unscripted life – Richard L. Fricks

Unscripted — Week 7–Seven Dogs, Zero Agendas: Lessons in Unfiltered Living

Welcome to Unscripted, a weekly reflection on what it means to live without inherited stories, rigid identities, or predetermined purpose. Each Monday, I explore a different part of this shift toward presence and clarity—one moment, one breath, one pencil stroke at a time.

There are seven dogs at Oak Hollow.

They arrived at different times, from different places, carrying different histories. Some came timid. Some loud. Some cautious. Some hungry for attention. None came with a plan.

They don’t share a philosophy. They don’t know the language I use to describe this life. They don’t care whether I’m present or distracted.

And yet, they may be the most reliable teachers of presence I’ve ever lived with.

No Narrative, No Improvement Plan

The dogs don’t wake up wondering who they should be today.

They don’t rehearse yesterday. They don’t plan tomorrow. They don’t carry a storyline about progress, productivity, or meaning.

They wake up. They stretch. They step into the day exactly as it is.

If there is sun, they notice it. If there is food, they eat. If there is movement, they follow. If there is rest, they take it.

Nothing is optimized. Nothing is withheld. Nothing is postponed.

Their lives are not efficient. They are complete.

Attention Without Agenda

One of the quiet surprises of living with animals is how differently attention behaves.

When a dog looks at you, there is no strategy behind it. No expectation. No story.

The attention is total, but uninvested. Present, but unattached.

They don’t want you to be better. They don’t need you to change. They don’t expect a version of you.

They simply register what is.

Being around that kind of attention has a way of stripping things down.

The mind, so used to narrating and evaluating, slowly loses its footing. There’s nothing to perform for. Nothing to explain. Nothing to manage.

Just contact.

Time Without Measurement

Dogs don’t experience time as a problem.

They don’t divide the day into productive and wasted hours. They don’t rush toward the next thing or resist the current one.

A walk is the walk. A nap is the nap. Waiting is waiting.

Time isn’t something they spend or save. It’s something they inhabit.

Watching this, day after day, begins to loosen the grip of urgency. Not dramatically. Not all at once.

Just enough to notice how much of human life is lived somewhere other than where the body already is.

Relationship Without Identity

Each dog has a personality, but none of them carry an identity.

They don’t introduce themselves. They don’t defend who they are. They don’t live up to a role.

If one is cautious, it’s cautious. If one is playful, it plays. If one needs space, it takes it.

There’s no tension between who they were yesterday and who they are today.

They don’t remember themselves.

That absence of self-story creates a surprising kind of freedom. Not freedom from constraint, but freedom from commentary.

They live without an inner narrator explaining their lives to themselves.

Presence That Doesn’t Try

What makes the dogs such effective teachers isn’t that they are wise or calm or enlightened.

It’s that they don’t try to be anything at all.

Presence isn’t something they practice. It’s simply the condition of being alive.

Living alongside that kind of unfiltered existence does something subtle to the human nervous system. It lowers the volume. It shortens the distance between thought and experience.

You stop asking: Am I doing this right? What should this mean? Where is this leading?

You just notice: This is happening.

How This Fits the Pencil-Driven Life

The Pencil-Driven Life isn’t about becoming more disciplined or more intentional.

It’s about removing the extra layers we’ve learned to carry.

Dogs don’t erase. They don’t revise. They don’t reflect.

They simply move.

And in that movement, something essential is revealed: life doesn’t need a storyline to be fully lived.

Sometimes the clearest way back to presence isn’t through effort or insight, but through proximity—to beings who never left it.

A Small Invitation

You don’t need seven dogs. You don’t need animals at all.

But you might notice:

where attention already rests easily
where time doesn’t feel pressured
where you aren’t managing an identity

Stay there a little longer than usual.

No lesson required. No meaning extracted.

Just notice what it’s like to live without an agenda—even briefly.

A Closing Thought

The dogs don’t know they’re teaching anything.

They don’t care whether I understand them. They don’t need me to apply the lesson.

They simply live.

And in their living, they quietly remind me of something I keep forgetting:

Presence isn’t something to achieve. It’s what remains when nothing else is required.

The pencil is already moving.

Unscripted — Week 6 – Walking the Runway: A Daily Practice of Awareness

Welcome to Unscripted, a weekly reflection on what it means to live without inherited stories, rigid identities, or predetermined purpose. Each Monday, I explore a different part of this shift toward presence and clarity—one moment, one breath, one pencil stroke at a time.

Most mornings at Oak Hollow begin the same way.

Not because I planned it that way, but because repetition has a way of finding you when you stop resisting it.

After the early hours of writing—after coffee, pages, silence—I step outside and walk the runway.

It’s a long, simple strip of grass cut into the land years ago for a different purpose. Once, it existed to lift something into the air. Now it exists for something quieter: walking, noticing, returning.

