having loved anything more than themselves; seeking out any available anesthetic against boredom or loneliness which increasingly feel like the same thing; pretending as if the Information Age was really about information. This way of seeing has much to recommend it, all kinds of pleasure and thrill, but also cements its victim inside an empty prison, entirely alone, entirely alienated, meaning and purpose feeling like a fable, a lie told to children.

I know this is vague and abstract, so let’s make it personal.

Every morning I wake up, I have to continually challenge the blind but certain assertion that I am the most vital person in human existence, the main character in a cosmic plot, and everything that happens, good or bad, is really all about me. I have to pull back the blanket certainty that I am deeply and literally at the center of being, something I can assume so automatically that it hardly seems like there is another way of seeing. It’s not hard to get lost in my head, imagining and planning and falling in love and getting ready for things that are going to happen and where I need to go next and what I might say and what sort of subtle but sincere impression that might make and how that will unfurl into some glorious, predestined future. But without making this centrifugal movement of self, which is not an act of intelligence but something else entirely, I am destined to go through my average adult day, impatient and offended and mildly annoyed at the inconveniences and interruptions and basic existence of others, who all seem like they’re just in my way. A part of me likes the idea of being important, no doubt. But that is the same part, call it pride or vanity or “the ego”, that doesn’t mind hurting people or lying or cheating to get what I want, believing I am smarter or different or fated or whatever. This part, not coincidentally, also makes my life lonely and hostile and terribly unfun.

The more time I spend fussing over myself, staring into the mirror of self, trying to fix myself in isolation, believing I can will my way to inner peace, the more unconsciously certain I become of my natural default setting that I am the most important and central person in existence, where other people are the problem and not me. In short, I become a slave to my head. And the more I make myself an object of attention, the more I become occupied, to the point of obsession, with all my problems and brokenness and impossible to untangle inner complexity, in a way that only makes it all thicker and worse.

In a strange way, when I began to attend to the external world, when I began to make the people in my life the main object of my attention rather than myself, I felt happier, somehow simpler. When I stopped monitoring my every thought or action and engaged with something fully in the real world—having a friend over for dinner to talk through his anxiety or building something useful out of wood or getting lost in the forest for a few days with my brother—the idea of self disappeared in the background which felt healthy and good. I became more useful to others. But also, people kept telling me I seemed more like myself.

I’m not talking about self-neglect or martyrdom, but a fundamental shift in the posture of my heart to be more concerned with something outside myself than with my own interiority and problems. I’m talking about a willingness to make the small, unsexy sacrifices, doing what would be all too easy to avoid and justify to myself that I’m too busy and bogged down and tired and important. It’s something like stepping out of the spotlight on a soul-marrow level. Because, in all honesty, I don’t want to be the object of attention. I am simply not that interesting or important a subject.

This basic idea has been codified in myths, proverbs, and parables since the beginning of time. It’s as old as Eden. We all instinctively agree with the idea that we are not meant to only live for ourselves. That life is found not in selfishness, but in love. That’s what a hero is: someone who sets aside their own wants and whims and wishes, someone who lays down their life for a friend. This is the idea that Tolstoy became obsessed with in his later work: “I know now that people only seem to live when they care only for themselves, and that it is by love for others that they really live.”

You find yourself by forgetting yourself. Or, more accurately, you realize there are more worthy things to find. You realize there are things more important than self-knowledge. In that threshold crossing, I believe, the true self is unmistakably glimpsed. Maybe that is a way to understand what He meant: “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”

Aristotle has a passage where he talks about how self-knowledge isn’t found in introspection. It’s not something located in your head. Knowing oneself is related to active perception, Aristotle says. Self-knowledge, the kind that leads to wisdom, is a result of being aware of how you act and react in the world and simply paying attention as if you didn’t fully understand yourself or what you are capable of. As if you are a mystery to yourself, an enigmatic thing, something unknowable and capable of surprise. It’s almost a kind of listening. An “Oh, so that’s what I’m like!” paying more attention to what you actually do than what you think about or dream of doing.

And, here is the kicker, nowhere do we have more contact with reality and are forced to confront ourselves and witness what we’re really like than in human relationship.

I know it sounds flowery and cliche and fake, but I really do believe that we see ourselves most clearly in the eyes of the Other. That we can only grow into the fullness of what life has for us under the shelter of their steady gaze, which both loves us fully as we are but also sketches the silhouette of what we can and must grow into, as the edges we thought were limits crumble and fold. We cannot become what we are meant to become alone.

It is the relationships in my life that make my days worth living. It is the love of others that keeps me from despair, that brings both the outpouring of everything good in me as well as the impetus to change, to be worthy of that love. It is friendship that has nurtured parts that I didn’t even know were in me, but are good and noble and kind. I’m not going to pretend like it’s easy, but there is something nourishing and redemptive to figuring out how to be in a room with other people, how to care for them, notice their emotional particulars, even grow fond of their flaws. In learning how to bear the psychic cost of being around other people, recognizing the existence of other human interests entirely aloof from my own yet just as real and legitimate, loneliness is transfigured and treated. There is something irreparably, inseparably human about it3.

The love we hoard rots our insides. But the more we pour out, the more we are filled. That is the fullest potential for what human relationship can be: a pattern of mutual self-giving, mutual emptying of self. That’s what marriage is, or should be. That’s why Juliet said to Romeo, “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.”

None of this is all that thrilling or complicated or intense. It’s nothing like taking ayahuasca in the Peruvian jungle or reading Nietzsche (then making sure everyone you ever talk to knows you read Nietzsche). It’s almost offensively simple, close in. But, I believe it’s where real life resides.

Mind you, this isn’t a truth you hear talked much about. Our culture won’t tell you to be less self-centered. The world of money and things hums along happily on greed and selfishness and craving and this inflated idea of self-significance. Nowadays, you see all this stuff about learning to love yourself and treat yourself and believe in yourself and prioritize “self-care”. (A narrative most fiercely and fervently fought for by spin studios and online therapists and luxury resorts, who all want to sell you something4.) The fact of the matter is, if you go about your day-to-day life in a strange but certain posture that you are the most important thing in existence and that your happiness is paramount, it is very easy to sell you stuff. It is very easy to control you with a kind of oppression that you come to love, mostly for its convenience5.

The way you embody an other-centred ethos is to actually and literally lay down your interests to serve others. To let yourself be interrupted. Even to honour the interruptions. (After all, what is love if not an interruption?) There is no other way around it. And not to be overly religious or propagandistic, but that truth sits at the centre of Christianity. The centre of the cross. That is what Christ embodied: the sacrifice of self for the Other. That is the goal of faith, to learn to live by love. As Augustine wrote, to translate cupiditas into caritas, self-centred love into other-centred love.

I don’t mean to suggest this is somehow easy or automatic. What’s hard is not just knowing this but keeping it upfront and conscious in my daily, busy, demanding life. Every day I get caught up in myself, in the maze of my head, tangled in the straitjacket of my thoughts, consumed by my concerns, as if all that is inside of me is ultimate reality. Every day I am called, invited rather, to the altar—to die to self. Some days, I don’t succeed. Some days, I don’t even feel like trying. But thank God I have good people in my life, people who love me, who remind me of this truth through their love, a love that confronts and counteracts the loneliness, even when I am undeserving of it. People who save me from myself.

By being in communion with others, in spirit and in truth, sometimes as simple as asking how your day was and really listening, or being vulnerable about how ashamed I am of my weakness and swallowing my upset pride, I am wrenched out of self. I lay down the spiraling loneliness, the dark tangled mass in my stomach, all my imagining and intellectualizing. The weight of aloneness is shrugged off like a heavy, ill-fitting winter coat. I relax into a naturalness and ease I cannot find when I am lost in abstract intellectual stuff or thinking about myself. Every time it is roughly equivalent to repeating the trauma of birth. Every time it works.

Even now, I still have too much time to myself. I hope and pray for a wife, for a family, for people to place even more demands on me, demands that pull me further outside myself. That call me to put my book down and my ideas aside, to sacrifice things I thought I could keep and be love-struck and exhausted in the best way possible. I’m not saying it will always be easy or fun or make me disneyland-happy. But I know, in a way I can’t explain, that is the way to life.

My backcountry hike in Algonquin could have gone much worse if I hadn’t met two other hikers when I was standing at a river crossing trying to find the trail, lost as anything, who knew the way forward and invited me to tag along. I spent the next two days hiking with them and had a great time. I look back on this now as mercy and allegory and a superb sense of humour.

Write you again when I can,

Writing has been terribly hard as of late. I was sick and busy at work and felt I couldn’t piece my head together. But I tried to be thoughtful and patient with this essay, giving it as much time as it needed to become something verging on great (by my standard—although reading Tolstoy certainly does not help my confidence here). What was cut is 5-6x longer than the final piece.

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He wanted writers from around the world to send in their best work to be scored by a hardcore judging process. The top 10 essays would be published in print. And with $10,000 for the winner, the world’s largest “open” essay prize.

I submitted a pretty popular essay I wrote in the Fall on how to be less extremely online, but with some major rewrites and restructuring.

To my surprise and mild horror, my essay came 1st.

The book is out now. This first edition is a limited release of 1,000 copies, and sales close on March 31st.

Buy the anthology

It’s a cool project with a big vision. A kind of analog renaissance, caring about quality instead of AI-slop, an example of how we can pull the internet out of the ether and back into physical, tangible, textured, real life. Despite the ease and accessibility of reading on a screen, there is something refined and delightful, almost visceral, about paper and ink.

The final essay is below.

I think it’s much better than the original. More focused and clear and (maybe) timeless.

If you’d like to read the full version in print, as well as the other 12 essays featured, you can get a copy of the anthology here. 100% of the royalties will go to the finalists, the judges, and next year’s prize pool.

“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.”

— David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

The other night, I got a flat tire on my bike, the fourth this year, and I had to take the city bus home in the dark. And as I stood on the bus, being rocked back and forth by potholes, an eerie and vacant silence destitute of any warm conversation or friendly chatter, I saw a girl across from me, Lebanese maybe, big bulky plastic headphones on, coat stuffed up to her ears, flicking through videos with an almost familiar ferocity—videos of tall white women with perfect makeup and poreless skin, tall white women in sparkling red dresses, tall white women on beaches in Greece or cafes in Italy. I saw a guy beside me with plastic headphones the size of arctic earmuffs, glossy and vacant eyes, watching Call of Duty gameplay, while scrolling through videos about Trump and missile strikes, while changing videos every few seconds, while trying to drink his coffee at the same time, raising his phone up like Simba to keep his glossy eyes glued, to not miss a moment. And I saw another guy on the bus, beside the hypothetically Lebanese girl, watching videos of a chef pulling pizzas out of a wood-fired oven—pizzas with genoa salami and sweet pepper and fennel, pizzas with prosciutto and arugula, pizzas with sausage and wild mushrooms, pizzas bewitched to a dark gold and glistening, while he pulled a second hard boiled egg out of a big crinkled Ziploc bag and began to peel it, without really looking, since he was watching his videos, fumbling his phone on his knees, surfing his phone across his knees, trying to hold the shell bits in one hand, but not really paying attention (since he was watching his videos), eggs shells cracking, egg shells splitting, falling all over floor. And I thought to myself, this must be a metaphor or something. I looked down the dark bus, lit up by a ghostly blue glow, and everyone was doing the same thing. Necks bent at forty-five degrees, postured to the palm of their hand, mesmerized by a little screen, constantly, mindlessly, compulsively reloading the feed, lost in a world that is entirely not their own.

And, feeling almost unbearably sad, I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the dark city bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.

We live in a culture of watchers and appearers—really, of watchers and approvers—a culture where it feels distinctively hard to be a real human being. It’s like some sort of strange Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as Big Brother, looking in at a fabricated and essentially false image of other people’s lives, an image that isn’t real, in any sense that we use the word “real,” as in factual and not imagined, but we, for some reason, fool ourselves that maybe it is. Instead of consolation, screens make us feel more anxious and more distant and more disconnected, as an apathy sets in that is increasingly abstract. Maybe David Foster Wallace was right, about this strange post-literate society we find ourselves in, where we’re lonely because we’re overconnected, and to cope, everyone is numbing out.

We’ve become inverted headless horsemen: big floating heads, drifting and disembodied, restless and searching. Looking for our bodies. Bodies that have been taken from us. Bodies we lost somewhere along the way in the big promises of convenience and what actually makes us happy.

These platforms feed into our desire to create a certain impression of ourselves in the minds of other people, in order to be liked or admired or accepted or, to be maybe a little simplistic but mostly accurate, unconditionally loved. But even after all the time and energy and careful cropping of ourselves to win approval or applause or whatever, even if we succeed, especially if we succeed, we fail. Because this polished person has almost nothing to do with who we really are on the inside, so we feel disgusted and fraudulent and trapped and sad. The danger—dare I say it, the peril—we have before us is casting ourselves as a spectator, a watcher, sinking snugly into the inertia of the passenger seat, instead of taking on the role of actor in the story itself. The danger is to spend our days watching ourselves being looked at, experiencing reality in terms of how it affects other people’s view of us, wanting witnesses, an audience to affirm our life matters and our experiences actually happened, distilling our identity down into an object of vision, a sight.

Modern writers have picked up on this scent of desperation like bloodhounds, like pre-teen boys. Everywhere essays are going viral on how to stop doom-scrolling on your “gross little phone” and literally just do things. Despite being a generally useless indicator of quality, I think we can use popularity to take a cultural pulse, to find the raw nerve-endings, to gauge the state of the subconscious which, as any Jungian will tell you, always runs to the opposite of the conscious mind. (Enantiodromia, it’s called, if you want to get fancy). I think this writing is so popular because it gestures toward a quiet yet violent yearning we all seem to share. This urge to be less performative, less see-through, less concerned with what others think of how we live—the urge to be less extremely online.

To reduce phone use, there are a few tactical things like deleting social media apps, deciding not to scroll during daylight, setting the screen to black and white, leaving it buried in a drawer in another room, or even more draconian measures, like downgrading to a dumb phone. But the reality is that without addressing the deeper, more metaphysical angst that drives this addiction, no tactics will make that much of a difference.

As the cultural conversation is dominated by what is fast and loud and immediately engaging—because those are the very qualities that screens reward—we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same thing for half an hour, to practice any kind of sustained attention. The ideas that resist compression are forgotten, cast aside, as everything has to be summarized in bullet points, stripped of all excess verbiage. And the faster things go, the more immersed we are in the infinitude of speed, unwilling to grapple with the slowness of the real world around us, the more we forget to feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet. That deprivation makes itself felt in the body as a kind of dread. A full body angst. I don’t think this feeling is an accident. It’s your conscience, whatever divine spark or higher knowing that is within you, sensing it is making you sick, trying to tell you, some days screaming at you, to stop.

Yet the worst part, the part that can only be described as sinister, is that the only cure seems like more. In order to compensate for the inner emptiness, you reload the feed again. And so a sense of lostness plants in your gut. And the loneliness intensifies into something you think you’ll just have to put up with for the rest of your life. This, mind you, is the best definition of addiction I’ve come across: something that makes you feel terrible, but the only way to feel better, it seems, is to do it again.

On his regular rants about ‘the Facebook,’ an old business professor I had in Navarra used to say, in his velvety Spanish accent, “If there’s no price, you are the price.” Entertainment’s main goal is not to entertain but to keep you so hooked, so riveted, that you can’t tear yourself away so advertisers can advertise. To create an anxiety that only promises relief by purchase. It’s a system that reduces the nobility of man to a cog in the capitalist machine, a unit of utility, something to sell to. And even if the powerful and pragmatic and ultra-intelligent algorithm can discern more about you in a few seconds than your Mom or best friend or wife knows about you, maybe more than you know about yourself, even if it can show you all your favorite things, all the stuff you love and laugh at, the algorithm doesn’t care about you. To it, you’re just data, a string of inputs and impressions, zeroes and ones. What the algorithm understands about you doesn’t mean anything to it. It’s not personal.

There was a Jesuit preacher, Anthony de Mello, who said if you’re suffering but not willing to do anything about it, you need to suffer more. Suffer until you get sick of your suffering. Which sounds harsh, but it’s true. The transformative moments in my life only came when the pain of staying the same finally became greater than the pain of changing. It wasn’t courage, perse, but a recognition of the cost of inaction.

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Someone drove into my parked car the other day, someone who doesn’t have insurance and potentially not even a license, which is really fun.

Anyway, as I was sitting in the mechanic’s cramped waiting room that smelt vaguely of metal shavings, old rubber, and sweat, waiting for a quote to repair my back bumper, I was looking through articles I’d saved to read on my phone, since I forgot to bring my battered copy of Crime and Punishment (a tragic, almost unforgiveable mistake, to forget to bring one’s book on an outing). I came across an old interview with Sam Altman where he said something that caught my attention. Something like: “We are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.”

This is one of the ideas that my brain has continued to circle and probe and poke at over the last few months, which is usually a sign it’s time to write an essay on it. Social influence. How sensitive and susceptible we are to what others think of us, at all times, often without even realizing it. I’m beginning to believe it’s the most pervasive and consuming force in determining what we say and do and think. So pervasive, it’s invisible.

I moved to a new city a year ago and in the first few months, I continually found myself in new social settings meeting new people. Sometimes in social settings, when I am aware and calm, there is enough interior space to both act and watch myself acting. Almost always, I notice how much I care about making a certain impression on other people, having them think about me a certain way. I notice how much I want to be liked and not do anything that makes me disliked. I can almost hear this quiet but constant script in the back of my head, monitoring how I appear before others, how people react to me, smile or look away or lean back or frown, how the smallest of words or gestures or glances can exert enough leverage to make my image of self bend. I can even begin to evaluate everything I say or do through the eyes of another and what kind of impression it will make and whether it’s the one I want to make. To be a little simplistic but basically accurate, I notice how I want to present myself in a way that is maximally likeable. Most of this, mind you, goes on completely behind the doors of conscious perception.

There are a few paradoxes at play here. One is that by trying to present an image of myself that I figure is maximally likeable, I am actually less likeable than if I was just myself. The very effort of trying to appear attractive or impressive or smart is what makes me feel less attractive and less impressive and self-conscious about my intelligence. (What “myself” means is mostly unclear, other than the fact that it lacks the strained effort of performance). The other paradox is that even if I’m successful in this, and people seem to like me because they smile or laugh or touch my elbow or whatnot, I am only sent deeper into the conviction that I’m somehow broken, because the approval I’ve gained has nothing to do with who I really am on the inside. Not to mention, this whole game, this overwhelming need to be liked, is accompanied by a constant fear of rejection. A fear that will suddenly and forcibly break in that people are tired or bored with me and see through my basic falsity. I’ve even noticed that with people I really want to like me, people I admire or am attracted to, this pressure becomes so palpable that I can barely speak, never mind clearly articulate my thoughts. This is often dismissed as “nervousness” or “awkwardness,” but I think that’s mislabeling for something that has more to do with cosmic validation1.

This, I submit, is why social media is false and bad. It allows us to fabricate an image, turn the dials, create a kind of managed window into our lives that we approve others to look through. Not only is this whole charade exhausting (in a way that the word “exhausting” doesn’t even come close), but even if you get a lot of likes or followers or whatever, it’s not really you that’s loved. And you know that, deep in your proverbial bones. And you cannot fool yourself out of the nausea that follows as you are sent deeper into the conviction that who you really are on the inside is unpresentable and lame and mostly pathetic. This is sometimes called “wearing a mask,” which is a soppy and annoying cliche for something deeper and serious and more sinister. It doesn’t just maim; it murders2.

The modern response to this line of reasoning is something like, “Don’t care what others think of you, just be you,” which is so brainless and naive and misaligned with the basic building blocks of human nature that I can barely stomach explaining it. I do not think our social sensitivity is a mistake or a flaw. It can be pathologized, no doubt, but it is generally a very good thing that we care what others think of us and are held morally accountable by basic social rules and guidelines that regulate our behavior and probably stop many from going off the deep end.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen has that famous line about how “pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” A certain amount of vanity is necessary and unavoidable. But, past that point, vanity becomes deadly. And, especially with technology, there are ways vanity can be encouraged, inflamed, on a large and lethal scale.

Recently, I’ve been wary of the vanity of writing; its corrupting influence. (It took me a few hundred words to get around to what I really wanted to say, but that’s how it works sometimes.)

See, you start writing purely for personal fun. Because you read a lot and love words and think too much and your friends are tired of your philosophical tangents and you want a way to make sense of your head or, at least, get your thoughts to leave you alone. But then, if you keep at it long enough, your writing starts to get more attention. Praise pours in from people you don’t know and your friends are impressed and one time a pretty girl from Paris emails to tell you in a shy, cute way she has a note in her phone with her favorite sentences of yours. This kind of attention is impossible to dislike, even if it makes you confused and uncomfortable3. It produces a strange and morbidly sweet sensation you’re pretty sure isn’t good for you, but you also don’t want to stop.

Naturally, you want the new essays you write to be liked too. Pretty soon, without really noticing, you start filtering your thoughts and feelings for what you think would be liked and sound interesting, mostly to show off and look impressive and get people to think you’re a good writer. You find you care about your image now and how many people read your stuff. And you see other writers’ stuff that gets more likes and attention and you can’t help but wonder if it’s better and more interesting and worthy than your stuff. You start writing things solely because you think it will get an equal amount of attention, an above-average number of likes, instead of talking, with probity and care, about what fascinates you and makes you feel alive, even if it’s unpopular or weird4.

The success you have, whether you like it or not, becomes proof. A way to furnish your pride, feed your vanity. Something you can point to quietly, almost imperceptibly, to affirm your silent and hidden belief that you were right all along: You are exceptional.

But the problem is that even if this new writing is liked and admired, you feel like a fraud. Because the image of who you think you need to be in order to be loved isn’t really you in the flesh and blood. There’s a gap now between who you are in writing and who you are in real life. And your handiwork shows, most prominently to yourself. The crooked pieces you tried to square away, the parts that are too embarrassing or ugly or shameful and have to be hidden, the stuff you don’t want to let anyone else see—it bulges out, pokes through the seams of you. You are afraid of being found out.

This creation of yours turns out to be more of a monster than a madonna, a certain betrayal of self, and starts to only highlight how terrible and unlikeable you actually are. But, it also feeds a hollow and insecure part of you that likes creating an aura, that wants to live in that aura, that thinks maybe it is the real you, and enjoys seeing yourself as someone special, set apart5. This insecure part, you realize, is where most of your pride originates, as a way to compensate for what you don’t want to confront within yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, there are also moments where you put out something you think is really good and people don’t seem to care and it kills you, in a way. But this is still vanity, just the opposite end.

Writing is frustrating and hard and confusing because despite the fact that you know it has a wide surface area for sin, you also love words and care about words and communicating old truths and complicated emotional realities and probably couldn’t stop without becoming restless and sad6. And when you step outside your tangle of abstract thought, there is the basic fact that someone halfway across the world had enough excitement and courage to tell you the words that came out of your hands made them feel a little less lonely.

Here is the question looping in my mind as of late: If my right hand was causing me to sin, would I cut it off? This saying has become trivialized from overuse, but it’s a serious saying and I’m saying it seriously. Am I willing to take extreme measures to remove the things in my life that are leading me astray, even if I love and depend on them? If my write hand was causing me to sin, would I cut it off? The answer, if I’m worth my salt, would have to be yes.

I wish I had a storybook ending, a kind of happy, glowy narrative arc where I tell you how I overcame the vanity of writing for good and conquered my ego and rediscovered the fun of writing in a childlike, enduring way, then disappeared into the sunset. But I don’t. If anything, it’s a battle that has to be considered and fought every day. We must die to self daily.

Although all this icky, skin-crawly talk about vanity does communicate something important: the necessity of love. Real, genuine, human, messy, face-to-face love. The kind of love where you don’t have to pretend or worry if they like you or will leave you. The love where someone pulls down your mask or pokes their fingers clean through, sees the brokenness and loves you anyway. Where you meet someone who is your match and can’t be fooled, or doesn’t want to be fooled, by the less broken, maximally likeable person that you’re pretending to be. Someone who doesn’t try to squeeze you through a hole or place you in a box, but meets you in the freedom of space. Meets you in conversation. Meets you as someone they can’t quite understand but want to try anyway.

And, in comparison, likes on an essay from strangers or trying to win approval from people you don’t know becomes less than nothing, emptiness. A striving after the wind.

Walk slowly and often,

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I often hear well-married people say things like, “There is a person I can be around her that does not emerge elsewhere,” or “I am not naturally like this but being married to him brings it out of me,” or “She explains me to myself” or even, “I didn’t know who I was until I talked to her.”

Which I never really understood. But, recently, it’s begun to make more sense.

There are certain people who, when I’m around, bring me out of me. Who I simply am more myself with. The conversation is natural and effortless and fascinating and wildly generative, for both of us. I seem to unfold more of who I am within that dialogue, overhearing myself saying things that surprise me, things I didn’t even know were in me, saying whatever pops into my head and it’s not disliked or weird. And their words find places within me that I thought were buried or lost.

But the conversation is not only deep and complicated but also full of smiles and laughter. It’s both cerebral and silly, switching between modes of seriousness that we instinctively meet each other on. Without trying. Without knowing how not to.

It’s not just a matter of being comfortable around them, which I am, but there’s something more mysterious and deep at work.

It’s almost like, to try an analogy, how some things taste more like themselves with salt. But not exactly because it’s mutual and there’s no solubility. One isn’t absorbed into the other. Rather, some new thing emerges, a third thing that we are both orbiting, mutually caring for, the sum being more true and human and enduring than each individual part.

I think this is true for all great relationships. Really, I think this is the DNA of friendship.

One Fall, I worked on a farm in the Okanagan Valley. Every morning around 5am I would wake up in my tent, the temperature just above freezing, the sky still raw black and hungry, shimmy out of my sleeping bag, rush to throw on clothes, then head to the farmhouse, its calm yellow windows in the distance humming out into the night like a lit city on a hill. I would bound up the front steps and through the front door, the sensation of warmth flooding in after being out in the cold. Rajko would be there already, sitting at the kitchen table, the coffee maker steaming and choking and sputtering like a sick man. We would bow to each other, like they do in Thailand, like nineteenth-century Russian aristocrats, and spend the early hours of the morning sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, me reading the Bible, him reading the local newspaper from his small town outside Venice. Not saying much, watching the day grow bright, watching the mountains gradually materialize on the horizon. This lasted an hour or two, before the couple from France and the two Aussies and the group of Germans and all the other volunteers on the farm from countries that used to go to war with each other came into the kitchen and began rummaging through the cupboards and toasting thick slices of bread with slabs of butter and gobs of nutella and shaking out bowls of cornflakes and pouring orange juice and sitting to eat, mostly in a groggy, half-sedated silence1. (The French, in particular, seem to have an almost superhuman capacity for sugar in the morning).

We started work on the farm at 8am, unless there was a bad frost. I’d head out into the field and spend the morning in the long dirt rows, watching the sun slowly crest over the mountains, bathing everything in a pale and glittering light. Some days I’d harvest arugula, grabbing a bunch with my first and slicing the stems at the bottom with a knife in a kind of sawing motion, almost as if I was scalping a man, and then sorting through the handful to pick out weeds and wilted bits, and dropping the rest into a big blue bin. Some days I’d harvest heirloom tomatoes or lettuce or spinach or tuscan kale, all by hand and by eye. (Food, it turns out, isn’t magic). Some days I’d listen to an audiobook of The Odyssey, but most days I would work in silence, with nothing but me and my thoughts, my heavily populated solitude, the monotony of the work becoming a kind of meditation.

The best days were when I’d work with Rajko. He’d do his work rapidly, ferociously, almost with appetite. But we’d talk. We’d talk about fate and free will and God and what it means to be a man. He would tell me stories of Italy and stories of delivering beer, how it’s a beautiful job, and stories of dating a woman ten years older than dating a woman ten years younger. Sometimes he’d say cryptic things like “Men used to go to war” or, “We all have a remote control but we don’t know where it is and don’t know how it works. In life, you have to find your remote control and find out how it works. You’ll probably figure it out right before you die. Say, ‘Oh, that’s what it was!’, then you’re dead. That’s not tragic. That’s life.”

He’d tell me stories of his ten years of travelling the world, living in the Australian outback alone for two months with no cell service, wandering through a jungle in India at midnight, working in a bar in Toronto and making friends with the homeless, giving his bike away to someone who needed it more than him, walking down Younge Street half-yelling “Trahno!” but no one would notice because people in a city have blinders on, oblivious to everything but their own snowglobed world. And he would tell me how he was ready to move back home for good now and buy a little piece of land by a river he grew up swimming in, and build a little house on the bank, because, as he told me, nothing can replace your home soil and where you’re from.

The other thirty-odd people I met on the farm were nice and interesting and everything, but there was a distance, a barrier of pretence and pretending that dissolved with Rajko. If you were to ask me for the reasons I liked him, I could point toward his big goofy smile and absurd lightness of spirit, which often cracked me out of my more serious heaviness. I could tell you about how he wasn’t afraid to think for himself or about how he greeted his girlfriend, also on the farm, with the same simple excitement as a golden retriever, like he hadn’t seen her in five years even if it’d only been five minutes. I could try to explain how he had a heart for animals and the helpless more than anyone I’d ever met. But none of these reasons, added up, equal to the friendship that formed. It was hidden somewhere in the conversation between us.

This leads to our first important point: real friendship resists articulation.

We are all born with this deep, complex interiority. You could call it the soul, whatever it is within you that is unchanging and unblemished; unwounded, despite that pain you’ve experienced. But nobody can see it. You can’t even see it—not really. But without having to understand it exactly, you can notice what kinds of people dissolve in your interiority, fuse with it, expand and aliven it. You will not be able to explain how or why this works. You will only be able to assent. And through this fusion and expansion you see more of who you are, more of what is within you. It is drawn out of you, mostly to your surprise.

