Although this pattern hasn’t left me feeling more tired during the day, it’s still a drag to drag my butt out of bed in the middle of the night to pee.

And then there’s the nagging thought, Is there something not right with my bladder or prostate gland? gnawing in the back of my mind.

Nestling a heating pad between my legs and placing my hands over my abdominal area, I began visualizing this urinary tract, recalling recent video clips I’d studied of how this tract functions.

Slowing my nervous system through focused breath work, I began to silently speak from my mind to this area inside my body: I want you to relax and be calm. Our kidneys, bladder, ureters, and urethra are being cleansed and are functioning normally. Thank you for the marvelous work you do. Together we are healthy and strong.

When I bring this kind of heightened attention into my body, I begin to experience a different awareness of my immediate surroundings as well.

Even if my eyes are wide open while silently speaking intentions into my body, I notice nothing around me. But then, suddenly I do, after finishing this internal conversation.

Staring up from my bed, I notice the broken, patterned shadows cast onto the ceiling from the street lights outside my window, now feeling almost eerily alive, dancing about.

And then, I turned my attention back to, me.

Lying there in bed, I started scanning my body, feeling into each limb, beginning at my feet and slowly moving up, eventually passing over my heart, then sweeping over my face and head, and then into the inside of my brain, as if I’d just crawled inside it.

Then the image of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, appeared across the screen of my mind’s eye.

It was a flashback from a TED talk she presented after recovering from a severe stroke that left her losing nearly all higher cognitive and physical functions, which took eight years to rebuild.

At one point during her talk, a man walked out from the side of the stage holding a serving tray with a round object covered over by a white towel. Dr. Taylor then informed the audience that the object on the tray was a real human brain.

After putting on some surgical-like protective gloves, she removed the towel, revealing the brain. Picking it up off the tray, she gingerly held it out in front of her chest, and with the attached spinal cord dangling in front of her, began to explain its anatomy.

Her stroke, she said, had interrupted the left hemisphere, which she reported is responsible for language and verbal processing, analytical thought, time orientation, a sense of individual identity, fine motor control, and detail-oriented processing.

Suddenly, the image of the human brain in her hands disappeared from my mind, and I became aware of me, lying in the bed.

Feeling my body pressing into the mattress, I said to myself while gazing at the shadowy light dancing and flickering on the ceiling, Here I am, aware of my body and my surroundings, but who is this me that I think is doing this?

Dr. Taylor spent a lot of time during her TED talk unpacking what it felt like for her to no longer have a sense of being separate from everyone else and everything around her, as the left side of her brain deteriorated during the stroke.

Later, during a podcast discussing her stroke, she described this phenomenon as the moment when the idea of a me, the girl Jill Bolte-Taylor, died, not physically, but as a felt sense, a way of experiencing herself that stopped being generated, leaving something else in its place.

Lying there on my bed, I could see and feel my body stretched out beneath me.

I had the felt sense that I’m an individual, seemingly separate from everything around me, and in that same moment, the underlying sense that something else is happening, allowing this idea of a me to emerge.

Before there was a bladder to talk to, a brain to hold, shadows to name, what was there?

Trump is a buffoon. Only Jesus saves. Democrats care for the country. All religions are scams. America never landed a man on the moon. Republicans are a “basket of deplorables.”

Climate change is a hoax. Anyone who denies climate change is ignoring the science.

Free-market capitalism works. Free-market capitalism must be abolished.

Suffering is a delusion of the mind. Your suffering stems from childhood trauma.

And so on.

How can two people look at much of the same evidence and come away with completely different understandings of what is true or real? What’s going on?

It’s one thing to draw conclusions and make claims. It’s another thing to explore whether those conclusions or claims can actually be justified.

I’m not talking about beliefs around things like what happens to your car tire if you keep driving on it when it’s flat, or whether your credit-card agreement says you’ll be charged a late fee if you don’t pay on time.

Those are claims that can be checked and verified from outside one’s individual beliefs or personal experience.

Things start to get more challenging when we posit claims about human nature, God, truth, political ideology, spiritual experience, or the ultimate meaning of an event.

In this kind of territory, the evidence often does not interpret itself, and fair-minded people can arrive at radically different conclusions.

When reasonable people sit at opposite ends of the spectrum around a given phenomenon, what might be the next step to move things forward?

One possibility is to look not only at what they believe, but at how they arrived at those beliefs, and whether the grounds for their conclusions hold up under careful examination. In real life, this process is extremely challenging.

In a recent conversation with someone I’ve known for a long time, I was surprised to discover just how far his convictions about God and truth extended beyond anything I had previously imagined.

Over a series of lengthy email exchanges, he emphatically told me that the framework he operates within regarding truth, God, and God’s providence cannot be proved false. No amount of alleged disconfirming evidence against that framework, he maintained, could invalidate it.

Not every framework works this way. Some leave room for being wrong. His didn't.

Lately, I’ve been encountering similar experiences with other friends. The subject matter might differ, but the underlying pattern is similar. Deep conviction gradually leaves less and less room for considering that the framework itself might be mistaken.

