Not one to miss out on a bandwagon, I employed similar methods to the Swedish-Luxembourgish Algo-Factory (i.e., hand-waving, guesswork, lies), and compiled this list: your 2025 Microprinciples Wrapped.

Let’s do this.

Top tracks

The principles that gave you life this year:

• You grow toward the light you can find. Soil can twist you into improbable shapes.

• Everything is drugs. The old trombones used to say “Just say no to drugs.”

• Avoid the need to check boxes. Some things are just information.

Truly, madly, obviously

The principles that made you go, “no doy”:

• Sometimes the answer is water. You are water. A sac of liquid with a passport.

• You gotta do something. Making and doing is fundamentally pointless in cosmic terms.

• Experience and words are not the same. Go buy this helmet, and never speak to me again.

Inscrutable percentage

You’re in the top 0.0000000001% of people who read these:

• The experiment works on you too. You’re about to eat an oyster for the first time.

• All sight is hindsight. The future, meanwhile, is behind you.

• Power is a dance, not a throne. Like a hug or a handshake. There’s no one-sided version.

Thank you, next

The principles (I assume) you stopped reading halfway through:

• You’re not invited. Dreams are nebulous. Vision concretizes.

• Beauty is better made. What you call “ugly” is everything you resist.

• Know when to fold ‘em. Your favorite donut shop changed the recipe.

Your Microprinciples age

No one knows what this means or how it is calculated, but it’s true:

• You’re 37

Your new go-to insult

“Trade-in your bovine existence of endlessly chewing algorithmic cud.”
–Boredom is the amuse bouche

Hey, I said that

Principles based on an actual conversation you had with V:

• Make a mess, keep it tidy. Go watch a mammalian birth.

• Think slow to move fast. The faster you move, the less you can see.

• Your handle doesn’t matter. Action matters more than aspiration.

Other side of the tracks

The principles you refuse to accept and maybe for good reason:

• Know your eternal questions. Your playground is another person’s taboo.

• You must learn to discern. Wisdom isn’t a collection, it’s a chemical reaction.

• No growth without demolition. Babies don’t struggle with walking because they’re stupid.

Mom, I’m on the phone!

The principles that made you think of your origins:

• You must find the bridge. An offer of a French fry to a seagull.

• Stop calling people smart. “Smart” is something you have or you don’t.

• Make your boundaries known. But you do this too!

Your Microprinciples club

Which club do you belong to? Cosmic Creator Club, obviously. These principles are especially for you, dear knowledge worker:

• Keep your first drafts. Wading into failure is prickly curriculum.

• Change the plane of conception. The reason was God’s will.

• Never reveal the magic. You’re better off explaining the shape of a sneeze.

• You can’t all be the main character. Too many chefs, spoil the plot.

• Yuck, yum, whatever. A tree can handle an axe blow; Seedlings need extra care.

True ballads

The principles that hit too close to home:

• Let fear ride shotgun. Where “hic sunt dracones.”

• Add probably, feel better. There’s a lot that can kill you.

• Want what sets you free. The rails you mistake for shackles

Thanks you for reading. Microprinciples now enters hiatus while V figures out what he wants to do with his life. (Because integration requires less.) Much appreciation to the readers who reached out to help with my long-form project. I appreciate you!

Onward.

–V. Sri

It’s the entire concept of comedy:
Follow a well-accepted insight
With an unacceptable one,
And delight in the confusion.

Comedy requires discernment,
And discernment requires distance.
Everything is funny from a distance.
So get yourself some distance.

It’s not “touch grass” it’s “touch big.”
A tree, a mountain, the ocean, an ostrich.
Shift your perspective from pixels to something bigger.
Lift your eyes and behold—

Less unity and more diversity.
Less simplicity and more stories.
Less clarity and more acceptance.
Less certainty and more possibility.