I think it is crucial to let friendship resist articulation, not needing to explain itself to justify its existence. Articulation is a friendship killer because that thing that happens between you doesn’t really make sense. The best relationships are rarely compressible into a sensible string of words, especially a string of words that impress others. They rarely conform to the kinds of tropes we expect. They’d be annoying or embarrassing to try to explain, almost offensive. Rajko had a tattoo on his scalp! But, within an hour of meeting him, leaning on a farm truck in a MEC parking lot outside Vancouver, he asked me about my ten year vision for my life and I excitedly started saying things I never heard myself say before, things I didn’t even know were in me.

Friendship is a unique resonance between two people. But our mind is a pretty bad judge of the kinds of people we will uniquely resonate with. This is because it’s mostly a mystery2. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky has a line that gestures toward this, how “we sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.” Joseph Campbell called it a recognition of identity in the other. Well-married couples say something similar. How they could tell this person was different, almost instantly, but had no real reason why. Even if it was awkward initially because they hadn’t learned how to talk to each other yet and he couldn’t look at her for more than a few moments without having to look away, there was something there. Love always takes us where we did not think we would go.

The way we find this unique resonance is through sensitivity to context. But instead of explaining context, which is harder to define, I want to explain why people get into trouble when they start with form rather than context. Meaning, when they think that reality shouldn’t surprise them. That someone must fit into a pre-defined shape and check all the boxes of the kind of person they would describe as ideal on paper.

We see this play out all the time in literature; Tolstoy and Austen come first to mind. When romantic relationships start with form, a checklist, a good match in the eyes of society, because someone is rich or high status or has nice epaulets or whatever. The relationship is a social creation first that is then pushed onto the two unsuspecting individuals who begin to think that maybe they do love that person after all because everyone else keeps making eyes at the two of them and telling subtle suggestive jokes. They like the social approval, what being with this certain person says about them or how it makes them look around others, and never look at the actual person. We are such social creatures that we will let this crude force sway even our most important and intimate emotions, like love3. Of course, you can imagine these relationships don’t go very well. Love always smashes through the box that reason tries to place it in.

I saw the same thing play out with a roommate. When two or three people in his social circle tell him to ask this certain girl out, a girl he’d never thought of romantically before but now, all of a sudden, now that he thinks about it, maybe he is in love with her. This kind of crude social pressure, like in literature, results in cancelled coffee dates and frustration about the fragility of one’s romantic feeling and a solemn vow to not pursue anyone unless it’s obvious, which I think is mostly a good rule.

When you start with form, what a relationship or person should look like, you cannot be attentive to the weird fusion that happens in the presence of some people, the unrestrained animation on your face, the feeling of expansion, the way your sentences build and overlap, the way your words mix together.

However, an important caveat is needed here. This fusion, this unique resonance, this recognition of identity, whatever you want to call it, is a feeling but a feeling that only emerges from a shared foundation of virtue. An admiration of each other’s character and what they stand for.

It is easy to start liking someone because they’re funny or hot or cool and make you laugh and feel excited and good. It is easy to think you are friends because you both like to ski or watch 80s movies, because they can help you get an A in a class or access to that new nightclub or elevate your status or whatever. But neither of these things, neither pleasure or usefulness, are a firm foundation for friendship. These things come and go. People will be more or less fun and useful to you in different seasons of life, as emotions ebb and flow, old interests die and new interests are born.

Real friendship, the insoluble, full-bodied kind of friendship, only forms when two people come together out of respect for each other’s values and admiration of their virtues, and decide to care for the development of their character, even learning to grow fond of their flaws. You may have fun together and they may be useful to you but even if they’re not, even if they’re in an idiosyncratic depressive funk and can’t answer your question about Proust, you still love them, care for them, and want to help them unfold their life with dignity. You still want them around. Just as a human being.

When I say real friendship is found through sensitivity to context I think what I am saying is: when you drop the expectation about how something should look and side-step the crude social pressure and instead pay attention to how you think and act and talk around different people, who you become in their presence, whether the words that come out of your mouth surprise you, noticing who makes you feel alive and real and true and heard. This kind of sensitivity requires surrender, treating people as capable of surprise, complex things that cannot be contained in your thoughts about them. Something not to be figured out but rather met with in the freedom of space.

Of course, I’m talking about friendship but I think you probably find love the same way. By paying attention. By letting go of how it “should” happen. And always when you least expect it. In fact, the word for friend and lover actually comes from the same Latin root: amor.

This kind of fusion is important and life-giving because we do not understand ourselves properly or fully in the darkness of our aloneness but under the light that someone’s gaze and committed attention shine on us. Within the pocket of care they create. The loving space to articulate our inner thoughts and express our deep, complex interiority, however confusing or shameful or scary. In good times and in bad.

We discover who we are in that conversational space. In the conversation itself.

We cannot disappear into the library or gym or therapist’s office and come back changed, isolating ourselves like some kind of cancer until we figure out how to be less broken and more on top of things, because the very change we need most, the change we crave, can only occur in relationship, in the presence of people who love us and care for us, sometimes more than we can bear to care for ourselves. People who ask things of us. People who are willing to stick by our side as we sort through the rubble of ourselves.

Humans are creatures who need a co-witness. Who need the gaze of another to fully see ourselves4. We are only fulfilled by and completed in relationship. We do not find the meaning of life alone. We find it with another5.

Friendship, I submit, is the basis of all relationship. Even love relationships like marriage often suffer simply for a lack of friendship. A lack of genuine enjoyment of being in the presence of the other. A lack of that weird fusion that happens when you’re together.

Yours,

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I am shivering, reading cold northeastern prose

and there is a word for what I do

but I do it anyway,

carefully setting dinner on the table uncooked,

before setting the table on fire.

— David Berman

On the body of my memory, there are these bruised spots, bloodied and tender and raw and purpling, that hurt like hell to remember. Every time I press a finger of awareness into one, my face uncontrollably flinches, winces, tenses, and twists like I just swallowed a serving of battery acid, like I’m Bugs Bunny turning twelve shades of green, like there’s something bitter I need to hurl up.

A therapist would call it unprocessed emotion. I call it life. Trauma in motion, crying out for redemption1.

And maybe these painful memories won’t go away. Maybe pain doesn’t just bruise. Maybe it brands. (After all, even Jesus kept his scars).

I haven’t been able to escape, despite my efforts, the urge to articulate grief. This is partly because I like trying to understand deep and complex emotions, and partly because talking about deep and complex emotions is cathartic in a way almost nothing else is.

Yet grief is almost impossible to snare in words. We can point at stories or paintings or people that depict it, we can gesture toward it with other inept words like “sadness” or “pain,” but to describe the thing itself, grief incarnate, like I fully understand it, like intense emotions were ever meant to be contained by language, feels foolish.

Here, then, is the conundrum: the need to articulate an inarticulable thing. All while being careful not to confuse words with the thing itself.

Opposed to an essay, which makes an implicit claim to know the intellectual landscape and traverse it with a consecutive chain of clear logic, a list of notes, jottings, and fragments, the kinds of things I would scribble on scraps of paper and stuff in my pockets and try not to lose, seems a better way to capture this particularly fugitive feeling. The form allows for unfolding. A reaching and straining and circling toward what the essence may be, even though I’m not sure where or what it is.

I’m going to try a lot of “cut-ins”. Different ways of grappling with grief that have accreted in my mind and in my notebooks over the years. Some may be interesting, others may be weird, all may start to sound repetitive and sad. Feel free to skip liberally, etc etc.

And if you are wondering or concerned or just generally alarmed, I am OK. Anything we can find words for has long been dead in our hearts2.

Here are my notes on grief3:

1. An almost physical ache, like my brain hurts so bad it has to share the pain with my body. Or maybe it was all one to begin with? Despite the metaphysics being mostly unclear, what is clear is that there is a necessary and inescapable physical response to the outpouring and overflow of pain. Grief fills you, it can seem, entirely.

2. I would say orchestral ache, and try to pass myself off as a minor poet, but it’s not that romantic. It’s neither fancy nor nuanced. Rather, it’s hard and blunt and heavy and just plain hurts.

3. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion, except I am the car and I am also the crash. But mostly the frightened, reluctant pedestrian on the sidewalk, watching the smoking wreckage, exhaling timidly and thinking how much the damage is going to cost. Perhaps, I am also in the passenger seat, a split second before the crash, bracing, tensing every muscle in my neck and shoulders and back and jaw for impact.

4. It’s like I was hit square in the solar plexus by a dodgeball. Not one of those soft, small foamy ones but the big, mean rubber ones you can barely get your hand around with sharp grooves for grip that burn the tips of your fingers to throw.

5. Or like someone dropped a bowling ball on my stomach from the top of a painter’s ladder, leaving me gasping, sucking for air, like my trachea suddenly shrank to the size of a soda straw. Like my lungs are filling with fluid.

6. Or like a small but staunch middle-aged Italian man, with big meaty hands and hairy knuckles and sleeves rolled up his thick forearms, hit me with an uppercut to the gut, low enough (due to his smaller stature) to get right under the ribs, right into my soft and exposed organs4.

7. A deer in truck headlights. Frozen with fear. Physically wounded. Reminding me of a story I read the other night about a butcher who, when a bull was bucking and bellowing and putting up a fight on the way to the slaughterhouse, grabbed a kitchen knife and turned around and stretched his arm through the cage to jab both the bull’s eyes out. Afterward, the bull was quiet as a lamb. No longer wanting any part in the world.

8. A guttural groan like I’m passing kidney stones at surprising intervals.

9. Grief makes you feel alive, unbearably human and aware of the stakes, in a way that seems significant. There was a certain blindness you had before that you can no longer return to. A certain loss of the capacity to delude yourself. This has something to do with wisdom.

10. Anger appears, often without announcement. An instinctive response to abandonment.

11. Hoping for something to calm the nerves and wick the sweat and steady my shaking hands, because whenever I try to write anything, the point of the pencil trembles and scribbles on the page like an old cardiograph.

12. It’s to realize the rock I thought I was building on was really a pile of gravel, with a fair bit of loose sand in the mix.

13. Like I’m choking on something, this mass accumulating at the top of my stomach, expanding, pressing into my diaphragm. Fear and confusion. A forgiveness I cannot or will not swallow. A vague but unvacant fear of complete cosmic rejection.

14. I don’t know why I’m giving so many stomach similes (or so many similes, period). Other than the fact that it seems to be where grief likes to live. Somewhere in the centre. Our acidic insides.

15. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” ― C.S. Lewis

16. It’s not fear exactly, but the sensation is like fear. The same anxious restlessness, the same nervousness, the gulping, lack of appetite, attempting to swallow. Yawning, opening my jaw wide, then wider, trying to pop my ears from an invisible pressure.

17. And it’s closer to fear than it is to sadness. At least, in the early stages. Sadness describes a coolness, but fear burns. Despair also gets close, in that it gestures toward a kind of stuckness and helplessness that accentuates the general angst.

18. Like a bad dream. But worse because it actually happened. Like a bad dream you are dragged through, a dream there is no awakening from and all you can do is stare stupidly at the surreality that is now reality. And try to cope.

19. Pain was always part of the deal. You knew that. But that truth looks very different from an abstract distance, comfy in the philosopher’s chair, compared to being close up, having its warm breath down your back, chilling your spine. The realization that real loss is not just something that happens to other people. That you do not live in a land where only other people die. That you are all in on this thing called life and, no matter what, it’s going to kill you.

20. Good grief, Charlie Brown.

21. It’s poetic and cool to say things like, “Love is the pain of being truly alive.” “Grief is love’s exit wound.” Or even, “What is grief if not love persevering?” But, I’d submit, people who parrot those kinds of impotent and annoying aphorisms either don’t know or have badly forgotten what the experience of grief is actually like. Theories don’t help.

22. I say I’m writing about grief, but I’m not. Not really. I’m writing about something like grief, because writing about actual grief is like staring at the sun: it hurts too much to look at, so all I can do is vaguely comment on the things it illuminates.

23. Even still, grief does not stand in opposition to love, but as an affirmation of love’s existence. It is love scratching its name on the tablet of your heart. Maybe pain is just another form of love: Love enduring through loss. The only way it can. The only way it knows how.

24. “Somehow, even deep within extreme grief, the worst pain is knowing that your pain will pass, all the sharp particulars of life that one person’s presence made possible will fade into mere memory, and then not even that”. (Wiman)

25. I wrote most of this in the throes of grief and although it doesn’t really make sense to me now, I knew it did then. I waited for wounds to turn scars, but the scar-brain can’t understand what the wound-brain vividly understood. It’s impossible to understand grief unless you’re in the thick of the fear and nausea and stomach-level topsy-turvy sickness. I cannot explain my grief to another. I cannot even explain my grief to myself.

26. Grief is a wordless intensity, straining through words to reach you.

27. And maybe Nietzsche was wrong because I could only find words for these things when they were alive in my heart, when they could be written in blood. Now they’ve dulled into a kind of gray distance, the words seem dramatic and depressing and unnecessary and annoying after a while. What was once important and essential to communicate now feels feeble, forgettable, almost weak. That’s the thing about complicated and deep emotional realities: because they can only be understood from the inside, they’re isolating in an immense, totalizing way.

28. Does time heal all wounds? Always? What’s the difference between healing and forgetting? That question, by the way, haunts me.

29. How much of grief is simply drowned in daily cares? How much is simply dropped because we have no choice but to keep up with the non-stop turning of the world, for which we need both hands?

30. Even now, every time my mind flashes back, I take a sharp, unnatural, involuntary inhale through my mouth. Without knowing why. Without knowing how not to.

31. It’s not wanting to be alone or for things to be quiet, but also not wanting to be around people, for anyone to talk to you or ask anything of you, because you are unwilling to bear the psychic cost.

32. “She did not want to talk about her grief, and with this grief in her soul she could not talk about irrelevancies.” (Tolstoy)

33. Grief is reflexive in a cruel and unusual way. Not only are you grieving, but you are simultaneously aware of the fact that you are grieving, thinking about your grieving, analyzing your grief and whether it’s too much or not enough, and what this says about how much you care and your overall emotional health.

34. “And just like that, I am thrown back into an interior darkness, a kind of nauseous foreboding, like something terrible is about to happen, a ball to drop, strangely, because the terrible thing already did happen. And the most frustrating and disappointing part is how much effort and time and patience it will take to pull myself out of the muck. Again. That I even have to write about it, like I’m doing, to have a hope of it leaving me alone.”

35. “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” ― William Shakespeare

36. There are some ways in which we do not want to be consoled, refuse to be consoled, get angry and indignant at other people’s seemingly empty, templated, ready-made phrases of consolation. There are some ways we hold onto grief, try to keep the wound fresh. Make the daily sacrifice of a broken spirit.

37. It’s also, as someone trying to support another grieving, impossible to say the right thing because there is no right thing to say. Grief is not a problem to be solved but a process to be experienced. Someone grieving cannot be rescued, but they can be accompanied. That is good and enough. That is compassion (the Latin com-pati). To suffer with.

38. I think the reality of grief is partly why I am a Christian. God can feel abstract, distant. “Christ, though,” in Wiman’s words, “is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you... The notion of God not above or beyond or immune to human suffering, but in the very midst of it, intimately with us in our sorrow, our sense of abandonment, our hellish astonishment at finding ourselves utterly alone, utterly helpless.”

The sinkhole all this seems to be circling around is the idea of grief as a kind of foreign and unwelcome sickness. A physical pain. A nausea, shudder and convulsion and shortness of breath. A certain bodily ailment that every cell in your being wants nothing more than to purge, if it wasn’t for how weak and helpless and incapable and immobilized it makes you feel.

Despite my efforts, what is left here is a grief-shaped hole. A small but infinite space where no words can live. Where language goes dumb and mute.

By attempting to articulate what grief is, I have mostly gestured toward what grief isn’t: something that can be explained to other people. Something that can ever hold the same intense vacancy in your heart, mind, or stomach as it does in mine.

Words are not the feeling. Words are the effort to untangle the knot of sensation that abides in your organs, lives in your blood. To make sense of it, so maybe it will lessen or leave you alone. But we forget that pain did not need the permission or even the existence of words to be born into us.

Intellectualizing grief seems to only send me into a deeper hole, or perhaps a more acute awareness of my hole’s depth. But, strangely, it’s also the way I find a foothold to begin to lift myself out. Only by confession, undressed confession, a meek but honest attempt to talk about all this that’s inside of me, much of which I’m confused and bewildered by, do the chains fall. Only by confession is my conscience unburdened. Only by confession is freedom found5. To you, it’s just words. But that is what we are given. So that is what we must take.

See, to be human is to be on trial. To be human is to need witnesses.

The light only grows from here,

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I will remember 2025 as a year of reading and writing.

It was the second full year of my lifetime reading plan. After the Bible in 2024, I devoted 2025 to Christian literature. I read some excellent books like Confessions, Paradise Lost, East of Eden, The Divine Comedy, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Ben-Hur, On the Consolation of Philosophy, Pensées, and spent a lot of time with thinkers like CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Tim Keller, Meister Eckhart, Simone Weil, Kierkegaard, and Gregory of Nyssa.

Admittedly, I had to cut several books from my initial plan. Partly because I continued reading the Bible first thing every morning, realizing it wasn’t something you ever “finish” reading1, and partly because, while I was looking for a place to happen, I got a job.

While some of my reading is structured into a kind of focused curriculum, some is spontaneous and unplanned. Last year, I probably read another twenty-odd books that had nothing to do with Christianity.

As a general rule, I try to keep margin in my days to follow joy, to anchor on joy, to discover how often the unbelievable comes true, to see where the thread of curiosity leads me, sometimes out of the labyrinth but sometimes deeper in. I want to be someone who leaves room in my life to be interrupted, expecting and even honouring the interruptions. I want to make myself available to be changed. This is an act of opening; opening past the point of pain, opening to what is unknown.

If nothing interrupts me, I am not living. I am a machine, a kind of rigid and cold assembly line. I am breathing just a little, and calling it life2.

Part of the beauty and allure of a physical bookshelf, one extensive enough that I forget some of its contents, is that I can scan the spines on the shelves and sense into which book is calling me in that particular season or mood of my life. I think I had faith in books before I had faith in God, silly as it sounds, that the right books find us at the right moments, as long as we let them. (Same with people!) At least, it’s proved true for me.

It is really cool, if you think about it, that for ten dollars you can witness some of the best thoughts from some of the most brilliant minds that have ever kissed existence. That you can hang out with Stevenson or Hrabal or Steinbeck or Austen, inside their mind, and they can reach across distance and space, sometimes thousands of years, and shatter the shackles of time, defeating death and the grave, to speak clearly and directly to you. That this can cure loneliness in a way almost nothing else can. That there are some books you will read and never be the same after.

Reading this way is also humbling. It’s hard to think you are intelligent or have even the faintest grasp of language afterwards. Men can have pride about their sin, but never about their stupidity.

I’ve learned just because I read what is excellent does not mean my life will suddenly become excellent. But a life sown with good books and good stories is better postured to think and to dream. To ask the beautiful questions.

The five most popular essays I wrote in 2025 were:

1. How to end your extremely online era

2. Do what you can’t

3. The weight of aloneness

4. My Lifetime Reading Plan

5. What is social media good for?

If you missed last year’s reflection, the five most popular essays before 2025 were:

1. the end of our extremely online era.

2. Real Life

3. slowness as an ideal

4. Commit before you’re ready

5. Where to live

In 2025, I also finished the longest, hardest, and most meaningful thing I’ve ever written on returning to faith. Writing it nearly killed me and sharing it publicly certainly terrified me but it’s the essay I’m most proud of and still a little amazed by. Despite being somewhat of a novella, people surprised me and actually read it and continue to read it at an alarming rate. (Quality long-form won’t have the same immediate popularity but tends to have a nice, slow burn). Already, some incredible and unexpected stories have come out of it: people opening or re-opening the Bible, visiting a church, starting to pray, and generally deciding to wrestle with the most influential book in human history for themselves, rather than let someone else filter it for them.

My relationship with writing also went through a painful liminal period this year, a certain threshold crossing. While a salaried job took the financial pressure off, allowing me to do neat things like buy groceries, and imposed an external structure on my day that helps keep me sane, with new time and capacity constraints, my old and untrammelled relationship with writing had to die and something new had to be born.

Writers have to navigate a trade-off triangle between length, quality, and volume. Usually, you cannot have all three. I chose quality, being somewhat agnostic to length, and relaxed a lot around volume, not needing to meet any due dates or deadlines for the first time since starting to write online four and a half years ago. When I was working on my essay on Christianity, I didn’t publish anything for nearly three months, because I refused to work on anything else until I finished it, knowing that would be the only way.

As I’ve become busier and stepped into more leadership at church, I’ve had to be razor sharp with my priorities and cut everything unessential away. I stopped taking online courses, taking random zoom calls (or taking any zoom calls really), using a smartphone, and consuming any information besides at-least-a-century-old paper books.

Most of my week is routinized with an almost silly degree of consistency, but the less I have to decide when to wake up every day (5am), when to exercise (every morning at 7am besides Sunday), or what to do after work (BJJ, archery, or church stuff, long walks otherwise), the more my mind is free to roam.

The other benefit of consistency in routine is that it makes me available to be found; to see and be seen.

I wrote less this year than in 2024, yet I’ve continued to raise the bar for quality. I also learned that I am most likely in it for the long haul, for the plain and simple fact that I could not stop, even if I wanted to. Necessity has been laid upon me.

Sentences pressure up through the seams of me at basically all hours of the day, ideas that burn like embers and demand articulation. I am always jotting down little notes, little fragments, little observations, seeds of ideas. When I started my job earlier this year, I tried to only write weekend mornings but basically failed after a month because I thought I’d implode. At least, the internal barometric pressure was enough to make my ears pop and I found myself back at the keyboard, six or seven days a week, typing away. Being a writer is absurd and frustrating and hard. But here I am.

When you put your soul into something, you cannot be repaid.

Yet I take some comfort that writing is kind of like a marriage, or any love relationship (because I don’t really know what it’s like to be married), in that there are seasons of feeling very intimate and close, where everything is easy and exciting, and other seasons of feeling frustrated and impossibly distant. But the key is to keep showing up, even when I don’t feel like it.

Ritual and vows and discipline carry us through the ebbs and flows of emotion when our tired muscles won’t.

One of my goals for 2025 was to write more as ethos. I wanted my essays to be deeply rooted in how I lived my life, both influenced by and influencing. For my essays and the self that I am to exist in a kind of ecology of mutual building up and encouragement. To be ideas I kept returning to, revisiting, breathing. Pillars, not pebbles. Foundational to the man I am becoming, not forgotten philosophical pandering that I fail to hold myself accountable to. This, on reflection, was a surprising success. For the longest time, I felt like a fraud because I wasn’t really living what I was writing. At least, the gap was evident enough for people to use it as a blunt object in arguments. This year, I think I caught up to my writing and even surpassed it, embodying a kind of wisdom that I can’t quite express or put words to. (This is basically what faith is.) Although I don’t consider myself wise, I think I am less foolish.

I’ve also made my process more tactile in recent months, writing and editing by hand (which is how the writers I admire created their work!) And if it’s not obvious from my misuse of commas or abuse of adverbs and run-on sentences or strange yet evolving relationship with semi-colons, I have never used anything other than real, unartificial intelligence in my work. All my essays are written in blood, edited in ink3.

I do not wish to outsource my capacity to think and make sense of the world. Even when it’s frustrating and hard.

Another big change to my process has been the “anti-grinding rule,” which is a strange and harsh and slightly erotic way of saying: only writing when I feel like it4. I think this rule is dangerous for new writers and probably dangerous for experienced writers, but the gap still surprises me between what I can write when I’m feeling excited and inspired versus when I’m feeling tired or distracted or forced. The other thing is, I almost always feel like it.

In 2026, continuing with my lifetime reading plan, I will focus on Russian literature. I have some classics planned, like Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Master and Margarita, Lolita, The Gulag Archipelago, Fathers and Sons, Dead Souls, Eugene Onegin, and Doctor Zhivago, as well as some more esoteric writers like Bunin and Lermontov and (just try and pronounce it) Krzhizhanovsky. All of which I’m rather excited for.

I’m sure I will read a bunch of other stuff too. Calvino has been calling my name for a while, as has Borges, Zweig, Gabriel García Márquez, Eliot, Didion, Dickens, more Steinbeck, maybe Fitzgerald. David Foster Wallace, always.

As far as writing goes, I will continue to be spirit-led and see where it takes me. I may start writing a book. I may not. These days, I’m living and breathing a lot of faith-based stuff, so I will likely write more about that. Perhaps something on money and spending since technically I am a licensed investment advisor. I’ve learned the hard way that if I’m not pulling source material from my own life, I probably shouldn’t be writing about it. People call this “credibility,” but it’s more like “firsthand confrontation with the raw mass of reality”. And reality is where all the interesting and surprising detail lives.

Also, I want to develop a keener sense of rhythm and contrast. I think one of my weaknesses as a writer is that I somewhat beat people over the head with my brain, trying to make every sentence profound and insight dense, when most great writing is very casual and relaxed, with a crazy sentence thrown in that pops in its profundity. People don’t want to hang out with me in the deep end all day. So my goal is: communicate profound, insight-dense things in a casual and relaxed, almost ordinary way. I’m also playing with more repetition, surprised by how much I enjoy it as a reader. If you haven’t noticed.

A publisher approached me about writing a book on the whole ‘online era’ idea since those two essays have been quite popular and there seems to be a hunger for it, but I haven’t decided if I have anything else to say and if I want to orient my book around what would sell. Writers tend to be rich in social-capital but poor in capital-capital, which can lead them to make sacrifices on topic or “sell out,” and then regret it later if they’re honest with themselves. I’m fortunate not to be desperate for money, which provides freedom in those decisions.

More importantly, heading into the next year I am increasingly wary of the vanity of the substack game of notes and likes and subs, being bummed and bewildered when an essay doesn’t get as many likes as I thought it would, posting a note I think people will like to compensate, not getting many likes on that either and feeling doubly worse and now a little desperate, comparing myself with other writers who get more likes than me and wishing I was as authentic and interesting as them. Even if you win those types of games, you still lose.

One of the most important essays I wrote last year was on the spiritual cost of being a writer. How, in one sense, I think writing makes me notice and see the world in a way that makes it come alive, in a way that allows me to go deeper than the surface. But, in another sense, there’s a real spiritual cost to writing—the vanity, ego, intellectual pride, worshipping my thoughts, etc—and maybe a lived cost too—being removed, in my own head, abstracted from the world, distant. This is a tension I cannot pretend to have resolved and can only hold the space for.

I don’t know where next year will take me, but that’s the exciting part. Despite the difficulty and seasons of distance, given my capacity to grow I think I am far from done.

I’m expectant of the absurd.

Wishing you way more than luck,

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For patrons, I’ve created a live list of what I’m reading every month.

Every year the city of Waterloo puts on a “WONDERS OF WINTER” light show in its creatively named Waterloo park. Teams of volunteers from all over the city spend weeks putting up, according to their website, “over 150 colourful displays with over 150,000 lights”. I walked over the other night to investigate.

The first light displays you see are classic and Christmas-themed. Santa and reindeer hitched to a sleigh, snowmen and Christmas trees and gingerbread men doing cartwheels and even Charlie Brown looking apathetic and impotent and frustrated with Snoopy asleep on his dog house. Then, there are more winter-themed ones, like polar bears and swans and reindeer, snowflakes, alpine skiers and ice skaters. But then, gradually, almost imperceptible if it wasn’t so obvious, it starts to get weird. Batman and Wonder Woman, race cars and Thomas the tank engine, a carousel, five flashing t-rex in lurid purples, reds, and yellows, an eight foot tall stegosaurus eating green leaves off the top of a palm tree, an anthropomorphized donut, a life-size ambulance with flames in the windows that’s running at you head on, a blue monkey-dog-like creature with an orange sombrero carrying two suitcases, which still vaguely haunts me. Apparently light alone isn’t enough because almost every single display flashes violently in varied staccato bursts, enough to keep any epileptic far away. And crappy Christmas pop floats through the park grounds, giving off what I can only call abandoned amusement park energy.

People ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and point and stop at literally every single display to take a photo of it on their smartphone, for reasons I’m still not entirely clear on1. Your investigator mainly notices because, despite being so engrossed in his own inner commentary, he has to weave around them when they stop in the middle of the path like pylons. Of course, each light display is sponsored by an advertiser, local businesses like Swan Dust Control and Morty’s Pub, national brands like Tim Hortons and Canadian Tire, law firms and realtors and whatever HelloMortgages.ca is (their website is mostly unclear) as well as esoteric community organizations who strangely have the budget and motivation to advertise like the Optimist Club of Lakeshore Village. All have put up big black and white back-lit signs that make no mistake to let you know just who sponsored it. Some of the light displays, in fact, are lazy and desperate enough to just be advertisements themselves. The Tim Hortons light display is just two weird glowy timbits, like space orbs, with ice skates on.

At the central barn, there are big posters on stands with squares where you can tap your credit card to donate in convenient increments of $5, $10, and $20. Near the exit, underneath the words “Merry Christmas,” made out in soft red lights, are several aggressively black laminate signs with big block highlighter orange text in all lowercase, failing to show the faintest attempt at grammar, saying brilliant and well thought out things like “475+ businesses waiting for you,” or “80 bars + restaurants 24 clothing stores 31 salons & spas and so much more!” or, succinctly, “everyone’s uptown”.

I couldn’t tell if this whole thing was cool or creative or capitalistic or just plain confused.

I turned around to go home, walking the outer edge of park, starting to string together all the sentences in my head that you just read, quite against my own will, keenly aware that I seem to be the kind of person that has to turn a evening walk through a fun, family-oriented, holiday-themed attraction that people worked hard to set up, into a cultural commentary about our materialism and surface dwelling and deteriorating values and how everything is a mirror, instead of just, as the mildly blasphemous voice in my head puts it, “enjoying the goddam lights”.

