Richard L. Fricks

Rereading The Boaz Secrets

The last few nights, I have been rereading The Boaz Secrets, one of my earlier Boaz novels.

I did not pick it up as a critic. I did not pick it up as a story coach. I did not even pick it up with the intention of studying it.

I picked it up as a reader.

What surprised me, quite honestly, is that I have been enjoying it.

That may sound strange for an author to say about his own work, but it feels true. Enough time has passed that I am not reading every sentence with the same memory I had when I wrote it. I know the broad shape of the story, of course. I know the world. I know the concerns that kept pulling me back to Boaz. But there are moments, turns, details, and tensions I had not thought about in a long time.

Rereading an earlier novel is a curious experience. You meet both the book and the earlier version of yourself who wrote it.

You see what you were trying to do. You see what mattered to you then. You see the kinds of pressure you kept returning to before you had fully named them.

In The Boaz Secrets, the title tells part of the truth. The novel is concerned with secrets, but not merely secrets as hidden information. In fiction, a secret matters only when it creates pressure.

A secret held by one person may shape a marriage.

A secret held by a family may shape a child.

A secret held by a church may shape what an entire community is allowed to say.

A secret held by a town may become part of the air people breathe without noticing it.

That is one reason Boaz has remained such powerful fictional territory for me. In a small town, the past is never entirely past. People remember what they pretend to forget. They carry old loyalties, old wounds, old accusations, old silences. The grocery store, the church hallway, the courthouse, the school, the funeral home, the family table — each place can hold memory.

That gives fiction a kind of natural pressure.

A character does not have to live in a mansion, inherit a kingdom, or face an international conspiracy for the stakes to matter. Sometimes the deepest stakes are local and intimate.

Who knows?

Who suspects?

Who is protected?

Who is blamed?

Who has been carrying the cost of someone else’s silence?

Those questions have always interested me more than spectacle.

As I reread The Boaz Secrets, I am noticing how much of my fiction depends on the tension between what is publicly known and privately understood. Characters live inside communities where appearances matter. Reputation matters. Church membership matters. Family names matter. The official story matters.

But fiction begins to move when the official story weakens.

That is where secrets become story pressure.

A secret is not just something hidden from the reader. It is something acting on the characters before it is fully revealed. It shapes behavior. It creates avoidance. It explains fear. It distorts memory. It makes certain conversations impossible until the story forces them to happen.

That is one of the things I would tell a beginning novelist.

Do not think of a secret only as a twist.

Think of it as pressure.

If a secret does not change how people act, it probably is not yet doing enough story work. If it does not create risk, silence, conflict, guilt, fear, longing, denial, or consequence, it may be information rather than story.

But if the secret bends the lives around it, then the story has something to work with.

That is what I am noticing now as I reread.

I am also noticing how often my novels return to the same deeper question:

What happens when someone finally tells the truth?

Not abstract truth. Not truth as a slogan. Not truth as something easy to admire from a distance.

Truth inside a family.

Truth inside a church.

Truth inside a marriage.

Truth inside a town.

Truth spoken by someone who knows there will be a cost.

That question runs through much of my fiction, and I can see it clearly again in The Boaz Secrets.

The pleasure of rereading the novel is not merely that I wrote it. The pleasure is that the world still feels alive to me. The people still seem caught in real pressure. The secrets still have weight. Boaz still works as a moral landscape where ordinary lives carry more than they can easily say.

That is why I keep returning to these books.

Not because Boaz is simple.

Because it is not.

Not because small towns are quaint.

Because they remember.

Not because secrets are dramatic.

Because they cost something.

And fiction, at its best, lets us feel that cost without reducing it to an explanation.

Readers interested in the Boaz novels can begin with the Novels page. And those interested in the wider fictional world may also want to visit The Tanner Files, where Micaden Tanner continues remembering what others have tried to forget.

You Do Not Need a Perfect Idea to Begin

Many people who want to write a novel never begin because they are waiting for the idea to become clear enough.

They think they need the whole story first.

They need the plot.

They need the ending.

They need the title.

They need to know whether the idea is good enough, original enough, serious enough, commercial enough, literary enough, or large enough to carry a full-length novel.

So they wait.

Sometimes they wait for years.

But novels do not usually begin as perfect ideas. They often begin as something much smaller and less certain.

A character.

A place.

A memory.

A question.

A family secret.

A crime.

A voice.

A scene that will not leave you alone.

A feeling that something happened once, or could happen, and that the story underneath it has not yet been told.

That is enough to begin.

Not enough to finish, perhaps. Not enough to publish. Not enough to know every turn the story will take.

But enough to begin.

One of the mistakes beginning novelists make is assuming that a vague idea is a failed idea. Sometimes a vague idea is simply an undeveloped idea. It has not yet been given pressure. It has not yet been attached to a character who wants something. It has not yet been placed inside a situation where choices matter.

A story idea begins to grow when you start asking better questions.

Who is this story about?

What does this person want?

What stands in the way?

What has this person misunderstood?

What secret, fear, wound, desire, or pressure is already present?

What changes if this person acts?

What changes if this person does nothing?

A vague idea becomes a story when pressure enters it.

Suppose all you have is a small-town memory. That may not sound like a novel. But if someone in that town knows a truth everyone else has agreed to forget, pressure begins.

Suppose all you have is a character. That may not sound like a plot. But if that character wants something badly and cannot get it without facing what they fear, movement begins.

Suppose all you have is a family secret. That may not yet be a story. But if the secret begins to threaten the life someone has carefully built, consequence begins.

Beginning does not require certainty.

It requires attention.

The early work of a novelist is not to prove that the idea is perfect. The early work is to listen closely enough to discover where the pressure is hiding.

That is why I do not think a beginning novelist should ask too quickly, “Is this idea good enough?”

A better first question is:

What is alive here?

What keeps returning to your attention?

What image, person, place, wound, question, or situation keeps asking to be noticed?

What would happen if you stayed with it a little longer?

A novel does not have to arrive fully formed. It can begin as a mark on the page. A sentence. A question. A scene. A name. A door opening. A body found. A letter discovered. A child overhearing something adults thought was hidden. A woman returning to a town she thought she had escaped. A man realizing the story he inherited is not the truth.

The work is not to possess the whole novel before you begin.

The work is to begin honestly enough that the next question appears.

That is where story often starts.

Not with perfection.

With pressure.

With curiosity.

With the willingness to make the first mark and see what it reveals.

If you have long wanted to write a novel but do not know where to begin, that is a legitimate place to start. Story coaching can help you turn a vague idea, character, setting, or memory into a clearer path forward.

Learn more about my Story Coaching.

Why Scenes Need Consequences

Every scene in a novel should leave something changed.

That does not mean every scene needs a car chase, a confession, a murder, or a dramatic reversal. Some of the most important scenes are quiet. A character notices something. A question is asked. A silence lasts too long. A memory returns. A small choice reveals a larger truth.

But something still has to move.

A scene without consequence may contain good writing, but it usually does not create story pressure. It may describe, explain, or decorate, but it does not force the novel forward.