It’s a lot of responsibility for a babysitter.
Victor Hugo says: “He who does not weep does not see.”
I say: “He who does not laugh is a doofus.”
And he neglects the other baby in the crib.

Laughter is a blessing not to be squandered.
Every conflict is rife with stupidity.
Every holy war is just two angry book clubs,
Each obsessed with one book.

Besides: death comes for everyone, even the innocent.
All that is made shall be destroyed.
You (yes you) are wrong about everything.
Take a seat in the dunk tank, once in a while.

Hold room for all of life’s babies,
Even the ugly ones.
A mind’s private tornado begins in a playpen
You can learn to let them play nice.

For others, the gulf can be even wider and deeper.
It’s more than “road closed.” It is a raging river.
And if they dare to step into the current, it’s all chaos and foam.
So they avoid it and wander alone.

How do you bring your adversary closer?
You must find the bridge.
The bridge is the avenue where conversation can flow
Without controversy or resistance.

The bridge looks like many things.
You can call it shared understanding.
It can be small talk or a peace summit,
It’s a safe space for discourse.

Instead of trading ideas in a turbulent river,
The bridge lets you practice on a “stable” surface.
You need neutral territory because you most definitely have a bias.
The bridge is the space between extremes.

I say “stable” because it’s human-made.
Every bridge requires active maintenance and repair.
And a bridge can start impossibly narrow—
In fact, every bridge must start this way:

Two words of high school Spanish in a rural village.
An offer of a French fry to a seagull.
A hand on a shoulder terminating silence.
A soccer ball on a battlefield on Christmas Day.

This bridge affords a safe passage between minds.
This is what you pay therapists for, by the way.
Even if you hate someone with every fiber of your being,
There is a bridge between you—because we are all family.

You can find it or build it; both are the same.
Bridges let you leave your island—
Which isn’t even “yours” in the first place:
It’s just where you happen to be.

Bridges are “no place,” and thus, utopia.
Stripped of culture, bridges serve only function—
To allow the intersection of private tornados,
So you may mingle in your fundamental oneness.

“I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down.”
–Sasha Chapin

You could go to the Amazon rainforest.
Or you could read about it in a book.
Do you think there’s a difference?
Your body already knows there is.

(And if you think they are the same,
Use my coupon code,
Go buy this helmet,
And never speak to me again.)

If you think they’re not the same,
You already know this bitter fact:
That words are woefully imperfect.
Experience and words are not the same things.

Words aren’t worthless, of course.
Metaphors heave light onto darkness.
Laws let you sheath your swords.
Poems carve beauty from the mundane.

But words are not what they measure.
A waterfall is meaningfully different than “falling water.”
Heartbreak is always peculiar to the ballads voiced in her name.
The longest obituary will never contain a life.

Words are technology, nothing more.
A mind is a private tornado even to yourself.
Your therapist is a mortal with problems, like you.
She cannot read you, and you are not your thoughts.

Even if you read every book ever written,
You would glimpse only a sliver of human experience:
Namely, the fragment of history someone wrote down.
(Don’t forget to tip the patron saints of lost time.)

And if you hurled every book ever written into a machine,
You’d have yet another technology,
Predicted to destroy our way of life.
The know-nothing that makes nothing, but words, words, words.

The know-nothing is your boyfriend who won’t shut up (about taking your job).
Neither waterfall, nor rainforest, nor heartbreak
Can be experienced from his precious plastic helmet.
Nor will it protect him from This Life.

Next time a friend has a profoundly meaningful experience,
Don’t ask them to render the experience into words.
Invite them to remember the feeling in silence.
That’s where the answer lives, if there is one at all.

“Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo.”
–Walter Benjamin

Someone asks, “How is your thing going?”

You might be bursting to talk about it.
You might crave validation for your efforts.
You might want feedback to give your ideas shape.
Incubate your idea until you’re one-fifth through.

In its earliest stages an idea is tender.
It may absorb the meta of other minds.
Foreign agendas may permeate the foetal work
And potentially destroy it.

