working notes

Fragments, field notes, and half-lit thoughts from the textual underground 

August 10, 2026 3:31 pm

Reading Tools for Thought, I keep coming back to Alan Kay’s idea of the computer as a fantasy amplifier.

It’s such a different way of answering the question: what are computers for?

Not productivity machines. Not devices for writing more emails, managing calendars, filling in spreadsheets or shaving another twenty minutes off the working day.

A fantasy amplifier.

A machine for taking something that exists in the imagination and giving it form.

And I’m beginning to wonder whether generative AI is bringing us much closer to Kay’s original vision of computing than almost anything that has happened in the intervening years.

Last night Ruth and I were talking about reversing the caravan. She was trying to get her head around the physics of it: why the caravan moves in the opposite direction, what happens at the hitch, how steering the car changes the angle of the caravan.

Normally I would explain it. Maybe draw something on a piece of paper. Perhaps find a YouTube video.

Instead, I vibe coded a caravan reversing simulator.

Twenty minutes later we had a little computational world in which you could steer the car and watch the caravan respond.

That seems significant.

I didn’t really want software. I wanted to make an idea manipulable.

There was something in my head — a model of how reversing a caravan works — and through conversation with an AI I was able to externalise that model, turn it into software and then interact with it.

The movement was something like:

imagination → language → computation → experience

And then, because I could experience what I’d imagined, another loop began:

experience → thought → language → modification → new experience

This is where my recurring phrase everything is text starts connecting with Kay’s fantasy amplifier.

By “text” I don’t necessarily mean written words. I mean that more and more of the computational world is becoming addressable through language.

I can type into a box.

Or, increasingly, I can simply speak.

There’s this thing I’m imagining…

And from there I can potentially create an image, a piece of music, a video, an application, a simulation, a website, a database, a game.

I watched a woman create an entire music track by making the sounds of the different instruments with her mouth. Those rough sounds became instruments, arrangement and eventually a finished track over which she sang the vocals.

Something imagined became something encountered.

This seems to me much more interesting than the current obsession with AI productivity.

Yes, give the AI my admin. Sort the diary. Summarise the emails. Format the spreadsheet. Save me twenty minutes.

Useful stuff.

But surely that is the least imaginative version of what we have built.

The more interesting possibility is that AI dramatically reduces the distance between imagining something and encountering it.

And vibe coding might be one of the clearest early examples.

Programming traditionally required me to translate an idea into the symbolic language of the computer:

idea → specification → programming knowledge → code → interface → working thing

Increasingly, that translation becomes:

idea → language → working thing

That doesn’t make programming knowledge irrelevant. There are still enormous questions of reliability, security, architecture, maintenance and scale.

But something else has changed.

I no longer necessarily have to know how to build something before I can begin exploring what it might be like if it existed.

That changes the bottleneck.

The question becomes less:

Can I program this?

and more:

Can I imagine it?

And perhaps this is where AI as a co-thinking technology becomes much more interesting to me.

Because imagination isn’t simply being converted into finished products. The things we make can come back into the conversation and change our thinking.

I imagine something.

We make a rough version.

I encounter it.

Something about it surprises me.

I change my mind.
We alter it.

I encounter the new version.

Another possibility appears.

The artefact starts participating in the thinking.

Which means the fantasy amplifier isn’t simply a machine that executes imagination.

It provokes more imagination.

Kay imagined computers as a dynamic medium through which people — particularly children — could explore ideas, construct models, create worlds and discover things through interaction.

Perhaps generative AI adds another layer to that dream.

Natural language becomes an interface to computational possibility.

The little text box becomes strangely powerful.

“There’s something I’m imagining…”

And the machine effectively replies:

“Okay. Let’s see what happens if we make it.”

Maybe that is the more interesting future of AI.

Not artificial intelligence replacing human intelligence.

Not merely artificial intelligence making human beings more productive.

But human imagination coupled with computational intelligence in a recursive creative loop.

A fantasy amplifier.

And perhaps, after all these years, we’re finally beginning to build the thing Alan Kay was pointing toward.

August 8, 2026 6:56 am

We talk about consuming books, as though reading were a kind of nutritional exercise: pages in, knowledge out. But the best reading has never felt like consumption to me. It feels more like entering into correspondence with another consciousness across space and time. A conversation where one voice has the strange advantage of having thought about what it wants to say for years, sometimes centuries.

The art of reading begins when we stop treating books as containers of information and start treating them as occasions for thought.

A book is not finished when the author writes “The End.” It is finished when the reader has wrestled with it long enough for something inside themselves to rearrange. Every worthwhile book is completed twice: once by the writer, once by the reader.

There is also the question of pace.