These days I’m less interested in arguing over whose conclusions or beliefs might be correct or true. What I am interested in is how those conclusions are being justified in the first place.

If a claim or belief cannot be independently verified, or if reasonable people disagree about what is true, what might that tell us about how well the claim is being justified?

This does not necessarily mean the beliefs or convictions are false. Nor does it mean they have not been meaningful or beneficial to the person holding them.

The larger question is whether the grounds for those beliefs are strong enough to justify the claims beyond that person’s own experience and interpretive lens.

I know something about this from the inside.

I used to understand reality through what might be called a providential lens, meaning I saw people, events, conflicts, and historical developments as part of a larger divine purpose unfolding according to God’s plan.

This worldview offered a comprehensive understanding of the meaning and purpose of my life, along with a newfound confidence that I might one day realize my deepest-held dreams and desires while taking part in God’s work on the earth.

However, at that time, if someone had asked me, “What can you point to that justifies your belief in this providential framework?” my answer would have largely been my personal experiences and what I regarded as the truth of the teachings espoused by the framework itself.

But what justified my confidence that my experiences and the teachings themselves were reliable evidence that the framework was true?

Could what I was personally convinced about, for whatever reason, be validated by someone from outside the world I was living in?

At the time, those outside my worldview regarded it as misguided, false, and dangerous. What I was seeing and what they were seeing were miles apart.

So where do we go from there?

If two people disagree about the meaning of the evidence, what would allow either one to say that their interpretation is better justified?

If we keep asking why someone believes what they believe, and then ask for the reasons behind those reasons, where does the chain of reasoning eventually end, if at all?

When do we finally arrive at something we simply accept as true, without asking for further justification?

And what happens when the reasoning begins to circle back on itself, when the framework is used to validate the authority behind the framework?

In my case, for example, I pointed to the teachings embodied in the framework as verification that the framework must be true. But in doing so, I was using the teachings to validate themselves, like someone claiming the Bible is the Word of God because the Bible says so.

But how much of what we call evidence is already being interpreted through the lens we bring to it?

For example, a while back, I watched a video testimony of someone claiming he died and went to Hell, where God showed him the terrible fate that awaits those who don’t believe in the message of the Gospel.

Another person might interpret the same experience as a psychological event. Another might regard it as a delusion.

And still another might see it as an experience whose meaning cannot ultimately be known.

None of this automatically tells us which interpretation is better justified.

What it does tell us is that disagreement can run deeper than the facts themselves.

It can reach into the assumptions, authorities, experiences, relationships, and interpretive frameworks we use to decide what the facts mean.

Perhaps the real work begins not with better explanations or answers, but with noticing when we've stopped letting evidence count against us.

Anyone for a cup of epistemic humility, please?

Growing up in the Catholic tradition, I was taught that I was a good person because God created me and loves me, but I also shared a wounded human nature that sometimes led me to choose wrongly and commit sin.

We were taught to examine our conscience: What did I do? Did I lie? Did I disobey my parents? Was I mean? Did I steal? Did I use God’s name improperly? Did I miss Mass?

I felt loved by God, and at the same time, conflicted about my tendency to not live up to what it meant to be a good Catholic boy: upright, honest, obedient, loving, and caring. Going to confession on Saturday afternoon allowed me to tell the priest what I’d done wrong and to ask forgiveness for any sins I’d committed during the week.

What strikes me now is how uncomplicated and satisfying this weekly confession routine was for me as an elementary school boy.

In my experience, I wasn’t entering the confessional wondering what was wrong with me or where my troubling thoughts and behavior came from. That had already been explained. I was a human being living with the consequences of the Fall and, like everybody else, capable of sin and in need of God’s forgiveness. My job was to look closely enough at myself to identify where I had done wrong, own up to it, and be reconciled.

After receiving absolution from the priest and reciting my assigned prayers, I’d step out of the church into the normal, noisy world, usually feeling lighter, relieved, and thankful for another chance to make good on my promise to obey God’s rules for being an upright Catholic boy.

Looking back, what strikes me is that I wasn’t being asked to understand why I had done what I’d done. The priest wasn’t helping me uncover something about myself that I hadn’t yet discovered. I brought something specific into the confessional, named it, and received something specific in return: forgiveness from God through the priest.

The questions we ask ourselves are more complicated now. Gradually, the question I had been taught to ask, What have I done?, was joined by others. Why did I do it? Where did that feeling come from? Why do I keep repeating the same bad behaviors? Is there something within me I don’t yet understand? What’s wrong with me?

Over time, our understanding of what troubles us expanded beyond ideas about right and wrong. Questions about our feelings, motivations, relationships, past experiences, and aspects of ourselves outside our conscious awareness now take a central role in trying to understand who we are, why we suffer, and why we do what we do.

Today, looking inward has become one of the primary ways we try to understand ourselves and find relief from what troubles us. We are encouraged to understand our patterns, process our experiences, heal our wounds, and work toward becoming healthier versions of ourselves. There is much in this that can be helpful. But it also introduces a very different way of experiencing ourselves.

If I need forgiveness, I have done something wrong. If I need healing, I have been wounded. If I need repair, something in me is not working as it should. Each begins with an understanding of what is wrong before the remedy begins. [In my previously published essay, I wrote more about what it actually feels like to live inside that logic of woundedness—the particular weight of it, the way it never quite closes.]

Perhaps the question worth asking is not only how we get better, but what we have come to believe about ourselves that tells us we need to get better in the first place.

What would it feel like, just for a moment, to set that belief down rather than examine it?

The beat goes on, or maybe not.

Human suffering has been around at least since someone, long ago, in one of the oldest stories in the Western tradition about shame, loss, and loneliness, tried to pass the blame to someone else for their lapse in moral judgment.

Suffering appears in every human culture and every generation, although no two people experience or carry it in quite the same way. We can count on experiencing some form of emotional, physical, or existential pain in life.

Long before I had any clear notion about what suffering was, I already knew what it felt like to place mine before someone I believed could receive it.

Every Saturday afternoon from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM, local Catholic churchgoers would line up in the aisle, one behind the other, facing the confessional box at the back of the church. Sometimes the line extended toward the middle of the church, and at other times, just a few people lined up.

Occasionally, my Nana would take me. Other times I’d go with a playmate, and I’d also go by myself. The whole thing was part of what you did on Saturday afternoon. Most of us who showed up knew each other, although occasionally I wouldn’t recognize one of the older people waiting in line.

Standing there, I mostly looked straight ahead, eyeing the confessional entrance to see who was entering and leaving, often guessing how long each person stayed inside talking to the priest.

Entering the confessional box was an ordeal. The less than fifteen-foot walk from the pew aisle to the confessional door felt like a mile. As I approached the wooden entrance door, I’d go over in my mind what I was going to say and confess. I’d ask myself: Did you forget anything? Are you sure you want to tell him your deepest secrets this time?

From what I can recall, the confessional compartment was about three or four feet wide, about the same depth, and maybe six feet high. It always felt much bigger to me, though, as I slowly opened the door and stepped inside. Maybe because, aside from a small crucifix on the wall, lit by a tiny, blurry, soft red light just above it, the room felt totally dark.

I’d always open the door slowly because sometimes it creaked, and against the dead silence of the church, any creaking sounded like a loudspeaker blaring to my hyper-attentive ears.

Once inside, making sure the door was closed, I’d kneel on the small, narrow, padded wooden ledge fixed low to the floor. The kneeler was positioned in front of a small, screened window in the partition separating me from where the priest sat on the other side.

With my knees resting on the padded kneeler and my body upright, my face landed roughly level with the small covered screen in front of me, close enough to speak quietly through the opening without needing to lean in or raise my voice.

The priest never turned to directly face me. Through the mesh screen I could only make out his profile. His face was angled toward the front of the church, as if he were listening not to me, but through me, to something else, even though I was speaking directly to him.

Nana had told me once that the priest wasn’t really the one listening to my confession, but that he was standing in for Jesus, who would always love me and forgive me for any sin.

Whatever I said to the priest, according to my Nana, he would carry it to God on behalf of Jesus. She encouraged me to see the priest not as a normal man, but as someone far larger, who already knew what I was going to say and who was ready to forgive my sins and love me regardless of what I had done.

Sometimes it seemed like I was kneeling there forever before the priest slid the mesh screen curtain open, casting a little more light into my compartment. He was also listening to confessions from someone on the opposite side of the booth, alternating between the two of us. The longer I waited, the more nervous and self-conscious I became.

I couldn’t hear the other person’s confession as I knelt there, but the muffled voice of the priest did reach my ears, without my being able to make out what he was saying.

When the mesh screen curtain finally opened, I’d speak first, staring at the priest’s profile, wondering if he recognized my voice. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession.” I do confess here that, on occasion, I’d have to say it had been two, three, or more weeks!

The priest always responded, “Go ahead, my child.”

One Saturday, during confession, I decided to tell the priest that one of my sins was throwing hard-packed snowballs at passing cars in front of the church earlier in the week. I think it must have been the last sin I uttered to him because I can remember an awkward pause hanging in the air for a moment. Then, suddenly, he asked, “Are you a good shot?” His voice felt more playful than usual.

I felt a surge of electricity through my body at this shocking, out-of-the-blue question. I wriggled, contorting my body from side to side. My face quickly felt hot with embarrassment as my mind raced to come up with an answer.

“Ugh…I guess I’m pretty good,” I said softly.

I honestly don’t remember much else about what happened after my answer. It likely ended in the usual way, with the priest assigning specific prayers for my penance, followed by his absolution: “I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

After reciting my prayers, sometimes quickly, other times more reflectively, in the same pew I’d sat in before confession, I’d step out of the church into the normal, noisy world. I often felt relief and a sense of cleanliness, as if I’d been given a new lease on life, another chance to be good and not disobey God’s rules for being an upright Catholic boy.

Decades later, after my understanding of God had evolved many times, I found myself in a very different place.

Unlike my mostly voluntary trips to the confessional on Saturday afternoons, carrying relatively minor sins to be gently absolved by the local priest, this time I arrived at the office of a family counselor carrying something much heavier. I felt overwhelmed by what I saw as my grave moral failures as a father and husband.

The fifteen-minute drive from my apartment to the counselor’s office felt like I was descending into one of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of tortured, agonizing souls in Hell.

Back in high school, in 1969, I’d bought Deep Purple’s third album largely because of its cover, a detail from the Hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, filled with contorted, deformed, and tormented human bodies. I’d never heard of Bosch before, but I was so fascinated by the grotesque imagery that I had to buy the album.

I must have stared at that cover a hundred times as a teenager without ever really considering its unsettling implications. Now, decades later, gripping the steering wheel on my way to a stranger’s office, the image rose up uninvited, its tormented figures suddenly accompanying me on the drive.

By the time I trudged up the sidewalk and entered the building where the counselor’s office was located, I had little hope that a meeting with a man I’d never met could do much to lift the heaviness I was carrying.

The counselor, John, directed me to sit in the faded green sofa chair across from his desk. I stared at the worn seat cushion, permanently molded by the countless people who had sat there before me, and wondered, “Did everyone who sat in this chair for the first time feel as confused and hopeless as I do right now?”

I remember very little of what I actually said to John that day, or how he responded as I tried to explain what was happening in my family. I do remember telling him something about my faith background. He said he had counseled other members of my faith community before, but I didn’t believe him. At the time, we were discouraged from seeking counseling outside the faith, so his claim didn’t make sense to me.

That only added to my caution about how much of myself I wanted to reveal. I didn’t know what John believed about God, or whether he believed in God at all, and at that point in my life, that mattered greatly to me.

I was sitting across from a stranger, wondering what he could offer that my faith, my prayers, and my relationship with God had so far been unable to provide. As our session drew to a close, John asked calmly, “Jack, have you ever had any thoughts of suicide?”

After I assured him that, because of my faith, suicide was not an option, he walked over as I stood up, wrapped me in a bear hug, and said, “You’re going to be okay,” as he patted me on the back. I felt my body relax as his words sank into me, even though my mind couldn’t believe them.

“I’ve sat in that chair just like you did today, okay?” he said reassuringly as he walked me to the door.

When I got outside, I felt relieved that I’d gone through with the session, but I knew I wouldn’t and couldn’t come back again. A man’s reassurance was not the same as receiving God’s approval and forgiveness, at least not as I understood it back then.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I walked out of John’s office that day.

New relationships and some first-time experiences have given me a window into very different ways people understand and respond to suffering these days.

One of those windows opened when I was introduced to a coach who works with entrepreneurs and business leaders. Reading through his website and listening to one of his leadership seminars, I found myself lingering over the language he uses to describe how he works with clients.

Deep self-awareness. True essence. Limiting beliefs. Profound inner work. The wisdom of the body. Authentic connection to yourself. Your deepest values. Your inner landscape.

The words were familiar enough. I had encountered variations of them many times before in conversations and in the expanding worlds of coaching, wellness, healing, and personal growth. I had also explored some of these ideas and practices in my own life, including spending ten days in silence at a Vipassana meditation retreat, observing my breath, bodily sensations, and the seemingly endless movement of my own mind.

I wasn’t encountering this language as an outsider. What struck me this time was something I hadn’t paid much attention to before. It was where all those words seemed to be pointing.

The person who feels stuck, unfulfilled, disconnected, or anxious is invited to turn inward, become more aware of what is happening within, listen to the body, uncover what may lie outside conscious awareness, and discover something more authentic beneath the surface.

But what does it feel like to be suffering and be told to look within? What exactly am I looking for? How will I know when I’ve found it? And what happens when what I encounter inside myself isn’t wisdom or clarity, but more confusion?

Looking back across these different encounters, I am struck less by which approach offers the better answer than by where each one directs us when suffering arrives.

As a boy, I brought what troubled me before God.

Years later, overwhelmed by problems I could no longer resolve through faith alone, I reluctantly carried them into another man’s office.

Today, much of the language surrounding wellness, healing, and personal growth invites us to turn inward, toward the body, the inner landscape, and resources assumed to already be there.

Suffering has followed me through all three worlds. What has changed is where I have looked for an answer.

Anyone who says they’ve got the definitive answer to this question is, if you’ll pardon the expression, full of that something that sometimes comes out of you in a big, dark and heavy lump.

Let me say up front that I used to think I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the answer to this question.

My certainty rested on unprovable metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the cosmos, the nature of human beings, and yes, that three-letter word with a capital G, God.

Back then, I assumed there was a God as explained to me in my parents’ Catholic tradition. God, as a reality, was a given.

I held for decades the belief that life was inherently meaningful because God, as I understood Him, created all things, was interested in my life, and would always be there to watch over me.

Just because my beliefs rested on assumptions that cannot be proven or disproven doesn’t mean those assumptions were meaningless.

Have you ever experienced being held by a power or force, or whatever you want to call it, in such a way that every second of your life overflowed with joy and a “peace that passeth all understanding”?