But, before I left, I passed a small shed tucked off to the side, dilapidated with age, peeling black shingles and old wooden boards, with warm yellow light spilling out of the front, pooling on the snow. Above was painted, “NATIVITY”. Inside the display were loose bits of hay and a collection of wooden figures, maybe fifteen in total. All about two feet tall and uncomfortably gaunt, hand-carved out of maple with solid walnut stands underneath, showing a varnish that seems to indicate age. Figures that would have taken an ungodly amount of time to make. There are eight lambs in different postures and positions, a donkey and a cow, two camels made of darker wood with their necks rearing, tongues flaring wildly out of their mouths (classic camel activity). Then, closer to the center, three shepherds, one with a sheep splayed out across his back in a kind of fireman’s carry, three wise men with rich robes and opulent, bejewelled crowns, then a careworn-looking man in rags standing behind a young woman kneeling, hands clasped in prayer, radiating piety and peace. And everyone’s eyes are transfixed on this small baby, lying belly up in a manger.

A few thoughts come into my head at this point. One is the historical inaccuracy of the scene, since Jesus, in all likelihood, was born in a cave. It also hits me that although the light show is packed, no one else is around. The nativity is tolerated as a relic but shoved off to the outside edge of the park, the part everyone walks by, when, if it wasn’t for this scene, at least the long-held belief this scene occurred and mattered, the light show wouldn’t even be there. I would call it irony but it’s something deeper and far more sad. And lastly, how preachy and presumptuous and annoying it will sound to try to talk about any of this in a way that is human and real.

This December I haven’t been blue exactly, but I have been feeling a few shades of gray. I haven’t been experiencing the festive gaiety and cheer that is stored up in November to be all spent in December because everyone north of the Mason-Dixon knows January to March are the dog-days of winter. Maybe it’s because I have two securities exams to write this week, maybe because snow keeps sailing down from the sky as a reminder of nature’s beauty and brutal indifference, maybe because I was politely side-stepped by a girl I liked, maybe because I’m immature enough to include that last line instead of pretending I’m cool and indifferent which is apparently more attractive, the temptation of art superseding almost all of my better judgment, or maybe it’s just the general busy bustling haze of day to day adult existence.

Last week I went into a shopping mall for the first time in four or five years, and the whole affair was a real wrist-slitter. Right inside the doors were big posted signs for a ‘Sensory-Friendly Santa Experience,’ and overplayed Christmas pop was piped through the loudspeakers and white high-powered LED pot lights beamed down like UFOs and every store and kiosk seemed obscenely bright and garish and fake with big signs saying things like, ‘Crave more’ or, ‘Happiness is a new pair of glasses’ or, my definite favourite, a coffee store with a big banner in self-serious serif, ‘Time to wake up’. And I couldn’t help but hear the voice of the understory in my ear saying, in its comically insistent tone, “Buy. Buy something. Did you buy something yet? Quick. Hurry. Don’t think. Come on, buy something already. Do it.2”

I hear complaints about how Christmas has gone capitalist and commercial and is stressful and demanding and expensive. And it is all those things. But that is only because we have torn out the underpinnings of the whole holiday from something numinous to something unnatural. You overspend when you lack values. You feel pressure to have the perfect day when you think that’s what the whole integrity of the holiday hinges on. Something you can do. Not something that has been done for you.

Or, for those who don’t get vertigo from the high expectations around the holiday, Christmas is shrunk down to an insignificant size, a mildly unordinary day. But a life stripped of genuine celebration seems, to me, inhuman.

But that isn’t the strangest part. The strangest part is that people still celebrate Christmas without believing any of it or caring to think why it exists and what exactly they’re doing when they celebrate it. That even people who disbelieve in the very origins of the holiday with a certain sense of pride, still drag a douglas fir into the middle of their living room and string lights around it and put boxes wrapped in fancy paper underneath and act like it’s all normal and completely compatible with their belief system. And the capitalist monster has sunk its hooks so deep into that single dedicated day in December that wanting and buying have become virtually indistinguishable from the holiday itself.

I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I just think it’s a little weird, when you think about it, what exactly we’re up to. I just think it shouldn’t be a surprise that if the current culture celebrates Christmas on borrowed and confused beliefs, the whole ordeal begins to feel borrowed and confused. Like it’s missing something.

The only evidence of the nativity scene I could find on the “WONDERS OF WINTER” website was a two-second pan shot of a grainy, awkward, side-angled photo with the words “Experience Christmas” flashed underneath, from their iMovie edited promo video set to an upbeat electric guitar version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”3.

Once you rip the religion out of Christmas, all you’re left with is a couple of extra days off work to eat too much and buy things for people and have people buy things for you and open things that you told people to buy for you and even sent them the URL so they don’t waste their money or don’t have to go back and return it, pretending to be surprised and delighted and enamoured with your new thing, forced to spend time with family you may or may not want to be around. There’s nothing solid and enduring to celebrate. If you are celebrating, it’s something like simple like quality time or something carnal like pleasure. Raw indulgence.

I can hardly remember what I got for Christmas last year4. And I remember everything.

In this secularized and sanitized rendition, Christmas becomes about the movement of money rather than the recognition of a miracle, about economic development rather than a witness to a light entering a dark world, a kind of pharmaceutical that momentarily speeds up the circulation of capital. I’m not commenting on what is or isn’t true. I’m just stating what is, if you really think about it.

And I should be studying for my securities exams or shovelling or gathering my courage but instead I’m sitting up at 10:30PM, well past my bedtime, listening to the cackling laugher from my roommate’s Christmas party going on in the living room, feeling like a fitting soundtrack to this whole charade, not editing sentences that don’t make perfect sense because the energy is there, because that’s how I first wrote it down before censoring myself, because this essay had to come out of me.

That night I stood there at the nativity, alone, shivering, feeling the sharp, cold air in my nose almost as a solid object, for a good thirty minutes. Staring. Waiting. Snow sailing down silently in large flakes, melting on the wet pavement. An old version of Silent Night crackling timidly from a small tin speaker into the darkness, sung by a woman who’s probably long dead. At one point, a small crowd gathered around, probably seeing someone look at something and figuring it must be cool, but dispersed when they realized it was just a nativity scene, not even worth taking a photo of with their smartphone. I stood there, in the wind and the cold, studying the faces of each figure, how the golden light pooled on the polished wood, picturing the fellow carving each piece, probably also long dead, imagining the amount of time it would have taken to chisel out every facial feature, as if he had something important to communicate, as if he was trying to reach me through the grave. Standing. Staring. Waiting for joy to strike me, for a familiar but forgotten peace to resound, a reminder of what this season is all about, refusing to budge until a light broke through the grayness. And then it did.

Walk where the light is,

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“Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

i.

I probably read for three or four hours a day. I read at a very slow, almost leisurely pace, often with a voice in my head like I’m reading to myself, underlining and making notes in the margins, rereading interesting or confusing parts two maybe three times, pausing to reflect, then staring off into space, then snapping back and starting to read again. I read in the morning before work, I read at lunch, at dinner, before going to bed, standing in line at the supermarket, waiting at the dentist’s office, and basically in any other cracks and quiet crevices of the day that I can find.

From sheer accumulation, I’ve read close to fifty books this year, including some big and difficult works like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, as well as longer studies on the writings of Stevenson and Chesterton and Hrabal and medieval literature and all the best essays of David Foster-Wallace1. Oh, and I’ve reread two-thirds of the Bible.

It is really extraordinary how much can get done in a year when you just show up day in and day out, sit down, and do something over and over again without worrying too much about progress or achievement or speed.

In some ways, I wish that number were lower. It’s evidence that I’m still reading too quickly and trying to cram too much into my head without enough time for digestion and digression. I don’t read to accumulate information exactly, but to let stories dawn on me, to let stories bathe my goals and dreams and fears, influence how I see the world and interface with reality. This is also why I mostly read fiction. Humans live in and live out stories.

The number of books one reads is a silly metric and doesn’t actually matter that much. A true education unfolds over a lifetime2.

The cumulative effect of this kind of deep reading is hard to overstate. My reading fertilizes and waters my writing, but it is also sown into all other areas of my life.

It is my belief that if you read seriously, especially in an age where real reading is uncommon, people start coming to you for guidance, people start asking you to work on interesting projects with them, people start bringing cool opportunities your way that you didn’t even know existed, wanting you to lead, to listen, to speak, to write books. People even start opening up about their guilt and mistakes and shame, sensing you can help bind up their broken heart. It’s like your brain is working on a wavelength that others want to be on.

Deep reading has a visceral quality to it. There is a kind of refinement that occurs, not only from the insight a good book can contain, but also the patient endurance that develops from sitting with something for a long time and giving it the space to unfold without running away when it gets hard.

In a world that wants everything distilled down to bullet points, the kinds of ideas that resist compression are increasingly forgotten and become increasingly valuable. What happens when we stop reading our children fairy tales? When everything gets squeezed, what slips between the cracks? What is lost in the lossyness3?

With a lifetime reading program, your sensitivity to story enhances. Your capacity to notice, to imagine. You quite literally begin to think and speak in a new language as the world takes on a new hue.

I’m sure that sounds cliche and annoying and mostly meaningless, like whenever we try to use words to describe something capital-T True, but I think the capacity to pay attention and consciously direct what you pay attention to is the single most valuable skill to develop in life. I know that’s a serious claim and I’m claiming it seriously. Attention is the beginning of devotion and what we love decides our life4.

In the early days of rekindling a love for reading that’s been smoldering since secondary school, I’d say to anchor on joy as much as possible. It shouldn’t feel like a chore or a weight or just another thing you have to do. It shouldn’t feel like a “should”!

There are books out there that will meet you where you are, that will tell you things about yourself you don’t already know, that will light up your insides. If you haven’t found them yet, keep looking.

In the past, I’ve gotten bogged down by trying to have a complex notetaking system or do intensive studies that generally made me like reading less.

There is no right way to read. People who share their complex reading systems fail or forget to mention that these systems started simple and emerged organically for them over time as they learned what worked and what didn’t, and cannot, by definition, be copied.

The most helpful thing (and I acknowledge this is boring and maybe disappointing) is to create enough quiet time in your days to ruminate and contemplate and reflect on what you read, letting it diffuse in your blood like liqueur, watching it play out in the theatre of your mind, noticing what other things in your brain it bumps into.

This is all to say: paper books are a rare window to escape a world of screens, to slip into a slower, stickier, more seductive mode of being. Text remains the loveliest medium.

ii.

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About once a week, I walk through an old graveyard near my house.

The graveyard is enclosed by a tall wrought iron fence, one with spiked spirals at the tops that twist upwards, just like you see in the movies. Its main entrance is through a narrow stone gate. Made of real stones, misshapen stones, stones that men would’ve dug up with a shovel and heaved out of the earth with their bare hands.

Past the gate, it’s quiet inside. Sleepy. Like a small and forgotten corner of a big, fast-moving world. The sound of cars from the adjoining suburban street is subdued into a muted moan, scarcely perceivable, soaked up by the cemetery’s open space. Squadrons of squirrels tear around the grass in circles. Maple trees blush red and orange, perhaps preempting their nakedness to come, and elm trees twist upward in hundred-year-old spirals, their bright green turned a dull silver. A slight breeze sways the branches, carrying the scent of damp earth, dry leaves, and pure ozone, and for a moment I swear I can hear the blood running in my ears, seizing through my arteries, pumping from my chest.

Anyway, like I was saying, about once a week, I walk through the graveyard. It’s more of a stroll, really. The slower I walk, the more the world opens up before me. Sometimes, I play a game where I try to find the oldest gravestone in the whole place. I’m at 1887 so far. Which isn’t that old, I’ll admit, but for Canada, it’s about as old as it gets. There might be a few that are older. The game isn’t finished yet. But with the real old gravestones, the ones where green-blue lichen crawls across their gray faces like five o’clock shadow, the letters are so faint I can hardly make them out, as if they’re some strange foreign language, ancient runes scratched into rock. Probably made faint from all those years of being beaten by wind and rain and snow and bleached by sun. All those years of being out there alone, standing steadfast and stolid, left there to endure the elements.

The reason I return, about once a week, is some strange mix of sadness and sweetness, a sense of remoteness that rises up from the soul like smoke, as if being in the presence of old things was a kind of secret and available drug. There’s this remembrance of what I am and what is waiting that becomes crystal clear in these moments.

What I am struck by as I walk—and I know I’m going to sound pretty sentimental and naive here, but it’s the honest truth—is the fact that each gravestone is not just a rock in the ground, but a life. Not that the rocks are actually alive or I hear them speaking to me or anything, but they are a marker, a stand-in, for what was once a living and breathing person. A baby who was born and held in their mother’s arms. A child who played outside in the summertime until dark, when the sodium lamp lights on their street fizzed on, one by one, and their dad yelled to come inside for bed. Who couldn’t sleep the night before Christmas. Who grew up and fell in love and cleaned the kitchen, who worried about money and how much they weighed and was probably scared to die and then did die.

I don’t mean to be dark or depressing. That’s not the point. Maybe I’m only thinking about this stuff because it’s November and the trees look like skeletons and everything outside is cold and hard and lifeless and the days are dark and getting darker and I can’t help but feel it’s all a testament to the truth that this world is filled with beautiful and precious things all careening toward decay.

Walking through the graveyard, I think to myself how, with only ten plain and inexpressive words, words that would make even Hemingway envious, every stone tells a story. Really, every stone tells more than a story because, like any living and breathing person, it refuses to be compacted into an idea, compressed into something that I can fit inside my head.

For instance, the other day I walked by the gravestone of a woman who came over from Ireland. Probably on one of those big iron steamboats. I noticed there was a third date, apart from birth and death, sometime in her 30s, with three words: “Saved by Grace.” Important enough, evidently, to be on her gravestone. Important enough for her friends and family and the people who buried her body to know this date, because she must have saved this date, kept it close for fifty years and refused to forget it, this specific day where something intense and meaningful and life-and-death-significant happened to her. Almost as if she saw it as a second birth.

Then, I walked by a stone with a whole family of four listed, almost grotesque in its tidy simplicity. And I wondered whether they were poor, buried on one plot because it was cheaper, and what the man did to put food on the table for his family—because that was the expectation back then—whether he sat in his chair by the fireplace late into the evenings, vacant eyes boring a hole in the worn floorboards, palms cold and clammy, a knot of nervous intensity in his stomach, not knowing where the money will come from that month. As I scanned down the names, I noticed their eldest son only made it to twenty, leaving his parents and younger sister to live on without him. And I thought about how brutal that must have been, the kind of thing you imagine only happens to other people. Those long silences at the dinner table and answering the same shallow questions about how they’re doing and what they did with the empty bedroom, whether they kept the door open or shut.

I can feel a nostalgia even for people I never knew.

After, I stopped to read the gravestone of a woman named Gloria, who lived well past eighty but lost her husband at sixty-five. And thought of all the late mornings she must’ve had drinking cold coffee at the kitchen table and the winter nights on one side of a bed that’s entirely too big and all the effort of trying to sew the shreds of her life back together into something worth living, pretending to be happy for the sake of her children, having lost a battle she never fought.

I know I’m projecting. I know most of this is untrue in a literal, historical sense. But that doesn’t trump or trivialize the fact that these people had deep and complex and full lives. Lives that began and then ended.

Sometimes my mind goes to all the families down the generations and across all the nations who loved each other within the four walls of their home. Who loved fiercely, loved uniquely. Families who played euchre every Saturday night after supper and celebrated birthdays with the same chocolate cake. Families who didn’t have much but romanced the ordinary. Who shared in the intricacies of love, with its nicknames and nagging, flaws you slowly learn to grow fond of, unspoken rituals that become almost holy in their familiarity. The conversational landscapes worn and well-trodden as fewer and fewer stones are left unturned. Families who are now all long gone and forgotten. As if they never were.

And I know too, with the kind of dread we feel for all the most certain things in life, there will come a tomorrow when I will no longer stumble down my street, walk through this graveyard, wander these dirt paths. A tomorrow when others will recall this thinking and feeling soul that I am with a vague, “I wonder what’s become of him?” I know that there is a day stamped for the last time my name will leave someone’s lips, never to be heard again. And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience—this universe I am to myself—will be just one less passerby, one less stranger on the street, and one more stone in the ground1.

That’s what flashes through my head as I bumble through the graveyard, subconsciously unconscious, barely looking where I am going.

Because here’s the thing about loss no one talks about: the worst part is not the grief, but the knowledge that the grief will pass. The worst part is that someone who we saw every day, someone whose very existence seemed fused to our own, someone we thought we’d never have to inhabit this planet without, will leave. Fade into a memory. Then, something less than that. And the sharp particulars of their lives will become dull and distant, and all we can do is strain to remember, barely holding onto the very basics of their humanity, the sound of their voice, their laugh, what colour their eyes were. As much as we replay the past and try to keep the pain alive, the numbness will lift and colour will slowly ache back into things. Life will go on.

But it’s brutal, you know. How life doesn’t stop. For anyone. How the world keeps moving forward, marching on, indifferent to whether we’re ready to move along with it. How we can’t hold on and keep living. How they wouldn’t want us to. How the beautiful things in our lives are entirely too brief and then all we are left with is a crummy gray rock in the ground in an old empty cemetery no one visits but squirrels, with letters that grow more and more faint until no one can read them anymore even if, about once a week, they stop and squint and try really hard because they’re playing a game to find the oldest date in the whole graveyard.

All you have are these memories that pile up, that collect dust, memories that feel fugitive as your past increasingly becomes a fiction, like a novel written by a stranger, even though you alone were a witness to it.

Yet as you sew yourself back together, stitch by stitch, in the early mornings and the late evenings, one day you suddenly understand you are not the same person who tore apart all those lifetimes ago. And, as much as you try to fight it, there is a love that bids you welcome. There is a love that runs after you, that pulls you out of the pit, that casts aside your chains and places you squarely in the freedom of space2. A love that enters through the very wounds you thought would never heal.

As I’m thinking all this, quite against my will, I resurface to realize a soft and purple twilight has settled on the cemetery, bathing everything in beauty.

I go to check the time but my watch is still stuck at 5:10, just like it was last time I checked it and the time before that, because it stopped ticking thirteen years ago right when my grandfather’s heart did, but that’s just the way I like it. I’m not saying it makes sense. All I’m saying is if you’re going to wear your grandfather’s watch—the one he always wore, the one that you’d never see him without, even when he was in the kitchen prepping the Christmas turkey and would swish around the house in his MEC hiking pants and smelt like fresh air and smoke, the very same metal that wrapped his wrist when it was still warm just like it wraps around mine—doesn’t it seem poetically sound that it’s not ticking?

I’m not going to pretend any of this is that practical or will change your life. Like all the people nowadays who try to force-feed you the ideas inside their head as if you are sick and they have the medicine. It’s not like you can live like this, with these deep and nebulous thoughts. It wouldn’t be very conducive to workplace performance. But I’m not sure what else to do with these untamed ideas of mine other than lay them at your feet, with the regality and mild guilt of a housecat with a dead bird on the doorstep.

Lost in thought, I walk home like a burning building, like a house on fire, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, drunk in reverie but sobered by a sweet and edifying sadness, listening to the symphony that is inside of me, utterly unable to discern the different instruments, walking by trees and squirrels and rocks, near bumping into things in my cloud of contemplation, watching the island of memory that I stand on erode with each passing day, knowing a paradise is only something that has been lost, every memory I have fizzling bright then fading softly and quietly inside me, Proust’s line echoing through my ears like a prophecy, bouncing between infinity and eternity. “Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”

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“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.”

— David Foster Wallace

About a year ago, I wrote an essay predicting the end of our extremely online era. Much to my surprise and horror, it went viral1.

I still stand behind the piece, but I realized that it’s more of an abstract argument than a practical guide. It’s missing next steps on what being less extremely online looks like in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence. That’s what I want to talk about in this essay2.

The surprising thing about the essay going viral was the fact that it’s not very good writing. Nowhere close to my best work. I wrote it in half-hour intervals over the span of four days, sitting on the floor of a cabin on the coast of Newfoundland, my laptop on life support from a solar panel battery. The finished product was mostly a first draft.

When people ask me, I say the same thing: its popularity was not from the quality of the writing but the resonance of the topic. It gestured toward a subconscious yearning we all seem to share. This urge to be less online. To be less performative, less see-through, less concerned with what others think of how we live, and more deeply involved and intimate with our own real local lives.

This longing is evident. Everywhere essays are going viral on how to stop doomscrolling on your gross little phone and instead live an intellectually rich life. How David Foster-Wallace predicted it all, this strange post-literate society we now find ourselves in, where we’re all lonely because we’re overconnected, and to cope everyone is numbing out. Nowadays, people literally just want to do things.

We live in a culture of watchers and appearers, of watchers and approvers, a culture where it feels distinctively hard to be a real human being. It’s like some sort of Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we are being watched, but we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as big brother, looking in at a projected image of everyone’s life, which isn’t that real but we, for some reason, pretend it is.

The other night, I got a flat tire on my bike, the fourth this year, and I had to take the city bus home in the dark. And as I stood on the bus, being rocked back and forth by potholes, I saw a girl across from me, Lebanese maybe, big bulky plastic headphones on, coat stuffed up to her ears, flicking through videos with an almost familiar ferocity. Videos of tall white women with perfect makeup, tall white women in sparkling red dresses, tall white women on beaches or in Italy. I saw a guy beside me with plastic headphones the size of arctic earmuffs, watching call of duty gameplay, while scrolling through videos about Trump and missile strikes, while changing videos every few seconds. And I saw another guy on the bus, beside the hypothetically Lebanese girl, watching a videos of a chef pulling pizzas out of a wood-fired oven, pizzas with genoa salami and sweet pepper and fennel, pizzas with prosciutto and arugula, pizzas with sausage and wild mushrooms, pizzas glistening, bewitched to a dark gold, while he pulled a second hard boiled egg out of a big crinkled Ziploc bag and began to peel it, without really looking, since he was watching his videos, fumbling his phone on his knees, surfing his phone across his knees, trying to hold the shell bits in one hand, but not really paying attention, since he was watching his videos, eggs shells cracking, egg shells splitting, egg shells falling all over floor. And I thought to myself, “This must be a metaphor or something”. And I looked down the dark bus, lit up by a blue glow, and everyone was doing the same thing. Necks bent at forty-five degrees, postured to the palm of their hand, lost in a world that is entirely not their own.

I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.

To reduce phone use, there are a few tactical things like deleting social media and email apps, deciding not to scroll during daylight, setting the screen to black and white, leaving it buried in a drawer or in another room, or even more extreme measures like downgrading to a dumb phone. But the reality is that without addressing the deeper, more metaphysical angst that drives this addiction, no tactics will make that much of a difference.

We are drowning in a river of short-form video. Where the allure isn’t even the content but the abundance, the infinitude of the flow. As the cultural conversation is dominated by what is fast and loud and immediately engaging, because those are the qualities screens reward, we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same thing for half an hour, to practice any kind of sustained attention. The ideas that resist compression are forgotten, cast aside, as everything has to be in bullet points, stripped of all excess verbiage. The faster things go, the more immersed we are in the flow, addicted to the speed, unwilling to grapple with the slowness of the real world around us, the more we forget to feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet. That deprivation makes itself felt in the body as a kind of dread.

Screens are reached at, mostly, as an escape. An escape from boredom, from anxiety, from an abating loneliness. Maybe, an escape from ourselves. But instead of causing consolation, screens only make us feel more distant and disconnected and lonely, as an apathy sets in that is increasingly abstract, a kind of stomach-level sadness3.

Yet the worst part, the part that can only be described as sinister, is that the only cure seems like more.

And so a sense of lostness plants in your gut. And the depression thickens. And the loneliness languishes into something with the promise of permanence, something you think you’ll just have to put up with for the rest of your life.

This, mind you, is the best definition of addiction I’ve come across: something that makes you feel terrible, but the only way to feel better, it seems, is to do it again.

I don’t think this feeling is an accident. It’s your conscience, whatever divine spark or higher knowing that is within, sensing it is making you sick, trying to tell you, some days screaming at you, to stop. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is boasting about AI increasing advertising efficiency, meaning they are using more advanced technology to abuse our attention spans and celebrating it as if it is somehow a good thing.

On his regular rants about ‘the Facebook,’ an old business professor I had in Navarra used to say, in his velvet Spanish accent, “If there’s no price, you are the price.” Entertainment’s main goal is not to entertain but to keep you so hooked, so riveted, that you can’t tear yourself away so advertisers can advertise. To create an anxiety that only promises relief by purchase. It’s a system that reduces the nobility of man to a cog in the capitalist machine, a unit of utility, something to sell to.

The goal isn’t entertainment. The goal isn’t even distraction. The goal is addiction4.

There was a Jesuit preacher, Anthony de Mello, who said if you’re suffering but not willing to do anything about it, you need to suffer more. Suffer until you get sick of your suffering. Which sounds harsh, but it’s true. The transformative moments in my life only came when the pain of staying the same finally became greater than the pain of changing. It wasn’t courage, perse, but a recognition of the cost of inaction.

My life today, I would say, is full of good things. I work a full-time job and write essays and read the Bible every morning, plus a few long and difficult books every month. I run and cycle and lift weights and train BJJ and serve at my church and volunteer at community events and lead a study group on Thursday nights. I bake bread and try new recipes and go on long meandering walks and get lost in the woods and stop by the farmers market early every Saturday morning and grow herbs and vegetables. I call family most days and have friends over for coffee and breakfasts and dinners most weeks. Sometimes I shoot my bow and go on long hiking and portaging trips and build wooden things here and there.

As I was thinking about this essay, sitting at my kitchen table with a coffee early in the morning, waiting on the sun, I wanted to take that paragraph out because I thought it sounded boasty and would make people not like me. But the point is not about my life, but that you can get an astonishing amount done when you throw away your TV and get off your phone. Not that getting things done is the purpose of life, but rather that there are so many cool and interesting things worth doing.

Most of a good life is simply refusing to do what is bad.

I have no social media apps, not even Substack, follow basically no news, listen to zero podcasts, and don’t have any streaming services. My information diet comes almost entirely from books. This is partly because I am audacious with the amount I want to read and the only way I can accomplish this is if I cut everything else out. But the real reason is because the flood of information on the internet made me feel anxious and incapable and directionless and overwhelmed. So I stopped.

With constant stimulation, you never have time to hear your thoughts or feel your feelings. In a world afraid of quiet, it is easy to get lost. Isn’t there a line about that? About how all of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone with himself?

Because there is no space for your conscience to talk to you, to tell you things you don’t know about yourself. There is no space to ask questions about yourself, inquire of yourself, interrogate yourself, wanting to know your own deepest secrets, the things you dislike so much you don’t even think about anymore. There is no space to accuse yourself like a judge and defend yourself like a jury and, in this roundabout, back-and-forth way, arrive at the meaning of your life.

I have watched people try and fail because they were not expecting a fight.

And that’s the thing: this is a fight. It has to be. After years stuck in the spin-cycle of dopamine, you have to expect the first few weeks to feel like withdrawal. Addictions are always crucifying to quit.

At the start, when you delete social media and throw away your TV and put your iPhone deep in a drawer, you will feel an anxious itch, a habitual twitch to check notifications. Getting off a screen, if you’re anything like me, will force you to confront some painful realities that constant distraction has allowed you to avoid. You will be forced to face some unpleasant things you’d rather not face. Maybe you can’t stand being alone. Maybe you don’t have any hobbies. Maybe you let your friendships atrophy, or haven’t had a real conversation with your brother in years, or don’t actually care about your job that much. Maybe boredom feels like a kind of broken promise, one you thought you’d never have to face.

There is pain in sitting and sorting through these emotions. But, and this I promise, there is joy and freedom and life to its fullest on the other side. Not a fake, superficial happiness but a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture, one that feels like a secret you can keep from the world.

I don’t think it’s extreme to say the less you’re on a screen the happier and healthier you will feel. It’s like stepping out of artificial office light into the warmth of the sun. Even some of the most spiritual people I know said they found more peace from deleting Twitter than from years of intense meditation.

People seem very reluctant to make tradeoffs in life. You can have your peace or you can have instagram. You probably cannot have both. At least, if that were true, which would you choose? It’s something worth thinking about.

People argue they use social media to keep in touch with family and friends. Luckily, there is something called email and the telephone. It is only in two-way mediums, where we must contend with the reality of another person, that real relationship forms and grows. Passive one-way consumption of someone’s life only creates the illusion of relationship, without any of the real effort it requires. As if we can have all of the closeness with none of the cost.

I tend to think if someone isn’t important enough for me to actively keep in touch with (take ten seconds to send a text!), they cannot be important enough to passively keep tabs on. There’s also the fact that social media isn’t really used as a social network, but as a way to watch videos made by strangers. Social media isn’t even social anymore5.

The biggest problem is that you cannot just rip out three or four hours of your day you used to spend on a screen and expect to get along fine. You have to replace the online stuff with something else. Ideally, something better.

A few suggestions:

• Read a book. You can read more than you think and it’s worth it to try. If you’re a seasoned reader, try something long and difficult, something that stretches you. Don Quixote, War and Peace, or The Count of Monte Cristo are all excellent. Or, if you’re feeling really adventurous, the Bible. I’ve learned that reading is an endurance sport. The first time I tried to seriously read again, it felt like the first time I went for a run: awkward and painful and shorter than I would have hoped. But with love and patience, it grows. I would not recommend a new runner to run a marathon, nor a new reader to pick up War and Peace. Just read. Read anything. Read fairy tales, read instruction manuals, read Calvin and Hobbes. Read what you love until you love to read6.

• Make something. It can be bad. But try making something. Choose something useful and worth doing. As you shape it, it will shape you. Carve a kitchen spoon, reupholster a chair, make a bookshelf, or a side table. Pick up a dresser off the side of the road and refinish it. These things aren’t that hard and it’s worth it to try.

• Draw or paint. By trying to draw something, you realize that reality has a surprising amount of detail. Most goes unnoticed. Much of drawing is staring at one thing for a very long time, until it comes alive. Writing is the same.