There’s nothing symbolic about it when I start walking. No intention to practice awareness. No goal to “be present.” I’m just moving my body across familiar ground.

And that’s the point.

A Practice Without Ambition

The word practice usually comes with expectations attached. Improvement. Discipline. Progress. Outcomes.

This isn’t that.

Walking the runway isn’t about achieving a state of mind or cultivating a particular feeling. It’s not meditation in disguise. It’s not exercise pretending to be spiritual.

It’s simply walking the same stretch of land, day after day, long enough for the mind to lose interest in performing.

At first, the mind does what it always does:

It narrates.
It plans.
It revisits old conversations.
It anticipates what comes next.

I don’t correct it. I don’t argue with it. I don’t try to replace it with better thoughts.

I keep walking.

Over time—sometimes minutes, sometimes not at all—the noise thins. Not because it’s been defeated, but because it no longer needs attention.

Awareness doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It shows up quietly, like noticing you’ve already been breathing.

The Runway as a Container

What makes this walk different from any other isn’t the scenery or the distance. It’s the container.

The runway doesn’t change. The trees don’t rearrange themselves. The path doesn’t offer variety or novelty.

Because the space stays constant, what changes becomes easier to see.

Some mornings:

the body feels heavy
the mind resists movement
the walk feels pointless

Other mornings:

light filters differently
birds are louder
the body moves without commentary

The runway doesn’t respond to any of this. It doesn’t reward effort or punish distraction.

It simply holds whatever shows up.

That steadiness is what allows awareness to surface—not as an idea, but as direct experience.

Awareness Is Not Something You Add

One of the quiet misunderstandings about presence is the belief that it’s something you do.

As if awareness is a skill to be developed, a habit to be installed, a discipline to master.

Walking the runway has taught me otherwise.

Awareness isn’t added to the walk. It’s what’s left when nothing else is required.

When there’s no destination, no performance, no improvement to chase, attention naturally returns to what’s already happening:

the rhythm of breath
the feeling of feet meeting ground
the way light shifts as clouds move

None of this needs interpretation.

The runway doesn’t ask me to understand it. It asks me to notice it.

The Body Knows Before the Mind

There are days when thought remains loud the entire walk.

Even then, something else is happening underneath.

The body walks. The arms swing. The breath adjusts.

The body doesn’t wait for clarity to proceed.

This is one of the quieter lessons the runway offers: awareness doesn’t depend on mental quiet. It depends on contact.

Feet on ground. Air on skin. Movement unfolding.

The mind may comment, but the body is already here.

A Ritual Without Meaning

I don’t walk the runway because it represents something. I walk it because it’s there.

Over time, the routine has taken on a shape of its own—not as ritual, but as rhythm.

Not sacred. Not symbolic. Just familiar.

That familiarity becomes an invitation. Not to transcend daily life, but to inhabit it more fully.

Walking the runway doesn’t make the day better. It makes the day real.

How This Fits the Pencil-Driven Life

The Pencil-Driven Life isn’t about adding practices to an already crowded life.

It’s about noticing where awareness naturally appears when you stop demanding meaning from everything you do.

For me, awareness shows up:

while walking the runway
while stacking wood
while feeding dogs
while writing early in the morning before the world asks anything of me

None of these moments are optimized. None are performed. None are shared to prove anything.

They are simply where attention settles when the pencil is allowed to move on its own.

If You’re Looking for a Runway of Your Own

You don’t need land. You don’t need a routine as specific as mine. You don’t need to call it a practice.

What you need already exists:

a path you walk often
a movement you repeat
a space that doesn’t demand improvement

Let it stay ordinary. Let it remain unremarkable.

Walk it without expecting awareness to arrive.

If it does, fine. If it doesn’t, fine.

The walking is enough.

A Closing Thought

The runway doesn’t teach me how to be present.

It reminds me that presence was never missing.

It was only waiting for me to stop trying to get somewhere else.

I walk. The mind talks. The body moves. The day begins.

That’s the practice.

The pencil is already moving.

Unscripted — Week 1: What It Means to Live Without a Script

Welcome to Unscripted, a weekly reflection on what it means to live without inherited stories, rigid identities, or predetermined purpose. Each Monday, I explore a different part of this shift toward presence and clarity—one moment, one breath, one pencil stroke at a time.

Why losing the old storyline becomes freedom rather than loss

For most of my life, I lived by a script I didn’t write.

Not a literal script—not words typed on a page or spoken into a microphone—but a story that explained who I was supposed to be and why. A story that laid out what mattered and what didn’t. A story filled with expectations, obligations, and roles assigned long before I ever had the space or courage to question them.

You probably have a script too. Most people do.

It’s the quiet narrative running beneath everything: This is who I am.This is what I’m supposed to want.This is why my life matters.This is what success looks like.This is what I must protect at all costs.

Scripts are powerful in the way gravity is powerful. You don’t notice them until you try to step outside their pull.