One question I often ask about a scene is simple:

What is different because this scene happened?

If the answer is not clear, the scene may need more pressure.

The difference can be external. A clue is found. A lie is exposed. A plan fails. A character loses access, trust, money, time, safety, or control.

The difference can also be internal. A character sees someone differently. A fear sharpens. A belief weakens. A desire becomes harder to deny. A question becomes impossible to avoid.

In mystery fiction, consequences matter because they create momentum. A scene should either deepen the mystery, complicate the investigation, increase the stakes, reveal character under pressure, or make the next scene necessary.

Beginning novelists often think a scene works because it contains information the reader needs. But information alone is rarely enough. The better question is not merely:

What does the reader learn?

The better question is:

What changes in the story because this moment occurred?

That is where scene structure begins to matter.

A scene earns its place when it creates a before and an after.

fiction craft, scene structure, story coaching, writing novels

If you are working on a novel and wondering whether your scenes are doing enough story work, that is one of the questions story coaching can help clarify. You can learn more on the Story Coaching page.

Simplify on Purpose: Where We Actually Live

Lately, I have noticed something simple and surprising.

My mind is clearer.

Not perfect. Not empty. Not magically serene. But clearer.

There are fewer thoughts racing through it. Fewer arguments rehearsing themselves. Fewer political headlines echoing in the background. Fewer imaginary conversations with people I will never persuade. Fewer little flashes of irritation from something I saw on Facebook or read in the news.

The change has not come from some dramatic life overhaul.

It has come mostly from subtraction.

Less scrolling.
Less news.
Less political noise.
Less Facebook.
Less exposure to the endless machinery of outrage, comparison, fear, performance, and distraction.

And the more I notice the change, the more I keep coming back to one thought:

The mind is where we live.

We may say we live in a house, a cabin, a town, a state, or a country. And of course, in one sense, we do. We inhabit physical places. We sleep under roofs. We sit in chairs. We walk across floors. We look out windows.

But the actual experience of life happens in the mind.

That is where the day is received.
That is where the world appears.
That is where fear takes shape.
That is where resentment grows.
That is where peace becomes possible.
That is where comparison wounds us.
That is where ordinary beauty is either noticed or missed.

A person can sit in a quiet room and live inside a storm. Another person can stand in the middle of difficulty and still find a small clearing of awareness.

The mind is not everything, but it is where everything is experienced.

That is why what we allow into it matters.

The Crowded Mind

For years, like many people, I let too much of the world into my mind every day.

News.
Politics.
Religious arguments.
Social media posts.
Other people’s opinions.
Other people’s outrage.
Other people’s certainty.
Other people’s curated lives.

I told myself I was staying informed. And some of that was partly true. Public life matters. Politics affects real people. Religious certainty still shapes families, communities, and laws in ways that deserve attention and criticism. The world does not stop being real because I stop scrolling.

But there is a difference between being informed and being consumed.

There is a difference between awareness and addiction.

There is a difference between paying attention to reality and letting the attention economy carve up your mind for profit.

At some point, I had to admit that the constant stream was not making me wiser. It was making me more reactive.

It was not deepening my life. It was crowding it.

I would pick up the phone for a moment and lose a piece of the morning. I would check Facebook and come away irritated by something that had nothing to do with my actual life. I would read political news and feel the same old machinery start turning: anger, fear, judgment, helplessness, analysis, commentary, despair.

And then I would look up.

The room would still be there.

The dogs would still be there.

The morning would still be there.

The work in front of me would still be waiting.

But I would not be quite as present for it.

Something had been taken.

Or, more honestly, something had been given away.

Attention Is a Place

I am beginning to think of attention as a kind of dwelling place.

Where my attention goes, I go.

If my attention is on outrage, I live in outrage.
If my attention is on comparison, I live in comparison.
If my attention is on fear, I live in fear.
If my attention is on political theater, I live inside that theater.
If my attention is on someone else’s performance, I live as an audience member to their life instead of a participant in my own.

That does not mean we should ignore suffering, injustice, politics, or responsibility. It does not mean we should become indifferent.

But it does mean we should be careful.

A human life is not unlimited.

A day is not unlimited.

The mind is not an infinite warehouse where we can store every argument, every headline, every grievance, every post, every video, every warning, every opinion, and still expect to remain clear.

The mind gets crowded.

And when the mind gets crowded, the ordinary world begins to disappear.

The cup of coffee becomes background.
The dog beside us becomes background.
The morning light becomes background.
The work of our hands becomes background.
The person sitting across from us becomes background.
The actual life we are living becomes background.

And what moves to the foreground?

Noise.

Simplify on Purpose

That is why the phrase simplify on purpose has become more important to me.

It is not just about owning fewer things.

It is not just about living in a smaller place.

It is not just about cabins, wooded lots, wood stoves, porches, gardens, or gravel drives.

Those things may help. They may create a setting where simplicity becomes easier. But the deeper simplification has to happen in the way we live inside our own attention.

To simplify on purpose is to ask:

What am I letting into my mind?
What am I feeding every day?
What am I rehearsing?
What am I carrying that does not belong to this moment?
What am I calling “necessary” that is actually just habitual?
What would happen if I did not pick up the phone?
What would happen if I let the morning stay quiet?
What would happen if I gave my attention back to the ordinary?

I do not ask those questions as someone who has mastered them.

I ask them as someone who has been helped by them.

Recently, the difference has become noticeable. By pulling back from Facebook and the constant news cycle, I have not become less aware of life. I have become more aware of the life actually in front of me.

The early morning feels different.

The room feels quieter.

My thoughts are less crowded.

I am not carrying as many strangers around in my head.

That may sound small, but it is not small.

It changes the texture of a day.

Unplugging Is Not Disappearing

There is a fear, I think, that if we unplug, we will disappear from the world.

We will become uninformed.
We will become irrelevant.
We will miss something.
We will fail to respond to the crisis of the day.
We will somehow become irresponsible.

But maybe unplugging is not disappearing.

Maybe it is returning.

Returning to the room.
Returning to the body.
Returning to the work.
Returning to the people and animals near us.
Returning to silence.
Returning to the unfinished thing in our hands.
Returning to the ordinary day.

There is a difference between retreat and recovery.

Sometimes stepping back is not abandonment. Sometimes it is the only way to recover enough clarity to live honestly.

The world will continue producing emergencies. Platforms will continue producing outrage. Politicians will continue performing. Religious voices will continue claiming certainty. Advertisers will continue manufacturing dissatisfaction. Algorithms will continue learning how to hold our attention longer than we intended to give it.

The question is not whether the noise will continue.

It will.

The question is whether I will continue to offer it the best room in my mind.

The Ordinary Is Still Here

This morning, as I thought about all of this, I found myself returning to the ordinary.

A cup of coffee.

A quiet room.

Dogs nearby.

A day beginning before the world gets loud.

Work to do.

A small cabin in the woods.

A grassy meadow.

A porch.

A path.

A simpler way of living that does not promise perfection, but does make room for attention to settle.

That is the kind of life I find myself wanting to protect.

Not because it is impressive.

Because it is real.

