Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to

Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew... See more

The future won’t be built merely by those who move fastest, but by those who remember how to stand still. Until we recover the courage to receive what we cannot produce, we will mistake velocity for vision. And we’ll keep accelerating—not toward the good, but simply away from the ground.

A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how... See more

dialing up my agency, which I think of as something like “manifest determination to make things happen.”