• Enjoy music. Stretch out on the couch and listen to a whole album, start to finish, without doing anything else but listening.

• Get to know your neighbours. Everyone wants community, but no one wants to talk to their neighbour. The Portuguese woman who smokes cigarettes on the street corner every morning, the old guy who’s always out in his garden on his hands and knees, the grouchy man with the smiling golden retriever. “Online community” is an oxymoron. Smooth and shiny frictionless Zoom rooms where everyone agrees with everything you say is not only inhuman, it’s boring. It is only the diversity that exists in community, the people who are not like us, that makes it real and true and human.

• Stare off into space. When’s the last time you were bored? When you watched clouds pass and saw their shapes, dogs and castles and battleships? When’s the last time you looked at the stars? This kind of idle, wandering time will also make you more creative. Much of creativity comes from the ability to stare at a wall for extended periods.

• Go outside. I think one of the reasons we have grown distant from the divine and distant from ourselves is because we are so removed from the natural world. Most of my problems are solved, or start to solve themselves, when I touch grass.

• Write letters. I read somewhere that Victorians used to spend 1-3 hours a night reading and replying to letters. There is a certain feeling to writing at length, where you can structure your thoughts and articulate feelings and develop a level of detail, that is hard to replace. Plus, people are delighted to receive a letter in the mail.

• Host dinners. Everyone is as busy as they’ve ever been, but everyone eats dinner.

• Sleep. Going to bed before 9pm for a full night’s rest makes you feel like royalty.

There is something simple and good about a more analog existence. An alluring quality that cannot be explained away. Playing cards after dinner instead of watching TV. Reading on crisp autumn afternoons instead of mindlessly scrolling. Filling your home with books and journals and pens and stamps, not LED things that beep at you.

If you are immune to boredom, if you can get drunk staring into the flames of a fire, or lost in reverie walking by yellow-lit windows, or experience a secret pleasure from staring into space, if you can be by yourself but not lonely, simply alone, then you’ve got it. You have found the sword with which the world becomes your oyster.

As you pull yourself away, as the chains you never saw come crashing to the floor, you learn things. You learn books can tell you things about yourself you don’t know. You learn concentrating on anything is very hard work. You learn what you pay attention to is the job of a lifetime, a job that never ends, a job that quite literally shapes your life because all your life is, you realize, is a story you tell yourself about living.

Inside each of us is something infinite, something eternal, something that someone else can only see a tiny fraction of, even if we spend a lifetime trying to show them. And even if you tried to explain, all this inside you, all that flashes through you, to me, it’s just words. Clumsy words that confine you, clumsy words that grope like a blind man in the dark, knocking over furniture, for the shape, even just the outline, of something fast and fractaled and huge and hopelessly interconnected.

There is so much inside that we can never show another. Because we know this, because we know what people see is never us, but only a part, a tiny and inadequate part, we expend so much energy trying to manage the part that they do see. That will probably never change. We will probably spend our lives being squeezed through a tiny keyhole, and trying to squeeze others through tiny keyholes.

But if there is any way, any hope, of feeling seen it will not be found on a screen but in the real relationships we find ourselves in. Those difficult, lumpy, sometimes annoying things that take constant work and care and attention to keep alive.

Only through the discipline of tending to the relationships that have been placed in our lives, like they’re a garden, like they’re an infant in need of our care, can we begin to poke our fingers through the mask that the other wears and see the broken and hidden things that wake compassion, that make our broken and hidden things seem not so broken and not so in need of being hidden.

That’s the only place, really, where love can grow: in between the cracks in the mask.

Real heroism is not found in the headlines but is only the result of minutes, hours, weeks, and years of exercising a careful and judicious sincerity, often with no one there to see or applaud. This really important kind of freedom involves discipline, doing what is difficult, being obedient to that still, small voice inside your head that knows exactly what you must do and exactly when you’re not doing it.

At the end of the day, the question everyone must answer is how much they want their life to be their own.

It is already late enough.

Write you again soon,

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Related reading:

In his journal, Thomas Merton played a game where he would think back to where he was a year ago, write out what he could remember, then keep going back, year by year, details becoming embarrassingly sparse, until his memory failed him or it got too painful.

It is only by exercising memory, like a kind of muscle, by blowing off the dust that settles and covers everything, that we keep the road of our lives open into the past.

Read more

1.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that a writer, or any artist really, is professionally detached from life.

When John Steinbeck was writing his masterpiece, East of Eden, he was at his desk before 8am, Monday to Friday. With the same blue-lined notebook and a long, sharp pencil, he began at the top of a fresh page on the left side, only the left, writing a letter to his friend and editor Pat Covici as a kind of warm-up before getting into the more serious work of the novel. He wrote a letter a day until the first draft was finished, 276 days later.

One of the reasons I like reading old letters and diaries is that people censor themselves less than if they were writing to an audience. They are not trying to sound impressive or worrying whether their thoughts are interesting, but rather writing clear and hard about what they want to say. Using plain language to put their mind, as it is, on the page. In a strange way, this often makes for good writing. The lack of rhythm becomes its own kind of rhythm, the casualness creating a sense of comfort.

Steinbeck talks about normal human things. Not sleeping well the night before, worrying about his writing being bad, getting sick, trying to lose a couple pounds for the summer, fretting over his sons. One part that stuck in my mind, even months later, is when Steinbeck talks about the strain that writing puts on his marriage and home life. "I help with what I can but I am very thoughtless—very. My mind goes mooning away. I never get very far from my book. And this must get pretty tiresome. I'm sure it does. I guess a writer is only half a man as far as a woman is concerned."

That last line especially: A writer is only half a man as far as a woman is concerned.

It may sound like Steinbeck is being dramatic but I don't think that is the case. To create great art, it requires all of you. A certain primitive absorption that can come off as distant or disinterested, but can only be properly understood as intense.

Maybe I need to explain.

2.

The story I really wanted to tell in this essay is about a summer I spent with a girl from Germany while I was traveling. I would come by her cabin in the mornings and she would make coffee and I would read parts of poems and listen to her stories about back home, how she was hurt and didn't know if she would heal. It was never romantic, but it was domestic. We argued sometimes, but we loved each other, I think, the way humans are supposed to love each other.

Anyway, after we had spent about a month together, I remember she found my writing. I must've told her about it. I remember she was quiet for a few days. And I remember when it all came out, one bright morning, as I sat on the floor of her cabin in my usual spot—back against the wall, book and pen in hand, eyes soft, lost in the pattern in the rug—how upset she was that I had this whole other side to me that she couldn't see and how she felt like she barely knew me, unable to reconcile the writer who seems to drink life down to the dregs with the man who was often somewhere far away.

I remember feeling guilty and bad. Like a fraud. Alarmed at the impossibility of ignoring this discontinuity, this compartmentalization of self, I didn't know if I could ever resolve.

3.

Henry James once said that to be an artist is to be someone upon whom nothing is lost.

Writing, like any art form, is crafted patterns of information. Less about the words, more about what happens to your mind, how your consciousness temporarily reshapes or permanently restructures, when you attend to the words. To read well is to let the world dawn on you.

Writers, to cultivate the kind of observational awareness that sees patterns where others see chaos, must inhabit a strange adjacency to experience. Removed from the action, two feet securely on the sidelines, wistful from being left out, but mesmerized from looking in. As if they feel life, the burn of being, most when watching.

One must have devotion to be an artist and there is no way of side-stepping the cost.

The thing is, on this road it's not hard to begin to see life as a distraction from art. Engaging in an experience that demands to be left unanalyzed or cannot be compressed into a sensible string of words seems frivolous, even threatening.

For most of my adult life, I worried I would become the kind of man "who would leave his wife and child because / they made noise in his study"1. That maybe I could write these simple and quiet words and touch people's lives, being a means to peace that I myself do not feel, but every morning old anxieties would return and I'd be as volatile and paralyzed as ever. Lost in a kind of isolation that only enables the intensity. Blooming in loneliness.

There is nothing more difficult to escape than a neurosis that has become useful to us.

If the human condition is one of solitary confinement, like Simone Weil once said, a writer is one who can't stop staring at the walls of their cell. They savour, in a cruel, self-sacrificial kind of way, standing numb and apart from others. Unsure what is more real, the world or their words. Unsure which is worth their attention and, therefore, their devotion. Both deeply seized by existence and deeply alienated from it.

But this kind of emotional reserve is a reservoir, a way to go deep inside, to pour color and feeling onto the page. Their art becomes a silhouette of all they fail to feel in normal human experience, as vacancy turns to pain, and pain turns to power. I think it was Annie Dillard who said a writer's life is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation.

The paradox is that art can compromise the well of experience it draws from. This is why artists, like the religious, can try to manufacture intensity, create and claim distance. To burn themselves awake. To feel something beyond the mildness with which they drift through their days, the monotonous hum of daily existence.

4.

People always tell me that I am a deep thinker. I never know what to say because I don't think my thinking is deep, it's just how I think. I can't climb into someone else’s consciousness to compare and contrast the texture of our thoughts. But the cost of this depth, perhaps, is that the ideas I communicate in conversation are often a fraction of the meaning and nuance I experience in my mind. (I am also a slow thinker and tend to replay conversations afterward for all the dumb stuff I said and all the cool stuff I should have said instead). That is why I write. To unravel. To sketch the fleeting and firing neurons in my brain. But writing feels into and feeds that depth, my tendency to “intellectualize stuff,” and the space between us grows.

There are these inescapable tensions: between writing and the people I love, between writing and my responsibility to serve others, between writing and a life that is creased and close and well-lived. Writing itself is a weird tension. One between obligation and joy. It is somehow both.

There is a safety in intellectualism. A naivety, almost. I can gesture toward grief, muse about how to have a good marriage, even describe how I will face death, but it is all safely remote from me, still abstract and impersonal, lacking in any sharp edges. I imagine all the young poets who valorized death felt quite different when they were staring into its cold, gray eyes.

Not to mention, there is the whole problem of intellectual pride. The ego getting involved, which it unavoidably does. Pride is the life of the art, but the death of the artist.

It's not hard to get wrapped up in wanting people to like me and admire me and think I'm a good writer. To care about how many likes my essays get, not as a means of happiness but as a shield from despair. If I'm not careful, my writing becomes basically about showing off, trying to get people to think I'm good. Trying to present myself in a way that I imagine will be interesting and impressive and maximally likeable. But the thing is, this kind of attempted seduction is exhausting, in the way all inauthentic things are, and it submerges me in the extreme unpleasantness of my own vanity.

Maybe I'm scared of what parts of me writing indulges. Maybe they are not all good parts. I have grown less interested in the self, feeding the parts of me that want to feel unique or smart or whatever.

5.

"Art, like religious devotion, either adds life or steals it. It is never neutral. Either it impels one back toward life or it is merely one more means of keeping life at arm's length".

— Christian Wiman

And so I wonder to what extent writing removes me from life. I've always had the feeling that art is sacrifice, in every sense of the word. I've always known it ends up consuming its creator, in both senses of the saying.

I've begun to believe that anything that abstracts us from the physical world is evil and anything that sends us deeper into the current reality we inhabit is good. These aren't categories alone, like art is evil and walking is good, but filters within categories. Whether it's art or religion or relationships, the unifying measure of goodness is whether it calls you to more fully inhabit, and therefore affirm, reality.

Perhaps true art, like true religious experience, propels you back toward the world and communion with others, not more deeply within yourself. It points you outward, in a sweet sort of agony, toward the nearness of the distant. Of the presence colliding with the absence.

And do not be fooled. It is not easy to love reality.

6.

These days, it seems I have lost the ability to write. The connection I had once experienced between the word and the world has grown faint. Estranged. I feel like I have little to say, or worth saying. Even many of the things I read nowadays feel circular, pointless.

There are things more important than self-knowledge.

And so I feel like I'm watching something I loved die in my arms and staring blankly. I find myself in this liminal space where something old is dying and something new is being born, but neck deep in the stark, sullen reality that both death and birth are disorienting. And intensely painful.

What I hope is happening in this confusing transition is that it's my vanity being crucified. My dependence on writing to make me feel significant and redeemed.

7.

A friend emailed the other day asking what makes me want to keep writing. I thought about it all morning and my honest answer was: I don't know.

Earlier this year, I tried to only write on weekends. But a month later, before I realized what had happened, there I was: 5:30am, six days a week, at my desk, writing.

When I wasn't writing, a mysterious ache began to mount inside my brain and devour my days. Ideas pressured through the seams of me, until they began to spill out into words and sentences I had to scrawl down. It's as if I am always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of my life that grows intensely unpleasant when I ignore it, because it demands the attention I am giving to other things.

I often return to Rilke's advice to a young poet: the only good reason to write is necessity. As in, the need to create has spread its roots to the very depths of your heart that existence itself would be colorless if you were forbidden. As in, you will probably die for it but certainly die without it.

This is all to say, writing is complicated and confusing, not to mention hard. It often looms over me more than I stand above it, yet it's a love I can't and maybe won't ever be able to shake.

All I know is that when life is thriving in me, I want nothing more than to go beyond it. In rare moments of religious feeling, how much I think of myself feels like a sickness that I am appalled by; a kind of cancer that I want nothing more than to escape.

I'm sure you can tell there is no clear or coherent conclusion, no triumphal declaration to change, or even a mild decision. This is life, the messiness on the page. It's contradictory and large. Full of multitudes2.

Your humble and obedient friend,

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“I sit beside the fire and think

of all that I have seen

of meadow-flowers and butterflies

in summers that have been;

...

I sit beside the fire and think

of people long ago

and people who will see a world

that I shall never know.”

— JRR Tolkien

I spent two weeks this summer back on the Hill in Newfoundland, ten acres of untamed land running along the Atlantic, a twenty minute hike from the closest road. Every morning, I'd wake early, the sky still dressed in a blue and gritty light, visit the sheep, then make coffee, sit outside, and think. Sometimes, I’d just sit. Watching the day grow bright. The vista of ocean and sky surrounding. The varieties of quiet. In open space, I am able to lift the guardrails of reason and productivity that pen in the modern mind and let my thoughts roam, untethered.

Thinking of the future is perhaps my favorite hobby. It is a kind of visceral pleasure that is hard to put into words. I know everything I said about the danger of falling in love with overly-architected, romantic visions because life may have other plans and won't turn out as I think, blah blah blah. In practice, I am not so sure I was right. In practice, romantic visions are the genesis of all quests and adventures. The hero sets out to save the world.

It's worth thinking about how the stories we love start like this. A grand, almost impossible ambition that seems doomed to failure, rather than a "iterating series of low risk experiments".

In the desire to be present, we can forget the presence of desire. In other words, we can forget that goals and dreams, even outlandish ones—maybe especially outlandish ones—are an essential part of a vital existence. “There is a version of yourself ten years from now that is begging this version of yourself to enjoy where you are currently just a little bit more”. True, but I would say the same of the inverse: “There is a version of yourself in ten years that is glad you moved from where you once were.”

~~~

Dreaming comes and goes in my life like a dew. Some mornings I wake and dreams are there, glistening. Other days, they are burned away by the midday sun of anxieties, office efficiency, and busyness. But when I am at my most vigorous, I am reckless in reverie. I think often of the future, what I want to build and do, and who I want to do it with. I keep a long list of projects and plans and lofty ideas, goals that practically spill out of my pockets, more than I could ever reasonably accomplish.

I started to think and plan about what job I wanted over a year before I could start work, not sure if I would keep writing and wandering the world. Only through this slow, patient gestation period of pondering how my past points towards my future did I discover work that works for me. I dreamt of planting roots for two years before settling somewhere. I wrote about familiarity and belonging while I was in an unfamiliar country that I didn't feel I belonged in. Now, after planting roots in a place and beginning to cultivate a community, I find happiness visits more often. I do not wish to be somewhere else again.

In general, I would say my life now works quite well for me. It took years to get here, crashing and burning through different lives that didn't work so well for me, but the success I’ve had I attribute to this kind of long-distance thinking. To casting my gaze as far ahead as I can, contemplating five, ten, even twenty years out on what I want to build and do in my life. Things important, but not urgent.

These are the dialect of dreams I cherish most: those that sit long in the heart, being heated and shaped, revisited for strength and hope, waiting for when they can be brought to fruition. Until then, out of a kind of fidelity to my future self, I remain faithful to what may someday be.

Mind you, it is easy to become estranged from my vision unless I make an effort to continually remember. Man is a forgetful creature.

~~~

There is the enduring fear that none of it will come true. That I will fail to extricate myself from the numbing parts of reality I am currently beholden to, and find myself stuck, dreams once close now feeling far and fugitive. What if there is no old stone home and wild roses? No late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair1? No dark winter mornings, restarting the wood stove and watching the flames, the room filled with an almost cellular stillness? What if I run into reality and reality wins? What if I fold? Worse, what if I settle? What if the vision cracks and my hands are not calloused enough to caress the broken pieces?

Of course, there is a danger in trying to force my plans and refusing to reimagine my life when new information is discovered. If there's one thing literature is clear about, it's the tragedy of living in the past. Being a dreamer who inhabits only the surface of the world. Yet I've come to think of it less as exerting my will, and more as creating a clearing for possibility. Leaving room to grow, perhaps. This requires a posture of humility (because what the hell do I know), but also taking my plans seriously, as if reality is a malleable thing and I could have what I wanted if I worked for it.

This is the paradox of planning, although I’m suspicious of something much larger at play, too: how to be open-handed and close-handed at the same time. Open to life as it emerges, open to surprise, but also closed enough to take what’s in front of me and run with it. Balancing both truths that what I want will neither fall into my lap, but also will not succumb to the cold calculus of reason and design.