The modern world encourages us to read the way we scroll—fast enough to harvest the headline before moving on. But some books refuse this economy of attention. They ask to be lingered over. A single sentence from Montaigne, Woolf, Nietzsche, or Solnit can occupy an afternoon. Not because it is difficult, necessarily, but because it unfolds. Like a landscape seen from different angles, it reveals more each time you return.

Perhaps reading is less like travelling down a road than wandering through a forest. You can rush from one edge to the other and claim you’ve “done” the forest. Or you can stop beside an old oak, notice the fungi on its bark, listen to birds you’ve never heard before, and discover that the forest was never simply a route—it was a relationship.

There is an ethics to reading, too.

A generous reader doesn’t merely ask, Do I agree? They first ask, What is this person trying to show me? Agreement can come later. Understanding comes first. Reading well requires a temporary hospitality of mind, an ability to let another worldview take up residence without immediately redecorating it according to our own tastes.

Of course, books are not always right. Some deserve argument. Some deserve abandonment. Some become more valuable because we resist them. But even disagreement can be a form of intimate reading if it arises from genuine encounter rather than reflex.

The finest readers become collectors of questions rather than answers.

They close a book carrying not a list of quotations but a slightly altered way of seeing. They begin noticing things in the street, in conversations, in their own thoughts that previously passed unnoticed. The book has become less an object than a new lens.

This is why marginalia matters. Underlining. Scribbled notes. Dog-eared pages. Conversations with friends. Journal entries after finishing a chapter. Reading is not passive reception but active participation. Every mark we make in a book is also a mark the book has made in us.

And perhaps this is the deepest art of reading: learning to read not only books, but the world itself.

Eventually the boundary dissolves. A walk becomes a chapter. A stranger becomes a footnote. A dream becomes an appendix. The city becomes a text full of symbols, omissions, revisions, and hidden authors. You realise that books were never teaching you merely how to read pages. They were teaching you how to become more readable to yourself.

The mature reader is therefore not someone who has read thousands of books. It is someone whose reading has become a way of being in the world—curious, attentive, slow enough to notice, humble enough to be changed, and alive to the possibility that every genuine encounter, whether with a paragraph or a person, is another chance to revise the story they are living.

August 7, 2026 7:36 am

Life is an orderly collection of uncertainties.

The order is not in what happens to us. It is in the fact that uncertainty keeps arriving. There is a rhythm to it. Birth, love, work, loss, chance encounters, illnesses, opportunities, endings. None of them arrive on schedule, yet somehow uncertainty itself is one of the few constants we can reliably expect.

We spend much of our lives trying to exchange uncertainty for certainty. We make plans, buy insurance, write five-year strategies, create identities, collect opinions. We call this getting our life together. But perhaps what we’re really doing is arranging our uncertainties into patterns we can live with.

A calendar is an orderly collection of unknown tomorrows.

A marriage is an orderly commitment to an unknowable future.

A career is an orderly wager that your skills will continue to matter.

Parenthood is an orderly surrender to permanent unpredictability.

Every meaningful human undertaking is built on this paradox: we create structures not because the world is certain, but because it isn’t.

Maybe wisdom isn’t learning how to eliminate uncertainty. Maybe it’s learning which uncertainties are worth embracing. Every choice closes some possibilities while opening others. To choose one path is to enter into a particular family of unknowns.

The existentialists might say that uncertainty is the price of freedom. The Stoics might remind us that uncertainty is simply reality refusing to obey our preferences. A mystic might whisper that uncertainty is the form in which mystery appears to finite minds.

There’s another thought lurking here.

Perhaps life isn’t chaos punctuated by moments of order. Perhaps it’s order itself that emerges from uncertainty, the way a flock of birds finds its shape without a blueprint, or a conversation discovers its meaning while it’s being spoken. The order isn’t imposed from above; it’s continuously negotiated.

This changes the question.

Instead of asking, “How can I become more certain?” we might ask, “What kind of order am I creating with the uncertainties I’ve been given?”

Because in the end, a life may not be judged by how many answers it accumulated, but by the quality of the questions it learned to inhabit. And perhaps that is the deepest order of all: not certainty, but a way of dancing with uncertainty that becomes recognisably your own.

August 6, 2026 2:12 pm

The air has changed.

I almost don’t want to say it out loud, as if naming it might hurry things along, but there was a trace of winter under the morning. It wasn’t cold. The air had acquired an edge, just enough to remind me that the year is already leaning towards another season. Where did the summer go?

Weathered stone ruins and bare branches beneath a heavy grey sky, with dry grass in the foreground.

Thinking often changes like this. I keep circling a question, carrying it from the desk to the path and back again, until one morning I realise I am no longer asking it from the same place.

For the past week the question has been: What is my practice?

The useful version of that question reaches beneath my work, my products and whatever skills I can put on a page. It asks what I am cultivating day after day, whether anybody notices or not.

The internet muddies the answer. I understand the marketplace and its machinery. If I want people to find my work, I have to make it visible. The platforms reward recognisable openings, familiar pacing and proven formats. Success leaves footprints, and the rest of us follow them until even originality begins to look as though it came from a template.

Every time I start thinking too strategically about “content”, I feel my attention detach from the thing that made me want to write. I start positioning rather than wondering. I ask, Will this perform? before I ask, Is this true?

These morning walks have been teaching me another rhythm. Walking, talking aloud, letting a thought find its pace somewhere between footstep and breath. I rarely leave the house with a destination for the thinking. The walk is the thinking. By the time I return, I know something I couldn’t reach by sitting still and pressing harder on the question.

July’s thirty-one days of blogging did something similar. It began as a challenge, became a habit, then asked to be treated as a practice. A challenge has a finish line. A habit can run without much presence. A practice asks me to turn up and meet the day that is here, with whatever quality of attention I can bring to it.

The Textual Underground has been holding versions of this thought for a while. On one walk, i uncovered a useful sequence: walk, notice, record, return, write, publish a trace. Another note asked what particular world becomes available through a person’s attention. Beneath both sits the same suspicion: the work begins before the writing does.

The blog has become the public edge of that practice. It can hold a finished essay, but it can also hold a photograph, a rough connection, a sentence that hasn’t decided what it believes yet. I don’t want it to document a row of conclusions. I want it to show a consciousness moving through time, books, streets, conversations and its own recurring questions, sometimes changing its mind in public.

Attention may be the thing I am cultivating. Attention to the year turning in the air. To old stone under a heavy sky. To the conversations overheard in cafés and the books that keep talking after I have closed them. To the odd thought that arrives halfway up a hill and refuses to leave me alone.

Writing is what attention leaves behind.

The business may grow from those traces. Readers may gather around them. Some notes may become essays, workshops, books or objects I can’t see yet. But those are later forms. If I make them the source, I lose contact with the walk, the question and the part of me that still writes to discover what he thinks.

Tomorrow the air may feel ordinary again.

August 4, 2026 1:26 pm

There is a will inside us that is older than thought.

It moves beneath the surface of the personality, beneath preference, fear and habit, carrying an intention we may only dimly perceive. We feel it as a pull, a recurring image, a quiet insistence that returns even after we have ignored it. Something in us remembers a direction the conscious mind has forgotten.

Our choices are the places where this hidden intention enters the world. Each decision opens one path and closes another. Each act becomes a small ritual of alignment or estrangement. We are always moving either nearer to the inner current or further from it.

This does not mean every impulse is sacred. The deeper will is easily confused with appetite, anxiety or the hunger to be seen. It speaks more quietly than these. It does not shout. It gathers. It waits. It reveals itself through patterns, synchronicities, dreams, resistances and the strange aliveness that accompanies certain paths.

Perhaps intention is not something we invent, but something we enter into relationship with. A thread running through the labyrinth. A seed already carrying the image of the tree. A hidden star by which the soul attempts to navigate.

The task, then, is not merely to exert more will, but to become transparent enough to recognise what is willing itself through us.

Every choice becomes a question offered to the unseen:

Does this bring me into deeper alignment with the life seeking to emerge through me?

We are never entirely still. Even in uncertainty, the soul leans somewhere.

August 3, 2026 8:39 am

There is no universal right way to live, but the platforms keep presenting life as if there were.

Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram turn existence into a hall of mirrors. Someone is travelling more, earning more, healing faster, raising better children, building a cleaner morning routine, finding their purpose, buying the van, leaving the city, moving to the city, lifting heavier, reading more books, becoming more spiritual, becoming less spiritual. Every swipe offers another life you could be failing to live.

After a while, you stop asking, What feels true for me? and start asking, How am I doing compared with the lives I can see?

Life begins to feel like a continuous assessment. You become both the student and the examiner, checking your days against criteria you never consciously chose. The standards change before you can meet them because the feed must keep moving. Yesterday you needed discipline. Today you need softness. Tomorrow someone will tell you that softness is avoidance and what you need is a 5 a.m. ice bath.

The struggle to “get life right” can become the very thing that removes you from your own life. Your attention moves away from the actual texture of your days: the work that absorbs you, the people around whom your body relaxes, the pace at which your mind opens, the small practices that restore you. Instead, you begin organising yourself around borrowed desires.

And borrowed desires are difficult to satisfy. Even when you get what you thought you wanted, the experience can feel strangely hollow because the wanting came from somewhere else.

I don’t know whether the core self is a fixed thing waiting underground to be uncovered. It may be closer to a grain in the wood, a direction in which your life bends when you stop forcing it. You notice it through contact: what gives you energy, what leaves a sour taste, what you keep returning to when nobody is watching, what kind of trouble feels worth having.

Living in accordance with that grain won’t necessarily make life easier. It may make you less legible to the people selling the approved versions. You may want a smaller life than the feed admires, or a stranger one. You may care deeply about something that photographs badly. You may discover that the life which fits you contains long stretches that look like nothing much from the outside.

Perhaps the question isn’t Am I living the right way?

Perhaps it is:

Whose idea of “right” is running through my head?

And beneath that:

What does my life begin to do when nobody else is scoring it?

August 2, 2026 3:57 pm

I picked up an old book this morning: Perceiving Ordinary Magic: Science and Intuitive Wisdom by Jeremy Hayward. The cover is a blue corridor of repeating geometry, the kind of image that used to promise either a difficult physics lecture or a trip through somebody else’s consciousness.

Somewhere in its opening territory, Hayward pointed me back towards Chögyam Trungpa and the Shambhala teachings. I had known the word warrior mostly through its degraded modern forms: the hard man, the self-improver, the person who mistakes tension for strength. Trungpa’s use of it runs in another direction. The warrior is the one who stops arranging life around not feeling what is true.

How often do I reach for the phone because the room has gone quiet? How quickly do I begin rehearsing the future when a task becomes awkward? How much of what passes for planning is just an elaborate way of avoiding the next plain thing?

The Shambhala language calls these little defensive constructions the cocoon. I know the feeling. A bright, upholstered chamber made of scrolling, second-guessing, imagined conversations, old arguments, and the promise that relief is one more click away.

Hayward’s phrase, “ordinary magic”, offers another way into the same space. Not magic as an escape from the real, but the possibility that the real becomes more available when we stop trying to categorise, use, control, or explain it into submission.

I have set up a small fourteen-day experiment for myself: sit for fifteen minutes with my eyes open; walk without headphones; notice one cocoon move; make one small honest return; write a few lines before bed.

No warrior costume. No spiritual badge. Just an attempt to find out what becomes perceptible when I stop defending myself from the ordinary.

July 31, 2026 3:38 pm

I keep seeing headlines about the new rules of attention, usually written by somebody who wants to sell a better way of getting hold of it.

The old rules were blunt enough. Interrupt people. Startle them. Keep them scrolling. Learn which colours, fears, desires and half-conscious wounds make a thumb hesitate for a second longer. Call it engagement. Invoice the result.

Nobody needed to explain this to us. We felt it in the back of the skull after twenty minutes on the phone: the strange mix of stimulation and depletion, like eating a whole packet of crisps for supper. Full of something. Nourished by nothing.

But attention has changed because the internet has changed. The web is filling with language that resembles language without having passed through a life. Clean little answers. Cheerful summaries. Posts that arrive with all the texture of a hotel corridor. They may be useful. They may even be correct. But they have not stood at a bus stop in the rain, forgotten why they walked into the kitchen, or had to sit with a sentence for three days because it would not behave.

So perhaps the first new rule is this: give people evidence that you were here.

Not performative authenticity. I do not need another stranger telling me they are “showing up as their whole self” beside a beige carousel. I mean the signs of actual contact: the grit on the walking boots, the awkward conversation at the café, the book with its spine cracked open on the table, the particular thought that arrived while you were taking the bins out.

A person’s attention still goes where they sense a living presence.

The second rule: do not make your reader pay for your neediness.

A lot of the attention economy runs on an unspoken demand: stay with me, validate me, complete the circuit. But writing can offer a different arrangement. You can give someone a room to think in. You can leave a door open. You can hand them a question worth taking on a walk.

The reader may not remember every word. They may remember that your piece slowed something down inside them. That it returned them to their own life with a little more curiosity.

That seems a fairer trade.

And the third rule may be the most difficult: make things that release attention back into the world.

The feed wants us facing inward, locked in the bright little casino of the screen. The barefoot philosopher wants to close the laptop and notice the birds having some kind of meeting in the hedge. He wants to read a paragraph, then look out of the window for ten minutes. He wants the internet to lead back to the street, the body, the unfinished conversation, the book waiting by the bed.

Maybe that is where blogging comes back into its own.

A blog does not have to chase you through every room of your life. It can sit there like a small public bench. You visit when you feel like it. Someone has left a note. Perhaps it is useful. Perhaps it sends you elsewhere. Perhaps it reminds you that another human being is trying to make sense of being alive under the same strange sky.

The new rules of attention may have less to do with capturing it than deserving it.

And the people worth reading may be the ones who know when to give it back.

If this post gave you something to carry into your day, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee or making a monthly donation or subscribing (free) to the blog.

July 31, 2026 2:33 pm

Yesterday, on a Wisdom Walk, I realised I had been spending my attention in three directions at once.