For years, I didn’t. I followed the story I had inherited, edited it lightly at times, rearranged chapters here and there, but never questioned its authorship. It felt like life. It felt like purpose. It felt like meaning.

And then one day—quietly, without drama—the script stopped working.

Not because of a crisis. Not because of a grand revelation. But because something inside me simply saw through it. The storyline I had used to understand myself suddenly felt too small, too tight, too noisy. And once that unraveling began, it didn’t stop. What once felt like identity now felt like confinement.

That unraveling is what eventually became The Pencil-Driven Life.

And this post—this first post in a new chapter of writing—is an attempt to name what it actually means to live without a script.

Not as an idea. Not as a philosophy. But as a daily, lived experience.

The Feel of Life Without a Script

Most people hear “living without a script” and imagine chaos or impulsiveness or aimlessness. But it’s none of those things.

Living without a script doesn’t mean abandoning your life. It means no longer forcing life to match a predetermined storyline.

It means dropping the old belief that you must always be “on track.” It means letting go of the constant self-surveillance that comes from comparing your real life to the fictional one in your head.

It means waking up without the burden of being someone.

When you live without a script:

You don’t need your life to make sense on paper.
You stop trying to justify every choice.
You don’t spend your days defending an identity.
You no longer audition for approval—your own or anyone else’s.
You begin to notice what’s actually happening instead of what “should” be happening.

Freedom doesn’t arrive with fireworks. It arrives quietly, like a breath you didn’t know you were holding finally releasing.

When the Old Storyline Falls Away

Losing your script doesn’t feel like liberation at first. It feels like disorientation—like stepping outside in the morning and noticing the temperature has changed without warning.

You reach for the old storyline out of habit. You try to reassemble it. You try to reason your way back into certainty.

But eventually you see the truth: What you lost wasn’t security. It was constraint.

The old storyline told me who I was supposed to be. It told me what a “good life” looked like. It told me what counted and what didn’t. It told me what to chase and what to avoid.

Letting go of that storyline didn’t erase meaning. It revealed meaning.

Meaning wasn’t in the script. Meaning was in the moment-to-moment clarity that emerges when you’re no longer trying to live in a story.

Life as It Is, Not as It Was Written

One of the surprises of living without a script is how ordinary it feels.

Not dull—ordinary.

The ordinary becomes spectacular when you are not reaching past it for something shinier or more “meaningful.” You begin to see:

The way the light falls through the window in the morning
The simple pleasure of making coffee
The breath of a dog sleeping beside you
The grain of a board you’re sanding in the Hub
The frost on the runway at sunrise
The stillness of a cabin before the fire warms it

None of these are “achievements.” None belong in a résumé. None advance a storyline.

But they make up a life—one that unfolds with quiet clarity when you stop trying to force it to behave like a three-act structure.

And here’s the strange part:

When you stop trying to control life, the day seems to cooperate on its own terms.

You’re not fighting with time anymore. You’re not measuring yourself against an imagined version of who you “should” have been. You’re not chasing a purpose. You’re living.

Fully. Simply. Honestly.

The Script Was Never You

It takes time to see this clearly.

For years, I thought the story I had inherited—religious purpose, professional identity, certainty—was my life. I thought stepping out of that story meant stepping into danger or meaninglessness.

But the script wasn’t me. It was something placed on top of me.

When it fell away, I didn’t disappear. I appeared.

Awareness remained. Presence remained. Life remained.

The script was the illusion. The clarity beneath it was the truth.

The Pencil-Driven Life Begins Here

Living without a script isn’t rebellion. It’s not self-improvement. It’s not minimalism or philosophy or technique.

It’s the simple recognition that life does not need a storyline in order to be meaningful.

Life is meaningful because you are here to witness it.

The Pencil-Driven Life isn’t about writing a better script; it’s about noticing the movement beneath the story—moment by moment, breath by breath.

Some days, the pencil moves quickly. Some days, hardly at all. Some days, it writes things you didn’t expect. Some days, it refuses to write anything at all.

But in every case, you’re not forcing it. You’re watching. You’re present. You’re alive inside the immediacy of the moment rather than inside an inherited narrative about what your life ought to become.

This simple shift—attention instead of expectation, presence instead of purpose—is the beginning of freedom.

A Final Word for This First Monday

This new chapter on the website isn’t a rebrand; it’s a revelation of what’s been happening quietly for years.

Oak Hollow has become the place where this philosophy is lived out in real time. This blog will be where it is articulated.

If you’ve lived your life inside someone else’s script, or even inside a script you once wrote for yourself but can’t bear to follow anymore, then you are already standing at the threshold of something larger.

Not a new storyline. A new way of seeing.

There is nothing to achieve. Nothing to prove. Nothing to become.

There is only this moment—clear, unburdened, unwritten—and the life unfolding inside it.

Let’s see where the pencil moves next.

—Richard