You can’t learn to drive in a parked car
And too-early feedback can stall your engine.
A tree can handle an axe blow;
Seedlings need extra care.

The first trimester of a work is particularly sensitive.
Be skeptical of reductive opinions in ten-dollar capsules:
“Too atavistic,” “Too truculent,” “Too rebarbative.”
The work will change; all it needs is time.

The early part is more interrogation than creation.
Guiding a stethascope over your disparate inner voices
And listening with the intensity of a safecracker
Trying to liberate his own precious psyche:

• Fear: what asks to be known?

• Anger: what protests the status quo?

• Joy: what longs to be celebrated?

• Sadness: what asks to be released?

• Arousal: what longs to be made?

The final question pulls you into your gut.
The truly wordless voice
That speaks only in “yuck, yum, whatever.”
You Pursue the whole body yes.

In the end, the idea might need to die,
But the work must pass through You before it passes to Them.
You are the first audience, the first critic, the first believer.
Trust yourself before you trust the world.

“Guilt is the teacher, love is the lesson.”
–Joan Borysenko

When something falls apart, the village exists to support you.
“It’s not your fault,” they’ll say, and they mean it.
They make you feel like the hero of your story.
But every story needs a bad guy and the bad guy might be you.

Don’t beat yourself up, but pinch yourself a little.
Friends help you save face, but only you can save your soul.
You must acknowledge your role in failure.
You did too much, or too little. You chose the wrong target. You held the wrong frame.

You are a work in progress
Mistakes are more than acceptable.
You grow by listening to a feeling called guilt.
Guilt is a teacher, not your enemy.

Guilt is an emotion that steers you to the universe within.
Your body’s warning that you did something out of alignment with your values.
(Because misalignment will kill you.)
Guilt keeps action and character distinct: “I did wrong, but I’m still a good person.”

Shame is different and to be avoided.
Shame fuses the feeling with who you are.
“Because I did a bad thing, I am a bad person.”
Shame chisels a mistake into stone and calls it your name.

You are not a singular idea.
Your stories do not always align and it takes figuring out.
You must bring your adversary closer.
Even when it is you.

You have the capacity to learn from your mistakes.
You must find your people to help you see clearly.
But in the end, when the village quiets and the faces blur.
All that remains is you.

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
–Kahlil Gibran

The designer strives for perfection.
Symmetry, balance, harmony, utopia.
But utopia literally means “no place.”
And symmetry is a myth.

The truth of the world is chaos and viscera
The trees grown askew in fallow soil.
The broadsheet dripping with grief.
The promises toppled like dominoes.

This asymmetry isn’t the problem.
What you call “ugly” is everything you resist.
Confusion. Uncertainty. Imbalance.
But is there really a problem?

Cross-examine your resistance.
You might not have beef with the universe.
Those superlatives might be pure corn syrup.
–Turn complaints into observations, June 5, 2025

Art is the canvas and the frame:
Fire is both the glowing manifestation of death
And the spark that warms the hearth.
Same flames, different frame.

Next time aesthetic disgust scrinches your nose,
Think about what you find beautiful.
You may have recovered beauty where others see none.
So reverse it. Push through the recoil. Rotate the frame.

Rotation is the designer’s actual work.
Change the frame, not the world.
You step into the mirror
And Consider how you might change.

You read a book more than once,
You bring your adversary closer,
You change the plane of conception,
And turn the impossible into routine.

All potential lies in what appears ugly.
Beauty is better made not found.
You are not swiping your way to a match.
You are what you design; what you design is you.

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke

History has a direction, but not a destination.
At any point along its river, you can hear its many songs.
It rushes in progress, dribbles in grief.
It is all one river.

You long to know where you are headed,
But all walk backward in this life.
You see only the past before you.
All sight is hindsight.

The past is the stories you chose to record
The parts you could crumb into words and pictures.
A fragment of what happened; much is unwitnessed.
The rest washed away in the flood.

