Thomas

Ambition isn't about getting more money, more goods, bigger houses, greater acclaim from people you don't know or respect. It's not about anything that can fit on a spreadsheet or graph, or that lends itself well to bragging on social media. All of that is just grasping, not ambition.

Ambition is about the echoes you want to leave reverberating in... See more

But we don’t always have access to a retreat center, a monastery, or a library, what we do have is this place, a base camp, a landmark for thinking beyond thought.

The metaphor of the base camp is particularly apt for this kind of contemplative scholarship. Like the mountaineer’s base camp—a place of preparation and return, of gathering resources... See more

Culture is to humans a bit like water is to fish; it is everywhere and yet imperceptible because it is not so much what we perceive but what we perceive through . Culture is what brings the world into focus, and it can be thought of as the lens through which objects are seen, not the object as such. In this sense, looking for culture is like... See more

We rely on the existence of an “away,” where all this heat, waste, everything, goes to and stays in. But it never disappears – it comes back.