This week’s email

Hi Reader,

A reminder: I started writing these emails aimed at a vision for the future I expressed as “a world no longer divided by religion.” I’ve included an update about that in the P.S. For now, on to the main idea.

Let’s continue pulling on this thread of growing today.

I was particularly happy with the last couple emails I sent you—about my thoughts not being my own, and the paradox of my thoughts being the only things that are my own. I felt I was able to compellingly articulate something nuanced yet foundational. Maybe that’s a subconscious goal of mine in all my writing.

Yet after finishing those pieces and rereading them, I had a thought something along the lines of, “who is this guy and by what means does he possess this confidence and knowledge?”

I realize it felt out of character for me to write that way. I don’t tend to have a lot of confidence, opting instead for the perceived safety of uncertainty.

Then I thought, well, I’m not just one thing. I am growing and changing, and what I think and write one week might be something I disagree with and tear apart the next. Sharing myself with you in these emails isn’t a matter of consistency or unshakeability of belief, but a continual practice of being open about my thoughts and feelings in the moment of writing this.

So there is no problem, no contradiction, in me being certain one week that I am a vital connected part of everything and in being racked by doubt the next whether any of this matters. If I am, I am, and that’s growing and sharing and being authentic. The only problem, if problems exist, is in trying to hold onto a perspective that no longer appears valid to me, or in putting up a façade to hide my true feelings.

It’s funny, I think there must be a way in which we can’t even refuse to grow. Growth is happening, whether or not we’re on board with it or in denial of it or at odds with it. It’s not that being stuck is a problem because it feels rotten to be stuck or whatever. It’s that being stuck is a problem because actually nothing is stuck. Stuck is hiding from the truth that we’re not stuck.

Rereading what I’ve written there, I see how fragile it is to try to express all this in language. It’s borderline nonsense. I catch the barest fingertip’s grasp of it with my comprehension, and then it falls away from me again (or I from it). I cannot come back to an earlier understanding, but can only fall toward a new one, as everything continues to move and shift and change and it’s all one big cacophonous beautiful terrible show, this reality. And there’s nothing wrong with any of it, and at the same time the more and the deeper we engage with it, the more it hurts.

I wonder, at this point, what the pain has to teach me. I think I might know the answer, somehow, while being simultaneously afraid to look directly at it, for fear that it will burn me to ash. Well. Isn’t ash what I’m made of, anyway? Ash with delusions of personhood. What a riot.

I have a question for you this week. It’s a question I have a lot of difficulty answering for myself. Maybe it’s the same for you, or maybe the answer will come easily. Anyway, here it is:

What do you want?