Part of me had gone backwards, picking over old choices and wishing I had chosen differently. Part had gone forwards, trying to get ahead of outcomes I cannot know. The rest kept looking for a side door through entertainment, the small and familiar way of leaving the room when the present feels awkward.

I have been thinking about personal power in the old warrior sense: not power over other people, and not the usual self-help business of becoming more assertive. I mean the ability to gather your own attention and use it where you stand. The older writers on the craft of the warrior talk about power leaks. That phrase has stayed with me because it describes the feeling well. Regret drains one pocket. Fear drains another. Avoidance finds a third.

This morning I pulled three tarot cards against that question. The Moon, The Sun, and Death, all upright.

The Moon looked like the mind under partial light. You know the territory. The past starts to feel editable. The future begins to feel dangerous before it has even happened. You follow a worry around the block a few times and call it planning. The card did not ask me to solve every shadow. It asked me to recognise the conditions and keep walking.

The Sun brought the practice back to earth. Ten minutes of meditation. Bare feet in the garden. Looking around the room. A breath. The next thing my hand can actually do. I am learning that the return does not need to be grand. It only needs to be real.

Then Death turned up, which I took as a blunt reminder that some old habit of selfhood has had its time. The version of me that tries to live in the past, secure the whole future, or duck out of the present may have done useful work once. It does not need to run the day.

I am trying a simple field instruction: when I notice myself leaking attention backwards, forwards, or sideways, I come back through the senses. Feet. Breath. Sight. One real task.

The day may still be messy. The question may still be open. But I am here for it.

July 29, 2026 7:54 pm

The shadow is not dark because it is evil. It is dark because it has been pushed out of sight.

Whatever we cannot consciously own tends to run us from behind the curtain. We condemn it in other people. We are secretly fascinated by it. We keep meeting it in the same arguments, the same attractions, the same loops where we sabotage ourselves and cannot say why.

This is a workbook for facing your shadow self.

Nineteen pages, eight exercises, designed to be printed and written in by hand. No videos, no course, no login. Questions and enough white space to answer them honestly.

What’s inside

👉 The Projection List. The people who provoke a reaction out of all proportion, and what you are actually reacting to.

👉 Triggers as Doorways. Slowing a charged moment down until the pattern underneath becomes visible.

👉 The “I Am Not That” Inquiry. The qualities you insist are not yours, and what it costs to keep insisting.

👉 Dialogue with a Disowned Part. Letting it speak before you correct it.

👉 Reclaiming the Gift. Separating the life force from the wound wrapped around it.

👉 The Inner Courtroom. Shame, responsibility, and the difference between them.

👉The Golden Shadow. Envy as a crude but reliable compass toward an unlived life.

👉 The Body Knows First. The physical signature that arrives before the story does.

Plus an integration section and a thirty-day practice.

A note on pace

Shadow work can be tender. One page at a time is enough. If an exercise brings up something too large to hold on your own, close the book and talk to someone you trust. Stopping is not failure.

Buy
July 28, 2026 12:23 pm

Only a few more days left in my 31-day weblogging challenge. My experience has been when you stop performing and stop conforming, a 31-day blogging challenge turns out to be surprisingly easy. You step out of the paralyzing effect of perfection and focus on staying in conversation with your own experience. A weblog, at its best, isn’t a content machine. It’s more like a mind in motion thinking out loud.

July 27, 2026 2:45 pm

Rheingold’s Tools for Thought has me asking an old question again:: what are computers for?

For a long time the answer seemed settled. Computers were calculators, then office machines, then portals into a giant shopping centre with a comment section. We learned to treat them as appliances that happened to demand more and more of our attention.

Rheingold writes from an earlier fork in the road. The people he follows were not trying to put a faster calculator on every desk. They were trying to build tools that could take some of the mechanical burden of thought, so that people might have more room to make connections, work together, remember what mattered and imagine something beyond the present arrangement.

Doug Engelbart called it augmenting human intellect. Alan Kay imagined a fantasy amplifier. Ted Nelson wanted a world-library that could keep changing as we changed. There is an old, generous ambition running through all of this: the computer as a place where thought becomes more associative, more visible to itself, and less lonely.

That ambition has not vanished. It is just harder to spot beneath the feeds, the dashboards, the little red counters and the machines now trained to produce smooth paragraphs before we have worked out what we mean.

I can feel that tension every time I open my vault. The Textual Underground is my small attempt to keep faith with the older promise. Not a second brain built to make me a more efficient employee of my own life. Not a warehouse for digital lint. A place where a phrase from a walk can sit beside a line from a book; where an old note can become useful again because the person reading it has changed; where links make trails that memory alone would not have found.