The more I move toward my goals, however small the steps, the more I have licence to dream2. Desire must always be accompanied by action, or it languishes into a kind of longing that makes the heart sick.

~~~

There remains a certain beauty to dreaming that I think can rarely be found or felt in actual lived experience. There is a glory in the yellow lit windows on a crisp October evening walk, as long as you remember it is only real on the outside. There is a kind of sweetness in the not having. In yearning for what may never be had, or what must be unreasonably waited for. As long as these moments are held lightly, it is when I feel the burn of being most.

Marilynne Robinson:

"For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweet as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? For to wish a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

Naturally, this shade of sentiment dissipates as soon as you have. That question has sat heavy on my heart these days: Can I learn to love the waiting? Can I, even, be moved to praise it?

For I believe that all will be made whole. It is only a matter of when.

Although I have no social media apps, not even Substack, I am fond of Pinterest. It is full of images of a life romanticized. Baking cookies on a rainy day, dirt roads and berry stains, a clattering coffee shop in Paris with a dog-eared copy of Proust. I continue to collect images that shape my vision of the life I want to create, the home I want to live in, the family I want to build. What the shape of romance is, to me.

May you always look forward,

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How I wrote this essay (My writing process)

This essay started as a stream-of-consciousness note I typed out in twenty seconds one morning at work.

Usually, my essays start with some abstract idea, but I must remind myself that it has to be paired with a personal story or no one will find it interesting (including me!)

Then, remembering the idea was similar to some cutting-room-floor material I had kept from earlier this year, I printed out my old notes and looked for anything interesting.

With my seed of an idea and some notes, I wrote out a first draft by hand.

The initial idea wasn’t on long-distance thinking but rather on romanticizing life. “I'm starting to think romanticizing life will actually make it better.”

But by this point, I realized the essay I was writing was really about dreaming and thinking into the future (which I should have realized since I’ve been talking about it in conversations). I cut away the parts that didn’t fit with the new direction of the piece.

With a fancy new title, I went through and edited. Again by hand.

Now with a decent rough draft, I used a voice transcription software (Otter.Ai) to get it into text, then did another edit. Here I was reminded of a few quotes I had come across that fit nicely (as well as other quotes I loved that sadly did not).

You can tell I have access to a printer since then I printed out the updated manuscript, and did another two passes of edits by hand, before updating the document and doing another three or four or six read-throughs, reshuffling and tweaking, wanting it to sound pleasant and good.

And that is roughly how you got the essay you now hold in your hands.

Of course, this does not count all the long walks and morning runs with nothing but my thoughts, or waking up in the middle of the night, racing to write a new idea down before it leaves me, but that is what a writer lives for.

I sought the Lord, and he answered me.

— Psalm 34:4a

Why I Am Christian Again

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A few months ago, I was baptized.

For the second time, technically. But the first time, I was a baby without much of a say in the matter.

When Mark Twain was asked whether he believed in infant baptism, he replied, "Believe in it? I've seen it." What I realized, only after I finished writing you this, is that Twain's comment captures the reason I returned to faith: I believe in it because I've seen it.

When you get to the end of this letter, maybe that will make sense.

I didn't want to write this, but I couldn’t help not writing it. It's all I've been able to think about. Any quiet moment of my day—biking to work or washing dishes or walking through the woods—it’s the gravitational mass all my thoughts orbit. It’s the thing that has filled the pages of three notebooks, set off the sparks of a thousand thoughts. Writing anything else has felt trivial in comparison.

Sometimes I’m not sure faith can be talked about, never mind written about. Whenever I wade deep enough into these thoughts, and approach anything approximately true, words begin to fail. But writing is the only way I know to make sense of my head and let you into my world.

Talking about this stuff is confusing and hard and, not to mention, scary. We live in a time of religious liberty where, in theory, everybody is free to discuss religion but, in practice, no one is allowed to mention it. Most of my friends would think I'm weird or violently out of touch if I said I believe in God. But, despite the temptation, it’s not something I want to hide.

It’s impossible to share intimacy with someone who doesn’t see the biggest parts of you.

Four years ago, when I told my last girlfriend I wanted to read the Bible, she said she'd break up with me if I became a Christian. Perhaps that's what I'm afraid of, when it comes down to it. Somewhere along the path of life, we’ll look up from our feet and realize we’re far away.

Separation rarely looks like a hard, clean cut. Separation, in reality, looks like a slow distancing, as cracks become canyons we can no longer traverse; too weak to be felt, until it is too strong to reverse.

I read somewhere that understanding is the basis of love. We need to understand people in order to love them. Or, we could love almost anyone if we understood them. That’s why love is an action: because understanding is an action. It takes effort and time to understand someone, a kind of sustained tenacity, but it never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.

I'm writing this because I want to build a bridge between us. I want to explain how I got here. I want you to see the reason behind it and where reason fails. And hopefully, out of that understanding, a deeper love will grow.

This letter is long-winded and hastily edited and writing it nearly killed me. It’s tricky to translate the slowly layered levels of sediment we accumulate in life into a cohesive narrative. It’s hard to know when something ends and another begins. If I had more time I would’ve written something shorter, but defining its scope has been like trying to put a boundary around my brain. Any line I draw turns out to be merely a mark in the sand, and then I look up and smile because I'm sitting in the Sahara.

It cannot be a defence of the faith, only the story of how I came to believe it. And like any story, it will contain only the most memorable parts, with most of the mundane day-to-day left out, which is always where the most meaningful work gets done.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff for the last four years, and pretty intensely for the last two. My mind is a big melting pot of books and letters and sermons and dreams and late-night conversations, all swirling around, infusing my blood and coursing through my veins. I can't quite tell anymore which of my thoughts came from where.

Reading this may feel like getting hit over the head with my brain. That is somewhat the point. To stretch reason until it snaps. To crowd out the head until we are forced into the heart. I am trying to show how three-dimensional chess flattens into a two-dimensional cross. If that doesn’t make sense, now you’re getting it.

Every night I go to bed consumed by these words, wanting to quit, but every morning I wake up with enough courage to continue. I am nervous of the masses and terrified of the mob, but ultimately I’m writing this for you.

Whenever I get cold feet, I come back to that line: it’s impossible to share intimacy with someone who doesn’t see the biggest parts of you.

After all, it is only courage if you are afraid.

I'm spending it all, losing it all, giving it all, gambling it all, laying everything out. Nothing is hoarded and nothing is held back. Like the poor widow in the temple, I hope to make the smallest of contributions, knowing it is everything I have.

And I'm consoled by the fact that no matter how much I labour, it's always going to be hideous compared to the image I have in my head.

The hardest thing is to start. Really, where did it all begin... Maybe from the day we met? Or nine months ago, when I wrote the first draft, which I've now rewritten four, maybe five, times? Maybe two years ago, when I started compiling fragments and notes, sensing something was on the horizon? Or four years ago, when I read that first essay about faith? Maybe it only really began in the last three months, writing every morning from 5 to 7am before work, trying to sift through the rubble of words for something that makes sense.

But, at the risk of cliché, the correct answer is: my whole life. My whole life has led me here. Which, funnily, is close to the day we met. When I was five days old and Mom took me home from the hospital and put me on your lap on the living room couch and you looked down at me, confused and serious and full of devotion.

The crazy thing is, I started writing this before I fully believed. It's like I knew what was coming, even though I wasn't there yet. Meaning, this letter is not a remembrance of things past, nor a podium to preach on, but a living document that I wrestled with God in as I continued to draw closer to Him.

I will start at the beginning. I’m going to tell the truth, as best as I know how to tell it.

Let’s hope I don’t say anything heretical.

From early childhood, I have dim and distant memories of St. Paul's on the Hill. Images that crackle and flicker in my mind—I can only hold them there a moment or two—now consigned to the imperfect and unstable domain of memory.

I remember how the stained glass windows glowed in the morning. I remember the tapestries of fish and nets that hung on austere white walls. I remember the smell of soup from the kitchen and old carpet in the lobby. The memory of scent is very rich. I remember VHS tapes of Veggie Tales and the cover of a book we read in Sunday school: God as a bald man in his seventies with a white beard and huge outstretched hands, hovering above the clouds. For some reason, only his torso was shown. Perhaps it's blasphemous to draw God’s legs. And I remember when the Shaw's grandmother got sick and, at five years old, you took it upon yourself to pray for her every night until she passed.

When we got older, cynicism snuck in. It was easy and fun to ridicule the nonsense they tried to sell us. That two of every animal in creation boarded a boat, or that some man floating in the sky is king of the universe.

When I was about the size of a fire hydrant, we stopped attending church as a family. At the time, I didn't think anything of it. After all, hockey was on Sunday mornings.

From that point through adolescence and early university, I placed religion in a big dusty cardboard box marked "irrelevant" and moved on. If you asked me then, I probably would have told you Christians were absurd, outdated. Blind believers, unable to come to grips with the realities of science and the modern world. And I would have been confident and assured in that answer, thinking I knew better.

It wasn't until the summer after I turned twenty that any of this resurfaced.

At the time, I was reading Mary Oliver and Viktor Frankl and Rainer Maria Rilke. They kept referencing the Psalms and using that word: "God". I remember sitting on a sunny park bench in Trinity Bellwoods, closing my dog-eared copy of Devotions, opening my journal and writing, "Why does God keep showing up?" I didn't get how these brilliant writers could seriously believe in a man in the sky. Yet, there they were, writing about the transcendent with the humility of a child.

My idea of God said a lot more about me than it did about Him.

That year, God whispered to me through nature, spoke to me through poetry, but shouted to me through pain. Midway through university, I was working from 7 in the morning to 10 at night, just to fuel my burning desire to get ahead, to be the best, all while ignoring family and my health and anyone who couldn't help me get what I wanted. I saw the world as competition and a career as something to conquer. Whenever I wasn’t working, I’d turn to drugs and alcohol to help me forget.

Once, in a job application, I felt I had to lie about my GPA, saying it was a 11.8/12.0 when it was only an 11.6, then became a nervous wreck for a good two months afterward, convinced I was on the verge of being found out.

I was friendly and functional on the surface, but below I was thrashing my legs just to tread water. Then the flood would come. Always unannounced. And I would be dragged under, drowned in anxiety, tossed and turned until I forgot which way was up. It took a few weeks to resurface. Sometimes months.

Once I told Mom I was never lucky enough to hit rock bottom, for things to really fall apart but then get better. Rather I was being dragged along a few feet above the bottom. Low enough for my life to hurt, but okay enough to stay that way.

I didn't think anything would change. I didn't see how it could. That's the thing about darkness; it makes you forget there's ever been anything but.

A part of me enjoyed playing the victim. A part of me savored the rotten luxury of being lost. I took pride in my hurt, it made me feel large and tragic. Despair is only an extreme of self-love.

The funny thing is, on paper, I was successful.

I was on the most prestigious clubs on campus, the ones that wear special jackets. I had my top choice of internship. I had a girlfriend and a close circle of friends. At 20, I was working at a hedge fund on the 51st floor of a bank building in Toronto, where I was making as much money as Dad. I graduated in the top 1% of my class, then went off to travel the world and work on a NYT best-selling book and read and write, and finally hit that glorious 1,000 subscriber mark on Substack and then a piece I wrote went viral and 1,000 turned to 5,000, and then more.

But none of it mattered. Not in any ultimate, enduring sense. None of it made an ounce of difference in how meaningful my life felt. Each milestone quickly became mundane and the restlessness remained.

I reached the heights of my ambition and could barely breathe. I made fistfuls of money and still felt impoverished. I wandered the world and found it empty. No matter how many of my aspirations materialized into abundance, I was as anxious and lost as ever. I was doing it all my way and my way was not working.

Rilke said that a man who feels life's pain falls right into the center of God.

It is in the darkness that one finds the light.

While all this was going on, I began to take an intellectual interest in Christianity. I had read two essays by David Perell on how every Westerner is implicitly Christian—because they live in a civilization founded on Christian ideas so immense they’ve become invisible—and how the Bible is the one book you need to read to be educated and is the key to understanding almost all great Western literature, art, architecture, and music. I was persuaded, but only passively decided that "one day I would read the Bible". It sat on the back burner of my mind, simmering, but never quite reaching a boil.

Meanwhile, I spent three years crashing and burning through beliefs in atheism and stoicism and Buddhism, plus my own self-concocted test run of Epicureanism. I read Seneca and Aurelius and Epictetus, listened to long dharma talks, and meditated with the consistency of a monk.

It's a long story, but it all culminated in a seven-day silent retreat at a monastery in Thailand that I left feeling utterly alienated and imperially alone.

I didn't understand how the relationships of love that I cherished most were all an illusion, why I wasn't allowed to be attached to the world when that is the engine of all improvement, and, deep in the Thai jungle, why I wasn't allowed to kill mosquitoes. I couldn't see how being harmless was an effective strategy when I knew that good needs the capacity for violence to defend itself against evil. It seemed naive for my past to all be an illusion, because if I fail to face my mistakes, I'm going to repeat them. And I knew I was responsible for my past; I carried its weight. There is no meditating my way out of the terrible things I've done. And I didn't agree that being happy is the point and purpose of life. Being happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. The capacity to love deeply is the capacity to feel deeply and suffer great sorrow. But the love heals the grief; the love wins.

Suffering seemed not only inevitable, but an essential part of being. It is compassion that defines our humanity, but having compassion means the pain of another is contagious (the word compassion literally means "suffering with"). Whereas all evil stems from the refusal to see oneself in another.

And even if the pursuit of pure happiness was the point I'm alive, it's strictly a solo exercise. Was I to put my own enlightenment first and leave all the people I cared for in the illusory dust?

“Love is our true destiny,” Thomas Merton wrote. “We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.”

That week at the monastery, I spent hours staring at statues of the Buddha, cross-legged or reclined on his side, sleek and smooth body, eyes sealed with sleep, a ghost of a smile playing across his lips. Removed from the world. Almost sedated. When confronted with the reality of suffering, how life can drag you to the rack and there is no awakening as from a bad dream, I didn't feel connected to a figure who was immune to it.

What I didn't know then was how different the image of Christ on the cross is. Body broken, six-inch iron spikes driven through both wrists, two feet fixed by a single spike, skin lacerated and bleeding, side pierced and gushing blood, parched with thirst, crown of thorns on his head, slowly suffocating, but eyes frightfully alive. At the center of the Bible is Christ in a moment of more pain, more abandonment, and more suffering than you and I will ever experience.

What I was just beginning to sense is that I could not believe in a God who did not suffer. For my suffering becomes manageable in light of His.

After years of "inner work", as I was led further and further into my self, my inner world only became more confusing and unsafe. The walls of my mental prison only pressed closer. My pain was only magnified. I learned the hard way that self is the gorgon: staring at it turns you to stone.

Spiritual seeking seduced me to worship a state of my own mind, this candle flame of calmness, that everyone and everything else only interfered with. Any obligation to others only took away from my meditation and journaling time.

Mere spirituality made me fragile. Worse, it made me selfish. I was so heavenly minded that I was no earthly good.

The stance that "unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it" inherently assumes that there is nothing I can do to change the situation, which is a convenient avoidance of responsibility to make things better. When the reality is, sometimes our surroundings suck and sometimes we should be dissatisfied. Maybe that will make us improve them, instead of reorganizing our inner feelings so the world does not bother us. If mankind followed Eckhart Tolle's teaching from the dawn of time, we'd all still be living in caves, dying of disease at thirty.

These kinds of individualist philosophies may work well personally, but they scale terribly. They give no guidance on our duty to others and the world around us. More than that, they disregard our immense dependence on others and side-step the recognition of the sweat and sacrifices of our ancestors for almost everything we have.

I had lied and cheated and twisted the rules to get my way. I didn't need emotion; I needed obligation. I didn't need to be soothed; I needed to be sent out. I didn't need to be satisfied with myself; I needed to be dissatisfied with the world. I needed to be burdened for another. I needed responsibility, a rock to push up a hill.

Religion is not just reckoning with God and the world, but reckoning with myself; all the ways I fall short and fail to put others first. It's not about feeling better, but being better. Not better thoughts (which can quickly convince me what a good guy I am) but better actions. That was the main lesson Aristotle taught me: You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. Good people don’t just think good thoughts, they actually do good things.

It is only when we come to the end of ourselves that we realize we need something outside of ourselves. That we need to be saved from ourselves. Really, that we need a saviour.

A wave of conviction began to crest that going inwards would not be the solution to my pain. I did not need to be more self-immersed. I had to stop shutting myself out of the real world for the sake of examining my inner world. My inner world was not that interesting and the real world needed me.

Only later did I realize that is exactly the Christian message: the door to happiness opens outwards. "Christianity came into the world to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards," G.K. Chesterton wrote. "The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners."

That was the first thing I learned about the faith that felt capital-T True. A good life is one of both contemplation and action. Work and prayer.

That year, reading Joseph Campbell and Rene Girard opened my mind toward the divine and how the Christian story is the crescendo of all mythologies.

The foundation of existence itself is the spirit of loving sacrifice. You see it in good parents and volunteers and front-line workers and those who risk their safety to serve the marginalized and oppressed. That's what a hero is: someone who has given their life to something bigger than themselves. Someone who goes beyond only thinking about their own self-preservation. And when we witness it in another, we all want to stand up and cheer.

Through this heroic self-sacrifice, made in the name of love, reality snaps back into proper order. On the cross, the mythical and the historical collide, because that is exactly what Jesus embodied: a willingness to die to yourself so that you can be reborn. That is the way to life. That is what saves the world.

In the wake of His life and death, Christ asserts that the force that rules the world is not violence or power or even wisdom, as the Greeks and Romans believed. It's love. Love is the undercurrent of all creation. Love is an outpouring of everything good in us. And love will bear all things. Even though it takes us and transfigures us and breaks our hearts with its unbearable beauty, it's worth it. Relationships of love are the fevered pitch of existence.

All the other ancient stories were reaching and stumbling towards Christ's ultimate conclusion. All myth culminates in Christ.

Despite learning all this, it wasn't until I watched Jordan Peterson's wildly popular lecture series on Genesis that I decided it was time to read the Bible. It was time to see for myself what it said, instead of listening to what everyone else told me it said.

It took two and a half years, but the pot began to boil. In January of 2024, I cracked open the cover.

While I was working my way through the Bible, beginning with the New Testament then going back to the Old, I started listening to Tim Keller's Questioning Christianity series. Keller, a long-time Presbyterian pastor, delivered a series of talks on the Christian faith in New York City to a crowd of young, ambitious atheists who had been driven by the glories of the material world, but began to sense the emptiness at the heart of it all.

Keller, to say it lightly, threw my worldview into a blender. He wasn't a radical, pulpit-pounding Christian like I expected, but one of the most well-read and rigorous thinkers I had encountered. There was no fire and brimstone fear, no "holier than thou" posturing, no blind assertions. There was only humility, and looking.

He taught me that every human lives by faith. We cannot prove there is a God, but we also cannot prove there isn't a God. We all hold beliefs about the nature of the universe—beliefs that shape everything we say or do—that cannot be known for certain. Faith is an unavoidable part of being alive. While Christianity can't perfectly explain everything in the universe, neither can any worldview. Atheists, for instance, are forced to believe that at the beginning of time, matter just generated itself out of nothing.

Through Keller, I came to see that I was embraced by a moral order. That there is an objective moral law, carved into my heart, that every human being deserves dignity and basic rights. Good and evil are not just preferences people invent or a difference of opinion. Genocide and slavery and torture are wrong, at all times and in all places. In other words, morality is not just a majority vote. Wrong is still wrong, even if everyone is doing it. All moral progress has relied on this bedrock belief.

But, there is no explanation for the existence of an objective moral law without the presence of a transcendent God.

The Christian ideas our culture has unconsciously inherited, but now takes for granted, were the very ideas that propelled us forward from the barbaric age. The compassion for the poor and sick and weak. The pursuit of truth. The equality of man. Freedom of speech. None of these things existed, in any uniform and agreed-upon sense, in previous civilizations. Aristotle said it was right to have slaves. Spartans threw unfit infants off cliffs. In one pagan culture, parents would sacrifice their baby on the outstretched hands of a scalding hot bronze statue of their god as a fire blazed beneath. Before Christ, there was no such thing as a victim. You were just weak. That was the Roman way: "Woe to the vanquished."

Human rights only exist in their modern form because they are founded on the insistence that every human being is made in the image of God. Human equality isn't self-evident at all unless you assume God has given us natural rights. Anything we invent, rather than discover, can just as easily be invented away.

I was forced to face the fact that if I choose to believe in human rights but not in God, I had an impossible rational argument to construct.

Another stamp Keller left on my mind is that an identity founded on God and His love is the only identity that will stand the torrent of tragedy and time. In other words, only an identity founded on something outside of this world will work within this world.

Everyone builds their identity on something, whether they like it or not. Everyone has a god. It's whatever their highest thing is; whatever they honor and admire and love before all other things. Everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the reason to choose something transcendent, as David Foster-Wallace writes about, is that anything else will eat you alive.

Our world still bows down to idols; now they just look like influencers. And the thing about idols is, they always break the hearts of their believers.

If I worship money or fame or power, and that is where I tap real meaning in life, I will never have enough. If I worship my beauty, I’ll feel ugly. Power, I’ll feel weak. With all the things of this world, I will endlessly race to fill myself up, only to find myself empty again before the next pour.

Most of my life, I worshipped my intellect. I wanted to be seen as smart and complex and interesting. I hoped it would bring happiness or, at least, make my life bearable. It's a very strange thing: to live for the imagination of others. But the more I sunk into the mire of my intellect, and the more attention it brought, the more stupid and guilty and sad and disgusted I felt. And because the foundation of my identity was so unstable, I was defensive and volatile. Any challenge to my intelligence was a threat to who I saw myself to be. It's why, after my first year of university, I couldn't check my exam grades for five months. My entire identity was on the line.

From Tolstoy, I saw where this road led. At age 50, when he was most invested in intellectual pursuits, he was on the verge of suicide, having to hide ropes and sharp objects from himself. He had written War and Peace and was at the peak of his literary fame, but had no answer to the question that sat in his soul, that sits in the soul of every human: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?

Even if I found my identity in noble things, it still fails. I still will be self-centered, instead of letting my heart be drawn out toward others.

If I make being a great parent the purpose of my existence, what happens if my child is bad by nature? Or, if they're a great person, what happens when they turn 18 and leave home? If I rely on my role as a parent to be the highest calling of my life, I will be left lost and aimless and broken and bleeding when I realize that not even my child—something born of my own body—I can hold onto.

Or, if I make my (hypothetical future) wife the main object of my devotion, if I depend on her to give my life ultimate meaning, what happens if she gets cancer? And all I am left with are the memories of those early days we first met, when she was full of joy and danced in the kitchen and had all these ideas and plans and ambitions for herself and for me and for our future children, and none of it turned out as planned. Even if we get fifty years together, one of us will have to spend some days alone.

If I make my longevity the purpose of my existence, and live only to live longer (circular reasoning, I'll admit), what happens if I get into a bad car accident? What happens when I hit seventy and my back starts to break down? I will be left scratching and clawing, like a rat in its cage, raging against the slow, creeping, crushing, inescapable shadows. I will die a million deaths before they finally bury me.

I could have all the success in the world. I could have all the money and fame and women I wanted. I could have AI that writes my emails and a microchip that downloads books into my brain and a device that teleports me from a F1 race in Tokyo to an opera in Vienna, but there still looms like a specter those ultimate and very human questions: What for? Where next? And what then?

That was the main lesson King Solomon imparted. He had all the power, all the success, all the wealth, all the women, and all the wisdom—every worldly thing you can imagine—yet it all felt meaningless.

Kierkegaard said that without a relationship with God, man is left trying to fill the void with finite things that ultimately fail because they can never satisfy our infinite spiritual needs. Every human has eternity in their hearts. With expectations of Heaven, the things of this earth can only fall short; to disillusionment, followed by disaster.

Many people look to romantic love to give them the fulfillment once found in religious experience. To give the sense that their life matters in the grand scheme of things.

My entire romantic resume has been two long-term relationships. In the early days, I glorified those girls. I put them on a pedestal and abused them with my love, but after discovering they didn’t fill the hole in my soul, I got bored and went back to my books. And that was the beginning of the end.

That's how it happens. The girl becomes idealized, where it's not about her, exactly, but what she represents. She becomes the embodiment of all we crave: beauty, acceptance, comfort, consolation, validation. First we want to be noticed, then we want to be seen. We want their eyes to be a mirror that reads back: you matter.

And the early stages of falling in love give this. It makes us feel something beyond survival. It makes us feel alive, like we're not living just to die. But then comes the rejection or the dejection from the difficulty of the relationship with a real, imperfect person. The fantasy fades. The vision cracks. And it doesn't just bruise; it brands. The realization that the ideal isn't real, that the other person is just like you, tired and flawed but trying, shatters the hope of final fulfillment through romantic love that we're chasing, that we've spent our whole lives trying to earn. But instead of seeing the game is broken, instead of making the quiet and terrifying choice to stay—because love is less knowing and more deciding—we blame the person, or the relationship, or ourselves, and look for something new. We chase the falling in love, addicted to the thrill, not realizing that if we never stay in love, we're just falling.

If we build our worth around it, that high of being wanted, we'll stay starving. Because no human can fill the orchestral bodily ache we carry. No woman can ever fix our wounds. No one will ever just understand us without having to explain. Not in the way we hope. They may make us feel happier, but they will never make us feel whole. And without that backbone of knowing we are loved, in an enduring and ultimate sense, we will just bleed on whoever is foolish enough to try to love us.

Real love is two people meeting on equal ground. Not as each other's savior or judge or solution to emptiness, but as partners against the storm, looking outward together at the same horizon. Real love is two people inspiring each other to live, recognizing how hard living is and how easy it is to lose passion for it. Real love is less a reward, and more a responsibility. It’s choosing to love someone just as flawed as you are and giving them the space and slack and support to be unfinished; to find out who they are and who they want to become. It's having someone stand beside you in all your fears and dreams and weird quirks, knowing your humanity is a shared blessing and not a unique curse. It’s standing beside them in the same, even on days you don't feel like it. Really, it's loving a person as they are, not as you’d like them to be. Not for all the ways they are perfect, but for all the ways they are not.

It is not polished and rarely pretty, but the messiness of it all is human and insanely meaningful. It is the good stuff.

Keller explained that if he loves his wife more than anything else in this world, he can only crush her with his love. If he places all his spiritual and moral needs on her, all his hunger for purpose and forgiveness and ecstasy and meaning, that weight will ruin their relationship. But, by loving God more than his wife, he finds the freedom to love his wife more. Once his love is rightly ordered, all of his love is lifted up.

For the unromantic, work has become a religion. People sacrifice for salary, pray for promotions, and pilgrimage for higher pay. They substitute Jacob’s ladder for the corporate ladder.

I remember spending at least two hundred hours one summer networking and prepping for interviews to land an investment banking internship. I remember nailing the interview, getting an offer, signing a contract for $85,000 at 19 years old, then feeling… absolutely nothing.

Time and time again, I thought once I got that next job, then I would feel fulfilled and financially secure and recognized and worthy. In a very real sense, I pinned my salvation on it. I ran face first into that wall more times than I’d like to admit, until one morning I woke with a growing terror of a life spent chasing a receding light, being the Dad who was never around, only after thirty years to get to the top and realize nothing is there.

This whole time, I was searching for something firm to hold onto, something real to grab and keep close. But everything was distant and dismal. Nothing felt stable. Nothing was there, in the final analysis. It all turned to dust in my hands and ash in my mouth. The truth gazed back at me, clear and cold, that everything in this world will eventually go its way and I shall go mine; and that is an existential dread that no one can soothe with rational argument or reassuring words.

It took me years to realize that very desire is the desire for God.

For I find in my heart a longing that nothing under the sun can satisfy. I find an emptiness that cannot be filled by the things within this world, no matter how hard I try. Money won't do it. Fame won't do it. Power won't do it. Health or beauty or brains won't do it. Not even mortal love. The restlessness remains, as I am haunted by the feeling of having had but lost some infinite thing. As Augustine wrote, “Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

Put simply, a discontent with the terms of this life led me to wonder whether I was made for another.

After coming to these personal convictions, I looked at the world around me and saw the destruction and depravity that the decay of religion had caused. I saw my generation feeling lost and confused and alone, hurtling headfirst through life with no guidance and no guardrails, crushed by the cold meaninglessness of it all. I saw a world where each person is placed at the center of their own universe, told to satisfy all their needs, to gratify all their urges and desires, to expand their needs and demand more, and told that this is freedom.

The secular narrative that we’ve been sold looks like freedom, no doubt, but tastes like tyranny. Because here’s the thing: the more I put myself at the center of existence, the more I make my life all about me and follow all the whims and wishes of my ego, the more miserable I become.

That’s the freedom that Satan sells in Paradise Lost: do whatever you like. “It’s better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”. Except absolute freedom looks like absolute anarchy, a slave to the passions, which is the worst kind of imprisonment.

Mankind is corrected by punishment, but controlled by pleasure. If you really want a prisoner to be trapped, you let him think he is free.

Strange as it sounds, true freedom is discipline. It’s obedience.

The greatest question posed since the Enlightenment is not communism vs individualism or East vs West, but whether men can bear to live without God. When Nietzsche said, "God is dead," it wasn't a statement of triumph but a declaration of tragedy. If God, the underlying framework for meaning and morality that our entire civilization was built on, was yanked out from under us, all our culture could do was collapse. Nietzsche knew the death of God wouldn't be peaceful. Man wouldn't suddenly be liberated to a lifetime of laughter. Rather, oppressive power systems would emerge. People would become desperate and dangerous and rush into fanatical ideologies. "When men choose not to believe in God," G.K. Chesterton wrote, "they do not believe in nothing. They become capable of believing in anything." Or, as Dostoevsky put it, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.”

And that's exactly what happened.

In the blood-soaked 20th century, fascism and communism killed one hundred million people. If one death is a tragedy and one million deaths is a statistic, one hundred million deaths is an abstraction; a number so large it becomes a sentence to skip over. In his Nobel Prize speech, when asked what caused the revolution that killed sixty million people in Russia, Solzhenitsyn could only reply, "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”

History’s lesson is clear: There is no replacing God. Any tower we build will topple. That's what Babel is all about.

The most haunting part of Nietzsche's words isn't even God's death, but his guarantee of the guilt that will follow. "Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

The human instinct to worship didn't go anywhere. It was just pointed in a tragic direction: back on ourselves. We are our own gods and we suffer infinitely for it.

I thought hard about the atheist's argument that it's immature to look at something outside yourself to give life meaning. That true adults can make their lives fulfilling, all on their own. And without the presence of God, man would be free. Free to love others and pursue truth. Free to stay tender and tap dance to work and laugh to the grave. To create a utopia, all of his own ingenuity.

In this way, an atheist is far more faithful than a Christian. He thinks humans, left to their own devices, are fundamentally good. A belief that becomes hard to explain in the face of the atrocities humans have committed.

Don’t get me wrong, many of atheism’s ideas sound splendid in theory but, as with communism, fail terribly in practice. They don't work.

I read an old novel, Nils Lyhne, about a boy who renounces religion because a girl he loved got sick and, despite all his prayers to God, died. He views religion as a crutch for the weak and is confident that human intellect and a free spirit can make life meaningful. But in rejecting religion, Nils doesn't become vital and courageous. He becomes lost. He spends his adult life going in circles, unable to commit to love and unwilling to aim at anything because he lacks a compelling reason to suffer, sacrifice, or hope. He writes a few half-hearted poems, too depressed to create the great art he once dreamed of, has an affair with his best friend's wife who, after his best friend dies, hates him for what they did, and ends up dying alone. Nils finds atheism's promises—of strength, beauty, or peace without God—prove empty in suffering. He’s an atheist until tragedy strikes, then finds himself on his knees praying to God.

Atheism works, until it doesn’t. Atheism works when you’re young and healthy and beautiful and no one you love has left. When life hasn’t sunk its teeth into you yet. But, another Biblical idea that proves capital-T True, the Flood is coming. And the unanchored, those unable to answer the hard questions life asks of them in those moments of absolute adversity, will be washed away. Left bitter and resentful and hurt and searching.

Now that we're already off track, I would also argue that no one is a true atheist in practice because there is not a single human being who isn't even a little superstitious. And superstition is nonsense if we do not live in a supernatural world.

Another interesting thing, only relevant for the sake of its irrelevance, is how often even the unreligious speak religiously. I hear "Jesus Christ" or "God help me" all the time in casual, unconscious conversation. It's not conclusive, but it is curious.

In a million little ways, the unseen is proved by the seen. You just have to look. To want to see. Attention is the gateway to devotion. It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.

But here's the miraculous thing: After centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and oppression and injustice and war, the human race still stands, still strives forward, still has men and women who choose good over evil, love over hatred, and generosity over greed.

It is only the humble man who can step back from all the givens that he normally takes for granted to realize the world is a very good place that could have been something much worse. To realize the world is here at all and didn't need to be. It is only the humble man who knows he did nothing to deserve it, yet gets to experience the beauty of this world; even if it is a dreadful beauty, one doomed to decay.

All gratitude rests on humility.

In rare moments of reverie, I hold the conviction that life is this achingly beautiful story. In its shoeless summer days and still winter nights. In the falling in love and falling out of love. Moving away and missing people and trying so hard to be better than you were yesterday. The heartache and homesickness, the joy that comes with the morning, the memory of those days you know are never coming back. How time just continues on and everything changes and there’s no way we can stop it. Even when life hurts, it’s a sweet and vicious pain.

And when I looked back at the narrative of my life, I had the felt sense it was orchestrated. That it was not all random and senseless, but there was some narrative arc, as mysterious as it was intelligent. Hidden from sight but hinted at, in all the near misses, the close calls, the chance encounters, the instinct to go right instead of left, to walk up and say hello. I saw it most clearly in the people I’ve met—people who have changed me irrevocably for the better, that I'm terrified to imagine never knowing—I just happened to stumble across. I can call it serendipity, call it synchronicity, or call it an everlasting coincidence, but what I really must mean is God.

I have not been given what I thought I wanted, but what I needed. Countless times, I was crushed when something I wanted so badly didn’t happen, but then raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the realization that it would’ve been terrible for me. Really, I have always been lucky, especially in my bad luck.

Even the low points, the times I felt buried from above and below, taught lessons I could learn in no other way. Not until we are crushed do we know what we are made of. As Dickens wrote, we are all bent and broken by this world but, must hope, into a better shape. And when the dust clears, we are stronger at the broken places.

This is to say, my life surpasses any story I could have written if I were holding the pen. My past proves there is a vision for my life which is higher and truer than anything I could have imagined on my own. That continues to unfold around me in miraculous ways.

All along, someone else has been for me more than I am for myself.

Once these conclusions began to crystallize, I began to wonder why.

Why do I believe in a moral law that cannot be explained without God? How could only an identity rooted in God work if He does not exist? Why do I have these desires that nothing in this world can fill? If God isn't real, why did His "death" send us into catastrophe? And if I life sense is a story, doesn’t there need to be a storyteller?

It was a shift in consciousness when I stepped back and saw that these immovable intuitions I had weren’t crazy, I just didn’t have the right framework to make sense of them. I began to sense an intelligent design behind it all. That I was made by a Creator, for a Creator’s love. That we live in a transparent world where the divine shines through in everything. But it is so obvious, it's not obvious at all.

There’s a story I heard from David Foster-Wallace that explains this shift better than I could.

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after the fourth beer. The atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist, all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

Carl Jung said men do not find God because they do not look low enough. Men do not find God because they fail to see the very water in which they swim. He is so big and so close that He is so easy to miss and just take for granted. It's an exercise of imagination to envision what a truly random, accidental, survival-centric world would look like and compare it with our own.

What Tim Keller did was make the Christian faith attractive.

I realized all my arguments against faith were based on half-baked assumptions that I never bothered to investigate. I didn't see through Christianity. I saw through this straw man version of the faith that I had casually constructed. My entire basis of belief was fragments from Sunday school, the weird Christian kid from gym class, and a couple of offhand comments from my uncle at Thanksgiving. I felt so silly and stupid to build such important beliefs on such shaky ground. As the saying goes, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for certain that just ain't so.”

Lies wound, but an ignored truth can kill.

Keller got me to lower my guard and question the certainty I had lived by for so long.

Not only did I not want to live in a world where there was no God, I started to see the living presence of one. I wanted to be a man who had faith. Like Peter dropping everything and running to the empty tomb, I wanted Jesus to be who He says He is.

What if it were true? Wouldn't that be something?

While I was listening to Keller's talks and working my way through the Bible, I was invited by a friend to church in Austin, Texas. It was my first time attending a service, besides a Mass in Buenos Aires, just for the vaulted ceilings and singing. I went in without expectation and went out with an aftertaste of revelation. Not only from the practical wisdom of scripture, but the earnest desire of a community of people to lift their eyes toward something higher and holy.

Everywhere I went, I kept meeting Christians who were nothing like I thought they would be. An old Irish philosophy professor in Newfoundland, who said “God bless you” so casually mid-conversation, you hardly noticed. A black belt businessman from Houston who trains with Navy SEALs. An environmental engineer from Beirut, who dragged me through a crowded night market in Thailand to buy food for this eight year old girl who asked for money.

These people weren’t the belligerent Bible bangers that I loved to criticize, but rather were cornerstones of their communities, quietly rooted in their faith and devoted to serving others. They broke out of every box I tried to put Christians in.

When I came back home after my travels, I started to go to a local church whenever I had a free Sunday morning. First, as an intellectual exercise. Then, it became something more.

I was still far from faith. I was curious, but I never thought I would actually believe any of this stuff. There was an invisible and insurmountable wall I never thought I'd climb over. The wall between my head and my heart.

But I started to read. That year I read the Bible, cover to cover. Then I read books by monastics like Saint Augustine and Brother Lawrence and the Desert Fathers, philosophers like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and Kierkegaard, poets like Milton and Dante, modern Christians like Lee Strobel, Richard Rohr, and Ellis Potter, as well as a whole host of writers who wove their faith through their work, like Tolkien and Austen and Dostoevsky. I spent weeks studying the stories of Cain and Abel, Jonah and the whale, and Jacob's ladder. And the more I read, the more the armor of reason and rationality I once wore with pride began to crack and chip.

I discovered the Christian faith wasn't crazy. Understood properly, it was not only coherent, but logical and convincing. Every objection I had, someone else had before me and found a resolution. The answers were there, I just had to look.

The very first thing I realized was my intellectual argument—that I was too smart to believe in God—held water like a sieve. The writers of these books had an Olympian intelligence and ran circles around my skull, yet still believed.

I thought modern science disproved the existence of God. But, as any real scientist admits, science has nothing to say about God. The idea Christianity and science conflict, and that you have to bury your head in the sand to be a believer, is peddled publicity, not anything rooted in fact. God could have worked through evolution, just as He could have been the source of the Big Bang.

Religious belief is completely compatible with scientific thought. It only states there is a more important reality that science cannot observe. A reality that is invisible to the eye but essential to the heart.

Science can tell you what something is, but not what it ought to be. Put simply, science can tell us about matter, but it is strangely silent about morality.

Some of the greatest scientists and mathematicians who lived were religious and claimed it was their belief in the transcendent that was responsible for their discoveries. Real science is founded on faith that the earth still has secrets. Every great scientist is also a mystic.

It was Christian thought—in its reverence for the truth—that unleashed the science and innovation that have lifted billions out of starvation and poverty and disease. It's not a coincidence that since Christ's death our world has advanced so rapidly, breaking out of circular time into linear time.

In the divinization of science, we seem to forget its dark side. The weapons of mass destruction, the algorithms of addiction, the pocket-sized touch screen pacifiers. After a lifetime studying human history, Will Durant concluded, "Science is neutral: it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build... All technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends."

Science may increase productivity. Science may make us all rich. But science will not save us.

The awareness of our place in the cosmos has led many to reject religious belief. We now know most of the universe consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold. Earth and humans on it are so small in comparison, it's hard to imagine we matter. But scale and significance are not correlated and should not be confused. One only has to look at their wedding ring, or better yet their newborn baby, to realize that a thing isn't important because it is big.

It's hard to imagine that God could care enough to enter into this small world, and suffer and die to redeem it. It's hard to imagine infinite love in finite space. But that's more a reflection of our own refusal of love than any tangible law of impossibility. "It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny," C.S. Lewis wrote, "but then we are wishing not for more love but for less." Because if it's true, if He does care about our world that much, it means our choices and our lives are staggeringly significant. As far as we know, there is nothing else like us that exists. As far as we know, we are the only conscious beings. That has to mean something.

Do we live in a cold, meaningless universe? Whenever I ask myself the question, all I hear from my heart is, “No. An undercurrent of love ebbs and flows through everything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”

There's also the fact that the position of the earth is so finely-tuned that if any physical constant of the cosmos were slightly different, life of any kind would be impossible. “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous," Steven Hawking wrote. "It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.” On a probabilistic basis, I either have to believe in a near-infinite number of universes, where one of them just happened to cultivate the perfect conditions for life, or that this one was created by God.

Back when I started reading the Bible, I was never expecting to come to faith. But, as I said to a friend, I can't unread Matthew.

Scripture wasn’t dry and dusty like I expected, but more alive and complex than any literature I'd encountered. Endlessly layered and bottomless in its capacity for insight, I came to realize the Biblical stories are the distillation of what it meant to be human. Steinbeck said the essence of the entire human experience is captured in the third and fourth books of Genesis, two or three pages in most Bibles. Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel. Original sin and rejection.

"I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection," Steinbeck wrote."And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind."

The Bible, I learned, is meant to be read as metaphor, not dogmatic formula. Thinking in metaphor, as Aristotle said, is the highest level of thought. It tends to feel like having my leg broken. But when believers and atheists alike get stuck in the metaphors, interpreting them as facts, they get into trouble.

The early books of the Old Testament cast aside the weight of facts and enter into a misted realm of myth. Eden probably wasn't a real place and Noah probably didn't put two animals of every species on a big boat, but that doesn't mean the stories aren't true. As writers know, fiction is for telling the truth when the truth isn't sufficient. Fiction is abstracted truth, which is more true than specific truth, in that it's both more universal and more personal.

The best arguments in the world won't open a man's mind to change. The only thing that can do that, really, is a good story.

And the stories of the Bible are embodied. The goal is not digesting information or even fully understanding, but rather letting them work upon you, layering over your reality with a new texture of light, in both seen and unseen ways. The gospel isn’t as much of a book as it is a living being.

I was struck by the fact that much of the Bible seems to repeat the same simple message: everyone has a value hierarchy; keep God at the top; things will go better. It’s the first commandment, restated in a thousand ways.

And if it is the Word of God, there should be things I don't understand or agree with. It should call into question how I'm living my life, because I am far from perfect. I am not God. My job is not to examine scripture for things I cannot accept, but allow scripture to examine me for things God cannot accept. Everything that irritates me about the Bible can lead to a deeper understanding of myself. Where I stumble, there lies treasure. Unless, of course, I would rather just worship an idealized version of myself.

The gospels aren't folk tales or legends twisted in the telling, but some of the most reliable historical documents. Jesus was a real man who walked on earth, and if I want to believe any of ancient history, I'm forced to believe the stories of His life are true. The Bible is the single most scrutinized text in existence, yet no fatal flaw or inconsistent detail has been found. In fact, modern archeological and historical discoveries have only further supported its legitimacy.

If it was a manicured manifesto, you’d think they would have cut some parts out. Jesus being rejected by his hometown and his own family thinking he was out of his mind. The continual confusion of the disciples. The garden the night He is betrayed unto death, where Jesus prays for another way.

What if the Apostles weren't crazy when they proclaimed they saw Christ resurrected, all the way to their death? What if they weren't trying to cook up the greatest con-scheme in the history of humanity, but genuinely witnessed something divine, something they could barely believe, and set about to record the story? What if?

Christ's words sought out the contours of my consciousness. Yes, I was weary and burdened and wanted rest. Yes, I was hoping, in some unjustifiable way, I would be healed. Yes, I was lost. It’s like He was speaking right to me, shattering the two thousand years of time between us.

Every time I retreat into solitude and stare into my soul, I see fear staring back. I see how fear lurks behind almost everything I do. I'm terrified that I'm getting older, that I will see people I love die, that I have to die. I'm terrified that I'm alive. From an old journal entry: "I do not know how to love without trembling, when everything I love is so soft and exposed, like the organs in my body jumped out and began walking around." But then I open the Bible. The most common saying in the entire book: "Do not be afraid." 365 times. Someone counted.

Assurance that I do not need to be afraid, from God Himself, was something more than words can capture and I will entrust to your imagination.

Months went by and books piled up on my nightstand. Notebooks were creased and pages were filled. The more I read, the more I began to admire the philosophy that underpins Christianity.

Men love to talk of changing the world, but never changing themselves. Yet, Christianity emphasizes the individual. It asserts that the stability of the world rests on the shoulders of the individual to accept the responsibility of his life, with eyes wide open. To pick up his cross and carry it. Across history, every time this is followed, things go well and every time it's ignored things turn tragic.

Nietzsche said he couldn’t believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time, but what he failed to appreciate is that turning outward from yourself is what saves you. Praise isn’t needed by God. It’s needed by us. God only asks for our praise because He knows it’s what postures us to wonder and love and everything that is good. Like summiting a snow-capped mountain or hearing the final note of an orchestra echo through your ears, a breathless “Wow” is not separate from enjoyment, but the completion of it.

I found the order of Christian virtues to be exactly true. Pride is the ultimate vice and humility is the ultimate virtue. The proud, always looking down on things and people, cannot see something that is above them. The proud, really, cannot see anything else but them.

We are more likely to have compassion for a criminal than for a man who thinks he’s a god. Whereas humility is so practical a virtue, men suspect it's a vice.

The rationalist deducts that the fullest possible enjoyment in life is found by putting ourselves first, but the religious know that it is found by putting ourselves last. Not extending our ego to infinity, but reducing our ego to zero. To make your world large and lavish, you must always be making yourself small. Without humility, it is impossible to enjoy anything.

Yet the truly humble man will not be thinking about humility. He will not be thinking of himself at all.

Sure, the notion that there is a man in the clouds who watches everything you do is a gross oversimplification, but it’s shorthand for a very true idea. In life, you don't get away with anything. (I must’ve written “You don’t get away with anything” in the margins of my Bible at least a hundred times). There is no "pulling one over" God. There is no twisting the rules of reality; they always snap back, and with violence. We always pay the price, sometimes literally, sometimes psychologically, often both. We are the ultimate and final victims of our own evil.

