Shifting our frames

The older I get, the more I fall out of love with efficiency. I’ve struggled enough mentally to know that many of the experiences that are most edifying and healing for me are slow and full of friction—cooking dinner with my bluesy women playlist rolling out of the speaker, a bottle of beer, and a cookbook dotted with sauces open-faced on the... See more

There may be no perfect frame waiting to be found but, argues the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, it is absolutely essential to have a compelling alternative frame if the old one is ever to be debunked. Simply rebutting the dominant frame will, ironically, only serve to reinforce it. And without an alternative to offer, there is little chance of

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The useful is the invitation to depth that myth always offers. Because if there’s uncertainty, then we are no longer sure quite what’s the right way to behave. And there’s potential in that, an openness to new forms. We are susceptible to what I call sacred transgression. Not straight-up theft but a recalibrating of taboo to further the making of... See more

Scientists couldn’t look directly at nothing to see something; they had to look and listen around the void, deploying techniques similar to image compositing and echolocation. We might apply these lessons, these techniques, to our own attempts to comprehend the pandemic’s pause, which has its own experiential event horizon. We have to look and... See more

What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase.