We often talk about good judgment as if it’s a product of experience or intelligence—as if time, data, and a sharpened mind will eventually yield wisdom. But what if becoming a good judge is less about having the right tools, and more about learning which signals to trust? What if agency isn’t built by knowing more, but by learning to move with less? In this reflection, I trace the slow shift in how I think, decide, and listen to the mind beneath the mind.
Tonight is about fear.
Not the feral, fist-of-the-heart kind, but the slow-burn variety that builds cathedrals of Excel files and pens love letters to contingency. Fear that mistakes itself for virtue.
In rooms where talk floats like ash, my mind ticks in triple time, a metronome among driftwood. They call it impatience. They do not see the wiring—synapses firing trapeze arcs, parsing micro-tremors in a voice, the spider-leg twitch of a finger retreating from truth.
Some people are born with a tolerance for ambiguity. I wasn’t.
I imagine parallel universes in the dark. Align variables like votive candles. Rearrange disaster into something I can hold. For years I named this ritual preparation, never admitting it was instead prayer: God, let me outthink the avalanche. Let me spreadsheet my way to safety. Lmao!
But terror, it turns out, can wear bifocals and quote Kant.
I once believed salvation lived in the footnotes. That if I annotated enough caveats — as in cross-referenced and peer-reviewed — the path would light itself. No one warns you of the drowning in data and the forgetting of how to swim. Maybe the cure isn’t more light, but learning which shadows to trust?
Yesterday, I chose. Not when the spreadsheets sang in chorus, but when my bones hummed louder. A decision made not in the mind’s war room, but in the sacral center's dim chapel.
Two years earlier, I had devoured rationality texts like scripture. I highlighted passages in Galef's The Scout Mindset until pages blazed with neon yellow. I memorized frameworks distinguishing truth-seeking from social posturing. I assigned probability percentages to mundane choices with the dedication of a devout faithful. I drew decision trees like sacred geometry, with each branch a lifeline, and each node a god of what-if.
But revelation rarely comes through the front door of reason. It slips through cracked windows when the thinking self exhausts itself. It arrives when the body is quiet enough.
The change wasn’t in how I thought, but in what I let thinking do to me. Less Is this true? More Does this truth leave blood on the floor? Less optimizing for perfect outcomes, more asking What story do I want my scars to tell?
Do not mistake this for abandonment. The mental models remain. But now I let the body lead sometimes — that ancient mammal who remembers fire comes before calculus.
Certainty is not the antidote to fear. It’s the cage. The bravest choices, after all, are made mid-tremble. So this means maturity isn’t mastery, but the learning to waltz with the ghosts of maybe.
After all, what really is more human? The flawless algorithm, or the hand that reaches through the smoke of doubt to grasp another? So tonight, I name this fragile thing not failure, but frontier. The moment we stop trying to outthink fear and start letting it teach us how to hunger.
But the loneliest borders are not lines on land; it is the uncharted edges where knowledge frays. Here, maps dissolve into blank spaces, and the number of pioneers eventually thin out, while those who linger speak in a lexicon of ghosts, tracing paths only the damned or desperate choose to walk.
Lately, every conversation feels like surgery. Do I slice myself open to show the snarled roots beneath, or suture the wound and let the scar do the talking? My mind drafts blueprints in the dark: looping circuits, domino chains of cause and collapse. But to be heard, I flatten them into stick figures. Hemorrhage nuance. Sever context. Pare truth to the bone until it fits in a palm of a stranger.
They mistake the blood on my hands for arrogance. Count my pauses as slights. Never see the silent labor of having to ask how many bridges must I build just to meet them on solid ground? How many shared myths must we resurrect before they’ll trust the earth beneath their feet?
Three makes a coven, and once, I tried leading a caravan through the wilderness — laid each stone of logic, strung rope bridges over every chasm. Watched their eyes dim like guttered candles. Learned to measure worth by the clockwork of their glances.
Now I shortcut to summits, hand them conclusions like souvenir postcards. Look, we’ve both stood here! But their peaks are not mine. We share the same words, but mine are freighted with ghosts.
Perhaps this is the curse of seeing too much: not pride, but exile.
And perhaps all visionaries limp. Perhaps to hold a telescope to the dark is to forever walk out of step. Not because others can’t see, but because survival taught them not to.
The real work isn’t in the seeing; it’s in the return. Translating sonar blips into song. Kneeling in the dirt to plant your hard-won seeds in soil that may never grant them sun.
I’m learning to speak in scars instead of theorems. To say: this truth gutted me, or that one kept me alive. To trade syllogisms for stories, as in not just the summit’s cold air, but the blisters, the thirst, the nights I mistook my own pulse for a predator’s breath.
The final frontier of knowledge will not be some distant star, but the fault line where reason meets raw nerve. Where the mind’s clean equations crash against the body’s messy hungers or emotional need. Where every grand theory of Everything must finally answer to a single, unbearable question: do you still love this world?
Maybe wisdom is just tending fires in the wilderness, not to conquer the dark, but to beckon others close enough to whisper, Stay. The night is long, but look how the light clings.
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