And because I am increasingly convinced that much of modern life trains us to miss what is real.

We are encouraged to live elsewhere. In the next headline. The next argument. The next purchase. The next fear. The next comparison. The next notification. The next outrage.

But life is not happening there.

Life is happening here.

In this breath.
In this room.
In this body.
In this day.
In this ordinary moment that does not need to be upgraded before it can be lived.

A Quieter Mind Is a Different Home

If the mind is where we live, then a quieter mind is not a luxury.

It is a different kind of home.

A cleaner one.

A less crowded one.

A more honest one.

A place where the ordinary can be seen again.

That is what simplifying on purpose means to me right now.

It means removing some of what keeps pulling me away from my own life.

It means questioning the assumption that I need to know everything, react to everything, and carry everything.

It means remembering that my attention is finite and sacred, even without using religious language.

It means refusing to let my mind become a dumping ground for every algorithm that wants to profit from my agitation.

It means making room.

For quiet.

For work.

For dogs.

For trees.

For a small porch.

For the next honest thing.

For the life that is actually mine.

And maybe that is where real simplicity begins.

Not with less for the sake of less.

But with enough space inside the mind to notice what has been here all along.

The Self Sam Harris Couldn’t Make Disappear

This morning, I quit a meditation before the timer expired.

That is not unusual. I have done it before. But today felt different. Today it did not feel like impatience, laziness, or resistance. It felt like clarity.

I was listening to Sam Harris’s daily meditation in the Waking Up app. Once again, he used the finger snap. Once again, he tried to direct attention toward the familiar exercise: look for the looker, notice the absence of the self, recognize that consciousness contains appearances but no one standing behind them.

And once again, I found myself thinking: I do not buy this.

Not anymore.

Maybe I never fully did.

I have benefited from Sam Harris. I have listened to him for years. He has helped me think more clearly about religion, politics, violence, free will, consciousness, and the dangers of dogmatic certainty. I remain grateful for much of his work.

But gratitude is not agreement.

And this morning, as the meditation unfolded, I found myself pushing back against one of his central claims: the idea that when we look closely enough, we discover there is no self.

That may be true if by “self” we mean an immortal soul, a supernatural essence, or a tiny ghost sitting behind the eyes pulling levers.

But I do not mean that.

I do not believe in that kind of self either.

The self I am talking about is natural, embodied, brain-based, conscious, and alive.

And the more I think about it, the more I believe meditation itself may prove that such a self exists.

The Self That Meditates

Meditation is often described as simple observation. Thoughts arise. Sounds arise. Sensations arise. Emotions arise. Everything appears in consciousness.

There is truth in that.

But meditation, at least as Sam Harris teaches it, is not merely passive observation. It is activity.

He says to notice the breath.

Then he says to look at an object.

Then he says to notice the space around the object.

Then he says to shift attention.

Then he says to look for the one who is looking.

Then he says to begin again when distracted.

That is not random appearance.

That is instruction, understanding, intention, direction, evaluation, correction, and choice.

Something hears the instruction.
Something understands it.
Something directs attention.
Something notices distraction.
Something gets irritated by the finger snap.
Something decides whether to continue or stop.

That something is not nothing.

Call it the organism.
Call it the person.
Call it the embodied mind.
Call it the conscious brain.
Call it Richard.

But do not tell me it is not a self.

When I am told to look at an object and I look at the object, I have found the looker. The looker is not hiding. The looker is engaged in the act of looking.

When I shift attention to peripheral vision, the self has not disappeared. The self has followed an instruction.

When I decide I have had enough and stop the meditation before the timer expires, that decision does not float in from nowhere. It arises from this life, this brain, this history, this irritation, this judgment.

It arises from me.

Consciousness as Self

The deeper question is this: why should the self have to be something separate from consciousness?

Maybe that is the mistake.

Maybe the self is not a little thing inside consciousness.

Maybe consciousness itself is the self.

I do not have Sam Harris’s consciousness.
I do not have Richard Dawkins’s consciousness.
I do not have Christopher Hitchens’s consciousness.
I have mine.

This field of awareness is not generic. It belongs to this life.

It is shaped by my body, my memories, my family, my dogs, my work, my deconstruction, my writing, my land, my failures, my griefs, my mornings, my aging, my choices.

My consciousness is not interchangeable with anyone else’s.

That seems important.

If someone says, “There is no self,” I want to ask: then whose consciousness is this?

Not as a clever trick. As a serious question.

Experience does not occur nowhere. It occurs from a point of view. It is tied to a living body. It is shaped by memory and biology. It has continuity. It has preference. It has concern. It has resistance.

This consciousness is not Sam’s. It is not yours. It is mine.

And that “mineness” is not an illusion in any ordinary sense.

It is what I mean by self.

The Controller Behind the Eyes

There is another phrase often used to dismiss the self: there is no little controller behind the eyes.

I understand the objection. If by “little controller” we mean a magical homunculus sitting inside the skull, then yes, I agree. There is no tiny man inside my head watching the movie of my life and issuing commands.

But there is something behind the eyes.

The brain.

And the mind is what the brain does.

Without the brain, there is no personal consciousness. When the brain dies, consciousness dies. When the brain changes, the self changes. Injury, disease, exhaustion, memory loss, medication, fear, trauma, age, and sleep all affect the person because they affect the brain.

So perhaps the old phrase is not entirely wrong.

There is a controller behind the eyes.

It is not supernatural.
It is not separate from the body.
It is not perfect.
It is not in total control.
It does not choose every thought before it appears.

But it does regulate, direct, remember, evaluate, inhibit, attend, compare, imagine, and act.

That is control.

Limited control, yes.
Conditioned control, yes.
Embodied control, yes.

But real control.

A driver does not control the weather, the road, the engine’s physics, or the behavior of every other driver. But we do not conclude there is no driver. We understand that the driver operates within conditions.

The self operates within conditions too: genetics, memory, habit, culture, emotion, fatigue, fear, desire, and circumstance.

But operating within conditions is not the same as not existing.

Why the Finger Snap No Longer Works for Me

The finger snap is supposed to interrupt something. It is supposed to cut through the illusion, perhaps giving the meditator a glimpse of awareness before thought reassembles the familiar self.

But for me, the finger snap has lost whatever usefulness it may have once had.

Now it feels like a trick.

Not a dangerous trick. Not a dishonest trick necessarily. But a technique that asks me to interpret a moment of interruption as metaphysical insight.

A snap happens.
The nervous system reacts.
Attention jolts.
Thought pauses.

And then I am supposed to conclude something profound about the nonexistence of the self.

But why?

The fact that my nervous system can be startled does not prove there is no self. It proves I have a nervous system.

The fact that thought can pause does not prove there is no self. It proves thought can pause.

The fact that attention can shift suddenly does not prove there is no self. It proves attention can shift suddenly.

In my case, the snap now reveals something quite different. It reveals continuity.

I remember the previous snaps.
I recognize the pattern.
I anticipate the move.
I feel irritation.
I judge the method unhelpful.
I decide to stop.

That is not the disappearance of self.

That is selfhood in action.