The question is no longer whether machines can help us think. They plainly can. The harder question is what kind of thinking they leave us with. A frictionless feed can narrow attention. A fluent AI can save time and quietly take over the work through which a thought becomes yours.

So I am trying to keep a little friction in the system. I want the machine to do the filing, the recalling, the connecting, the tedious bits. I still want to make the turn in the sentence myself. I still want the awkward pause, the notebook margin, the walk home, the moment when two things that did not seem related begin to speak to each other.

Maybe the real purpose of a tool for thought isn’t to give us answers faster. Maybe it’s to protect the conditions under which original thought can still happen.

July 25, 2026 5:51 pm

I’ve got the new Masters of the Universe queued up on Prime for viewing tonight. I suspect I’ll be viewing it through two lenses. The kid, waiting to hear “I have the power!” and the storyteller who’s curious to know if they can make the mythology of Eternia something more than a marketing reboot. One thing I hope they preserve is what made the original strangely compelling beneath the Saturday morning animation: it wasn’t just muscles and monsters. It was a mythic story of identity. Adam isn’t powerful because he’s He-Man; he’s powerful because he chooses to become He-Man. That’s a classic hero’s journey dressed up in neon armor.

July 24, 2026 7:04 am

This morning I picked up How to Practice Self-Inquiry by Ramana Maharshi. I expected a quick survey read, a reconnaissance mission into the territory of the question Who am I? Instead, before I had travelled very far into the book, another question appeared:

Is this your game? Is this your true mission?

I could almost locate the voice physically. I raised my left hand as though it were speaking from that side of my brain. It wasn’t dismissing the book. Intellectually, I find the whole thing fascinating: the idea of following the sense of “I” backwards, beyond name, history, personality and role, towards whatever remains when all the usual answers have fallen away.

But fascination is not necessarily vocation.

As I sat there thinking about consciousness, another whisper began pointing elsewhere—back towards The Feminist Art of Walking, towards psychogeography and mythogeography, towards the work I have been doing around movement, place and the conversation between the inner and outer worlds.

That is where the energy seems to be.

As I understood it this morning, Ramana’s method moves inward by subtraction. Sit still. Withdraw attention from the world. Follow each thought back to the one who is thinking it. Ask who is afraid, who is curious, who is restless, who is asking the question. Keep tracing the “I” towards its source.

There is something beautiful and rigorous about that. But there is also a part of me that resists the image of consciousness as a room I must enter and seal behind me.

My own inquiry seems to begin when I leave the room.

I experience myself through contact with the world: walking through fields, streets, ruins, footpaths and forgotten corners; noticing signs, overhearing fragments of conversation, encountering weather and history; allowing a place to disturb the familiar arrangement of my thoughts. The landscape does not merely provide a backdrop for reflection. It participates in the reflection. It interrupts, provokes, remembers and responds.

Perhaps I do not discover myself by withdrawing from the world, but by entering more deeply into relationship with it.

The question, then, may not be simply:

Who am I?

It may be:

Who am I here?

Or:

Who do I become in contact with this place?

What does this street awaken in me? What does this landscape remember on my behalf? Which part of me appears only when I am moving? What does the world call into speech that would otherwise remain silent?

This feels like a form of self-inquiry, but one conducted through encounter rather than retreat. An ambulatory self-inquiry. The inquiry is distributed across body, place, memory, history and imagination. My feet become part of the thinking apparatus. The route becomes a line of thought drawn across the land.

Movement is not a distraction from contemplation. It is the engine of it.

Perhaps the value of Ramana’s book, for me, will not be that it persuades me to adopt his method exactly. Its value may lie in the contrast it creates. It shows me one path towards the self clearly enough that I can recognise the shape of my own.

His path says: strip the world away and discover what remains.

Mine may be saying: enter the world more fully and discover what emerges.

So the question Who am I? remains, but it refuses to sit still. It wants weather. It wants roads, thresholds, voices, ruins and chance encounters. It wants to be carried into the world and allowed to change as the landscape changes.

Perhaps I am not a monk of consciousness.

Perhaps I am a walker in the world.

July 22, 2026 9:21 am

“Same shit, different day” is one of those phrases I hate because it usually arrives wearing a smirk. It reduces a life to a conveyor belt: wake up, coffee, work, scroll, eat, sleep, repeat. A little verbal shrug before another day gets fed into the machine.

And yet, some mornings, it’s mostly true.

Routine isn’t the villain. I like the small anchors of a day: making coffee before I look at a screen, walking the familiar stretch of road, opening the notebook, sitting down to work before I’ve had time to invent too many reasons not to. A few repeated acts hold the shape of a life together. They save you from having to negotiate every tiny decision from scratch.

But routines have a dark side. They can turn into grooves so deep you stop noticing you’re in them. You take the same route because it’s efficient. You eat the same lunch because it’s easy. You keep putting off the phone call, the email, the invitation, the strange little idea that keeps knocking because it doesn’t fit the version of you who has got things under control.