To try and put this experience into words, I’d say it’s like eating your favorite ice cream, recalling a beautiful sunset, and quietly drifting off into a peaceful sleep, while somehow knowing you are an integral part of everything that IS, all at once.

I have a different kind of certainty now, the certainty of uncertainty. A different kind of holding, the holding that comes from letting go of any definition of what’s holding.

Yes, I’ve listened to the anthropologists, believers, materialists, and others offer their particular answers to this question. Bless them all for giving it the old college try.

Many of us want concrete answers about most everything, even the toughest existential questions.

I know what evolution says. I’ve read enough to trust that it explains, remarkably well, how the human form arose from earlier forms.

But the question of why there is form at all, or a universe capable of producing form, is a different question altogether.

When we say form, what are we referring to?

The human form isn’t only something described in textbooks or traced back through fossil records or DNA, is it?

Perhaps the deeper question isn’t simply how the human form emerged, but what makes this human form possible to appear?

Before we ask where we are going, we might first pause before the fact that we are here.

Recently, I stumbled upon the story of the Inca girl, La Doncella, discovered by archaeologists in 1999, fully clothed and remarkably preserved on Llullaillaco, a 22,110-foot volcano on the Argentina-Chile border.

According to known Inca history, this teenage girl was offered to the gods as part of the Inca ritual of capacocha, to secure the empire’s favor, protection, and success.

This aspect of the story is fascinating in itself, but I was drawn to something beyond her selection as a ritual sacrifice.

Looking at photographs and watching short video clips of La Doncella enclosed in a glass display case, I found myself mysteriously drawn to her.

Sitting there in still-colorful but faded ceremonial garb, with her long dark hair, well-preserved skin, and seemingly serene facial expression, I found myself unable to look away.

Yet, what was I being drawn towards?

“She” no longer existed—only her form.

I imagined making the journey to that museum to stand before her. Not to study her, as the scientists were doing, but to ponder what makes it possible for this human form to appear, to live, to grow, and to “die”?

Somehow, I felt at one with this stranger’s form, as though I were sitting beside her in that glass chamber.

I experienced a slight feeling of disorientation, as though I were frozen in time, everything narrowing to that one moment projected back to me through my phone.

I found myself asking: What happened to this young girl when her physical body froze to death?

Where did she go, or not go?

We’ve progressed rapidly in the West since the introduction of Enlightenment thinking and science.

We understand far more than previous generations about how our bodies work, how diseases spread and are cured, how the universe expands, and how the human form evolved over thousands and thousands of years.

And yet, when it comes to the question of where we came from and where we are going, we are still incapable of answering it with conviction.

Isn’t that odd? Isn’t it strange?

Why is human life like that?

Why isn’t a clear answer available to us?

Would our lives be any better off if we had a convincing, universally accepted answer to this question?

Or would it not matter one iota?

Over the next few weeks, through a series of long phone conversations, we caught up on the previous thirty years and what life looks like today. In one memorable conversation, he asked me to list the influential teachers, books, and other spiritually related materials I’d accumulated, and to share what each had done for me.

At one point, he said something that struck me as odd.

“Jack, I actually don’t have any beliefs that I live by.”

Surprised, I immediately shot back, “But Tom, isn’t what you just said a belief? If you say you have no beliefs, isn’t that a belief about not having any beliefs?”

“No,” he replied instantly. “It’s not.”

“Yes, it is,” I returned, a defiant tone in my voice. “Everyone has beliefs. Even the Cowardly Lion had beliefs. Remember? ‘I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do…’”

I quickly followed up. “And what about the recent bestseller by Shawn Achor, The Power of Beliefs? He identifies seven core power beliefs that will lead to greater success and life fulfillment.”

“I’m not saying beliefs don’t have merit,” Tom replied, “but I no longer make beliefs the centerpiece of my life. I’m done playing that game on myself.”

Tom’s statement jarred me. Without realizing it at the time, it planted a kind of worm in my mind that wiggled its way into my thinking over the next several days.

“Okay, Tom, I can see we aren’t going to resolve this right now, but I still say having no beliefs is itself a belief.”

We both chuckled, and over the next few months, Tom and I continued sharing our ideas and attitudes about life.

What Tom meant by having “no beliefs,” I slowly realized, wasn’t that he had no opinions or working assumptions. It was that he refused to turn any of them into ultimate, unchallengeable stories about reality.

“I still make decisions,” he told me at one point. “I still care about things. I still have hunches about what’s true, but don’t look at any of this as the final word on reality or who I’m supposed to be. I live each day by responding to what shows up in front of me, without adding drama or interpretations to each experience.”

So maybe I was right that Tom had beliefs after all. But I’d been asking the wrong question. The real difference between us wasn’t whether he had beliefs, it was whether he’d let any of them harden into something no experience was allowed to touch.

That distinction is what I want to follow here, because once I saw it in Tom, I started seeing its absence everywhere.

One writer friend of mine writes extensively about America as God’s beacon of hope for the world, God’s chosen nation at this time in history. As far as he’s concerned, if Christians in America don’t start doing a better job of living up to the teachings of Jesus, America’s future will darken further, and the world will plunge into greater chaos and violence.