Dawkins, Hitchens, and Permission to Trust My Own Mind

I have also thought today about Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two thinkers who helped me during my own deconstruction.

Neither man, so far as I can tell, built his life around meditation.

Dawkins, in conversation with Sam Harris, reportedly tried the guided meditation exercise and disliked it. His reaction was not mystical awe. It was more like: I followed the instructions, but I do not see the point.

That matters to me.

Not because Dawkins is an authority I must obey. I have spent too much of my life recovering from authority-based thinking to simply replace pastors with public intellectuals.

But Dawkins’s reaction reminds me that a serious, rational, secular person can encounter meditation and remain unconvinced.

Hitchens died before the Waking Up app existed, so it would be unfair to claim he rejected it specifically. But I find it hard to imagine Hitchens submitting patiently to “look for the looker” as a final revelation about the human condition. His path was argument, language, wit, memory, history, literature, conversation, and moral clarity.

Dawkins and Hitchens woke up in their own ways.

They did not need a finger snap.

And perhaps neither do I.

I Am Not Rejecting Awareness

I want to be clear about what I am not saying.

I am not saying meditation is bad.

I am not saying no one benefits from it.

I am not saying Sam Harris is foolish.

I am not saying the Waking Up app has no value.

I am not saying I have learned nothing from it.

I am saying something more personal:

This particular practice may no longer be helping me.

That is enough.

I do not need to turn that into a universal conclusion. I do not need to build a campaign against meditation. I do not need to prove that everyone else is wrong.

I only need to be honest about my own experience.

And my honest experience is this: the daily meditation has begun to feel repetitive, irritating, and philosophically unpersuasive.

I no longer feel awakened by it.

I feel interrupted by it.

Other Forms of Presence

The deeper truth is that I already have practices of attention.

I write.

I sit at my desk early in the morning.

I walk.

I listen to the dogs.

I work on cabins.

I notice the weather.

I read.

I question.

I watch my own mind argue, resist, grieve, remember, and revise.

I build.

I doubt.

I pay attention to ordinary life.

Those are not inferior forms of awareness.

For me, they may be better.

There is a kind of presence in walking the runway without headphones.

There is presence in drinking coffee before daylight and noticing what thought is doing.

There is presence in writing a sentence and then realizing the sentence is not yet true.

There is presence in feeding dogs, carrying lumber, watching light move across the trees, or sitting quietly without turning the moment into a lesson.

Maybe I do not need to “look for the looker.”

Maybe I need to keep living honestly as the looker.

The Self I Am Willing to Defend

So here is where I have landed, at least for today.

I do not believe in an eternal soul.

I do not believe in a supernatural essence.

I do not believe in a little ghost behind the eyes.

But I do believe there is a self.

The self is the conscious life of the brain-body system.

The self is this particular field of awareness.

The self is the embodied person who remembers, attends, chooses, resists, loves, regrets, acts, and dies.

The self is not separate from the brain.

The self is what the brain does when the brain produces a conscious person.

When the brain lives, the self lives.

When the brain changes, the self changes.

When the brain dies, the self dies.

That is not mystical.

That is not religious.

That is not crude.

That is real enough.

Closing

This morning, Sam Harris snapped his fingers.

And I did not awaken to the absence of self.

I awakened to the presence of one.

A tired, questioning, irritated, conscious, brain-based self who had followed the instructions long enough and finally said:

Enough.

Not out of avoidance.

Out of honesty.

And perhaps honesty is its own form of waking up.

The Self in the Dental Chair – Why I Am Not Trying to Disappear

Yesterday morning, I spent about three hours in Dr. Wallace’s dental chair.

The original plan, at least as I understood it, was for her to place a crown on one of my upper right teeth. But as dental work often goes, the plan changed once she got inside the real situation.

She also filled a tooth on the upper left side. Then she turned her attention back to the upper right tooth — the one intended for the crown. She numbed the area, ground the tooth down, and prepped it as much as she could. But she was not satisfied that it was quite ready for the permanent crown. As I understood her, she did not think she had gone deep enough into the gum area to permanently set the crown the way it needed to be set.

So the permanent crown was delayed.

Instead, she prepared and placed a temporary tooth on the upper right tooth — the crown tooth — while we wait for the next step.

I did not understand every technical detail. I did not need to.

That is one of the strange things about sitting in a dental chair. You are awake. You are conscious. You are listening. You are participating in your own life. But at the same time, you are surrendered in a very practical way. Someone else has the tools. Someone else has the training. Someone else is looking into a part of your body you cannot see for yourself.

Toward the end of the visit, Dr. Wallace explained what she thought we needed to do over the next few months. She went into detail. She laid out the plan. She spoke as a professional who knows her field and cares about the person in the chair.

And I said something like, “Well, my life is in your hands. I trust you. You’re the expert here.”

I meant it lightly, but I also meant it.

She smiled, or at least responded in that familiar way people do when they know where the conversation is going.

“You know what I’m going to say,” she said.

I told her to say whatever she wanted.

And she said, “Your life is in God’s hands.”

There it was.

The sentence I have heard in one form or another for most of my life.

Your life is in God’s hands.

I did not argue with her. I did not challenge her. I did not turn a dental appointment into a theological debate. I love Dr. Mary Wallace. We have a wonderful relationship. She has always treated me with kindness, skill, and care. She is a believer, and from what I have heard her say over the years, her view of life seems to sit close to the world I came out of — the Southern Baptist fundamentalist world where God is sovereign, life belongs to him, and every human moment is finally interpreted through divine ownership.

But as I sat there, numb and tired, I noticed something inside me.

Not anger.

Not ridicule.

Not even disagreement exactly.

More like clarity.

Because I had spent the early morning struggling again with Sam Harris and his Daily Meditation. I have used the Waking Up app for quite a while now, and I still find much of it valuable. I often save Sam’s short “Moments.” Many of them land well. They interrupt the day in a helpful way.

But the Daily Meditation has become harder for me.

Too often, the session moves beyond simple attention, breathing, noticing, and returning. It becomes a lesson in Sam’s deeper claim that there is no self. Thoughts appear. Sensations appear. Emotions appear. But when we look for the one who is looking, Sam says we cannot find anyone there.

No rider on the horse.

No thinker behind the thought.

No self.

And this morning, as has happened many mornings before, I found myself not meditating but arguing.

Who is being asked to follow the breath?

Who is paying close attention?

Who heard the instruction?

Who decided to sit down in the chair at 3:00 a.m.?

Who is responsible for the day ahead?

Who went to Marvin’s yesterday and decided not to buy the pre-built steps for $89 but to buy the materials and build them himself for the cabin down the runway?

If there is no self, who is living this life?

I understand part of what Sam is saying. I do not think there is a tiny ghost hidden behind my eyes, pulling levers and operating Richard like a machine. I do not think there is a little captain sitting somewhere inside my skull, separate from the body, separate from the brain, separate from experience.

But I do think there is a self.

I am a self.

Donna is a self.

Keith, my new next-door neighbor, is a self.

Brandon, who is renting our first East Hollow cabin, is a self.

Dustin and Chelsea, who have moved their cabin onto one of our East Hollow leased lots, are selves.