Our conscience always keeps score and eats us alive when we betray it. We can never cut ourselves away from it, even when we cut ourselves away from everything else.

The notion that we have an angel on our right shoulder and a devil on our left, is another example of an embodied, staggeringly deep idea: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

In each of us, two natures contend. Our higher nature and our lower nature. The part that wants to send us up to Heaven, and the part that wants to drag us down to Hell. Every human heart is a battlefield between good and evil, with a line that cuts between the two running somewhere down the middle. All our lives the fight goes on, but, in the end, the side that wins is the side we choose. It’s the wolf, to borrow from the Cherokee tale, that we feed. That is the power we have, regardless of circumstance. That is free will: what we want most becomes what we are.

Good versus evil is the one story of our species, and the final question we will face once we brush off the dust and sit back to look at our life: Was I good or was I evil?

Christian morality inverts common sense. Jesus says the sorrowful and persecuted are blessed, and the meek will inherit the earth. In weakness, there is strength and in emptying, there is fullness. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted, and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. To save your life is to lose it, but to lose your life is to find it.

It's all a paradox. It's all so unlikely. Yet, out on the playing field of life, it works. Religious or not, these things are true.

Many of the convictions I had come to on my own I thought were unique, until I realized the whole of Christian thought had gotten there before me.

I believed, long before I came to faith, that a life centred around service was the way to live. That true greatness is found in selfless love. In giving until the giving feels like receiving. I believed that self-centredness is what it means to be a sinner and other-centredness is what it means to be a saint. I wanted, more than anything else, to be a lighthouse for others; someone who lightens their burden.

The interesting thing is, the more I'm able to forget myself, through self-sacrifice or a selfless goal, the more I actualize my potential and the more my neuroses disappear. In other words, the more I love, the more I become what I am capable of becoming.

But that is the gospel: dying to self and rising with Christ. Being the light of the world.

And love is at the root of it all. When you love, you wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve. As Victor Hugo wrote, we can give without loving, but we cannot love without giving.

Now that I'm wielding that word, I want to explain that sin isn't about fire and brimstone and a priest towering over a pulpit. The word sin comes from an old archery term meaning "to miss the target". If a relationship with God is the ultimate target, sin is attempting to separate yourself from God, both by doing bad things and by making good things into ultimate things. It is nothing more and nothing less than disordered love.

While the rules in the Bible may seem heavy-handed and harsh, they were discovered and distilled over thousands of years of observing how reality seems to work. Watching people take certain actions and follow certain philosophies, and then seeing how things go for them. The commandments prove to be the confinements that a good life lies within. In retrospect, the times I broke them and just did whatever I felt like, were the times I was the most lonely and lost and anxious.

The ethics Christianity emphasizes are not about moral scolding or guilt trips. Rather, they sketch out how the fabric of being seems to fold, with clear warning signs along the gradual, gentle, and soft road to Hell.

In my short life, I have watched people fall into sin and not repent for it. I have watched people put themselves first and cut away all commitment and hurt others, but not apologize, not seek forgiveness, not try to make it right. I have seen how their lives turn out, five, ten, fifteen years later. It is not pretty. Sin leaves you on an island of one.

I think our culture has rejected the word at its own peril. "People began to get self-conscious about the fact that their misconducted lives were going to pieces," Thomas Merton wrote in his journal, "so instead of ceasing to do the things that made them ashamed and unhappy, they made it a new rule that they must never be ashamed of the things they did. There was to be only one capital sin: to be ashamed. That was how they thought they could solve the problem of sin, by abolishing the term."

But it is easier to play the victim than to see the hand of divine justice. Still, I believe even with the most prideful and power-hungry on this planet, there is a small voice, somewhere below the surface, saying something is out of tune.

The parts I struggled with most were the Incarnation and the Resurrection; the two central mysteries of the Christian faith. How could God become man, and how could a man be raised from the dead? It didn't seem possible to me.

But, I was caught in my own contradiction. If there was a God, who am I to say what He can or can't do, based on what I think is or isn't possible? If He can form the universe at the beginning of time, creating everything out of nothing, surely He could raise from the dead. The truth is: if God exists, anything is possible.

I never understood Jesus walking on water or feeding five thousand. But the greatest miracle of all is in broad daylight: the conversion of the whole Western world to Christianity after Christ's death, started by a handful of men of no power or position, not performing any miracles. In short, the greatest miracle is the absence of miracles.

We’re supposed to struggle with these things. Even the disciples doubted the miracles, who saw them with their own eyes. But miracles are not meant to convince our cognition, but move our heart. To worship, awe, and wonder.

Besides, evidence of the supernatural surrounds us.

Talk to ten people and half of them will admit they have experienced something that cannot have a natural cause. I have met people who testify that Jesus Christ has changed their lives more than anything else. People who have had their depression defeated, a lifelong nicotine addiction go up in smoke, their baby's heartbeat restored, suicidal thoughts swept away with the morning light. I have heard story after story of surgeons scratching their heads and saying, "Gee, that must've been God." Miracles, perhaps, are not opposed to nature, but only opposed to what we think we know about nature. A miracle only means the liberty of God.

On the opposite end, I have a philosopher friend who came to Christ after having recurring visions of demons at night. What am I to say? That he didn’t? What the hell do I know? Encounters with evil, mind you, are one of the most common catalysts of a belief in God. If absolute evil exists, then so must its opposite: absolute Good.

Christianity isn’t an opiate of the masses. Karl Marx was wrong about that, like he was wrong about basically everything else. It can be used as an opiate, like a badminton racket can be used to bludgeon someone to death, but that doesn’t mean that’s what it is. Anything can be bent by human corruption. A badminton racket or the Word of God.

Christ's message isn't meant for some dreamy, far-off future. It's not meant to reserve salvation for death. A believer must always ask: Is it saving my life, right now? Because when Christ said the kingdom of Heaven is at hand, He didn’t mean "okay guys, now you can go to Heaven." He meant you can experience the life of the kingdom, today. In ways that cannot always be observed, it is already in the midst of us. The kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth but men do not see it.

Christians are called to live in a way that pulls Heaven down to earth.

But the point is not to be upright and good for a one-way ticket to the clouds, like God plays cheap trading games, but to enter a kingdom of grace while I live. It’s not so much to have life in Heaven, but to have life here on earth.

"This is true perfection," Gregory of Nyssa wrote, "not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we servilely fear punishment, nor to do good because we hope for rewards... but because we have come to love the good itself and to take pleasure in the beautiful nature of the good."

Faith is not an opiate. Faith is a fire for the cold, a rope let down to the lost, necessary as bread in the hands of the hungry. Take away God, and you take away hope. Take away hope, and there is no reason to live. As St. Paul says, faith is the foundation of things hoped for.

Christianity also isn’t just death avoidance. It's not spiritual insurance. Christian theology asserts that no one knows for certain whether they're going to Heaven until it's too late to change it. The judgment of men is not the judgment of God.

If faith was all an attempt to avoid fear, it would be much more pleasant and sunny. Christ wouldn't have told us to gouge out our eye if it's causing us to sin, or that looking at a woman with lust is committing adultery in our heart. There wouldn’t be Hell. A Hell that is entirely self-chosen and locked from the inside.

Nothing about how Christianity is designed is emotionally convenient.

The message of the Bible is more, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, that the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. That the road to life is not through the easy, pleasurable things but through the hard, challenging things.

It's not like atheists are soldiering forth to bravely confront "the raw facts of reality" or scaling a ladder to the stars. Men who deny the existence of God always have a reason for wishing God did not exist. If God exists, they cannot just do whatever they want. Huxley was a genius but didn't believe in God because it would put restraint on his black and deep desires. "I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none..." he confessed. "For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom." If he was a Christian, Nietzsche couldn't justify being puffed up by pride, staring down and scowling at the rest of humanity "from the heights". Bertrand Russell couldn’t seem so smart and sophisticated and eccentric in opinion.

Regardless of accolades or intelligence, I learned many men arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they found attractive. Sometimes a man wants to be foolish if it lets him do a thing wisdom forbids.

There are many who reject the Bible because of their past. If what it says is true, they have a lot to repent for. Which is ironic in a sad way, because that's the whole point. The whole point is to admit we were wrong, have our past forgiven, and be born again. Confession is not condemnation. It’s freedom.

Horrible as a man's sins may be, Christ receives whoever turns to Him with wide-open arms.

There are also those who left the faith and returning would mean admitting they were wrong. But the utterly human story is falling asleep. The utterly human story is falling away from the right path and getting lost in a dark wood. Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept. We all turn prodigal, but we are all called home.

If God doesn't exist and the faithful are wrong, they have lived upright lives and lost nothing. But if God does exist, the faithful gain all and the faithless lose everything. Rationalists would call that an "asymmetric bet".

The church has committed atrocities. It has an ugly side to its history that I can barely stomach. Clergy do not always conduct their lives as if God exists and not all who claim to be followers of Christ are actually following Christ. Instead of clearing their own heart, many have tried to clear the world. Many have used the Bible as justification for their own egocentric purposes. Even in his lifetime, Jesus was perplexed that many praised His name but did not do as He said.

One of the best men I know grew up in the mountains outside Venice and told me he couldn't support the church because they sit behind closed doors in big, beautiful buildings while the poor still starve on the street.

That was Nietzsche's critique: the church started strong but has fallen too far away from Christ. It’s twisted too far away from the ideal it was meant to serve.

There's also a lot of guilt and shame and weight associated with organized religion. I have a close friend who was shamed into hating her body by a priest. It’s confusing and sad because the core of Christ’s message is being released from the guilt and the shame and all the weight we carry.

I don't know how to reconcile it all. But I would say it's important not to confuse God or Christianity with the church. The church is made up of men; all imperfect, some corrupt. Faith is supported by community, but it is ultimately an intensely private thing. It is between you and God. We do not need to look elsewhere. He is within us.

Dante was a devout Catholic yet chided the corrupt Cardinals and said Peter, who cared for neither gold nor silver, would be aghast. In his Divine Comedy, we meet more Popes in Hell than in Heaven. Dante saw that some men fail terribly in their pursuit of God, but that does not diminish His glory. In fact, the Bible has the explanation for this behavior built into it: man is a fallen creature.

Despite the wrong it has done, Christians through the church were the first to oppose slavery, invented hospitals, and founded the first universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc). They worked to reduce national conflict, instituted a court system, softened legal penalties, and expanded the scope of charity. "The church promoted morality in a time of moral disorder and chaos," Will Durant wrote. "Immorality still thrived, but it would have been a lot worse."

The church has produced great infamies, but everyone forgets it has also produced great saints.

I would also add that it's not fair to judge a two-thousand-year-old institution through a twenty-year-old cultural lens. The splendour of a church's marble spires wasn't oppressive to the humble peasant, but one of his greatest joys. For he truly believed it was God's house.

The Christians you know who have glaring flaws may not be convincing examples of the faith, but what you cannot observe is the maniacs they would be without it.

There is also the whole problem of spiritual pride. But Christianity asserts that God cannot be manipulated by religious righteousness or acts of altruism. His love cannot be earned with good behavior or lofty thoughts. He is only reached by repentance. Man is not saved by any moral effort of his own, but by grace. "The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good," C.S. Lewis wrote, "but that God will make us good because He loves us."

In Stevenson's masterpiece, Dr. Jekyll tries to redeem his sinful past with charitable giving and good deeds. Yet his acts of service only spur a feeling of superiority as he compares himself with all the other lazy, pathetic, selfish men he sees. One afternoon, sitting on a park bench, bathing in his ego and riding a high of self-righteousness, Dr. Jekyll involuntarily turns into Mr. Hyde. Not in spite of his good deeds, but because of them. The real stab of the story is that what we do is almost nothing, but how we do it is almost everything. Doing good is not being good if it only provides proof for our pride.

A Christian who thinks they are better than others, or better than other Christians, is not being faithful to their faith. What God values most is, conveniently, the hardest thing to fake: the posture of our heart.

There are Christian fanatics. Those who are overbearing, opinionated, insensitive, and harsh. Those who post videos saying women are evil. Those who claim they know what political candidate God supports (which, by the way, is the real meaning of taking the Lord's name in vain: speaking with the authority of God, as if you have a clear window into His will). But, the fanatics are fanatical not because they are too Christian, but because they are not Christian enough. Fanaticism is a failure to understand the message of the gospel.

Jesus said you can know His disciples by the love they have for others.

His call is to love. To love your neighbour, regardless of their sexuality, nationality, race, or religion. Even if you don't agree with them or can’t understand their actions, to still love them. “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” This is simple in theory but impossibly hard in practice, making it convenient to ignore.

You could argue Christianity "doesn't work" because many of its followers fail to follow it. But what's the alternative? Everyone making their own rules based on what they can manage on any given Tuesday? A belief system where people treat each other as equals and work to make the world a better place and follow it with military discipline?

Jesus set the bar high. He broke the four-minute mile of morality. He embodied perfect humility. All I can do is ceaselessly fall below it, but endlessly reach up toward it. That's the point. That’s fighting the good fight. That’s where the growing gets done.

Christians are not called to be perfect, but to recognize their failures, repent, pick themselves up, and begin again. Saints are sinners who keep on trying.

I decided that I could disagree with the avarice of the church and the acts of other Christians, but still remain faithful. It didn't make sense to let the corruption of man lead me away from communion with God.

Of course, Christians think they are right, meaning they think other belief systems are all at least somewhat wrong, but so do atheists. So does everyone. That's how beliefs work. If we didn't think it was right, we wouldn't believe it. It can be seen as narrow to claim one religion is right, but it's just as narrow to claim that they are all equal. In other words, there is one way to think about religion.

I’m not saying you are bad or dumb if you don’t believe in Christianity. It would be nice if it were that simple, but it isn't. Some of the best and brightest people I know aren’t religious. I haven’t seen a discernible difference in intelligence or kindness or moral action between my Christian and non-Christian friends. But, the difference is, Christians know there is a higher standard they are called to, and know when they’ve fallen below it. They have the intent to be shining and not sinful, even when they fail. They want to be good, but need God's help.

The problem with both the religious literalist and the atheist is the same: blind certainty. A close-mindedness that slams the door on any questioning. An arrogance that amounts to an unnoticed imprisonment in a replica world that is entirely too small to be true. A dogma that is held so strongly, it is not thought as dogmatic.

That’s why I go to the woods alone. To step back. To remember the world I live in is bigger and greener and softer than anything I try to make it. This, mind you, is where every religious leader and spiritual teacher seems to agree: it's about learning to see.

The process of coming closer to God is not one of addition but subtraction. Not doing more, but doing less. Unblocking. He is always there, but it is hard to feel His presence when we're fed by a constant drip of drugs and distraction and dopamine (perhaps with a Saturday night splash of serotonin) that all centre our attention on serving ourselves. There's an old monastic saying that God's first language is silence. Or, in silence, He speaks.

Anyways, over a course of two years, as I read about what Christianity really was, instead of what I assumed it was, my objections melted away, one by one.

Until I had none left.

Mankind has a funny way of making the important things trivial and the trivial things important. Everyone is buzzing about the football game and what some politician said and how the Dow Jones keeps falling, but few are pondering the very nature of the world they live in.

It's difficult to ask these sorts of questions. To think about such radical and reorienting things. Many just don't. It's too deep, too heavy, too threatening.

A friend who fell away from faith in university said over lunch, "I don't think about stuff anymore". This, I wanted to reply, is because atheism has no answers. It just tells you to stop thinking. Live your life and have fun and don’t worry about it. Atheists don't spend time building out their belief in nothingness; there is nothing there to believe in. It becomes a black hole that kills all questions.

Yet, atheism is also fragile. A mere glimmer of God can bring it crashing down.

The modern attitude is that a man must stop thinking if he is to go on living. Life is too crazy and complex, intellectual amputation is easiest and—dare I say it—most convenient. The technologies our culture glorifies all effectively do the same thing: make us stop thinking for ourselves. And the more I looked into it, the more it seemed the religious were the only ones still thinking.

When other belief systems told me I was suffering because I was thinking too much, Christianity told me I was suffering because I wasn’t thinking enough. When spirituality told me to step out, religion told me to step in.

Thinking, of course, is difficult. That's why people tend to judge; it is far faster and more certain. Judgment doesn’t ask me to hold any tension in my heart or nuance in my mind. I can just put people in a box, assuming I understand them, and move on with my life.

To be fair, there have been brilliant and honest people who thought hard about these things, but couldn't come to a belief in God. I studied several writers with a large intelligence and a deep heart—a mental complexion I saw my own reflection in—who couldn't bring themselves to believe in anything. Yet, they were left agitated and unhappy by their lack of belief and lived somewhat tragic lives, smashing up things and suffering for their cynicism; bleeding for their badge of intellectual pride. Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and David Foster-Wallace committed suicide. They went on seeing through things until all they saw was oblivion, staring right back at them.

The danger of the day-to-day trenches of adult existence is that many convince themselves there is no life to be found. That the world is filled with unsatisfying things. That the emptiness is just something to put up with and the patterns of behavior they can’t seem to break are just part of them. They lower the horizon of their thoughts and don't bother to think about the ultimate concerns, developing the capacity to compromise instead of the courage to ask hard questions. “The danger,” Simone Weil wrote, “is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.” Losing yourself can occur very quietly, almost as if it were nothing at all.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. If you do look, you usually do find said something, but it is rarely the same something you expect.

I would submit, with a quiet desperation, there is nothing more important. There is nothing more important than exploring the big questions and looking for answers. What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? Where did I come from and where am I going? What purpose makes the pain of life and certainty of death bearable?

Your core beliefs—the story you tell yourself about how the world works and what is true and what is good and what is evil—decide how you extract meaning from experience and impact every small thing you do. In a very real way, they define the world you inhabit. The story you live in is the story you live out. And maybe your story is a tragedy, and maybe you don’t want it to be.

That's the harsh fact of life I rarely want to face: I’m all in. The stakes couldn’t be higher. No matter what I do, it's going to kill me.

If you do the work and come to the conclusion that Christianity is a conspiracy and our world is random and meaningless, or some other religion or spiritual sect is true, or it's all "the universe" (whatever that's supposed to mean), that is okay. If that’s where your heart settles, that is enough.

Although, as a pastor told me and what I witnessed firsthand, those who seek the truth end up in Jesus.

At the end of last year, I finished reading the Bible, minuscule marginalia on every page. I had a stack of books about God beside my bed with half the pages dog-eared. Church on Sunday morning had turned from recreation to routine to ritual. Yet, I was still straddling the fence. I knew there was probably no turning back or going back to the way things were before. But coming to faith still seemed far away. Surreal.

I was convinced of Christianity intellectually and I had the face the fact that it wasn't honest to pick and choose only the ideas I agree with, like the Bible is a buffet. If I only believe what I like in the gospel and reject what I don't like, it is not the gospel I believe in, but myself. Nor can I only accept the intellectual aspect of Christ because, divorced from its story and significance, it loses all meaning.

If I think religion is a "useful lie," that it isn’t true but seems useful for living a good life, so we should all deceive ourselves into believing Christ's deity, then it really is an opiate of the masses. And I still run into the painful problem that started my journey into faith: I'm still placing myself alone at the center of creation, making the world revolve around me, which proved a reliable recipe for misery. If the focus of my faith is how God can serve me, instead of how I can serve God, I'm missing the whole point. If I only believe in God because He can do something for me, I'm worshipping myself. Even then, I couldn't explain why life seems to go a whole lot better, filled with more beauty and belonging and purpose and love, if it's all a lie. That doesn't seem to be how lies work.

Whereas the truth is what makes you clear and strong. The truth is what sets you free.

Faith in God doesn’t work because it’s a convenience or cosmic coincidence. It works because it’s true. Because it aligns you with the wood grain of reality. Rather, it could not work if it was not true.

I came to a point where I realized a choice must be made, and not choosing was still a choice. I couldn't pretend as if Jesus had never lived and died. No leader of any other major religion claimed to be God.

Jesus was either a lunatic or who He says He is.

As C.S. Lewis wrote:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic… or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Or, as St. Augustine puts it: "I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden."

Christianity built the West. Jesus of Nazareth was the most influential person to have ever lived. Then comes the question: Do I think the world was transformed by the life and death of a lunatic? Does that make sense? Is that the world I live in? As a friend said, driving to church one morning, if Christ was the Son of God, that's crazy. But if He wasn't, that's even crazier.

Make no mistake, it’s crazy if it is true. That the central human story is a perfect man who suffered perfectly. That we killed Him, not in spite of His virtue but because of it. That the cross is the symbol we needed.

It doesn’t make sense, but the secular story doesn’t make sense either. The fact we’re here doesn’t make sense.

The secular narrative is that we're evolved apes on a rock hurtling through an endless void of space, a random accident and statistical impossibility, who somehow just came to consciousness, while no other animal did. If that is true, then Beethoven's Ninth is just vibrating air, a Monet is just splotches of color, our sun is just a star (a small and fairly unremarkable one at that), and falling in love with a girl is only a kind of chemical madness because her beauty and charm is purely produced by the momentary and accidental collision of atoms. If that is true, everything we experience as beautiful and meaningful is just an illusion. Real warmth and enthusiasm and joy and serious pleasure are all in hopeless disharmony with the reality of the universe we live in. And eventually, the sun will bring about the heat death of the universe, and everything will be wiped out, and the empty maw of space will remain and reign, and even the eight billion years the earth existed will be nothing compared to the oceans of time before and after. Nothing we have done, good or bad, will have made any ultimate difference because, in the end, all will be forgotten as if it had never existed.

If human life is a brief firefly speck in the night and death ends all, there is no basis for hope. There is nothing to hope for. Yet, I find myself needing hope more than I need oxygen. I find myself with deep spiritual longings, and a hunger for beauty and love, and a firm burning belief that good will prevail. I find my heart yearning for immortality, complete nonsense if we are hyper-evolved apes. And I find the narrative of cosmic meaninglessness deeply wrong and strangely offensive. Either we are all insane, or we are all creatures of God. Take your pick.

The secular narrative not only gives no reason to live well. It gives no reason to live.

But the Christian story, the story that God made a very good world, yet man fell away from Him by his own free will, but God so loved the world He sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross to pay for our sins to bring us back into His love and a relationship with Him, and in the end, good will defeat evil, all wrongs will be made right, all hearts will be mended, all tears will be wiped away, all suffering will be saturated with meaning, and Heaven and earth will be made new, is glorious. It's a glorious story.

The message of the Bible is so hopeful that I was scared to let myself believe it.

Hollywood, whether they realize it or not, tells the Hero's Journey of Jesus over and over again. We fill the theatre seats and witness how that story fractures reality and sense it is authentic and real because we feel it in our nerve endings.

I began to realize it would take more faith, more reliance on unproven assumptions, not to believe than to believe. Put simply, it took less faith to believe in Christianity than to believe in anything else. "It seems to me to take a great deal more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian," Ellis Potter wrote, "because you have to maintain the idea that a blind, meaningless, purposeless, amoral, uncaring, directionless reality has produced human beings who are the opposite of all these characteristics."

Wouldn't it be weird if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose? If a world not forged out of the fire of love created humans who need love so badly?

I saw the Christian story made the most sense of both the beauty and brokenness of the world. The war and hate and violent cruelty, but also the warmth and care and acts of radical love. Once I accepted the mystery of God and Christ His Son, nothing else seemed a mystery. In an almost visceral way, the Christian story felt true.

I could make all the intellectual arguments in the world. I could explain how a mathematician calculated the probability that Jesus fulfilled 40 of the Old Testament prophecies, made in a span of over 1,000 years before His birth, is equivalent to selecting a single correct atom in our entire universe of atoms. Never mind that He actually fulfilled 300. Or how secular psychologists state the evidence that Jesus was mentally unstable, never mind completely insane, is approximately zero. Or the fact there is no competing narrative for the resurrection, with five hundred eyewitnesses. And after fleeing in fear when Jesus was arrested, but then swearing they saw Him resurrected, His disciples were all martyred, except for one, proclaiming Jesus Christ the Son of God to their death.

These things were not done in a corner.

But to argue proofs of religion is somewhat to miss the point of religion. It's taking an atheistic approach to contemplating the divine. While God does not demand proof, but simply asks to remain a mystery.

This, I would argue, is the biggest barrier for modern man to God: the overestimation of the intellect. “I can’t believe in anything I don’t understand,” is reasonable until restated: “If my mind, as the central locus of truth in the universe, cannot fully grasp something, it cannot be true and I refuse to consider otherwise.”

The modern world is so soaked in the drunken delirium of reason that even the devout feel they need hard evidence for their devotion.

But the worship of reason creates a false sense of certainty that makes the mind brittle and stops any real thinking from being done. It is easy to maintain this kind of intellectual rigidity. It is easy to wall off your world to only what you can understand. It takes much more effort and humility to maintain a poeticism of thought. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The most meaningful things we do in life, like getting married or having children, don't make rational sense. They don’t look good on a spreadsheet. We may not even have the words to explain our desire. These things are always leaps of faith, where we jump and build our wings on the way down. But if we're stuck at the top trying to get our heads around it, if we never leap because we’re too busy calculating the right angles or arguing the longing of our heart is "irrational," we miss out on the most meaningful things this life has to offer. There is more to acting intelligently than mere intelligence.

The most important laws we live by—laws of love, forgiveness, compassion—could not be discovered by reason, because they are unreasonable.

I read somewhere that two-thirds of Jesus' teachings are about forgiveness, but forgiveness has nothing to do with logic. Really, forgiveness is illogical. To forgive is to excuse the inexcusable. It’s only forgiveness if it’s undeserved, yet we need to forgive or we are crushed by the weight of our pain.

And if forgiveness is illogical, love is insane.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable,” C.S. Lewis wrote. “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

We are told, above all else, to love our neighbour. We are told that the highest calling in human life is to love whoever is next door. Whoever is around to be loved. And through the fires of love, we are told, there lies our salvation. Love will rearrange us.

To lack reason is to be inhuman. But to admit nothing but reason is to be disembodied. Put simply, human life cannot be ruled by reason alone, or it is not living at all.

For years, I could not believe in God because His existence is beyond my comprehension. I thought the human mind had wrapped itself around the world. I was living entirely in my head. Yet the more energy I expended trying to figure it all out, the more confused and restless and bitter I became.

Pride kept me in the prison of my mind. Pride told me if I didn't understand it, it wasn’t true. Pride told me that everything without a neat line of logic is a lie. It made my world simpler, but also much smaller.

God met me where I was: locked in the house of reasons and proofs. But faith is not purely an intellectual exercise. The mind cannot come to God. He wants our hearts.

It was a terrifying but true step away from the cold confines of reason and rationality when I accepted that I do not need to fully understand something to believe in it. I do not need sufficient proof to derive serious meaning and have it bear fruit in my life. I don't need to figure it all out. I can't and I won't. And that's okay.

Facts are useful and real, but they are not my dwelling.

Each step I take by faith and not by sight, my mind, drunk on certainty and consensus, clings to its jail cell bars, straining to explain, nails peeling away at the paint, but my heart marches on. The more I do this, the more I come alive.

Faith is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced. Religion is active. I cannot resolve the question of God in my head, I can only willingly agree to bear the mystery of God inside my heart. Sometimes this can be painful as pulling teeth, but, as far as I can tell, it’s the truth.

What matters is not knowing or possessing. What matters is whether my sense of gratitude is a fitting response to our world. Whether I am filled with awe and the rapture of being alive. Whether I keep some room in my heart for the unimaginable. Whether I am astonished.

For we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.

That's why the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. That's what it means to take life seriously: living in awareness of the terror and the beauty of creation, strangely soothed by its immensity.

Faith isn't irrational. It transcends the rational. To argue the Bible is scientific is to stoop down to a narrative level, a frame of perception, that Christianity rose above. Atheists exist at a level of consciousness where they see only the scientific and view all of reality through a rationalist lens. A rung up the ladder is to realize there are near infinite frames through which to view reality, none of which are objectively correct. But the final rung, once accepting the multiplicity of lenses, is to ask: What frame of perception, when embodied, leads to the most beautiful, useful, and good life?

The Christian answer to this questions is found in Jesus Christ. That Christianity, lived properly, results in the most beautiful people, the most beautiful families, and the most beautiful communities. That the victory of Christ is manifest in those He's enthroned.

Religious experience doesn't only transcend rationality, it transcends words. Pondering the divine breaks our brains, in the best way possible.

The very nature of God is that He is beyond our understanding. Whatever we think He is, He is so much more. If I really tried to talk about God, I'd start rambling about mystical oneness and infinity and eternity and all these labels that don't help and almost certainly hurt. Once you label something, you negate it. You stop seeing it. The moment God has nice neat lines and a black and white dictionary definition, we are no longer dealing with God but an invention of man. Joseph Campbell said the word "God" is the final barrier to the experience of God.

This is all to say: I try to be reverent, as best as I understand it. And that has made all the difference.

Faith is more like falling in love than answering a complex question. Faith, really, is a commitment to putting my heart at the centre of my life. It's rarely intuitive or easy, but only when faith is difficult does it mean something. Hope is only a virtue when things are hopeless, temperance when you are tempted to excess, and faith when you see a wall of reasons to be faithless, yet still stand firm.

And if faith is like falling in love, it is impossible without some degree of risk. Perhaps it works the same way: slowly at first, then all at once.

Sometimes people ask me about my "conversion," but that word is a relic from the rationalist's worldview. There was no full swap of beliefs, or Wednesday morning where I woke up and decided to pour gasoline on my old life and light a match. It was less of a conversion of more of a gradual inspiration, like someone breathed life into these old stories until they appeared more than just words on a page. I spent enough time reading the Bible until I realized it was true.

As to the nature of the change, I keep remembering this strange little riddle I heard in high school. If an old boat is docked in a harbour, full of rot and unfit to set sail, and a shipwright rebuilds it by replacing just one board at a time, when he's finally finished, is it an old boat or a new boat? I don't know the answer, but I do know I feel like that boat. I was rebuilt by Christ, board by board, almost imperceptible while it was occurring, until one day I looked back and realized I was no longer the same.

There are people much smarter than me who could smash holes in every intellectual argument I've made. I doubt I would fare well in a debate against Sam Harris. My only real evidence for faith is the work that God has done in my heart. That is a boat that cannot sink.

It is the one thing I cannot explain, but the one thing I know to be true. Funny how that works.

Faith has brought light into a darkness that I thought would never go away.

The confusion and heaviness, the weeks when it felt like water was filling my lungs, the conviction that I was just broken. The regret over not being someone else. The nostalgia for a future I'll never have. The search for lost time. As I've fallen into faith, most of this has just dissolved. Where it hasn't is where I'm still not faithful enough.

Coming to Christ is not being made better, like some self-help seminar. It's being made new. Through the act of daily surrender, it’s the death of the old self and the birth of a new self. It’s being given a new heart.

Faith has given me something I never could have imagined, before I had it. It's like I had the word "life," and then Christ came along and called me into it.

For instance, most of my life I was sick with envy. I had my heart set on things that cannot be shared. But Christ, as a figure to imitate, inverts everything. Instead of being strong, He is weak. Instead of being effortlessly happy, He weeps. Instead of being adored by the masses, He is crucified by the mob. Instead of ignoring the emails of his followers, He washes their feet. People were expecting a warrior, but instead got a Messiah who suffered and, in compassion, we turn to Christ. His pain evokes the humanity within our heart. His suffering becomes our salvation. This somehow makes Him the only role model worth having. The only figure I can strive to imitate, without it eating me alive.

No matter how hard I tried, or how many Michael Singer books I read, I could never trust “the flow of life” or surrender to “the universe”. It was too abstract and unsupported. It wasn’t until I had faith in a God who loved me and wanted what is best that I could truly trust in the outcome, even when it didn’t make sense or didn't seem fair, and focus on my actions and obedience. Only when my eyes are fixed on God can I let tomorrow take care of itself. Only then, daily duties and daily bread and a second coffee after lunch are among the sweetest things in life.

Faith is a reminder that we are rarely changed by acquiring new facts, but we are broken and remade by acquiring new loves.

It is not as though I’m good or virtue is easy. There is evil in my heart that I fight against every day. Since coming to faith, I’m only more painfully aware of my selfishness, my lust, my pride, and all the ways I fail to put others first. Those things won’t ever go away. My job is to wrestle with them until I die. To stay awake.

When I feel content with how well I’m doing and with what a good guy I am is when the danger is greatest. The minute I think I'm humble, I’m proud.

Faith also doesn't mean that I am happier, although I would say that I am. I don't go to God to make me happy. On earth, Jesus had moments of mirth, but was also deeply moved by grief and sorrow. In the gospels, more than any other emotion, He is distraught. Christ’s promise isn't happiness, which is fleeting and fragile, but meaning and purpose, which turns out to be much better, and something we can choose to create. Whenever my life doesn’t feel meaningful, it’s because I’m not taking on enough responsibility.

We want life to be about happiness, but the paradox is, if we make being happy our sole focus, the less happy we become. The more we squeeze, the more it slips away. But if we aim at meaning and purpose, we get meaning and purpose, and sometimes happiness thrown in.

Humans, in general, are terrible judges of what actually makes us happy.

If you want to be fully free, you will be fully lonely. But if you want to be happy, you must be tied. Real happiness comes from the fulfilment of duty; it is correlated with effort. It's like that old poem says: "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy."

That was part of Jesus’ message in the sermon on the mount: if you fulfill your daily obligations, you don’t need to worry about the future.

The Christian faith is the explanation of why we suffer, not the escape from it. In a world where we have free will, the only world where true beauty and goodness can exist, suffering must exist. But through Christ, I learn how to be worthy of my sufferings. I learn how to suffer like Him.

I’ve always thought that was one of the most important characteristics of being a good person: being able to process the pain of life without spitting it back out on other people.

The more I try to avoid suffering, the more I suffer. The more afraid I am of being hurt, the more fragile I become as every small thing becomes a threat. But Christ heading to the cross is the ultimate example of the voluntary acceptance of suffering, which, paradoxically, is how you transcend it. When you accept the unavoidable, you rise above it. That is how death is defeated.

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely," Heidegger wrote, "I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself.”

Through going to the cross as a voluntary act, life is renewed. Through letting all the parts of me that need to die burn away, I survive. And by remembering the certainty of death, I am called to live in a way where my absence brings no pleasure to the world. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.

At every moment of the day, I choose to close my heart or to open it. Being a Christian is choosing to let my heart break open. To open, open so much it hurts, then open some more, and never close again to the world.

I am always pushed to make my heart bigger.

No, I don't want to drown in bubbles of bliss. I want to feel it all, the highs and the lows, the joy and the sadness, every emotion this human experience has to offer. The times I am closest to my faith are when I am repentant and sorrowful. The moments I feel God’s presence most are my moments of despair and weakness and vulnerability.

I can't explain why bad things happen to good people. There is an element of fate and chance in life where you can do all the right things, but still struggle. You can make the sacrifices and sometimes they aren't accepted. I don't know why the same God that produced Roger Federer also produces sick children who don't make it to their seventh birthday. I think any attempt at explaining it would be grotesque.

There are many whose belief in God is too simple and shallow and crumbles when they slam into a wall of adversity. Like Job’s friends, many think that if bad things happen to you, it must be your fault; God must be angry with you. But the notion that if you live a good life, things will go well for you is wrong. Jesus was sinless. Yet his time on earth was marred by poverty, rejection, hatred, and a death so painful we had to invent a new word to describe it: excruciating.

In my life, there are still things I am waiting on God for. There are still things that don't make sense. I struggle to see how all of what has happened is good. But I do trust that it is good, in an ultimate and final sense. I do trust that if I could see eternity, I would receive both the sweet and the bitter equally from His hand. And I do trust that everything will be made beautiful in its time.

“Until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man,” Dumas wrote, “all human wisdom is contained in these two words, ‘Wait and Hope’”.

Besides, it shouldn't make sense to me. I don't see the bigger picture, the beginnings and ends of things. I don't know how grass grows or how my knees work; I can't expect to know how all of eternity is managed.

Given the choice between a random, senseless universe and a very good world where a Creator, in His infinite abyss of contemplation, is preparing some mysterious good beyond my comprehension, I will choose the latter. Every. Time.

Christians must believe this is a white world with black spots, not a black world with white spots. Evil is a small and passing thing; a deformity, not a default. There is light and beauty in the world, and the darkness will not overcome it.

I sense that play out within. Despite how hard the world pushes me, I find in my heart, there is something stronger, something hopeful and higher, that pushes right back. Despite how badly I've been hurt, I find a place in my soul where I've never been wounded. Deep down there is joy and the joy burns out the pain. There is so much meaning, the suffering becomes somewhat irrelevant.

And if I take Christ at His word, which takes faith, many days more faith than I feel, death is not the end. It took me some time to not revolt against that idea as totally wrong and deluded, but rather lean into the instinctive response of my being; how every cell sings.

Maybe it’s the hardest death narrative to believe, but it’s also the only death narrative that’s satisfying. Every human instinctively knows that death is not only sad, it’s wrong. And becoming fertilizer for a plant in the circle of life, or a dewdrop that melts back into an ocean of consciousness, is almost insulting. Because what we want is not life after death, but love after death. Love can only exist if we retain a personal self.

To say I've found an answer does not mean work is done. Rather, much like confessing to a pretty girl that you are in love, the work has just begun.

I also think it's the answer. To dilute my words by saying it's "my truth" or that it "works for me" is to succumb to a post-modern narrative that insists there is no such thing as objective truth. That everyone can walk around as lords of their own skull-sized kingdom with "their truth" as long as it doesn't offend anyone else's truth. Post-modernism insists that truth is only subjective; a statement which, ironically, is an objective truth.

The Bible can be bitter to the modern palate because it states there is a right way to live and there is a wrong way to live and nowadays we never dare to say one person's interpretation of reality is true or good and another's is false or bad, because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief. But tolerance doesn't mean not having beliefs. Tolerance means still choosing to love people, even if they disagree with you.

It can be frightening to have convictions. It can be scary to stand for something. But if you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything. In an old story, Satan greets people in Hell with: “You’ll find that there’s no right or wrong here—just what works for you.”

If you think men who care are dangerous, wait until you see what men who do not care are capable of.

It takes courage to stand for a truth unaccepted in our times. The punishment is usually crucifixion. But, as a friend once said, all men are crucified, you only get to decide what you will be crucified for. In other words, you’re going to pay a price for everything you do and everything you don’t do. There is a price to telling the truth, just as there is a price to telling a lie. You only get to choose your punishment, and hope it’s not something greater than you can bear.

In our modern world, when knowing what is true can feel so complicated and confusing, when everyone on Instagram proclaims to have the secret formula you simply must know, when the flood of information feels like being sucked sixty feet under the sea and blinded by the sun all at once, and the bounds of your brain are about to burst, Jesus calls through the noise, "Follow me". Christ says He is the way and the truth and the life. That He has a way to live and if you follow it, you will have life to its fullest. That is His promise.

If Jesus is the Son of God, His teachings are divine insights I can live by with confidence. He is the rock on which I can build my house; the rock I can depend on when the storm comes.

Christianity, as an operating system for life, works. It works so well, you'd think God designed it. And because it calls us to orient around love and service to others, my faith doesn’t just lift me up, but everyone I interact with. As I’ve leaned more into my faith, life has only become more miraculous. Or maybe I’m just more attentive to all the miracles. Is there a difference?

The Bible has the key to a beautiful life. If I fail, it is not because I don't know the truth, but because I am unable to follow it. "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting," G.K. Chesterton wrote. "It has been found difficult and left untried."

Having faith is actually much harder than not having faith. Yet, the difficulty is holy. The difficulty is why I trust it.

All of this religion distills down to love, hope, and faith, in that order.

Love, as anyone with a pulse knows, is difficult. It’s exhausting. But Jesus says to love, even though we pay the price for it. That love is still worth it. That love itself is pain, but it is the pain of being truly alive.

As an atheist, I thought Christians were blind believers, clutching onto their convictions with false confidence. But as a Christian, that's not how I experience faith at all. Faith is not belief exactly because belief implies certainty. Faith is not about certainty, but rather a yearning for something beautiful I can sense, but never fully grasp. Faith, really, is desire itself.

Viewed in this way, a Christian does not live on the continuum between belief and doubt, but between intensity and apathy. As with breathing, the question one must always ask is: Am I doing it, now?

Faith is about the wrestling, the wondering, the continual motion toward God. It’s holding space in my heart for the tension that never goes away. It’s thinking I’m surrendered and then realizing I really wasn’t. There is no arrival or completion or satisfaction. There is only the striving. The endless and burning desire to move toward God, who is infinite.

He who thinks he has finished has already fallen back.

Faith is scary at times because I am not seeing, not controlling, not totally understanding. I don't have it all figured out. I can't get my head around it. I am surrendering the need to know precisely what is happening or exactly where this is all going. I am walking and trusting God to provide strength and stability in the overflow of life. As a friend said to me a few weeks back, "You cannot always know how God is working in your life, but you can trust that He is".

I'm nowhere near as mature in my faith as I want to be. I have days when this whole thing feels crazy and surreal and I want to close my eyes and click my heels back to my childhood bedroom when everything was safe and nothing really mattered. Days when the religious words people speak seem fake and made-up, even manipulative, and the good deeds seem performative instead of pious.

In my weaker and more vulnerable moments, I don't want to believe. I don't want my choices to matter. I don’t want life to be this real. Part of my wrestling with God is that I don’t always want to wrestle with God. I just want to figure it out and be done.

Yet every time I stumble, it's because I am letting my head step on my heart. When my faith feels dry, it’s because I’m trying to do it all myself, instead of coming to God for grace.

Even when I struggle to believe in Jesus, I believe in His works. I believe in the healing I have seen in others. I believe in the beautiful families I’ve spent time with. And I know how my own life has been changed, in a way as surprising and mysterious and unexplainable as the experience of waking up out of a deep sleep.

There is no knowing for a fact. But the love of Christ surpasses all knowledge.

It was huge for my faith when I heard other Christians admit doubt. Even pastors see a man cast off his crutches and their first instinct is that he's faking it. Even lifelong believers are awake in the middle of the night worrying, "But what if I'm wrong?" Tim Keller said that in his lowest moments, death scared him. I realized I didn't need bulletproof confidence to have faith. I just needed the desire.

And I still have questions that I don't have good answers to. Why did God ask Abraham to murder his son? What did Jesus mean when he said, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword?” How can Christ be both fully man and fully God? If Satan is real, what does that mean for how I live?

But God doesn't want us to stop thinking or abandon reason. He wants us to ask hard questions and test everything for ourselves. Not asking hard questions means my faith is weak. It means I don't trust that God has the answers and can guide me through the crisis and confusion.

The Bible seems to suggest that God wants us to wrestle with Him. Not repeat the same empty platitudes or sweep our doubts under the carpet, but lay our moments of spiritual despair at His feet.

In my journey, doubt becomes a door to discovery. Doubt urges me upward, to a higher understanding of my faith.

Even on mornings when I am fragile, I remember God is not. Even on days I don’t feel faithful, I stick to the actions and trust that feelings will follow. And even through the weeks of waiting for the dryness to catch fire, what is clear is more important than what isn't. The victory of Christ, seeking to have Him enthroned in our hearts, that we can experience the kingdom of Heaven now.

And I am affirmed in my faith by the intellectual giants who walk before me. Men and women across the ages who thought about these things down to their ends and out to their edges and their faith held fast. Augustine and Austen, Dante and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Tolkien, Milton and Merton, and many more. G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis were especially impactful for me, if you couldn't tell by how many times I've quoted them.

Faith is a lifelong journey. A slow and steady pilgrimage. Some of it is moving and uplifting, but most of it is mundane, hard work. Most of it is Monday to Saturday.

The love of God is a long conversation that takes place in my heart.

A lot of other hard to explain things happened. I could tell you the story of how I met a 74-year old pastor at a hostel in Salzburg who told me about the twenty-four miracles he's experienced. Or, in the last breakout room of an online writing course, how I met a man who, two years later, pointed me toward C.S. Lewis and Tim Keller when I said I was sick of all the talk of finding purpose. Even last summer, I chose a random Workaway living at an off-grid property in Newfoundland, hosted by a fellow who, to my surprise, was a Catholic monk in his 20s and then got a PhD in philosophy and theology and became a professor.

For years, as I was working through all of this stuff, slowly and painfully coming to all these conclusions, yet still confused as could be, some people looked at me as a lost sheep. Like they had it all figured out, while I was flailing but ultimately failing to answer even the most basic of life’s questions. It made me angry. Until I realized I was a lost sheep. And then I was found.

That's where I am today, four years from when I read that first essay about Christianity in my dark and damp university basement apartment.

I pray first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I bring my requests to God, telling Him how I see things and what I want, knowing I don't see everything clearly. I bring my brokenness to Christ, admitting it's a mess, and ask for His help. I pray for family, friends, sometimes strangers, and, on my best days, a few enemies. Mostly, I say thank you.

Every day, I read the Bible. I try to keep my sins in sight. My hand open, my heart tender, and my steps surrendered. I aspire to be the light of Christ, wherever I go.

And I attend church on Sunday. A living church, rooted in scripture, filled with a community of people I've fallen in love with. If you'd like to come sometime, I'd love to take you.

All of this is beautiful and complicated. I don’t fully understand it, but I no longer need to. Instead, I embody it and watch magic unfold in my life as a result.

I sought God and He answered.

That is why I am a Christian again.

With all my heart,

“I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”

— Psalm 118:5

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Every Saturday at 5:30am, after putting coffee on the stove to percolate, I take my sourdough starter out of the fridge and feed it with equal parts starter: flour: warm water. (If you don't have any starter, you can come over for coffee one afternoon and I will share some of mine.)

In the afternoon, after the starter has expanded, I weigh out 500g of flour, 10g of salt, ~100g of starter, and 375g of warm water in a large bowl, mix it well, then cover it. The bowl goes in the fridge before bed and comes back onto the counter the next morning to “re-rise”. After lunch, I set the oven to 450°F, flour a baking pan, scrape the dough out of the bowl, fold it over itself a few times, put it into a pleasant bread-like shape, then bake for thirty-five-ish minutes. This whole process takes about 10 minutes and produces bakery-quality bread at a fraction of the cost.

I've made all my own bread for about a year now, and often make extra to share with neighbours and friends. Of course, making bread can get more complicated. Some recipes have seventeen stages of proofing and scoring and patting and pulling and caressing. Some recipes demand you dedicate a day to kneading at precise, thirty-minute intervals. These, in my opinion, are needlessly complex in a way that discourages attempts being made. I cannot look like an expert if I admit something is surprisingly simple.

I am not going to win any awards for my bread, or be recruited by any Parisian boulangerie (although that would be cool). But that does not mean I cannot take great joy in both the process and result, and share it with others.

Perhaps one day I will seek the status of an artisan, but perhaps not. Besides, something must first be formed before it can be perfected.