This picture of the past keeps changing,
Like a watercolor unwilling to dry.
New paint daubed with each backward step.
The layers below buried by progress.

The future, meanwhile, is behind you.
You are not entitled to know the destination
Because there is none; only direction.
Tentative backward steps into darkness.

History shapes the potential futures you can step into.
The stories change the shape of the river behind you,
You are a conduit that bends story into possibility.
And you are made of history too: a drip of watercolor paint.

You might find it easier holding someone’s hand.
Painting history together transforms the kaleidoscope.
Disconnected fragments become navigable story,
Which means you must find your people.

You will paint this canvas together.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
–Kurt Vonnegut

You order the bartender to make you a drink,
She controls what goes in your mouth.
So who has the power?
It belongs to you both.

You say, “Make it again!”
She says, “Get the hell out of my bar.”
Power is a dance, not a throne.
Sometimes you swing, sometimes you’re swung.

Power is woven of alternating acts of service.
A co-created construct,
Like a hug or a handshake.
There’s no one-sided version.

You may resist the idea that anyone should lead,
But someone has to decide.
To lead is to know what you want.
To lead is to evangelize the impossible.

You may resist the idea that anyone should follow,
But to follow is to live your curiosity.
To be led isn’t weakness; it is being receptive.
It requires presence, and a belief in your worth.

There is a phenomenon called “force”
But that’s not what power is.
Force can seize the moment.
Power endures across time.

Should you choose to lead, you must become a servant.
Like a conductor serves an orchestra.
You keep the score, set aside your agenda,
So others can revel in flow.

Should you choose to follow, you must become a teacher.
Because you show the next person how to trust.
Without your assent, there is no truth.
Without your follow, there is no dance.

The bartender pours you a cocktail.
You sip with full trust.
Sante.
Neither wield the power alone.

Once upon a time, people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are born as individuals and have to find their communities.
–Youth Mode

You have fallen out of love with the ordinary.
To be ordinary is a failure.
To be extraordinary is the norm.
Revel in how weird this is. Now scroll.

No one is awkward anymore.
Unless it’s deliberate affectation or “cringe.”
A child on camera knows their marks like an actor.
Everyone knows their good side.

You are awash in hyphenates and bullshit job titles.
Everyone has main character energy
And says shit like “main character energy,”
Like you’re interning at Bravo.

The robot vomits slop: “When everyone is unique, no one is.”
More like: when everyone is unique it’s damnedable.
You can’t have ordinary shared experiences.
Like enjoying Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

This is not a paean to a swirling plastic bag in a parking lot.
This is not nostalgia or sonder with a hopecore soundtrack.
It is a boombox raised high in the air
For a six from homeroom called Ordinary.

“I couldn’t possibly give up all this novelty.”
What was the last thing you read on the internet?
Who wrote it? Did you savor it? Did you actually feel it??
Or did you taste a leaf in your mouth during a hurricane?

Just about everyone who read Youth Mode got it dead wrong:
Normcore is not performing normalcy in an aspirational way
The promise of normcore is post-aspirational.
It is less about standing out and more about being together.

“Do you mean I can’t be special?”
You don’t need a brand.
A brand is what they used to tell cows apart.
You have a voice, you have a community, you have you.

You are the same as everyone else.
Can you imagine? Maybe it’s OK to just be
A human person in an ordinary world.
You will learn to survive.

You’ve fallen out of love with the ordinary among you.
You mistake your friends’ online presence for their value.
Your platforms reward mind-viruses and assholes
There is no room in your world for the supporting roles.

But any story struggles when everyone’s the protagonist,
You can’t all be shouting catchphrases and kicking dragons.
Life is as much about texture as it is forward motion
Too many chefs, spoil the plot.

There are other archetypes: makers, magicians, alchemists,
Muses, lovers, caretakers, connectors,
Questioners, contrarians, innocents, and jokers.
They make the story too.