Each person is a separate, living, embodied center of experience. Each has a history, a memory, a body, a temperament, a pattern of choices, a web of relationships, a private inwardness no one else can fully occupy.

We can call the self a process. I am fine with that.

But a process is not nothing.

A river is a process, but it is still a river.

A family is a process, but it is still a family.

Oak Hollow Cabins is a process — land, roads, cabins, water access, agreements, work, mistakes, hopes, people moving in and making lives there — but it is still Oak Hollow.

So why should Richard disappear just because he is also a process?

That is where I find myself parting ways with Sam Harris. He may be right to question the illusion of a fixed, separate, unchanging observer behind consciousness. But I think he overstates the case when he says there is no self.

Maybe the more careful statement is this:

There is no ghostly little owner of consciousness hidden behind experience. But there is a real self — the living person whose consciousness this is.

That seems closer to reality.

My consciousness is not Keith’s consciousness. Donna’s consciousness is not mine. Her life is not mine. She grew up in her own family. She made her own choices. She became a special education teacher and spent nearly forty years helping struggling students learn to read and survive school. She has loved, suffered, endured, chosen, regretted, served, rested, and continued.

No one owns Donna more than Donna does.

No one owns me more than I do.

That does not mean we are isolated. It does not mean we are self-created. It does not mean our choices float free from biology, culture, trauma, memory, influence, habit, or circumstance. Of course we are shaped. Of course prior causes matter.

But prior causes do not erase the self.

They become part of the self.

I am the one those causes have formed. I am the one who must live from them, revise them, resist them, continue through them, and sometimes lay them down.

That is why Sam’s Daily Meditation has begun to feel, to me, less like meditation and more like a quiet argument. It is not unlike consuming political commentary. One side tells me what Trump did and why it proves he is destroying the country. Another side tells me what Trump did and why it proves he is brave, strong, and chosen for the hour. Everyone has an angle. Everyone has an interpretation. Everyone is pushing a frame.

And I have learned, slowly and imperfectly, that not every voice deserves entrance into the morning.

Not because I want to hide from reality.

Because I want to stop letting other people’s certainty colonize my attention.

That is what the Southern Baptist fundamentalist world did to me for decades.

It told me who I was before I had a chance to ask.

It told me I was a sinner.

It told me my heart was deceitful.

It told me my mind could not be trusted.

It told me my desires were dangerous.

It told me my life was not my own.

It told me I was born under judgment and could be rescued only by accepting the system’s diagnosis and cure.

And now, here comes another kind of certainty, this time dressed not in hymns and altar calls but in calm language, neuroscience, and meditation:

There is no self.

I do not want to exchange one authority structure for another.

I do not want to leave Southern Baptist certainty only to kneel before secular certainty.

That does not mean Sam Harris is the same as a preacher. He is not. There is much in his work I value. But for me, the Daily Meditation has begun to smuggle in a conclusion I do not accept. And once I notice that, I cannot unnotice it.

The practice no longer quiets the mind.

It starts the debate.

So maybe my practice needs to become much plainer.

Sit down.

Feel the chair.

Notice the body.

Notice the breath.

Let thoughts come.

Let thoughts go.

Return.

No doctrine.

No metaphysics.

No need to solve consciousness before breakfast.

No need to disappear.

That feels much closer to The Pencil-Driven Life.

Because The Pencil-Driven Life is not about proving there is no self. It is not about finding a new theological system. It is not about replacing one master with another.

It is about living this life attentively.

The life actually here.

The dogs.

Donna in the next room.

The gravel road.

The cabin down the runway.

The lumber from Marvin’s.

The leased lots in East Hollow.

The work still waiting.

The words still wanting to be written.

The ordinary morning.

The self who is here for it.

And that brings me back to Dr. Wallace.

After she told me my life was in God’s hands, we later talked about what she was going to charge me. It sounded to me as though she was giving me some of her time and professional care. I told her I understood that. When I practiced law, there were times I helped people and did not charge them. Professionals do that sometimes. Not always. Not carelessly. But sometimes, when the person and situation call for it.

That led her to tell me about a man she knew from Mexico. He was both an architect and a lawyer, she said. A gracious man. A generous man. A wonderful person. Someone who had grown up poor and went out of his way to help others.

And then she told me he was killed by someone he was trying to help.

I did not say what passed through my mind.

But I noticed it.

If my life is in God’s hands, then so was his.

And look what happened.

That is not a cheap argument. It is not meant as a sneer. It is the problem that eventually breaks the frame for me.

When something good happens, believers say God is faithful.

When something terrible happens, believers say God is mysterious.

When the crown goes well, God guided the dentist.

When the generous man is murdered by someone he tried to help, God’s ways are higher than ours.

The system protects itself no matter what reality does.

But I cannot live there anymore.

I do not know that my life is in God’s hands.

I know that, for three hours yesterday, part of my dental life was in Dr. Wallace’s hands. Her trained, skilled, human hands.

I know that my decisions today are in my hands, in the only sense that matters: not as an uncaused soul floating above nature, but as Richard — embodied, shaped, conscious, responsible, and alive.

I know that Donna’s life is Donna’s.

I know that the man from Mexico owned his life too, and that his goodness did not protect him from tragedy.

I know that saying “God is in control” may comfort some people, but it no longer explains the world to me.

And I know this: surrendering to a good dentist is not the same as surrendering my life to a doctrine.

Trusting an expert is not the same as abandoning myself.

Letting another person help me is not the same as believing I am not real.

So this morning, I think I am ready to pause Sam’s Daily Meditation.

Not meditation.

Just that meditation.

I do not need an agenda-driven voice in my ear telling me there is no self.

I do not need a preacher, religious or secular, defining my inner life before the day begins.

I need silence.

I need breath.

I need the chair.

I need the simple practice of being here.

Not as a ghost.

Not as an illusion.

Not as a soul under judgment.

Not as a selfless field of appearances.

As Richard.

A living self.

A changing self.

A responsible self.

A pencil-driven self.

Here for this breath.

Here for this day.

Here for the life that is still, in the only way I can honestly say it, in my hands.

The Map on the Wall — and What Steve Marshall Revealed Next

In my last post, I wrote about the flyer I saw on the door at Sand Mountain Family Practice Center — a flyer promoting a Steve Marshall rally.

What bothered me first was the setting. A medical clinic should not feel like a campaign office. A patient sitting there for lab work, test results, or a diagnosis should not have to wonder whether the people responsible for his care are also quietly signaling political loyalty. A clinic should be a place of care, not tribal branding.

But as I wrote then, the deeper problem was not just that politics had appeared in a medical space. The deeper problem was which politics had appeared there — and which man was being normalized.

Now, only days later, Steve Marshall has revealed himself again.

This time, not through a flyer.

Through a map.

Through voting power.

Through his celebration of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that weakens one of the last meaningful protections left in the Voting Rights Act.