~~~

I assume much of life is like this. I assume there is meaningful work everywhere, work that tangibly makes life better, that isn't as difficult as it appears to a spectator. I assume that the world is full of useful things to make that even someone with the abilities of an amateur can accomplish.

In the last year, I built shelves, stairs, and a deck. I helped put a steel roof on a timber-framed off-the-grid cabin in Newfoundland. I designed and built a shed at my cottage to store firewood for the winter. Even in the last few weeks, I taught myself how to service a bike, adjusting the brakes, replacing the back tire, tuning the spokes, and repairing the chain. All things I once deemed impossible, at least impossible for me, yet yielded to effort and patience.

By seeking and blundering, I learn. And with each attempt to do something difficult, my confidence in my ability to do other difficult things grows.

It's hard to describe the satisfaction that arises when I do something myself that I had always cognitively outsourced to "other people." It’s even harder to articulate the clear joyousness of spirit found in embodied doing. Man is at his most natural when he is making things.

I've learned there is a very thin layer of knowledge needed to make an attempt. The much bigger barrier is belief. That’s why agency is precious. Making a good attempt, making something worth making, is often simple. Excellence is rooted in the capacity to feel like a fool and the willingness to do things imperfectly. To witness the early results and continue anyway.

The real reward is in the striving itself. That is what most experts fail to grasp. Instruction is good, but encouragement better. My life became immeasurably more alive when I lost the impulse of spectatorship1. To create is to lure the divine.

When you learn you can just do things, you become—dare I say it—unstoppable.

My first bookshelf was wobbly, the deck wasn’t exactly level, and the roof had a weird overhang on one side. All were imperfect. But all were still worthy of love. The bookshelf held books, the deck held me, and the roof kept the rain out.

I got to a point where I realized if I wanted my life to be more full of the things I want, I had to be willing to do those things imperfectly, but frequently2. It would never be convenient, but it was still worth it.