A main character needs a crusade and a crusade is crazy-making;
Those in supporting roles can keep their identity fluid.
For their efforts, you deride them as NPCs
But they are the infrastructure that make human connection possible.

God bless the supporters who whole communities together
Who value the group more than the spotlight.
Who are more interested than “interesting.”
Who have become the ones not talking.

You all have multiple roles in life to play
Which is why people must make new people.
To grow is to enable new main characters
And surrender your role in the franchise.

Never reveal the magic, do not explain it away.
Despite the insistence of the curly-haired rats,
The waste is what works.
You are pulled by the mystery, not the reveal.

Yeah, sunlight is the best disinfectant,
Sure, your podcast “tells it like it is,”
But not everything is solved with a Vox explainer.
Neither your Craft, nor this universe.

“Where do you get your ideas?”
“Is your last song about me?”
“What’s going to happen to the world?”
These questions are not unexpected.

But don’t waste a second trying to answer
You’re better off explaining the shape of a sneeze.
The mortals want to know “Why am I so moved by Chaos?”
When that, of course, was the intended effect.

Besides, you have neither the ability nor the right to explain.
You are not you; you are a conduit.
The artist weaves from Collective Dream
On everyone’s behalf.

You can know your eternal questions.
That’s all a storyteller gets to know.
The listener must know her questions too,
Two shards of curiosity meeting in the prism of Craft.

Ask not about the magic.
Read a book more than once if you want answers
But you’ll mostly learn about yourself.
Which is the “point” were there such a thing.

To craft is to insistently rush into the unknown.
An endless collision of Chaos and knowledge
Producing as byproduct both failure and artifact
And the gorgeous illusion:

That the universe needs to make a lick of sense.

Never solve a problem in the plane of its original conception.
–George Saunders (after Albert Einstein)

Humans suffered from heartbreak, hunger, and pain.
The reason was God’s will.
The “answer” was Human Science.

The most human of Human Science is known as biology. With a strong enough loupe, biology reveals itself to be chemistry, the study of molecular reactions. Chemistry is addressed with physics, the motion of particles. Physics is math. The deepest maths are philosophy in disguise. And philosophy is best understood by walking in a human body and suffering God’s will.

Never solve a problem where you found it. You must change the plane of conception.

The most profound breakthroughs are betrayals of common sense. To solve disease you need to invent disgusting critters called germs. To grok alternating current you need numbers that don’t exist. You, yourself, are a country nothing like its citizens: the cells of your body. These aren’t contradictions.

Synthesis accretes in dimensions that don’t currently exist. (So Don’t leave out the impossible.) Expect to be confused. All novel dimensions are like the internet to a dog: inconceivable!

Transcending conceptual planes doesn’t eliminate your problems, of course. They just change shape. Once you feared bears. Then you feared the bomb. Now you fear upward scrolling text on illuminated glass.

Each new plane of conception is a step through an infinity mirror—more perspective, more terror. It gets worse before it gets better.

It’s worth slowing down.

Fast-moving eyes must latch to the sticks and stems of the trail; you become stuck to the current plane of reality. When you move as slow as possible, you are able to see more. You might even pause at the base of a tree and climb. A new plane. A different vantage point.

You learn the true shape of the path: it’s a spiral.
You learn the truth about the forest: it’s ablaze.
You notice a beetle on a leaf, and it stares back at you.

The beetle asks you a question, but you can’t understand it.

The reason is God’s will.

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
—E.M. Forster

If you’re making, you’re making a mess. You’ll never get it right the first time. Anne Lamott calls these “shitty first drafts.” They’re part of the process, so resist the temptation to erase these attempts, unusable as they might be.

Instead, let them become the soil. Creation is easier when you think of it as revision—everything is a remix, anyway. Your first attempts are the map. The mess is part of the method.