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, a case involving congressional redistricting and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The decision sharply changes how Section 2 can be used in racial vote-dilution cases. The Court held that states cannot be forced to draw districts based on race and that plaintiffs challenging a map must now do much more to prove intentional racial discrimination rather than partisan mapmaking. The practical effect is obvious: in states where race and party overlap heavily, a state can say, “We were not diluting Black voting power because of race. We were just pursuing partisan advantage.” (Alabama Attorney General’s Office)

That distinction may sound lawyerly.

It may sound neutral.

It may sound clean.

But in Alabama, it is anything but clean.

Because Alabama’s history is not neutral. The South’s history is not neutral. Voting rights are not an abstract academic exercise here. They were fought for, bled for, marched for, beaten for, and in some cases died for. The Voting Rights Act was not born out of paranoia. It was born out of real, deliberate, sustained racial exclusion.

So when the Supreme Court makes it harder to challenge maps that weaken Black political power, and when Steve Marshall rushes to celebrate that decision, we should not pretend we are watching ordinary legal disagreement.

We are watching values reveal themselves.

Marshall did not respond with caution. He did not say, “This is a serious decision, and we must be careful to ensure that every Alabamian’s voting power is protected.” He did not speak about Black citizens, minority representation, democratic inclusion, or the moral weight of Alabama’s history.

He celebrated.

His office called the decision “momentous.” Marshall called it a “watershed moment.” He said the Court had “shut the door” on vote-dilution claims that use racial data to disguise partisan disputes. He also said the South has made “extraordinary progress” and that laws “designed for a different era” do not reflect present reality. (Alabama Attorney General’s Office)

There it is.

That is the old Southern move in modern legal language.

Declare the past sufficiently healed. Declare the present essentially fair. Declare race-conscious protection to be the real problem. Then call the dismantling of protection “progress.”

The very next day, Marshall filed emergency motions asking the Supreme Court to lift injunctions that have blocked Alabama from using its 2023 congressional map. In other words, he did not merely applaud the Louisiana decision from the sidelines. He immediately tried to use it to revive Alabama’s preferred map — the one blocked after courts found Alabama had failed to comply with the Voting Rights Act. (Alabama Attorney General’s Office)

That matters.

Because this is not theoretical.

This is not Steve Marshall writing a law review article.

This is Steve Marshall using the power of Alabama’s Attorney General’s office to reduce the force of voting-rights protections in this state.

And now he wants to be a United States Senator.

That should alarm anyone who cares about democracy, equality, racial justice, historical honesty, and basic human decency.

Marshall wants Alabama voters to see him through the language of faith, strength, and tradition. As I noted in the earlier post, his Senate campaign branding leans into the slogan “God. Grit. Alabama Strong.”

But slogans are not character.

A man’s values are revealed by what he celebrates.

Steve Marshall celebrates power when it is used against the vulnerable.

He celebrated the weakening of voting-rights protections.

He defended Alabama’s aggressive posture in redistricting.

He has aligned himself with Donald Trump.

He supported legal efforts after the 2020 election that sought to discard certified election results in states Trump lost.

He has threatened legal theories against those helping women travel out of state for lawful abortion care.

He has defended harsh state intrusion into the medical decisions of families with transgender children.

He has promoted Alabama’s role in pioneering nitrogen-gas execution.

Again and again, the pattern is the same.

Control.

Punishment.

Domination.

Tribal loyalty.

State power turned against people with less power.

That is what is obvious about what Steve Marshall stands for.

He stands for power wrapped in piety.

He stands for the state’s right to dominate, so long as the domination is framed as law, order, faith, tradition, or constitutional principle.

He stands for “freedom” when powerful people want fewer restraints.

He stands for “states’ rights” when Alabama wants to escape federal civil-rights oversight.

He stands for “colorblindness” when Black voters seek protection from dilution.

He stands for “life” when controlling women.

He stands for “family” when overriding vulnerable families.

He stands for “law and order” when expanding punishment.

He stands for “values” when the actual value being protected is hierarchy.

This is not a man fit to represent Alabama in the United States Senate.

Not because he is conservative.

Not because he is Republican.

Not because he uses religious language.

He is unfit because his public record shows a repeated willingness to use government power without adequate humility, compassion, historical honesty, or concern for the human beings most affected.

A person deeply interested in all humanity stands somewhere else entirely.

A person deeply interested in all humanity begins with the vulnerable, not the powerful.

Such a person asks: Who will be harmed by this decision?

Who will lose representation?

Who will be silenced?

Who will be made more afraid?

Who will have less access to care?

Who will be treated as a problem to manage instead of a person to understand?

Who will be crushed under the machinery of the state while politicians congratulate themselves for defending “values”?

A person deeply interested in all humanity does not look at the Voting Rights Act and see an outdated inconvenience.

He sees a hard-won protection born from suffering.

He sees Black Alabamians who were denied the vote for generations.

He sees literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, violence, courthouse doors, sheriff’s clubs, Sunday sermons, white citizens’ councils, respectable men in suits, and the long, bitter machinery of exclusion.

He sees Selma.

He sees John Lewis.

He sees the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

He sees blood on asphalt.

He sees why federal protection became necessary in the first place.

And because he sees that, he does not celebrate when protection is weakened.

He grieves.

He studies.

He asks what justice requires now.

That is the difference.

Steve Marshall looks at this decision and sees a victory for Alabama’s power.

A person concerned with all humanity looks at the same decision and asks what it means for Black citizens whose voting strength can now be diluted under the convenient label of partisan politics.

Steve Marshall sees the Court shutting the door on certain vote-dilution claims.

A person concerned with all humanity asks why that door existed in the first place — and who will be left outside now that it is closing.

Steve Marshall says the South has made extraordinary progress.

A person concerned with all humanity says progress is not proven by declaring racism over. Progress is proven by protecting people who have historically been excluded, even when protection complicates the ambitions of those in power.

And that is why this matters so deeply.

Alabama does not need another senator who performs righteousness while defending hierarchy.

Alabama does not need another politician who wraps aggression in God-language.

Alabama does not need another man who treats cruelty as courage, coercion as conviction, and exclusion as constitutional purity.

Alabama needs leaders with moral imagination.

Leaders who understand that democracy is not merely majority rule.

Leaders who understand that “the will of the people” cannot mean only the will of those already holding power.

Leaders who understand that voting rights are not favors granted by the state but protections against the state.

Leaders who can look at Alabama’s past without flinching — and then refuse to repeat it in cleaner language.

That is not Steve Marshall.

His reaction to Louisiana v. Callais makes that clear.

He did not merely accept a Supreme Court ruling. He celebrated the weakening of protection. Then he moved immediately to apply it in Alabama. That is not incidental. It is revealing.

And it takes me back to that clinic door.

The flyer bothered me then because it signaled that Steve Marshall’s politics had been given a place of casual respectability in a setting devoted to human care.

This Supreme Court reaction bothers me even more because it shows exactly why that casual respectability is dangerous.

A flyer can make a man look normal.

A slogan can make him sound virtuous.

A rally can make him appear strong.

But a voting-rights decision shows what he does when history, power, race, and democracy are on the table.

Steve Marshall chose the side of power.

He chose the side of less protection.

He chose the side of making it harder for minority voters to challenge maps that weaken their political voice.