His writing doesn’t project a proposition about America and its destiny so much as a confident, self-assured tone, as if what he writes is already an actual, verifiable fact, not to be critiqued or reconsidered for accuracy or veracity.

What struck me wasn’t that he believed America had a unique role in history. Lots of people have believed that. What struck me was that there was no hint this was an interpretation, a hope, or even a deeply held conviction. It was presented as settled knowledge, a fact about reality itself.

It's like the proverbial claim some Christians make about the Bible: "The Bible is the Word of God." How do you know that? "Because the Bible tells me so."

I bring him up briefly, as a milder version of something I encountered more fully in another friend, one I’ve known for over fifteen years. His case is worth slowing down for.

He holds an absolute belief in the truthfulness of his church’s teachings about God and the solution to human suffering and evil. When I pointed to the possibility of disconfirming evidence, things that might implicate the framework he’s committed to, he let me know that the framework itself can never be directly implicated.

To him, any alleged disconfirming evidence against the framework is, by definition, untrustworthy because the person bringing it is always biased, and their views about the framework are inevitably tainted and never objective.

When I pushed further and asked what evidence, in principle, could ever show his framework was wrong, he offered three hypothetical, internal doctrinal errors, the only kinds of flaws his framework could contain.

Every example he gave was framed at a metaphysical level, almost impossible to test in any straightforward way. Meanwhile, any lived outcomes of the framework, like harm, contradiction, or disillusionment in the community, were automatically ruled out in advance as irrelevant and untrustworthy.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think this makes him a fool or a liar. Most working belief systems, including the scientific ones and the moral ones I rely on every day, keep some core commitments that aren’t up for grabs at every moment. You can’t function without some bedrock.

The difference isn’t that my friend has convictions he protects. It’s that his framework has quietly expanded the protected zone to cover everything, so that no lived experience, no matter how damaging, ever counts as evidence against it.

He gave me the impression that, from the inside, his framework feels robust, rational, and open. From the outside, it looks like a system that has quietly immunized itself against the very experiences that might call it into question.

That’s the pull and the cost of self-sealing frameworks. They offer coherence, safety, and belonging. They answer the deep human hunger for a world that makes sense. But they allow a steady filtering of reality, where some experiences are welcomed as confirmation and others are labeled as noise, irrational bias, or attack.

Over time, a person inside this kind of framework may genuinely not see what others see. Not because they’re dishonest, but because the framework was allowed to train perception to sort experience in a particular way.

His openness was genuine, but it was directed only at corrections unlikely ever to occur, while the evidence that actually challenges the story from the outside gets dismissed as tainted or misdirected.

That’s the quiet power of a self-sealing framework. It allows open discussion and inquiry while making sure the most threatening kinds of evidence are never allowed in.

I recognize this pattern because I’ve lived inside it myself, not just observed it in others.

There was a time when my own faith community functioned as a self-sealing framework for me. My dad, who passed away a few years ago, used to point out his objections, often with disdain: “When are you going to get the hell out of that group before the bottom falls out and you’re left with nothing?” I didn’t hear concern. I heard ignorance. I was convinced he didn’t understand what my community really was, and that one day he’d have to change his mind.

It took years, and the actual collapse of parts of that world, for me to see that he had spotted cracks from the outside that I was too invested to see from the inside. He wasn’t inside the story with me, and that was exactly why he could see what I couldn’t.

That’s part of why I can see my friend’s framework the way I do. I’ve spent years inside a framework built the same way his is, sealed, complete, unable to let outside evidence register as real.

I know what that feels like from the inside, not just what it looks like from a distance. He hasn’t had the occasion, or maybe the need, to stand outside a framework the way I’ve had to stand outside mine.

I don’t say that to claim my vantage point is truer than his. I say it because it’s different, built by having occupied both positions rather than just the one he’s still standing in. Whether that gives me anything worth trusting is a separate question, and probably his to answer as much as mine.

I think about that a lot now, because the clearest view of a self-sealing framework rarely comes from within it. It comes from someone standing close enough to care, but far enough outside to notice what’s being filtered out.

A different kind of filtering shows up in Karen Carpenter’s story, and the more I sit with it, the less I think this is a stretch.

Karen didn’t just misjudge her body the way you might misjudge a distance or a color. She held something closer to a conviction about it, strong enough to override the evidence right in front of her.

People close to her tried to show her, with medical charts and visible signs, that she had lost too much weight and needed to eat. From the outside, the evidence seemed undeniable. From the inside, when Karen looked in the mirror, she experienced herself as not thin enough, still needing to do something about it.

That’s not a passive glitch in perception. That’s a belief doing what beliefs do when they are allowed to seal off and filter out the weight scales, the charts, the people who loved her, because none of it was allowed to count as evidence against what she already knew to be true about her body.

Karen did eventually find her way to a different vantage point, gaining weight and making plans to rebuild her life, but not until real, permanent damage had already been done.

If any of this feels familiar, it may not be because you share my friend’s theology or Karen’s struggle, but because you recognize what it’s like to live inside a story that protects itself.

