Thoughts

I don't write here often, but when I do, it's because I've been thinking about something for a long time without a clean answer. More than once, it has been one idea showing up across things I do that have nothing else in common.

I write to find out what I think, and it works because a thought that looks finished in my head turns out to have holes the moment it has to sit still on a page. Nobody has a fully formed idea about anything they haven't written down. It's also good for you in a plainer way - a few sessions of writing out what's been bothering you show up months later as fewer trips to the doctor and less stress, which is a strange thing for words on a page to do.

An essay was an attempt before it was anything else, a try at a subject by someone who expects to come back to it, and what gets written is a passing state and never a settled one. The rarer skill is being able to sit in the uncertainty without grabbing at the first answer that ends it. One of the oldest texts there is does exactly that - the Rigveda's hymn on how everything began ends by admitting that whoever looks down on it all from the highest heaven knows how it happened, or perhaps he doesn't.

What follows are the essays and notes I've written that way.