Essay The Lighthouse We Didn't Climb
A rain check at the door, a veranda martini, and a rainy Thursday that turned into one of the better days anyway.
Photo: founder's own collection
Impressions
Writing.
Two streams. Essays are the longer pieces — what a place taught me, what a problem cost me, what an idea was worth in practice. Reflections take a teaching old enough to forget and write it down again in plain words.
Each piece is tagged with a finger (where in life it lives) and a pillar (how the practice shows up). Mix and match — any pillar can pair with any finger.
Essays
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Reflections The Most Famous Thing NASA Ever Built Was Made of Duct Tape
Two hundred thousand miles from Earth, three men were being slowly poisoned by their own breath, and the fix had to be built from what was already in the cabin.
Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Reflections We Wore Out a Perfectly Good Word in About Four Years
In 2022 lookups for 'gaslighting' jumped 1,740 per cent and Merriam-Webster made it word of the year. Somewhere in there it stopped meaning what it meant, and the people who needed it lost the only word that named the thing.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Reflections No Animal on Earth Knows What a Monday Is
A day is one rotation. A year is one orbit. A month is roughly the moon doing its round. The week answers to nothing at all — and the dread you feel on a Sunday evening was never installed by the calendar.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Reflections Twenty-Seven Years, and He Came Out Looking for a Way to Share the Country
Nelson Mandela went into prison at forty-four and came out at seventy-one. Every ordinary human account says the man who walks out of that is owed a reckoning. He went looking for something else.
Photo by Alex Wigan on Unsplash
Reflections He Ran a Marathon a Day, on One Leg, for 143 Days
Terry Fox lost his right leg at eighteen. Three years later he started running across Canada — about forty-two kilometres a day, every day — for a finish he did not expect to see.
Photo by Paul Fiedler on Unsplash
Reflections Thoreau Figured Out the Noise Problem Before There Was Noise
In 1845 there was no feed to check and no phone to put down. He unplugged from ordinary 19th-century life anyway, and said exactly why.
Photo on Unsplash
Reflections Jason Redman and the Five Words That Get You Off the Floor
A Navy SEAL took two rounds and a face wound in an ambush outside Fallujah. What he built afterward wasn't a comeback story — it was a five-step tool anyone can use.
Photo on Unsplash
Reflections Elizabeth Gilbert Went Back to Bali Expecting Nothing in Particular
A palm reader told her she'd return to study with him one day. She did — with no idea what that actually meant. It turned into one of the defining relationships of her life.
Photo on Unsplash
Reflections Edgar Mitchell and the View Nobody Trained Him For
NASA trained him to fly a spacecraft. Nobody trained him for what it would feel like to look back at Earth. He came home a different kind of person than he left.
Photo on Unsplash
Reflections Cheryl Strayed and the Trail Magic She Didn't Plan For
She set out on the Pacific Crest Trail with a pack too heavy and a life falling apart. She didn't expect the strangers. That's what she remembers.
Photo on Unsplash
Reflections You're Probably Asleep Right Now
A Jesuit priest spent his life telling packed rooms, gently and often hilariously, that they were sleepwalking through their own lives. He might have been talking about this exact moment.
Photo via Unsplash
Reflections The Seven Minutes Nobody Prepared Him For
Handed seven unplanned minutes on live television, Norm Macdonald didn't rush to fill the silence. He let it sit there — and it became legendary because of it.
Photo via Unsplash
Reflections The Optimists Died First
In the Hanoi Hilton, the prisoners who didn't survive weren't the pessimists. They were the ones who picked a release date and couldn't survive it passing.
Photo via Unsplash
Reflections Nobody Scheduled Bill Murray
No publicist, no plan — just a stranger who shows up at your party and starts washing the dishes. The stories may not all be verified. That might be the point.
Photo via Unsplash
Reflections Gary Larson Quit at the Top, on Purpose
Fifteen years into The Far Side, at the peak of its fame, Gary Larson wrote his readers a letter and walked away — before the thing he loved started running on fumes.
Photo via Unsplash