The sense of certainty. The safety of having an answer for everything. The belonging that comes from sharing the same script. And maybe, too, the quiet discomfort when some experience, some relationship, some fact doesn’t fit and has to be pushed away or reinterpreted.

I’m not suggesting we try to live with no frameworks or beliefs. We all need working stories to get through the day, and some of those stories need a firm floor under them, or they wouldn’t hold us at all. But there’s a difference between a floor and a sealed room.

Although my friend and I have known each other for over fifteen years, only now, for the first time, have I fully sensed the weight of a life lived inside a sealed story that doesn’t allow outside evidence in.

There’s a texture to our friendship I hadn’t noticed before, the careful sidestepping of certain topics, the way some conversations glide smoothly while others hit an invisible wall. We’ve been batting these things around for years, but now that I see the structure underneath, something has shifted.

I want to hold that seeing loosely, though, and not mistake it for the last word. What I’m calling clarity is still my own reading of him, built from my side of the glass, and it deserves the same question I’m asking of his framework: what would count as evidence that I’ve got this wrong?

The trust between us is still there. The history is still there. But the ground has changed, and I don’t think things will be quite the same again.

The next time we meet up for an early morning breakfast at our favorite spot, if we do, I imagine us sitting there, looking at each other across the table. We’ll look the same, our faces, the history in our eyes, but something unspoken will occupy the space between us that wasn’t there before.

Maybe we’ll talk about it. Maybe we won’t.

But underneath it all, both of us will know that a certain conversation, not available previously, has become possible now, or impossible, depending on how you look at it.

That’s the thing about seeing the structure of someone’s framework. Once you see it, you can’t quite unsee it. And once you suspect the other person knows you’ve seen it, something in the relationship recalibrates, not necessarily for the worse, but not simply for the better either.

I don’t know what happens next. I only know that whatever happens will carry the weight of this recognition, and of the question I’m still asking myself along with him: what kind of evidence would I allow to matter here?

Some friendships survive that kind of seeing. Some don’t.

Some become something else entirely.

All I know is that sitting across from him next time, I’ll be looking into the eyes of someone I’ve known for a very long time, and also someone I’m meeting for the first time.

It was a long, thoughtful response to an essay I published on June 19, 2026.

The essay my friend responded to begins with the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer sent in 1944 to Lubang Island in the Philippines with orders to destroy the airfield, harass the population, and never surrender.

Living deep in the jungle, Onoda was unaware that Japan had officially surrendered to the Allied Powers in September 1945.

For the next 29 years, he and a small group of men held out on the island, convinced the war was still going on.

In October 1945, American aircraft dropped leaflets over the island, announcing Japan’s defeat and surrender, urging combatants to come out of hiding and prepare to return to Japan.

When Onoda and the men with him examined the dropped leaflets, and later the Japanese newspapers, letters, and photographs left by search parties—all announcing that the war had ended, and pleading for them to come out of hiding—they concluded it was fake, enemy propaganda.

In Onoda’s world, the only thing that could end the war was his commanding officer’s direct order, not the world’s evidence that the war had already ended.

Any evidence against his perceived reality was reinterpreted as deception, and the structure of his world remained untouched.

One of the most striking reinterpretations of disconfirming evidence Onoda made concerned Japanese newspapers left on the island, which clearly showed post-surrender life in Japan.

Instead of seriously considering the possibility that the war was over, Onoda saw these newspapers as proof that the war against America was still going on.

In Onoda’s mind, if Japan had truly been defeated, no Japanese citizen would be alive, because he believed every Japanese citizen would fight to the death before ever surrendering to the Americans.

The newspapers, Onoda reasoned, far from proving the war had ended, proved it had not ended. They showed Japanese civilians living normal lives, which, in his logic, would be impossible if Japan had truly lost.

Evidence that clearly demonstrated the war was over was recast by his self-sealing logic as convincing proof that he must carry on fighting the enemy.

I saw the same kind of self-sealing logic at work in my friend’s responses.

Over several days of email exchanges about the essay, an unsettling, almost Twilight Zone–like feeling came over me.

At first, I called it disorientation, but that word does not aptly capture what I experienced.

Disorientation suggests confusion, a temporary loss of bearings.

What I felt, as the messages accumulated, was a shifting mix of sadness, rage, exasperation, bewilderment, and, by the end, a quiet hopelessness.

Beneath all of it was a single, persistent question I asked: When does accumulating disconfirming evidence make it necessary to critique or re-examine a framework?

I’m writing from inside a tradition that understands itself as carrying a divine mandate, with a clear structure of authority, calling, and assignment.

I have seen, first-hand, how this framework allowed for abuse, neglect, and tragic circumstances to play out in the lives of faithful, devoted people.

When I suggested that potential disconfirming evidence against a framework might require the framework to be questioned, my friend’s response was not to examine the framework, but to reinterpret any so-called disconfirming evidence.

In his view, the framework remains pure.

Any failure is the individual’s failure to stay properly aligned with it, for whatever reason.

The framework cannot be blamed for what happens to individuals within it.

