Table of Contents

10/4/25

The Quiet Swipe

I watched my daughter check her phone. She’s a young teen. Her fingers flicked fast, almost instinctively — a blur of motion I could barely follow. She read a text, opened a post, liked it, swiped twice more to see who else had liked it. Maybe she read a comment. Then she set the phone down and returned to what she’d been doing. The whole thing was seamless, like muscle memory — one unbroken movement.

I asked if that was how her brain worked now. She looked puzzled, but intrigued. She wanted me to explain. I couldn’t. How do you describe what it feels like to have a mind that once ran on analog — that once had pauses, that had to wait — to someone who’s never known a moment without a feedback loop?

Before constant input. Before the dopamine drip of scrolling. Before every thought had an immediate mirror. Does that change how a person thinks? How they imagine?

I can’t stop thinking about the thinkers we’ve been losing — the ones who could see systems, who asked questions no algorithm would let trend. Jane Goodall. Manchán Magan. Sandra Harding. bell hooks. Sonia Sanchez. Bernice Johnson Reagon. People who taught us to look under and behind things. To connect the micro to the macro. To think about thinking itself.

We are losing them at the same time that thinking — real, systemic, uncomfortable thinking — is being treated like sedition. Sesame Street was canceled. The culture that once taught children how to share now terrifies adults who can’t bear nuance.

And then there’s cancel culture. I don’t forgive easily. I don’t get angry often enough to need to, but when I do, it’s because someone’s done something so unethical it feels unforgivable. But cancel culture is a different animal. It’s a blunt instrument in a world that demands scalpel work.

If someone causes harm and stands by it, they don’t deserve our platform. Silencing that voice can be a form of justice — a boundary set for collective safety. But when we erase entire bodies of work because someone said something ignorant decades ago — when we discard the context, the time, the learning that followed — we risk something else. We risk cutting off our own lineage of thought.

If we throw out the baby, the bathwater, and the river the water came from, what remains to teach us not to drown again? Without the river feeding them, the oceans and lakes would cease to exist. Memory dries up the same way — not in an instant, but by neglect.

For me, it’s a matter of degree. Step over the line into deliberate harm, into willful ignorance — I’m out. I won’t amplify it. But if a person once said something that reflected their moment, and they’ve done the work to see beyond it, then I want to keep the conversation open. Because to cancel is to forget, and forgetting breeds repetition. And repetition — more often than not — is the repetition of our worst mistakes. The ones we swore we’d never make again.

Maybe that’s the real danger — that in the noise, in the constant stream, we’re losing our collective memory. Our patience for context. Our tolerance for imperfection.

The question isn’t how to erase harm, but how to remember intentionally. How to evolve without rewriting every uncomfortable truth into oblivion.

I look at my daughter and wonder: will she know what stillness feels like? Will she ever know how a thought sounds before it’s packaged? I hope so. I hope we all remember how to sit in the quiet long enough to hear the static — and tune through it.

10/9/25

The Liminal Hour: Living in the Space Between

We are suspended in amber, watching the world spin at light speed while standing perfectly still. This is the paradox of our time—the sensation that we're hurtling toward some unnamed future while simultaneously sliding backward into patterns we thought we'd outgrown-did we really believe that though?

There is a velocity to standing still that makes it hard to move, to act.

Everything moves too fast now. News cycles devour themselves before we can digest them. Trends are born and buried in the span of a heartbeat. We swipe through lives, loves, and losses with the same casual flick of the thumb. Yet somehow, we're also moving with the sluggish inevitability of geological time—each day another degree warmer in the pot, another small freedom traded for convenience, another truth bent until it snaps.

Consider how we've become archaeologists of the immediate past. A meme from last week feels ancient. A phone from two years ago is a relic. We're simultaneously the most connected and most isolated humans who have ever lived, crafting digital personas while forgetting how to sit with ourselves in silence.

There's something almost theatrical about it all—the way reality has begun to feel like a fever dream written by a satirist who's lost the plot. Politicians tweet like teenagers. Billionaires play with rockets while people ration insulin. We debate whether the earth is flat while carrying supercomputers in our pockets. The line between news and entertainment dissolved so gradually we didn't notice until we were already living inside the punchline-or did we notice and just not know what to do? Fight, flight, freeze...FROZEN. The human body will force itself into freeze when all else fails. It's a biological response at a certain point. 

Is this what happens when the masks slip in the most undeniable way? When the veneer of civilization becomes so thin we can see the ancient wiring underneath—the original instincts, the fear of the other that is nothing new becomes acceptable-again, the desperate scramble for resources and status that has always driven us? People are predictable. Human behavior is predictable. We are wired to sustain life-our own-and it takes a conscious, intelligent and intentional push to move past putting that first-past reactivity. People will go back to what is familiar, watching themselves repeat what they know is destructive and dysfunctional because it is familiar. When all hell breaks loose the body believes it is better to go back to the known that has been survived than the unknown.  OR Perhaps we're not witnessing humanity's decline but its revelation. 

Maybe it's something else entirely. Maybe we're living through the birth pangs of a new kind of consciousness—one that's struggling to emerge from the chrysalis of our old ways of being. The dissonance we feel might not be decay but transformation, the awkward adolescence of a species learning to think beyond the boundaries of tribe and territory.

We're the first generation to see our planet from space and the last to remember what it was like before everyone was watching everyone else. We're translators between worlds—the analog and digital, the local and global, the human and the algorithmic. No wonder we feel dizzy. I've always believes psychosis might just be a part of the human brain being turned on that we just aren't ready for evolutionarily. 

In this liminal space, everything carries the weight of both profound significance and complete meaninglessness. A celebrity's breakfast generates more discussion than climate legislation. We mourn the death of strangers on screens while struggling to connect with the person sitting next to us. We're drowning in information while starving for wisdom, surrounded by noise while aching for silence.

Perhaps this is what it feels like to live at the hinge of history—that moment when one age is dying and another is struggling to be born. We're the witnesses, the translators, the ones who remember before and will help shape after. The water is getting warmer, yes, but maybe we're not the frog. Maybe we're learning to be amphibious.

The question isn't whether we'll survive this strange season of becoming. If we don't than the answer doesn't matter. The question is what we'll choose to carry forward and what we'll finally have the courage to leave behind-like for real. Radical revolution requires the melting of old tools. Audre Lorde tried to tell us. 

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