On Presence

That’s maybe the most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it, versus embrace it. Change it. Improve it. Make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important.

“The secret of life is to waste time in ways that you like.” -Jerry Seinfeld

New ways of seeing are constantly being laid out in front of us. An avalanche of information, but we can only hold so much. The challenge is to filter them, to know ourselves enough, to be rooted enough that we are not so easily swayed. ⁠

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Willow Defebaugh, Editor-In-Chief of Atmos put it perfectly, "I suppose that’s what it means to see the world through a prismatic lens. It requires us to embrace contradiction and multiplicity, to never be afraid of letting new perspectives repattern our own. It’s about accepting that life is a kaleidoscope of every hue imaginable, in shades both light and dark, at once disarmingly fragmented and breathtakingly whole. And in those dazzling shards, we find our humanity reflected back at us—jagged, brilliant, and gleaming with possibility." ⁠

The eyes are hungry. They eat brain energy. When you close your eyes your brain opens to your ears. When you open your eyes, now the brain is crowded.

The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless.

There are in this world certain lonely places: The mountaintop when a storm begins, a long drive under the obscurity of night, the unfinished attic of an old house as a child, the empty alley of an otherwise busy city. In the prolonged absence of others, our senses both sharpen and diffuse. We might begin to hear the subtle sounds that are forgotten in normal life. We might lose track of time. We become almost at risk of noticing things that are not really there. Solitude conspires with our surroundings to push the seen world and the unseen world closer together. It is no wonder that these settings are where we find ghosts.

Because there's an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in.

Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.

- Werner Heisenberg

Historical writing often makes the mistake of focusing solely on presence, of what is here and why. But goaded by Zweig, I am looking for traces of absence, the unnamed things that once were, and are silently no longer. I want to see the ghosts.

A plan is just a thought. We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

“Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you are in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you.”

— Deepak Chopra

“When you are walking, nothing really moves: it is rather that presence is slowly established in the body. When we are walking, it isn't so much that we are drawing nearer, more that the things out there become more and more insistent in our body. The landscape is a set of tastes, colours, scents which the body absorbs.”

― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Contemplate the price you pay for inaction.”

“Freedom is an earnest walk toward an unknown destination.” -Stacey D’erasmo

Every day around the world, billions of moments slip by uncaptured, lost to time. Fleeting instances of love. Flashbacks to childhood memories. Realizations of nature's beauty. While oral storytelling is older than recorded history, passed down alongside the crackle of flames, there are an astronomical number of moments that have been forgotten because they never hit the page.