Visit your dentist twice a year. Sleep eight hours in an unbroken block. Floss every night. These instructions arrive wrapped in the authority of science, the reassurance of consensus, the patina of timelessness. They feel like facts discovered rather than decisions made – as though someone in a laboratory, bent over instruments, unearthed them from…

The most profound changes seem to require us to pull away from the very people who could support us through them. Counterintuitive, even cruel – yet this pattern appears everywhere we look – in nature, in personal growth, in creative breakthroughs. The more I’ve explored this paradox, the more I’ve come to see it not…

Visualize: You’re in a dream, seated in an ornate concert hall with burgundy velvet seats and golden baroque molding that seems to breathe with the music. A stranger approaches, apologetic – you’re in their seat. You stand, move aside, and exchange a brief glance of mutual acknowledgment. The moment passes. You wake. Somewhere else, maybe…

Often, I think about our effort at permanence – how we construct cities, nations, and entire civilizations as though they were eternal fixtures rather than brief arrangements of matter in an indifferent cosmos. There’s something both terrifying and liberating in contemplating the immense scale of time, in recognizing that Earth spins not just on its…