Don’t hide these drafts in the basement, neither. You can be fancy and curate them, as though you needed to present them at trial to prove you suffered for your craft. Or, if the courtroom metaphor invokes anxiety, imagine you’re leaving fodder for future historians trying to make sense of your work.

But be warned. Trying to convince future historians that you’re enlightened is pointless, manipulative, and impossible:

It’s not the point of art to age well, because no one can predict the future. The truth is what you believe for now, and art is a reflection of “what you believe for nows” across the infinite smear of nows we call time. The word “Shaboozey” could be a slur in 2928. It’s not the point of art to age well, because no one can predict the future.
–Don't be so hard on the past

You keep your drafts to see how you work. Wading into failure is prickly curriculum, but your first attempts are the purest map of a mind. It’s forensic evidence of your thinking. A place to learn your patterns, your stuck points, your breakthroughs. Maybe you’ll become an enthusiast of your own weird process. Embrace the clunk.

At the very least, it’s a reminder that no one gets it right the first time. Every finished work is a granite mountain of failure called history, topped with a faint dusting of “done.”

Everything comes to an end. You train for endings by trading linguistic simulations called stories. All stories have an end (except for your mother's), and you couldn’t want it any other way.

Even television used to close each night with the national anthem and a test pattern. Today, you thirst for firehose. You want your favorite stories to run forever, your relationships to never change, your routines to remain permanently satisfying. You ask “and then what happened?” and the algorithms deliver, forever. Permanence is the enemy of meaning. Never trust a story that promises “forever.”

Not all endings are the same.

They can be drama: the shouty you-can't-take-that-back pronouncements, punctuated by door slams. They can be delicate: the gradual transition of your friend group into parents while Hey Jude plays. They can be doom: when you are locked out of your country, by bureaucracy, never to return.

This isn't the last post, but it is the beginning of the end.

The reason is simple: I'm writing a book. These microprinciples are starting to feel different. They are no longer the rehydrated post-its that inspired this project. They long to become something else. I feel them changing under my fingers.

(If you're interested in providing feedback on early drafts, you should let me know.)

This might feel like a Midwest goodbye—the kind where you announce your departure but linger in the foyer for 45 minutes. I'll keep posting until I don't. The remaining notes might taste different, like your favorite donut shop changed the recipe. You won’t see it coming. Equal parts drama and fade away.

Not all endings are the same, but in a sense they all are. Endings are the acknowledgment of heartbreak. The force that turns every story into something you can hold.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
–Joseph Campbell

You check your inbox for an invitation to your dream. An acceptance letter. A job offer. A shiny golden ticket. A “yes” that transforms everything.

No invitation is coming, because you’re not invited to fulfill your dreams. All manifestation is a form of trespassing over fence and unmarked trail. It’s messy. You will have to find your own way. Especially if you have interesting dreams; how could it be otherwise?

Dreams are nebulous. Vision concretizes. A plan connects a vision to a territory, but you cannot plan everything—you only see as far as your headlights. So you start to trek and along the way, unplanned opportunities appear. Are they distractions or are they shortcuts? Here’s how to choose:

1. If the alternative between options is doing nothing, do the thing that’s not nothing.

2. If the alternatives are both equally compelling, choose the path that’s harder in the short term1. (That’s your invitation.)

The harder path bends time because it confronts you with the inevitable before you are ready, which is the fastest way to learn. If you wait until you are ready, it’s too late.

Familiar paths endorse comfort, and you know how we feel about that. Even if all you discover is “I hate this,” now you know. Lessons travel in packs and opportunities beget opportunities.

You increase what is known by venturing into the unknown. You make your dreams real, literally, by making them. No one is coming to save you. No invitation is coming. You must write it all yourself. It’s usually the harder path.

An experiment is a question you ask of the universe. Sometimes the answer is yes or no. Usually the reply is hazy, because the the universe is not binary. Each experiment teaches you something new.