Life grants nothing without hard work.

~~~

When I am at my most vital, I think often of my hopes and dreams. When I meet new people, goals practically spill out of my pockets. I've come to believe cultivating desire is a skill in itself. The future must be beautiful enough to want.

I get a kind of tingling thrill from entertaining my aspirations. From contemplating what my life could become if I so choose. From daring to ask, "What breaks my heart with longing when I imagine it?" All this I permit, as long as it is paired with action. The more I act, the more I can allow myself to dream.

These visions are romantic in nature, even edging on unreality, but I tend to think that's important. I'm starting to think romanticizing life will actually make it better3. That some idealizing is necessary on a regular basis to live well4.

Without a vision, the people perish. Without a beautiful future, I fall apart.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I let the grandiosity of my vision daunt and demotivate me. When one dreams of constructing a coliseum, laying the first brick feels meager. Almost pointless. I wanted to do everything, and so I did nothing.

Today, I have far more ambitions than I could possibly accomplish. I have a long list of projects I want to pursue, many I won't get to this year. It required a shift in my heart posture to look at all these plans as an abundance of hope, rather than a scarcity of resources or skill5.

A man's reach should exceed his grasp. Besides, it is remarkable how well things work out in the long run if I am patient and consistent.

I choose to see life as a skill I can only improve at6. Over the years, with patience and effort, I will perfect my favorite recipes, become a seasoned outdoorsman, absorb more from each book I read, and grow a more fruitful garden (one protected from the despotism of rabbits). I choose to see every small thing as a skill I can take seriously, develop in, and learn from.

It is a kind of piety to take great joy in daily life.

This is all to say: If you want to be the best, the details make a world of difference. But, if you don't need to be the best, you can just try stuff.

Now that your attempts don't have to be perfect, they can be good.

With a sincere heart,

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The other day, my roommate asked me whether I'd want to spend a day doing something I like alone, or doing something I dislike but with someone I love.

At first, the answer was obvious. As a tried and true introvert, I spend a lot of time alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, and rather enjoy it. Most of the time, I am not lonely. I am simply alone.

But, I thought a moment. I remembered a cold and gray October day, when a mean-spirited rain fell in sheets and I was outside planting cloves of garlic three inches into the mud for five hours, hands numb but shoulder to shoulder with a friend from Italy who liked to talk about philosophy and free will and never failed to have fun.

If I had to choose, I would repeat that day in a heartbeat. Over any day I've spent alone. At the time, it was frustrating, verging on maniacally funny, but now is one of the best memories I have.

Moving to a new city has been interesting because it provides the delightful and daunting opportunity to cultivate community from scratch. Delightful because I can meet people as who I am now, instead of living in stories of who I once was. Daunting because I don't know anyone here. I'm forced to evaluate what sort of people I want to surround myself with and, therefore, what sort of person I am and want to be.

These past months, I've spent most of my time alone. Many Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons reading and walking and talking to myself. Somewhat to my surprise, I've had this sense of loneliness gently orbiting my world. Not a crushing weight of aloneness, but rather this valence. This thin, patient, almost delicate, feeling of being lonely.

This isn’t the cool and confident essay I had planned to publish. It doesn’t fit the attractive image of myself I’d like to project. But it’s what feels the most real right now.

Loneliness is a pain that comes at the threshold crossings of life. Crossings between places, crossings between jobs, crossings between beliefs. There's an ache of outgrowing old things. I find myself asking the same questions. Where do I fit in? What sort of people do I feel at home with? Who do I really care about? Who really cares about me? I'm less interested in connection that is forced or polite or full of pretence. I don't want kindness. I want love.

Because when I look into my own loneliness, it's not the breadth of connection that I miss, but the depth. The seeing and being seen. Friendship, true friendship, is a recognition of the self in the other. It's that moment of "Oh! You too? I thought I was the only one." True friendship is effortless. True friendship is as free as breathing.

I've realized the pain is not from being disliked by people, but rather my own inability to deal with their indifference. Put simply, no one is out to get me. They just don't care that much.

There is loneliness in people, but what is perhaps more piercing is loneliness in things. As in, I thought I had something but realized I don't have it anymore. Or maybe never did. My armor of identity, the things I could point to that made me feel good about myself, made me feel better than other people, I don't have anymore. I can no longer retreat to my intellect. I can no longer comfort myself because I read Dante and write essays. It all seems so full of holes now. Like a hand came in and poked its fingers through and now light is streaming in. In this sense, loneliness is a stripping away. A stripping away and a staring down of what's left. It's an experience of nakedness underneath all that armour. When I feel like I have nothing, what do I have?

Really, loneliness is being afraid of the space. Waiting, full of expectancy, for something to come in and fill it.

I think it's natural to have long bouts of melancholy in life. There is a poetry in accepting the seasons of the heart, much like the seasons of the year. To hold space to feel these things. To still keep a posture of serenity. There's this line I repeat in my head: "Open, open so much it hurts, and then open some more". I don't really know what it means. But I like it.

Last night I read that loneliness is just another form of vanity. It hurt, in the way that the truth usually does. After all, loneliness is only more self-immersion. The disease cannot be the cure.

April is a month of rain. When the wind blows and the skies open and a flood of water comes down upon the earth. When all that is old and dead and unprepared gets washed away. When only things founded on rock are left standing.

April is also a month of planting seeds. Seeds that get watered in the rain. Seeds that grow quietly in the soil. Seeds that may take months, or longer, to sprout.

All farmers know this.

In enduring admiration,

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i.

November, 2022

Biescas, Spain

So there I was. In the pitch black. Running on the shoulder of a remote rural highway that wound up into the Pyrenees mountains, stumbling over potholes and protruding veins of rock and rebellious chunks of asphalt. Nothing to light my way but a pale moon and a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars above. A steep cliff a slight side-step to my right with only a low, rusted guardrail between me and a long way down.

Cars raced by on both sides, hurtling down the road or roaring up it, piercing the sublime stillness of the night. As they passed, some laid on their horns, probably muttering a hurricane of extraordinary Spanish insults. Some meekly moved over to give space. But most kept on driving as if I wasn't there. I probably would've done the same.

I pulled up from my run, back aching from the twenty pounds of food and water I was carrying, sweat soaked through my shirt. Bent over, sucking for oxygen, legs burning with ferocity, negotiating with my nervous system to relax. Gazing out into the deep but dazzling darkness, I could feel the presence of danger as if the sky had a low ceiling, or something was looming over my shoulder. But, it was no time to think. I checked my phone. 2% battery. Still four kilometers to go. Time was running out.

In the Fall of 2022, I was studying abroad in Pamplona, Spain. Coincidentally, where Ernest Hemmingway spent a fair bit of time, sometimes writing, but always drinking and bothering the locals.

One weekend in mid-November, I decided to head out for a hiking trip in the Pyrenees Mountains—a stunning range of rolling rocky peaks that straddles the border of France and Spain—for a photographic feast.

I was too young and too broke to rent a car, so I mapped out a route by bus. Early Friday morning, I boarded the first crowded bus to Jaca, then a second less crowded bus to Sabiñánigo in the afternoon, where I bought a weekend's worth of groceries of the highest nutritional quality—a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, almonds, and a bag of tangerines—and, by some miracle, managed to hail a taxi.

My plan was perfect. I'd take the taxi to Biescas, a small sleepy town at the foot of the Pyrenees, then walk the 8 kilometers to my motel before check-in closed at 8pm. Brilliant. I'd enjoy a scenic walk after a day of sitting and save a few Euros from a shorter taxi trip. But, the buses that day were both late, and calling a taxi with my broken Spanish proved difficult. When I left Sabiñánigo, daylight was only beginning to dim, but by the time we neared Biescas, the sky's grainy and luminous blue had faded. A veil of twilight had settled on the town and yellow windows glowed with warmth as the taxi rolled up to the cobblestone central square. I wanted to ask for a ride all the way there, but I am stubborn and polite and I couldn't explain even if I tried.

With a quiet "Gracias," I got out of the taxi and started through the town, as children were called inside from playing and teenagers were huddled outside convenience stores on BMX bikes. It seemed as though with each step I took, "sort of dark" slipped silently into a thick and velvet dusk.

On the outskirts of the town, I found the road that snaked up, 1,000 feet in elevation, toward my motel. Only then did I learn it was more of a highway, with narrow and soft shoulders, and a pitch black highway at that, without a single streetlight to be seen. It was quarter to seven, a little over an hour until check-in closed, but at least a two-hour walk. I would have to run.

I turned onto the highway, took a strong first ten strides, then promptly realizing the idiocy of running up a highway in the pitch black, pulled a u-turn back to town. I rummaged through my bag for my old and failing iPhone 8, with a battery that drained by the second. There was no taxi service and all the hotels were closed for the winter or 100 Euros a night. I turned around again, back to the highway, took a strong ten steps, then stopped and looked over my shoulder to the golden glow of the town below. Cursing myself, cursing my stubbornness, cursing my stupidity, I then looked up at the dark snaking highway ahead. "This is so dumb." I started to run.

So there I was, running on the side of a country road in the raw rural darkness, up a steep and steady hill. Never having hitchhiked before, I dared to extend an arm, hoping a car might stop and offer a lift. But none did.

After forty minutes of running, climbing, cursing, panting, burning, I saw a single sodium lamp light in the distance. My jog picked up in pace. I cut across the highway and up a final hill to Residencial Bubal, a 2-star motel with yellowing linoleum floors and peeling wallpaper and popcorn ceilings, but nestled neatly into the Pyrenees.

With 30 minutes to spare, I checked in, found my way to my cabin, took a hot shower, and collapsed on the couch, legs like lead, too tired to move.

But, despite all that had happened, all the trouble my foolish frugality had gotten me into, the most half-witted thing was next. I texted my girlfriend at the time, who was at an Oxford University dinner a few thousand kilometres away, "I did something really stupid." Then went to sleep.

ii.

May, 1992

Stonehenge

A cold rain was falling in sheets from the soft and gray sky. My parents, only a few years married, full of excitement and expectancy, were on their first trip to Europe. They had spent a few days in London, then picked up a rental car at Heathrow to complete a clockwise trip through England and Scotland.

One casual and commonplace afternoon, after finishing a tour of Stonehenge, they climbed back into their car. I'm sure my Dad was still mulling over the history of England—the Anglos and Saxons, wars over roses, Henry's and Richard's and Edward's—as he checked all of his mirrors, checked them all again, and started to pull out of the parking lot and toward the main road. I'm sure my Mom had their accordion map of the UK spread across her knees, the same one that’s tucked away in our living room credenza today, as the car rolled up to turn onto the small one-line highway. I'm sure of it.

My Dad flipped on his left-hand turn signal. Tik tik tik. Rain kept beating down from the soft and gray sky, harder now, drumming on the steel roof and splattering on the windshield in fat drops, turning the whole outside world a milky white. Tik tik tik. He paused. He looked left. No cars coming. All clear. He turned left into the lane.

All of a sudden, a bellowing horn blared, loud enough to feel in your chest cavity. A two-ton military transport truck, flying down the highway, was barreling up behind them. The solider in the truck slammed on the brakes, the pressed pedal shooting pressurized fluid through narrow lines, pushing pistons that squeeze calipers that clamp like a snake's jaw onto spinning metal rotors, all in a split second, slowing the rapid rotation of the wheel. Driver gripping wheel, brake pads gripping rotors, rubber gripping road. The wheels locked and the truck skids, governed by the same physics of running on a hardwood floor in socks.

Finally, the truck came to a halt, with a big mechanical wheeze, short of their back bumper by a couple of inches. My parents both let out a guttural exhale, clenched muscles slowly uncoiling. The sky still soft and still gray. It was one of those times, so they tell me, when your life flashes before your eyes and eternity is seen in the seconds.

A few seconds later and they would've been crushed in their compact car. Spines snapped in seventy-two places. The abrupt end of their big, exciting trip to Europe. And my existence.

iii.

July, 2024

Greenland, Newfoundland

Waves began to crash into each other, foamy and white, the unapologetic midday sun scorched the surface of everything it saw, and a strong west wind picked up, pushing our twelve-foot inflatable Zodiac boat more than a kilometer from the coast, with nothing but endless ocean gaping in front of us. And that's when the motor quit.

A few hours earlier, to celebrate my last week in Newfoundland, we decided to go out for a final fishing trip. The wind was a little stronger and waves were a little higher than normal, but nothing we worried about on the safety of the shore.

After fishing in the cove for an hour and catching nothing, we decided to venture out further to sea to see if our luck would change. A good fisherman always blames his location. I pulled the ripcord on the boat's old but enduring four-stroke Yamaha motor, and after a brief cough and sputter and choke, it roared to life and we putted out into deeper waters. I cut the engine and we continued to cast, hoping to catch at least one or two cod but nevertheless enjoying the growing warmth of the day, as the sun mounted higher in the cloudless pale blue sky. A few other fishing boats cruised by but, with similar luck, had all continued on.

Being in a boat, especially a small boat, when there's a strong current is a curious illusion. It never feels like you're moving much, yet when you look back at the shore, fix your eyes on some anchor point, you realize you've moved a mile.

And then it happened.

As the wind picked up and the waves frothed white, I realized the rocks on the coastline had shrunk to small specks. The rocking of the boat changed from rhythmically relaxing to rough. My friend went to start the motor. He yanked on the cord. The motor coughed and sputtered and choked, but then went silent. He yanked again. This time only a cough and a sputter. Each pull of the cord became violent and desperate, as the realization of the real danger we were in became clear. I threw my fishing rod down and raced to the oars to try to keep us from blowing any further out from shore. As hard as I rowed, the boat barely moved. After one minute, then two minutes, then five minutes of trying, the wind still howling down, where time felt hot and sharp and painfully slow, we had to abandon all hope the engine would start. It was like stepping into a sauna of fear.

There were all the ingredients of a true tragedy. We had no cell phone, no food and hardly any water. Not a single other boat was in sight. I leaned into the oars twice as hard. It was pull or perish.

After ten minutes of rowing we had moved a tad closer to the coast. There was a solid chance we would reach the shore, but it would take hours. High strung nerves started to relax. Panic melted into anger at our own stupidity. Progress was slow and arduous. Then the wind picked up again, howling down more harshly than before. Doubt seeped back in like a slow poison.

But then, around an outstretched arm of rock, a beige motorboat appeared, first far away but drawing closer. An elderly couple, locals, with leathery lines in their faces that sang of innocence and experience, happened to see us morons rowing a kilometer off the coast and came to see if we needed help. Yes. Yes we did.

They threw over a tow line and, slicing through the choppy water, guided us back to shore. It was one of those "kiss the earth" kind of moments. A near miss with a nautical disaster.

iv.

Why am I telling you this? What's the point? What's the thread that stitches these stories together?

Nothing. Nothing really. Besides that they are stories worth telling. Stories I want to remember. Stories that occupy some liminal state between fact and fiction, yet will weave into the tapestry of family legend and lore, like all the stories told and re-told over kitchen table coffee and backyard brunch and Thanksgiving dinner for years to come, yet somehow get better at each telling. In actuality our lives are made up of days, but in reality our lives are composed of stories. It is one big sweeping saga, with hundreds of sub-plots beneath. And it is stories that furnish the room of our memory and adorn its wanting walls. As we consign more and more of our life to the dim and unstable domain of memory, as we endlessly acquire new loves like artifacts, as we only remember more and more, even when remembering fills us with such a sweet and vicious pain.

Nothing connects these stories besides, of course, the profound and paralyzing fact that fate, my friends, is decided by inches.

Come by for coffee soon,

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The fastest way to get somewhere is, reliably, a straight line.

There seems to be a strange milieu of waiting in the modern age, partially propagated by bad advice about "biding your time" and "being too young" and "paying your dues". While there is no substitute for hard work, this line of logic leads many to a kind of passive spectatorship in life. A cold inertia that is exhausting1.

Complacency is a soft and gentle slope of continuous concessions, without signposts or sudden turnings, until one day it is too late to turn back. Mediocre situations, languished in long enough, simply become lost years.

Some waiting periods and rites of passage—those made articulate—are necessary2. But most exist more in imagination than in reality.

I've written about this pernicious pattern before. The trap of waiting for real life to start. Waiting for some nebulous benefit before deciding. Waiting to feel “ready”. Waiting for permission. Waiting for a conviction that will never come. Sometimes, just… waiting.

When I think about it, much of the advice I've received from adults is scarred by cynicism. "Don't settle down too early, don’t get married, don’t have kids! Have fun! Travel more, drink more, be more free!3" Life is heavy. Time makes its wounds. But a refusal to be pessimistic is the rarity. An open-handed encouragement to pursue the depths of commitment is almost extinct.

Wandering forms character, but one can wander too far.

~~~

It is strange to me when people move to the city "only for a few years," just to work a job they don't want to be doing in a decade4. If everything is treated as temporary, nothing is worthy of care. And if nothing is worthy of care, nothing will truly be cherished. Nothing will feel like home.

If I had one wish, it would be for people to stop being so lackadaisical about life. To stop caring so much about politics and pop-culture and sports, and instead take a serious interest in the direction their life is headed and whether it's somewhere they want to go.

Maybe you can just go to where you want to be in a decade now? What if you could? What if the waiting wasn't necessary? I think it's worth at least investigating.

If you have a ten-year plan, what's to stop you from doing it in two?

Of course, the scripts we inherit do not offer much help here. But the mark of maturity is when someone decides to stop following the script and starts writing their own story.

~~~

The trouble is, we think we have time.

Not that life is a race. But depth deserves all the time it can get. Love grows with time. Trust compounds with time. Beauty layers with time. That sense of familiarity and whole-bodied belonging only thickens and intensifies. When it comes to depth, there is simply no substitute. Last year, I joked that I was sad I would miss Christmas with my wife. I'm not married. I’m not dating. I don't even know who she is yet. But still, it's one less Christmas we get5.

William Blake said that “eternity is in love with the productions of time”. But, I would argue the reverse is also true: the productions of time are in love with eternity. At least, I am in love with eternity.

More and more, I only want to do things that last forever. I only want to invest in things that compound. I only want to love what will grow. I’m less interested in what can be done in five minutes of work, and more interested in what can be done over five years of effort.

I know this philosophy is practically insane, but I also happen to think it’s insanely practical.

For instance, I chose not to live in Toronto, the big bustling city where the bulk of my friends are, because I knew I would never stay there long-term. Instead, I chose Kitchener. A smaller city with vitality and an exciting future, but also plenty of rural countryside and surrounding small towns. I wanted a place where I could plant roots. I wanted to find the cozy coffee shops, befriend farmers at the market, and know what roads not to speed. A place that could convince me to cast off the feeling that I would only pick up and leave again. I wanted to live in a way that doesn’t make sense unless where I am now is my forever home.

There is a chance I am wrong and will move somewhere else. But here, there is room to grow. To build slowly. To see where five or ten or twenty years of effort in one direction could take me. We overestimate what can be done in a day, but underestimate how much can be done in a decade.

Similar with my career search, I was told I had to go work at a big bank for five or ten years before I could do what I wanted: work at a small, high-integrity wealth management firm where I would get close personal attention and have the chance to do meaningful work that affects the company's bottom line. But, stubborn enough to tempt convention, I contacted thirty firms that fit my ideal, doubtful a job was even possible, and three offered to hire me. Now I'm in a position to do work I'm ethically and intellectually aligned with and could keep doing for the rest of my career. Again, I do not know for certain. But there is room to grow.

~~~

The fastest way to get somewhere is a straight line. And if it's the wrong thing, a straight line is the fastest way to figure that out and not hold onto dreams steeped in delusion.

Romantic visions are reckless and unreliable, or so I’m told, but the only thing worse than finding out is never finding out at all. Growing nostalgic for a future you'll never have, resenting not being someone else, yearning for what could have been. Longing for impossible and infinite things, precisely because they are impossible and infinite. Those are the regrets that weigh the most. The things left undone, the words left unsaid, the plans left unproved. The dreams still dusty in the garage.

Our job in life, our duty to ourselves and the world and all the generations to come, is to empty our hearts, entirely. To walk a straight path, making things a little more useful and beautiful as we go.

I came to a point where I decided that if I knew what I wanted, there was no reason to wait. And if I didn't know, there was no excuse not to figure it out.

The beauty of life consists of both light and darkness. But for those who wait too late in the day, shadows may swallow the light.

Your friend,

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• I’ve been settling into my new home in Kitchener, building rituals and routines, and getting integrated within the community. I joined an aikido class, started to swim lanes again, and bought a used road bike to get around.

• Next week, I start work. My first full-time, in-office job since 2021. I’m expecting the first four weeks to be uncomfortable, at best, but I’ll adapt and think I’ll rather enjoy it.

“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy.

Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.”

― G.K. Chesterton

I spent St. Patrick's Day at one of the biggest illegal street parties in the province, volunteering to hand out water and Timbits to help drunk university students sober up1.

It’s marked on my mental calendar since St. Patrick's Day in 2023, two years ago, was the last time I had a drink.

Whenever I tell people I don’t drink anymore, an admission I try to avoid, it sounds like I was once a raging alcoholic and my burning lust for liquor culminated in some wild backyard Bacardi binge, and afterward I vowed never to do it again. But that’s not how it happened. As far as I remember, I had two or three glasses of Chilean red wine, went to a friend's for a few hours, and was home by 9pm.

I can't say it was ever a clear and firm decision to stop. There was no fanfare or flourish, no rallying call to arms. Alcohol simply faded into the background of my life like an old memory. I just lost interest.

My drinking died not with a shout, but with a whimper2.

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Why have I sought my path with fervent care,

If not in hope to bring my brothers here?

— Goethe

They say the three biggest decisions in life are who you're with (partner), what you do (career), and where you live.

A few months ago, I wrote about where to live. This essay is about how I chose a career. I've also written about my philosophy for work here.

Part One

Recently, several people asked me what I do for work and how I make a living. Despite the temptation to give a veiled answer in a velvet tone, like "a little of this, a little of that," last week, I signed a full-time job offer. My first “real job” in four years. But it was a long, confusing, and arduous path to get here.

Here, I want to tell you the story of how I decided what work I wanted to do.

In my last year of university, after realizing I didn't want to go to Wall Street, following a series of intense finance internships and a period of spiritual seeking, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I had already been writing a newsletter on Substack for a year, in the cracks and crevices of the day, but now I wanted to be an uppercase-W, real-deal Writer. Nothing captivated me more than the world of books and ideas. Becoming a writer seemed the only way to make a full-time profession out of my full-time obsession. I was convinced that if I could make it work financially, writing for a living would be the dream.

After I graduated, thinking I was above a corporate career path, I landed a part-time remote job for $30/hour working with Noah Kagan, an entrepreneur and business influencer, on his book Million Dollar Weekend. I spent a year bouncing between home and away, visiting the Canadian Rockies, Brazil and Argentina, then Thailand and Japan. I would write for a few hours in the morning, then work on the book in the afternoon. Yet, even with ample time for my own interests, I still scraped and clawed for more. A few hours wasn’t enough. I had an almost primal urge to command complete control over my time.

When the book launched in January 2024 and work wrapped up in April, I turned down the offer to join his YouTube team, as well as three other offers from popular entrepreneur-influencers who were writing books. I didn't want to be a "book marketing guy". I probably could've spun a decent business out of it, but I had no interest in floating over the globe like a pale ghost, getting very good at selling books that I wouldn't read myself. No, I wanted to be a Writer.

After two years of yearning, never thinking it’d actually happen, I finally found myself free to pursue writing. I wouldn't be making money, but it didn't matter. I would be living out my dream, pushing it to the cliff’s edge and seeing if it would fly.

To keep costs down, I mostly lived at home. The two trips I took—two months in Newfoundland and one month in BC—were both through Workaway. In exchange for five hours of work, I could stay with a host family for free and write in the quiet corners of the day.

In June, after a year of planning, I turned on paid subscriptions. I even hired a marketing consultant to make sure the launch would be lucrative. With "conservative assumptions," I projected that in two to three years, Substack would generate enough income to live off.

But, to my surprise and chagrin, writing full-time wasn't anything like I thought it would be.

I had complete freedom over my time. But instead of feeling liberated, the boundlessness soon became daunting. It was entirely up to me to structure each day and keep the discipline to stick to it. Weekdays were no different than weekends. I could choose to do nothing, and nobody would care. Life was so weightless that I was floating away.

Eventually, I learned to set a writing cadence that worked. But when the words I wrote became the point and purpose of my day, the standard by which I measured a day's success and justified my existence, the pressure became Marianic. A bad day's writing became a bad day.

There was a certain emptiness that rose into my soul like a gas and diffused despair. An emptiness from making my mind, my thoughts and ideas and feelings, the sole center of my life. I saw a future of this downward spiral of introspection, lost in the labyrinth of my mind, peeling back the layers of the onion until there was nothing left but abyss. Dante’s critique of Odysseus was a clear warning: wandering forms character, but one can wander too far.

And, I continually stubbed my toe on the brute reality that I could only write for two, maybe two and a half, hours a day before my brain began to melt. I was living the life of a retired 70-year old, writing and reading and baking, strolling through meadows of milkweed and watching clouds pass. Sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, surrounded by old men reading the newspaper, the subconscious guilt tattooed on the back of my brain was a reminder that I hadn't done my years of service to society.

And that, in all honesty, was the worst part: I didn't feel useful. I didn't feel my work was making a real contribution in the world. Yes, people were lavish in their appreciation of my essays, which still makes me smile like a kid in a candy store, but I didn’t feel I deserved their kindness. Writing is fundamentally a self-serving act. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I see, what I want, and what I fear. Writing is an act of ego. There's no way around it.

And, not to forget, there was the fact I wasn't making enough money to buy groceries. I learned it’s very hard to get people to pay for writing, especially without being pushy or clickbaity. Monetizing creative production is difficult1. The economics of any creative endeavour are almost impossible to make work, especially in the first two decades. Creative success asks for a lifetime and won't accept anything less; almost no one succeeds right out of the gate. Most artists don't do their best work till their 40s or 50s, sometimes later.

To be an artist is to commit to at least a decade of obscurity. At least a decade of persistence and sweat and devotion, until one day, unexpectedly, it pays off.

Besides, I knew if I started to treat writing as a career, and relied on it to afford groceries or a mortgage or car payments, my work would suffer and I would suffer more and the people who love me would suffer most. Pinning financial goals to each essay would make me deeply unhappy. Soon enough, my writing would mold around money, aiming for virality instead of a patient quality.

When I began to read about the lives of my favorite writers, it wasn't pretty. Many were manic depressives, lonely alcoholics, and romantics with reckless abandon. They often couldn't keep a job or couldn't keep out of trouble. Many were poor as pennies, relying on family or rich, pitying patrons to survive. And they all had egos bigger than the moon.

Were they writers because they were manic, or manic because they were writers? I think the answer is both. Their mania and their creativity existed in an ecology, each fueling the other. There is a certain Faustian bargain writers make, where their excessive introspection and ruthless observation lends to a stunning landscape of the soul, but elevates their interiority to a dizzying height, from which all they can do is fall.

I decided I did not want to be a martyr for my art. I did not want my life to be a train wreck of torment and tragedy. Mostly, I want a normal and quiet life, filled with good work and green things. To build a beautiful home and fill it with love. To work in the garden on Saturday mornings and read books on Sunday afternoons. Walk about in the woods, raise children, make pancakes. In an age where fame accumulates at the extremes, a normal life is overlooked and underrated. Domesticity is not dull but life's true delight. "The most extraordinary thing in the world," Chesterton wrote, "is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children."

I decided I would rather live a normal life, even if it meant I would never produce anything great.

Besides, a day job can fuel creative pursuits. I figured meeting some characters and having some real life experiences—instead of being locked away in an ivory tower of reasons and proofs—would only deepen my understanding of what it means to be human. In order to write about life, I must first live it.

And so there I was. I had no interest in being a starving artist. To reduce my lifestyle to that of an ascetic or rely on my parents or a partner to foot the bills and limit the opportunities for a family because of my own needs for a creative odyssey. It seemed selfish. I felt I had a duty to build wealth. But, I was also unwilling to go back into the crazy corporate world, where I knew I would get sucked up in the current. It'd be foolish to think I was strong enough to resist what everyone else around me was doing. And I was unwilling to give up on my intellectual and spiritual life in order to make a living. Not only would I become lost and depressed, I'd inevitably start to hate the confines of the job until I cut enough corners to get fired. I needed work where I still had time outside of the office to expand my mind and keep my heart open. To remember spreadsheets are less important than Shakespeare. To stay close with family, forge meaningful friendships, help the community, and take care of my health.

Once I decided to get a job, the first place people told me to look was in writing. On the surface, it makes sense. I love to write and I've gotten good after years of deliberate practice. But instinctively, I knew it would be creative suicide. A big part of the reason I love writing these essays is because I have autonomy. I decide what ideas are worth exploring and expanding. I decide what sentences to keep and which to cut and how much to abuse alliteration. Perhaps I am maternal about my words: devoted and fiercely protective. Writing about things I'm not interested in, while someone else makes me cut parts I love and keep parts I hate, would drive me nuts. It is, as a writer friend said, "prostituting yourself out". And, after a full day of writing for work, my interest in writing for pleasure would be close to zero. I wanted my job to be entirely separate from writing.

The second option, one I seriously considered, was trying my hand at entrepreneurship. It's all the rage these days. I have thousands of subscribers on Substack, growing at a healthy clip, as well as experience at start-ups and a business education. I could whip up a course or coaching service and package it with a pretty bow and make more in a month than I’d make from writing in a year. I could also become a book consultant, charging authors $500 an hour to give them the "blueprint to success". Again, on the surface, it was alluring. I could live in Kyoto or Cape Town or Cambridge, work whenever I wanted, and still have time to write.

But here's the fatal flaw: I would no longer be a writer. I would no longer be devoting most of my time and mental real estate toward publishing exceptional essays. Writing, the thing I cherish, would get devoured and digested by the jaws of business. It just would. My writing would deteriorate as the top idea on my mind became selling rather than sentences, and with it, my respect for myself. Success would lead me away from the very thing that made me successful in the first place. Success, in short, would eat itself (more about this decision here).

Here's another uncool but true thing: I realized I'm not an entrepreneur. I don't have the risk tolerance. The unpredictability and volatility in income didn't seem like a rock I could build my house on.

Writing and selling require entirely different mindsets and modes of being in the world. Writing is internal, private. Selling is external, public. I have not seen a single person who has been able to successfully do both. No one can serve two masters. Yes, some entrepreneurs have written great books but, I would argue, they are fundamentally communicators, not writers. They are not obsessed with the craft of writing but rather with communicating their ideas about business or money or productivity in a clear and crisp way. A communicator will cut all the redundancies and repetition and recklessly weird combinations of words. A writer will leave them in. A communicator will think JFK could've simply said, "Ask what you can do for your country." It would have been more concise. A writer will ramble on about the shoulders of mountains and the lips of the waves and the toes of trees. A communicator only cares for the medicine. But a writer knows it must go down smooth; it must dissolve in the blood, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins until it is felt in the nerve endings. Ideas alone will only get you so far.

Despite the delusion, I still held firm to my faith in being a writer. Just like when I was a boy, filling the final few pages of my blue and red lined Hilroy notebook with poems of tragedy and stories of knights, until my hands hurt and my Dixon #2 pencil was dull.

For a while, I considered how demanding a job I wanted. Mary Oliver, who made nearly no money off her work, always took uninteresting jobs because she was worried an interesting job would distract her from poetry2. On the other end of the extreme, I know a man who became a Wall Street investment banker in the 80s because he wanted to capture the mechanics of power in his work with crystal acuity, despite needing to wake up at 4am to still write. Eventually, I landed somewhere in the middle. I didn't want a menial or minimum wage job, because I'd soon get restless and because I wanted a salary I could provide for a family from. But I also didn't want 80-hour weeks, moving at head-splitting speeds, to preserve time for higher things.

Over the fires of contemplation, I forged my ideal: a stable, secure, 9-5 business job that would challenge but not consume me, to then pursue writing on the side. I was content with a moderate salary as long as there was room to grow. I also liked the idea of doing something "low status," because these opportunities tend to be overlooked and undervalued. Ideally, a job that I could continue over the long-term, compounding skill and trust and responsibility, until I can earn ownership of my time.

Now, I just had to find one.

Part Two

In February 2024, while I was still in the throes of all these discoveries, I had a glimmer of an idea that I wanted to work in wealth management in a small town. When I did an assessment of my strengths and weaknesses and the work I actually enjoyed doing, knowing I could fool myself and I could probably fool an employer but I could not fool reality, wealth management made good sense. I figured I could use my analytical thinking and interpersonal skills to help families toward financial freedom, without having to work eighty hours a week.

In November, when I came home from my travels and began to dig into these career questions, my hypothesis still held.

It's dangerous to give general advice, since advice generalizes poorly, but I want to explain the process that worked surprisingly well for me.

• I knew I wanted to work at a small firm with a promising future. I'd receive a lot of personal attention, see my work make a real impact on the company's bottom line, and perhaps get equity in the business. Especially as one of the first hires, if the company grows, I'd be in a position to take on responsibility and leadership. And small teams avoid much of the politics and bureaucracy and meetings that slow things down and stop good work from getting done.

• If I had to choose, I would take good people over good work. Good people can make boring work fun, while bad people can make good work intensely unenjoyable. I had to find intelligent, heartfelt, high-integrity people to work with. Ethical trade-offs exist in any industry, and I wanted to be with people who were not in the black, or even in the grey, but standing upright in the white. I wanted to be proud of how I made my living and able to sleep soundly at night. My motto became: Good work, done well, for the right reasons.

• I would prioritize where to live before what I did for work. Not to risk being unromantic, but a job is just a job. It won't make my life meaningless or meaningful. It is fundraising for the things I want to do, with a chance to build my character and contribute to other people's lives in the process by doing excellent work. On the other hand, where I live is the biggest enabler in achieving my goals. I could have the best remote job in the world, but if I was living in a miner’s hut in rural Manitoba, it would make finding a wife or being involved in a local church almost impossible. I wanted to move somewhere I could stay close to family, cultivate a circle of friends, and have access to amenities without needing a car. Somewhere without the concrete calamity of a city but still had vitality. Ideally, a place I could grow into, with farm fields on the outskirts where I could one day buy land.

• I've always had a moderate distaste for job boards. They seem an ineffective and inhumane way to find a career. Now with AI, where anyone can dash off a customized cover letter in five minutes, I can confidently say they are a waste of time. Instead, I made a spreadsheet with 10-20 places I'd like to live then, one by one, searched on Google Maps for businesses in the area that fit my ideal: small, independent wealth management firms.

• I found contact information on their website or LinkedIn and reached out to the top person at each firm (always go right to the top) with a part-templated, part-customized email, asking to do a short ‘informational interview’ to learn more about their business (thank you ). My goal wasn't to ask for a job but simply to get in front of someone, feel them out, and learn something new. Through these calls, not only did I learn about the industry and whether it was actually a good fit for me, I discovered there were companies doing exactly the work I wanted to do. Out of the ~30 professionals I contacted, 20 agreed to speak with me (small firms don't get a ton of inbound traffic), which turned into a few follow-up calls and three job offers. Mind you, not one of these firms had a job posting3. Many weren't looking to hire at all, but a few vaguely knew they wanted to add somebody soon and were waiting for the right person to "come along".

I started in late November, took two weeks off for the holidays, and by the beginning of March, I had a job at a firm I admire in a city I'm excited about living in. I’d make 30-100% more money if I stuck with my old internships, but I don't really care. It's enough for me4.

Of course, what is impossible to compress or express here are the long days of waiting and wondering, starved of direction and craving clarity. What is hard to appreciate, in retrospect, was how clueless and hopeless and conflicted I felt for many months. I considered almost every future imaginable—book consultant, copywriter, carpenter, farmer, hermit—until I found one that fit.

Since signing the offer, I have already felt the pressure on my writing hiss out like a tire's inner tube. I have felt more freed to write whatever I think is interesting and good (like an indecently long piece about my career search) instead of giving into the gravitational pull of public opinion. There is a creative freedom, a weight lifted off the chest, from not depending on writing for meaning or money. The weight doesn’t disappear, but I am more free to carry it. Like if you gave Sisyphus a wheelbarrow.

Without long, unhurried days to write all morning and read all afternoon, I will need to redefine my relationship with this work. I expect most of my writing will be done in longer blocks on weekends. I can’t promise the same publishing cadence, but I can promise everything I publish will be my best and most earnest effort.

As with any practice, ebbs and flows and plateaus are part of the process. I plan to be writing till the day I die.

Walk slowly and pause often,

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