Tentative Decisions!

It has been eight years since I resigned from my job. In that time, my laptop and a good internet connection became my teacher and, honestly, my best friend. I read what I wanted, watched what I wanted, followed one curious thread into the next one, with nobody assigning any of it to me. In 2020, one of those threads led me to Andrew Huberman . I remember the exact feeling of listening to him for the first time, hearing scientific names for things I had already been doing since 2014, quietly, without knowing there were names for them at all. I am not a trained scientist. I don't have a deep background in neuroscience. But between Huberman, and later a good amount of Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, I started to see the shape of my own Vipassana practice from a completely different angle, a laboratory angle, not just a spiritual one. A Practice That Disappeared and Came Back Vipassana is old. The Buddha taught it in India roughly 2,500 years ago. What most people don't know is t...

For most of my adult life, I thought of myself as a rebel. I said the word to myself the way some people say a job title, with a little pride attached to it. I invoked God, poetry, feminism, government, money, boundaries, tradition, one after another, in conversations where I knew exactly what reaction I'd get. If I'm honest about the earliest version of that habit, I have to admit it wasn't purely philosophical. Some of it was attention. I liked being the person in the room who said the thing nobody else would say. Somewhere in the years since, something shifted, and it took me a long time to even notice it had happened. The same instincts that used to feel like a performance stopped needing an audience. I stopped my education without finishing the degree everyone expected me to finish. I traveled when I was told to settle. I resigned when I was told to hold onto a job. I didn't marry when I was told to marry. I asked questions about God long after I was told the que...