More than your tolerance for bivalves, you’ll learn your orientation around disgust, and your comfort with the unknown.

There is no getting it right the first time, so aim for getting it different each time. Murder your first born ideas. Every experiment adds to your catalog of what’s possible, what’s worth pursuing. You’re collecting mistakes, and mistakes are more than acceptable.

This is true for your health and your craft.

To learn to write, you must write poorly first. But more than that: you must be willing to become someone who is comfortable with writing poorly. At least for a little while.

Experiments might look like “waste,” but they’re the slow accumulation of courage. The waste is what works. Each experiment makes the next one easier. Repetition breeds affection. Each failure expands your capacity for risk.

It doesn’t matter whether you like oysters. It’s about becoming someone brave enough to find out.

Just say no.
–Nancy Reagan

The old trombones used to say “Just say no to drugs.” Sorry grandpa, everything is “drugs.” Sugar, love, exercise, your job, your fame, your souvenir shot glasses, and even precious ideas on the internet, light as a feather. Everything you munch—physically or mentally—changes your body and mind. That’s what drugs do.

Because all drugs have side effects, you are advised to find the minimum effective dose. Even for ideas, light as a feather.

You already do this with medicine. You take two aspirin, not twenty. But boy howdy, you’re reckless with memes, images, and words. You doom-scroll for hours. You binge television. You gorge podcasts until your apartment is spotless.

You don’t give your brain a minute to rest, let alone process, the drugs.

Turn off the firehose once in a while. This is why you’re cranky. Look out your window. Nothing is on fire. It’s the drugs. They’re working.

There’s no FDA for the internet. No sticker telling you that consuming daily outrage will rewire your baseline. No warning that basking in aesthetic will leave you chronically dissatisfied. Nary a mention that rapidly combing your eyes over a glowing screen for over five hours a day might be less than nutritious.

Choose your substances wisely. Know your dealer. Do the right amount. Consumption is never neutral, especially when the drugs are free.

Soil can twist you into improbable shapes.

Consider the honor-roll student nabbed for shoplifting. You see a criminal in the making. You might miss the absent parents or empty refrigerator. His soil is scarcity.

Or the manager who refuses to take sick day. You see a workaholic. You might miss the childhood where worth was measured in gold stars. Her soil is performance anxiety, fertilized with conditional love.

Soil shapes everything—what nutrients flow freely, what threats must be survived, what adaptations are essential. A mind formed in chaos learns to scan for danger. A mind formed in safety remains open. Like the acid-soaked cypress, neither chooses its shape.

You grow toward the light you can find.

Though we are born in different soil, we are all connected by the implacable will to survive.

Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo’s cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements.
–Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities”

What performers know and critics resist, is that life is a performance.

Performance isn’t a bad word, by the way, it means the undertaking of duty. In this life you will don many costumes. Many chances to play many roles. Artist. Writer. Poet. Nurse. Lover. Rebel. Performer. Critic. You.

But not every role is meant for you. At first, this bums you out. But if the glove don’t fit, don’t curse the glove. Don’t curse your hand either. You may not yet be ready, or perhaps you never will be. You can’t do everything.

You may never learn that second language. You might never find work/life balance. You might never be the life of the party. That’s OK. You’re only human.
–You Can’t Do Everything

So then you look within and see an ensemble of players in medias res. It turns out you already contain many roles. And they don’t always get along.

There’s that one voice on a quest. How noble. Another voice prods him with resistance. How rude. So they duel. “You should write more” squares off against “You have nothing of value to say.” A third voice pleads from the back, “Stop fighting, let’s get ice cream.” A fourth one asks himself, “Could this be a microprinciple?”

You are witness to your own drama.

But there’s a twist in the third act. When you bring your adversary closer, your inner swordplay comes to resemble dancing. A musical number! This is enlightenment; the easeful embodiment of performance. Should you chance to glimpse it, all performance disappears. The costumes fall away.

All that remains is you.