Eighteen Months In, I Finally Arrived
I'd dreamed about Thailand since I was thirteen. I spent eighteen months working my way through it before a divorce, a stand-down, and a hostess named On taught me how to actually see it.
Impressions
Writing.
Two streams. Essays are the longer pieces — what a place taught me, what a problem cost me, what an idea was worth in practice. Reflections take a teaching old enough to forget and write it down again in plain words.
Each piece is tagged with a finger (where in life it lives) and a pillar (how the practice shows up). Mix and match — any pillar can pair with any finger.
Essays
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Reflections The Problem Is Not Outside
If you have a roof over your head, food in your stomach, people in your life who love you and you're still not happy... the problem is not outside.
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Reflections Surround Yourself With Smart People
Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who'll argue with you.
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Reflections Ready Is Not a Feeling
Ready is not a feeling. It's a decision.
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Reflections Do What You Fear
Do what you fear and fear disappears.
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Reflections Die With Memories, Not Dreams
The goal should be to die with memories, not dreams.
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Reflections What Chiang Mai Taught Me About Doing Less
A month in northern Thailand will rearrange your relationship with productivity. Mine came back lighter.
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Reflections Pat Tillman and the Contract He Walked Away From
He was a starting NFL safety with a multimillion-dollar offer on the table. He turned it down to enlist as an Army Ranger. Nobody made him do it, and that's the entire point.
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Reflections Charlie Brown and the Football He Keeps Running At
Lucy pulled the football away every single time, for fifty years, and Charlie Brown ran at it anyway. Schulz never let him kick it once. That was the whole point of the joke.
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Reflections Anthony Bourdain and the Discipline of Showing Up Hungry
Bourdain's whole career was built on one unglamorous rule: eat what's offered, ask real questions, and never pretend you already know the answer.
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Reflections Alex Honnold and the Fear That Didn't Show Up
In 2017 he climbed 3,000 feet of vertical granite with no rope, no gear, and no margin for error. The scientists who scanned his brain wanted to know why he wasn't afraid. The real answer was less comfortable than 'he just isn't.'
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Reflections Wendell Berry Found Peace Where the Wood Drake Floats
A farmer-poet wrote one of the most quoted poems of the last century about lying down where a duck floats on still water. He wasn't being precious about it. He was describing an exit.
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Reflections Seneca on the Time You Cannot Get Back
Seneca wrote a whole essay about why you have more time than you think and less than you're spending. He wrote it to a friend. The friend apparently needed it.
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Reflections Mary Oliver Had One Question
Mary Oliver spent most of her life walking through marshes and writing about what she saw. She also wrote one question that has never stopped being relevant.
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Reflections Epictetus Had One Rule and It Was Not Complicated
A former slave became the most influential Stoic teacher in Rome. His entire philosophy fits on a napkin. The napkin is hard to live by.
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Reflections David Foster Wallace and the Water You Can't See
Two young fish are asked by an older fish how the water is. They swim on, then ask each other, 'What the hell is water?' The point isn't that fish are dumb. The point is that the most obvious, all-encompassing thing is the hardest thing to see.
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