Nothing dramatic happens. That’s part of the problem.

You don’t wake up one day and find a guard standing at the edge of your life saying, You may not leave the pattern. You just keep choosing the familiar option until it starts choosing for you.

When I feel that happening, I borrow a trick from Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man. Not the whole project — I’m not handing my moral agency over to a cube of plastic — but the basic interruption.

I make a list of six possible actions.

They can be small: take a different route into town; work from a café rather than the desk; send the message I’ve been rehearsing in my head for three weeks; spend an hour reading something outside my current obsessions; go somewhere I’ve never bothered to enter; make the phone call.

One option has to be something I would not normally choose. Not reckless. Not self-sabotaging. Just inconvenient, unfamiliar, or slightly embarrassing. Something the routine-self would dismiss before it had a chance to become real.

Then I roll a d6.

The only rule is that I honour the roll. No best-of-three. No quiet reinterpretation. No “well, technically I have done the thing by thinking about doing it.” The dice don’t care what I wanted.

That’s the point.

Most of the time, I know what I want before the die stops moving. I roll a three and feel a small lift of disappointment. Or relief. That feeling tells me more than another hour of analysis would. The die has not revealed a cosmic instruction. It has made my preference visible by putting something else in front of it.

Other times, the roll sends me somewhere I wouldn’t have gone: down a road I’ve ignored, into a shop that has sat in my peripheral vision for years, towards a conversation that breaks the stale internal monologue. The day doesn’t become a cinematic adventure. Usually, it becomes a day with one less automatic movement in it.

That can be enough.

I don’t think the dice are wise. They are indifferent little objects with numbered faces. But indifference has its uses when your own habits have become too persuasive. The roll cuts through the committee meeting in your head. It interrupts the little boss who thinks safety and repetition are the same thing.

Sometimes the right response to “same shit, different day” isn’t a grand reinvention. It’s a different walk home. A meal you haven’t made before. A message sent without polishing it into dust. One small act of disobedience against the machinery of your own predictability.

Roll the dice. Then go where it tells you.

At least for today.

July 21, 2026 3:12 pm

The forest does not offer answers in the way a book, a screen, or a clever conversation does. It gives you texture. Uneven ground. The sound of your own feet. Branches moving against one another. The minor negotiations of a body making its way through the world. In that setting, the mind’s usual bureaucracy begins to lose authority. The lists, rehearsed conversations, inherited measures of success, old complaints, small self-defences: they do not disappear, but they stop being the only voices in the room.

To “lose my mind” is not to become irrational. It is to step outside the cramped administrative office of the self. The mind that Muir wants to lose may be the one that keeps score, keeps pace, keeps the gates shut. In the forest, attention gets redistributed. A bird call cuts through the internal monologue. A patch of light on moss asks nothing of you. A path bends out of sight, and for a few minutes the future is not a project but a turn in the trail.

Then the soul, if we use that old word without embarrassment, has a chance to speak in its quieter register.

Perhaps the soul is not a hidden object we discover, like a coin in the leaf mould. Perhaps it is the part of us that reappears when we stop forcing experience to justify itself. It knows something about proportion. It remembers that we belong to a world that was not made to fit inside our plans. It brings us back to appetite, grief, wonder, fatigue, gratitude, and the strange relief of being one animal among many.

The forest does not cure us of thought. It gives thought a wider habitat. We return with the same problems, perhaps, but their edges have changed. The mind has been loosened from its familiar grooves. The soul has had some air. And the path home, though it may be the same path, no longer feels entirely owned by the person who set out.

July 19, 2026 11:15 am

I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around with me: unfold a map, put a glass down anywhere, draw round its rim, then go out and walk the circle as closely as the streets allow. This is a low tech version of the deríve app I made last week.

It’s a lovely bit of mischief because it gives the walk a rule without getting to complicated. The line is arbitrary, yet the body has to negotiate it: the cul-de-sac, the dual carriageway, the bit of private land, the pub garden, the place where the tidy circle becomes a long awkward detour. The map makes a proposition, and the street answers back.

Robert Macfarlane’s version says to record the “textual run-off” as you go: graffiti, branded litter, snatches of conversation, visual rhymes, whatever keeps catching on the mind. A walk doesn’t need a grand revelation to become material. It only needs attention and a way of catching what sticks to it.

I like that the instruction ends with the circle and the record ending together. There’s a discipline in it. You don’t have to turn every walk into a project, a lesson, or a little performance for the screen. You walk the strange line you drew, make a few marks, and come home with whatever the streets were prepared to give you.

Maybe that’s enough. A route, a notebook, a few scraps of the world.

