Responding to an echo...

I was lost. Thankfully, my compass continues to point toward solitude. I run on the road, trails, and when I am lucky along the sea. Lucky for me I thrive on being alone. Let’s face it. When you are up by 4:30 in the morning, fancy several hour runs, and write all day you will have a lot of alone time.

I dabble in social activities when I am traveling for “work”. This seems like cheating because these are people with similar interests to my own. I am not forced to squint and look for edges to align for conviviality or friendship. Yes we can enjoy each other’s company but often one of us sees the time as transactional.

Solitude as a super power allows me time away from family to pursue other interests.

One Year in the Life of a Part Time Hermit might seem a weird YouTube series to pursue for an atheist but to be honest, I have never felt closer to what many call sacred. The latest in the series is a wrap of the year and it had me laughing and in tears. Fr. Johannes M Schwarz is a Roman Catholic Priest with answers to questions you didn’t even know you had. Much of the content is Johannes restoring his hermitage in the Italian Alps. The religious musings are reserved for the final ten minutes of each episode in case it isn’t your thing. Respectfully you are invited to walk away but there is much to be learned by sticking around.

I stuck around. Today he answered a question of why he became a priest. He described a 2,000 year echo of something bigger, something divine perhaps (my words, not his). His words made me think about things and how they used to be — and am I giving service to what I think is important?

Today I decided to delete FaceBook. The preamble here is part of the context but not the whole story. In fact, I had deleted the app weeks ago but it kept creeping back — not on my home screen but tucked away in little nooks and crannies on my phone. It reappeared again today. I explored my reasons for not doing a better job of destroying the breadcrumbs it was using to stumble its way back. None were compelling.

Professionally I live a quasi public life so if you want me — I am easy to find. Here is the problem with FaceBook. It is a friendship killer. We have forgotten the art of friendship because we have this proxy for “engagement” — the passive low-value, minimal commitment time suck of social media.

I bear the responsibility of killing my share of friendships but I had help from Covid, travel, and let’s be honest — other things I would rather be doing. Funny how the big friendships were able to weather the challenges but those built on something else are an echo of a different season.

Professionally the tug has been similar. Do you want to live your brief wondrous life like an actor in a film you are producing or really be immersive? I decided to stop fulfilling the expectations others hoisted my way and be more authentic.

Authenticity invites patience, grace, and charity.

…”I believe in the sun - not because I can see it, but by it, I can see everything else.”— C.S. Lewis

I am embracing quantitative storytelling. Mathematical models are useful but often they are simply reflecting an ideology of picking only the variables that can point to your preferred conclusion. When telling a story quantitatively you bring all of the numbers and data into the glare of the light. Context and narrative matter and the invitation is open in an industry agnostic manner.

Technology has a place but it shouldn’t crowd out the other chairs at the table — the biophysical world has a simplicity — an echo if you will. The secrets of the Fibonacci sequence whisper throughout ecology.

We need to listen.