He chose the side that Alabama has chosen too many times before.

That is what the flyer revealed.

That is what the map confirms.

And that is why Steve Marshall is not merely the wrong man for the United States Senate.

He is a warning.

A person can vote for Steve Marshall without knowing all of this. Many people vote from habit, family tradition, party loyalty, church culture, fear of the other side, or a few familiar phrases about faith and Alabama values. I understand that. But a person who does know — who knows about the Trump loyalty, the election-overturning effort, the abortion-travel threats, the transgender medical-care battles, the nitrogen-gas execution, and now the celebration of weakened voting-rights protections — is making a different kind of choice. That vote is no longer merely Republican. It is no longer merely conservative. It becomes a decision to accept these things as tolerable — or perhaps even desirable — in exchange for political power. And that is where moral responsibility begins.

A Flyer on the Door — and What It Revealed

Yesterday I went to Sand Mountain Family Practice Center for my annual labs.

It was an ordinary appointment, the kind that comes with age and routine. I checked in, sat down, waited to be called back, and expected the visit to be uneventful. But while I was sitting there, I noticed a flyer posted on the door leading back to the lab area. It was promoting a Steve Marshall rally.

That disturbed me immediately.

Part of what bothered me was simple: I do not think partisan campaign material belongs in a medical setting. A health clinic is not a rally. It is not a church lobby. It is not a campaign office. It is a place where people come as patients — aging, uncertain, worried, exposed, waiting on answers. A medical office should lean toward care, neutrality, and dignity. It should not quietly signal that one political tribe, one moral brand, or one candidate belongs there more naturally than anyone else.

But what unsettled me even more was this: of all people, Steve Marshall.

Because once I saw his name on that flyer, the question became bigger than whether politics belonged on a clinic door. The deeper question was this: what exactly was being normalized there?

Steve Marshall wants to be seen as a man of faith, grit, and Alabama virtue. His Senate campaign literally uses the slogan “God. Grit. Alabama Strong.” When he launched his run for the Senate seat being vacated by Tommy Tuberville, the rollout leaned heavily on Donald Trump’s praise and presented Marshall as the kind of senator “our president can count on.” (AP News)

That language is not accidental. In Alabama, it is a formula. Wrap yourself in God-language. Speak in the idiom of home, tradition, strength, and righteousness. Present yourself not merely as a politician, but as a moral symbol. Make support for you feel like an extension of faithfulness itself.

But slogans do not tell the truth about a person. Choices do.

And Steve Marshall’s choices tell a revealing story.

He did not merely endorse Donald Trump from a safe distance. Marshall chose to travel to New York during Trump’s criminal hush-money trial and appear publicly in support of him. AP later described Marshall as one of several Republican elected officials who attended Trump’s 2024 hush-money trial in New York “to show support and speak on his behalf.” That is not passive alignment. That is active identification. Marshall wanted to be seen standing with Trump in that moment. (AP News)

And what kind of man was Marshall choosing to stand beside?

Donald Trump is a man who was found guilty on all 34 felony counts in the Manhattan hush-money case. Prosecutors said he falsified business records in order to conceal a payment meant to keep damaging information from voters before the 2016 election. He is also a man who was hit with a roughly $454 million civil fraud judgment after a New York court found that he fraudulently inflated his wealth for financial advantage. And he is a man who was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. Those are not talking points. Those are public facts. (AP News)

So when Steve Marshall chose to go to New York and stand with Trump, he was not standing with some persecuted hero of truth and decency. He was standing with a man publicly marked by fraud, criminal conviction, and abuse. That matters, because it tells me something about Marshall’s moral priorities. It tells me that whatever else he means by “values,” they do not begin with honesty, dignity, or respect for human beings.

And the Trump loyalty is only one piece of the pattern.

After the 2020 election, Alabama joined the Texas lawsuit that sought to throw out election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Steve Marshall signed Alabama onto that effort. The lawsuit asked the U.S. Supreme Court to toss out certified election results in states Biden won. Whether you call that legal maneuvering, partisan desperation, or outright election subversion, the core fact remains: Marshall aligned himself with an effort to discard lawful votes after his side lost. (Alabama Political Reporter)

That is not a small detail. It is one of the clearest windows into who he is.

A man who truly cared about democratic integrity would not lend his office to a scheme like that. A man who respected voters would not support an attempt to nullify certified results in other states. A man who believed truth mattered more than party would not help feed the fantasy that a lost election could simply be overturned by legal aggression. Marshall did.

Then there is the abortion-travel issue.

Marshall’s office took the position that Alabama could potentially use conspiracy law against people or groups who helped women travel out of state for legal abortions. That threat had real effects: abortion-assistance groups said they stopped helping patients because of the legal danger. A federal judge later ruled that Marshall could not prosecute people for such assistance, holding that such prosecutions would violate the First Amendment and the constitutional right to travel. In other words, Marshall was willing to push Alabama’s power across state lines and into private acts of help and support between human beings. (AP News)

That matters to me because it reveals a very specific moral posture.

It is one thing to oppose abortion. It is another thing entirely to threaten people who help women leave the state for lawful medical care elsewhere. That is not humility. That is not restraint. That is not reverence for human complexity. That is coercive power dressed up as principle.

Then there is the transgender issue.

Marshall has been a public defender of Alabama’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors. Reuters reported that the 11th Circuit left that ban in place and that Marshall praised the decision. Whatever one thinks about the broader issue, the core point here is that Marshall again chose an aggressive use of state power in one of the most intimate and painful arenas imaginable: the medical decisions of families with vulnerable children. Opponents in the case argued that the law strips parents of the freedom to obtain medical care for their own children and places ideology over individualized treatment. (Reuters)

Again, the pattern is not hard to see. Marshall’s politics are repeatedly drawn toward control, punishment, and state intrusion — especially where fear, identity, and moral panic can be activated.

Then there is the death penalty.

Marshall’s office was central to Alabama becoming the first state in the nation to carry out an execution by nitrogen gas. Reuters reported that Alabama pioneered the method with the execution of Kenneth Smith and that Marshall later said Alabama would help other states adopt it. Reuters also reported witness descriptions of visible distress and criticism of the method as cruel and experimental. This was not some reluctant bureaucratic duty. Marshall publicly defended and promoted the method. (Reuters)

That too says something about who he is.

A man can speak endlessly about God, values, and righteousness. But when he repeatedly places himself on the side of harder punishment, more coercive power, more intrusion, more cruelty, and more loyalty to tribal leaders than to human dignity, then his actions begin to define him more clearly than any slogan ever could.

And that brings me to what I mean by real human values.

Real human values are not campaign branding.

Real human values are honesty when lying would be politically useful.

They are compassion when cruelty would energize your base.

They are humility instead of self-righteousness.

They are a respect for truth that survives even when your side loses an election.

They are a respect for bodily dignity, for human vulnerability, for the painful complexity of real lives.

They are decency toward women.

They are care for families in distress.

They are restraint in the use of power.

They are the refusal to make domination look holy.