With thanks to Robert Macfarlane, “A Road of One’s Own.”

July 18, 2026 9:21 am

Rebecca Solnit’s sentences are archipelagos of thought. You step onto one clause and find another small island appearing just beyond it: a memory, a road, an old map, a story someone told her, a political fact that refuses to stay merely political. The sentence does not hurry you to its conclusion. It gives you somewhere to stand, then asks whether you might look sideways.

This can feel dreamy at first. Then you realise the dreaminess has a method. Solnit slows the reader down long enough for the usual boundaries to become less convincing. Inner life and public life. Geography and memory. A walk taken alone and the larger histories written into the land beneath the feet. She lets them mingle until you can no longer quite separate one from the other.

For a mind that likes to move laterally, this is a relief.

So much writing now arrives already ashamed of taking up time. It declares its point, breaks it into obedient little units, and offers a summary in case you have a more important tab waiting. Solnit’s prose makes another wager. It trusts that a digression can be part of the thing itself. It trusts that the route towards an insight may matter as much as the insight.

Deleuze and Guattari used the image of the rhizome: a root system that spreads sideways rather than growing from a single trunk. No proper beginning. No clean hierarchy. A potato does not look much like a tree, but it knows something about survival, multiplication, and finding another way through the soil.

Solnit’s paragraphs often work like that. They wander, return, take an unexpected turning, and then land somewhere that feels both surprising and inevitable. You don’t feel that she has lost the thread. You feel like the thread was never a straight line in the first place.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost understands this better than most books. Losing your way is not merely an error to correct. It can be the condition in which another kind of seeing becomes possible. The familiar map stops working. You have to look up. You have to notice where you are.

Perhaps that is why her work feels so companionable to anyone trying to think their way out of a narrow life-script. Her prose does not demand efficiency from the reader. It offers permission to follow an association, to linger with a contradiction, to walk the longer road without having to defend the choice.

There are thoughts that only arrive when we stop treating every detour as a failure of direction.

July 17, 2026 8:23 am

It feels to me as though this is the only true choice we have.

You did not ask to be born. You did not choose your parents. You did not choose the circumstances into which you arrived. The only real choice, I think, lies in deciding how we will play the hand we have been dealt.

Not to mix metaphors, but I am reminded of Thomas Henry Huxley’s description of life as a game of chess.

He was searching for a metaphor for the silent player seated opposite us from the moment we are born:

“The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”

It is important to remember that the hidden player is not malicious.

It simply follows rules that do not bend for our comfort. Its only demand is that we learn the board or accept the consequences of failing to do so.

We learn the moves because we must.

Perhaps that is where freedom begins: not in choosing the game, the board, or the pieces we were given, but in learning how to play them.

July 14, 2026 5:50 am

I’ve been thinking about the difference between critical thinking and the kind of intelligence that has to sit beside it.

Critical thinking gets a lot of the limelight. Fair enough. It is the part of the mind that asks for evidence, spots the loose plank in an argument, and refuses to be charmed by every shiny claim that comes down the road. In a culture thick with sales pitches, outrage machines, and synthetic certainty, we need it. It is the Yang move: active, discriminating, separating what holds up from what does not.

But I keep wondering what its Yin counterpart is.

My best name for it, today, is receptive thinking. It is not the same as switching your brain off. It is not believing everything you feel, or treating a hunch as a court ruling. It is the capacity to sit with something before you pull it apart. To listen before you judge. To notice tone, context, relationship, body language, the strange image that arrives while you are making coffee, and the fact that an idea may still be half-grown.

Critical thought asks: is this true? Receptive thought asks: what is this showing me?

One works by distinction. The other works by attunement. One tests the map. The other notices what the map has left out: the texture of the ground, the person standing beside you, the nagging feeling that the question itself has been framed too narrowly.

I recognise the Yang reflex in myself. It wants to get hold of a thought quickly, put it through its paces, and decide whether it deserves to stay. Useful reflex. It has saved many of us from bad arguments, dodgy gurus, and the kind of certainty that falls apart the moment you ask it a second question.

Yet an overworked critical faculty can become a little border guard behind the eyes. Every new thought has to produce a passport before it can enter. Some ideas need questioning; some need a little room. A walk. A notebook. A few days of being carried around in the body before language catches up.

The opposite trap is real too. Receptivity without discernment can turn into absorption, where every feeling becomes a fact and every coincidence becomes an instruction. That road can get very strange, very quickly.

So I am not looking for a winner. I am looking for a rhythm. Receive the signal. Let it form. Then test it. Put it into words. See what remains when it meets other people, actual life, and the awkward furniture of reality.

Maybe thinking well is less like holding court and more like a good conversation between two old friends. One says, “Hang on, does that really stand up?” The other says, “Yes, but have you properly listened yet?”

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