Book

Day 47 — I realized different kinds of thinking do not have to defeat each other. FRI Something happened today. D1 and D2 started as a joke. Chad, Darryl and Darryl 2. A little nod to Newhart. Then the joke became useful. D1 is the one who can take a simple question and somehow discover […]

Day 24 — I found the courage to hold the whole coin. WED Something happened today. This may be one of the central discoveries in the book. Reality has two sides that human beings spend enormous energy trying to reconcile. Beauty. Wonder. Love. Birth. Music. Kindness. Mystery. And on the other side: Pain. Hardship. Loss. […]

Day 18 — Gentleness stopped looking weak. THU Something happened today. Some discoveries announce themselves. Others arrive in a whisper. Gentleness was one of those. I had been noticing how differently closeness feels when it is invited rather than forced. This was especially clear in my marriage. Trying to create closeness can become another form […]

Day 63 — I realized the best joke in the D2 cartoon might be the reader agreeing with D2. SUN Something happened today. Bill says the cartoons are funny. D2 says they are not. Bill insists. Meanwhile there is a Barf/byte pun sitting on the desk like evidence entered by the prosecution. That structure delighted […]

Day 7 — The fragments began to sound like music. SUN Something happened today. I was listening to Fool’s Overture by Supertramp. I have loved music for much of my life, and one of the things that fascinates me about that piece is that it feels so large and deliberate. Then there is the wonderful […]

Day 51 — I made a pun so bad that D2 was right to complain about it. TUE Something happened today. That may be the entire lesson. I had this cartoon idea. Bill is at a drafting table drawing cartoons. D2 is looking over his shoulder. You know, Bill, those really aren’t that funny. Well, […]

Day 28 — A hedge became a treasure map. MON Something happened today. It began, as these things so often did, with absolutely no intention of discovering anything. I was going to trim the hedges. That was it. No philosophy. No meditation. No grand project called Personal Growth Through Shrubbery. The hedges needed trimming, and […]

Day 59 — I looked around at what had been built in a remarkably short time and the funny part was where I was sitting. WED Something happened today. A basement in Nova Scotia. Not a startup incubator in Silicon Valley. No glass walls. No venture-capital coffee machine. Just me, a computer, an artificial intelligence […]

Day 39 — I made myself laugh with a sentence about karma. THU Something happened today. Sometimes karma takes longer than normal to make it all the way around. Not because you are not worth it, but because it is battling headwinds. I loved the image immediately. Not because I had suddenly developed a scientific […]

Day 20 — A small disagreement led to deeper harmony. SAT Something happened today. One of the gifts of a relationship that lasts for decades is that you eventually acquire a very large archive of evidence that you are two different people. This should not be surprising. Somehow it still is. We want closeness, and […]