By those standards, Steve Marshall’s public record tells me far more than his “God. Grit. Alabama Strong.” slogan ever could. (AP News)

And that is why the flyer on the clinic door disturbed me so much.

It was not just that politics had shown up where I did not think politics belonged. It was that this particular politics had shown up there — politics wrapped in God-language, politics built on Trump loyalty, politics willing to help overturn elections, politics willing to threaten helpers, politics willing to let the state reach deeper and deeper into private human lives, politics willing to pioneer a new method of execution and call it progress.

That is not what care looks like to me.

That is not what moral seriousness looks like to me.

And it is certainly not what real human values look like to me.

So yes, the flyer bothered me.

Not because I am too sensitive to handle disagreement.

Because I have lived long enough, watched long enough, and thought hard enough to recognize the old Southern trick when I see it: take power, wrap it in piety, call it values, and hope nobody looks too closely at what the man actually does.

Yesterday, sitting there in that clinic, I looked.

And I did not like what I saw.

Daily Deep Dive–Why Clarity Often Feels Like Standing Alone

There is a quiet assumption built into most social life:

If many people agree on something, it must be right. If something is widely accepted, it must be normal. If it is normal, it must be healthy.

Erich Fromm challenges that assumption directly.

A society can be deeply disordered while appearing functional. Individuals within it can adapt so completely that they no longer question the structure they are living inside. In that sense, conformity can produce stability—but not necessarily sanity.

This creates a tension.

To belong is to align with what is shared. To see clearly is sometimes to step outside of it.

And that step can feel like isolation.

Clarity does not always come with agreement. In fact, it often removes it. When a person begins to see something directly—without relying on inherited assumptions—the result may not match what others see. Not because the person is trying to be different, but because they are no longer filtering reality through the same framework.

This is where discomfort enters.

It is easier to belong than to see. It is easier to agree than to question. It is easier to adjust than to stand still in what is known directly.

But the cost of constant adjustment is subtle.

A person begins to lose contact with their own perception. Decisions become shaped by expectation rather than understanding. Over time, the internal sense of alignment weakens, even if external functioning remains intact.

Fromm’s idea of sanity points in another direction.

Sanity is not agreement. It is not comfort. It is not the absence of tension.

It is clarity.

Clarity requires attention. It requires the willingness to see what is there, even when it does not match what is expected. It requires holding perception steady long enough to trust it.

This does not mean rejecting everything external. It means not surrendering to it blindly.

A sane life, in this sense, is not one lived in opposition to others. It is one lived from a stable center of awareness. That center allows for connection, but it does not depend on agreement.

The result is a different kind of relationship to the world.

Less reactive.Less dependent.More grounded.

But also, at times, more solitary.

Not because the person is alone in a literal sense, but because they are no longer fully merged with shared assumptions.

This is where clarity and solitude meet.

And this is why clarity often feels like standing alone—not as a dramatic stance, but as a natural consequence of seeing without distortion.

The question is not whether this will happen.

The question is whether it will be avoided.

Because the alternative is not true belonging.

It is quiet disconnection.

Daily Deep Dive–Why Wholeness Matters More Than Balance in Creative Work

We often talk about creative work in the language of balance. Balance your reason and your feeling. Balance structure and spontaneity. Balance discipline and inspiration. There is truth in that language, but it can also be misleading. It suggests that the self is made of separate compartments that must be carefully negotiated into cooperation.

Lucille Clifton suggests something deeper. In the interview Maria Popova draws from, Clifton says a poem has to come from intellect and intuition. Too much intuition becomes sentimentality. Too much intellect becomes a mass of material no one knows or cares about. But the center of the insight is not really “balance” as such. It is wholeness. The poem is about a whole human, speaks to a whole human, and therefore must come from a whole human.

That distinction matters.

Balance implies management among parts. Wholeness implies a different condition altogether—an undivided life from which the work can arise naturally. The problem is not merely that we favor one faculty over another. The problem is that many of us live in pieces. We think in one register, feel in another, work in another, speak in another, and then wonder why our creative output seems thin or strained.

A divided person may still produce competent work. But there is a difference between competence and aliveness.

Clifton’s wisdom helps clarify that difference. A poem dies when intellect takes over in a sterile way, but it also dies when intuition runs free without shape. The answer is not to keep those two forces on opposite ends of a seesaw. The answer is to let them belong to one living center.

That is harder than it sounds, because modern life encourages fragmentation. We are trained into roles, outputs, categories, and modes. Be productive here. Be emotional there. Be analytical in this space. Be practical in that one. Even inner life becomes specialized. The result is a person who may function effectively but not always wholly.

Creative work suffers under that arrangement because art is not merely assembled from skill. It is formed from personhood. Popova opens the Clifton piece by observing that everything we make is shaped by the whole of what we are and what we have lived. A song, an equation, a poem, a page—all of it bears the imprint of the person making it.

That means the deeper question is not only, “How do I balance my faculties?” It is, “From what kind of self does this work arise?”

If the self is fractured, the work may carry the fracture. If the self is present, receptive, and integrated, the work may carry that instead.

This is why I think wholeness matters more than balance. Balance can remain mechanical. It can become one more managerial project. Wholeness is less tidy and more organic. It comes from living in a way that allows thought, instinct, memory, craft, labor, and feeling to remain in conversation with each other.

The same may be true well beyond poetry.

A day of useful labor, a well-made bench, a prepared garden bed, a clear conversation, a thoughtful page—none of these arise from one faculty alone. They draw from attention, memory, judgment, bodily knowledge, and a certain instinctive feel for what belongs where. Life itself asks for more than balance. It asks for participation by the whole person.

Clifton also says something else that deepens this. Poetry can heal because it comes from a heart and can speak to another heart. The healing power lies not only in expression, but in connection. The work is not complete when it is merely made. It becomes fully itself in the contact it creates.

That too points toward wholeness rather than balance.

A balanced self might still remain self-contained. A whole self is able to connect. It can create work that not only displays intelligence or feeling, but actually reaches another person. And perhaps that is one sign that the work has come from a deeper center: it does not merely show off the maker’s capacities. It carries some living human charge from one person to another.

The language of wholeness also has the advantage of being more forgiving. Balance can make a person imagine a neat symmetry that few real lives possess. Wholeness does not require symmetry. It requires honesty. It requires a willingness to let the actual person show up—flawed, layered, experienced, thinking, feeling, remembering, trying.

In that sense, wholeness is less about perfection than about consent. Consent to be present as one life. Consent to let the hand belong to the mind, the intuition belong to the craft, the labor belong to the reflection, the solitude belong to the connection.

Perhaps that is why some work feels alive from the first line or the first glance. It was not produced by a well-managed fragment. It was made by someone who, for that moment at least, was gathered enough to speak from one center.

And maybe that is what so many of us are after without quite naming it. Not simply better balance. Not a more polished arrangement of our competing faculties. But a life out of which work can rise without distortion because it rises from a self no longer at war with itself.

That kind of wholeness cannot be faked. But it can be practiced. In the page. In the shop. In the garden. In the conversation. In the way a day is lived.

The work, then, is not just to make something.

It is to become someone from whom living work can come.