Instead, it must be upheld as the standard by which individuals within it are judged.

That move is what made our exchange feel so uncanny.

I was bringing concrete pain, lived experience, and observable harm with my question.

He was offering a self-sealing logic that turned those very facts into proof of personal misalignment.

At first, the sadness surprised me.

I had expected disagreement, maybe even debate.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly our exchange became a place where lived harm was translated, almost gently, into a lesson about personal responsibility and alignment.

I thought of all the faithful, devoted individuals doing everything asked of them, whose suffering gets reinterpreted this way.

The sadness wasn’t just for them.

It was for the realization that someone I cared about could hold this logic so firmly.

With each message, the same logic returned: the framework remains pure. It is the individuals within it who are found wanting.

Something in my gut tightened when I realized what my friend was alluding to here.

It wasn’t just intellectual disagreement.

It felt like a betrayal of the very people the framework claims to serve.

There were moments I wanted to grab hold of him, shake him, plead with him, just as the search parties and dropped leaflets pleaded with Onoda to come out of the jungle, give up, and acknowledge that the war was over.

But every plea I made to my friend got absorbed into the same logic.

In his world, my leaflets of possible disconfirming evidence were not evidence at all. They were temptations to be rejected.

I would ask, “When does the pattern itself become evidence?”

He would answer, “The pattern is always a collection of individual stories.”

I would press, “What if the individuals are faithful, devoted, doing everything asked of them?”

He would return, “Then the issue must be alignment.”

The loop closed neatly every time.

Exasperation set in.

I was playing chess while he was quietly playing checkers and insisting I was breaking the rules.

There were moments I read his messages and had to pause, not because they were unclear, but because they were too clear.

They made perfect sense inside a world I no longer recognized as my own.

We were speaking the same language about framework, evidence, and responsibility, but the grammar had changed.

I was using those terms to ask when a framework might need to be questioned.

He was using the same terms to explain why that question, properly understood, cannot and does not need to be asked.

The bewilderment was not about his clarity.

It was about the realization that we were living in different realities, built from the same words.

There was one crucial difference between his world and Onoda’s.

Onoda’s conviction, however rigid, was a belief about the world, a claim that could, in principle, be proved false.

That is why it could end.

When his commanding officer arrived in 1974 with the standing to declare the war over, Onoda could finally give up the fight and return to Japan. He was finally able to let the evidence in, evidence that had accumulated over decades, but which his self-sealing logic had refused to let in.

My friend’s posture cannot be approached the same way.

There is no commanding officer who can arrive to confirm any disconfirming evidence, because the vow he has taken is self-authored, self-enforced, and self-sealing.

Any “commanding officer” who showed up with contrary evidence would, by his own logic, be just another biased observer, another individual whose testimony is tainted by misalignment.

By the time of our final exchange, the rage had burned down.

What remained was a quiet hopelessness.

Not about my friend, not about our relationship, but about the possibility of this conversation ever reaching a different place.

The framework he described was built to withstand exactly what I was bringing to it.

Onoda at least had a commanding officer who could arrive and end the war.

My friend had no such off-ramp.

The vow he had taken offered no end date.

And to make it even harder, this was someone I had called a friend for years.

We had developed and nurtured a relationship in which I felt safe enough to share my doubts, my questions, the experiences that didn’t fit the story I’d been given, the story I’d lived in for decades.

Over the years, whenever I shared with my friend about my doubts and the things that didn’t fit the story I’d been given about the framework, I now realize he rarely directly replied or tried to argue with me.

He often remained politely silent.

I told myself this was openness, a kind of generous space for my uncertainty.

What I didn’t realize was that the silence wasn’t neutrality.

It was the quiet carrying of a framework that, when finally voiced, reclassified everything I’d shared as personal failure, for whatever reasons or excuses I might offer, to remain aligned.

The silence, I came to see, was not a space for my doubts.

It was a holding pattern for a logic that, once spoken, left no room for them.

That realization added a new edge to everything.

Sadness, yes, but also a sharp sense of betrayal.

Not because he disagreed with me, but because the terms of our friendship, as I understood them, were not the terms he was operating under.

My vulnerability was being quietly reclassified as misalignment, a failure to stay aligned with the framework.

I’m not trying, in the end, to prove who is right or wrong here.

What I care about is identifying the pattern and its consequences.

What it does to people, to relationships, to the possibility of truth-telling inside a community that claims to value it.

Here is the core of my friend’s logic, as I see it, stated plainly:

Individuals within the framework will never uncover objective evidence against the framework, because such so-called evidence will always be tainted and biased by the observer, whatever their reason or motive, and thus cannot be trusted.

It always comes down to misalignment with the framework.

The people are the ones who, unfortunately, fail to adhere to it.

That is the self-sealing move.

Evidence is not weighed.

It is automatically disqualified by definition.

The observer in possession of what is claimed as disconfirming evidence is always suspect.

It cannot be any other way.

The framework is always innocent.

I still don’t have a clean answer to the question I started with: When does accumulated disconfirming evidence make it necessary to critique or re-examine a framework itself?

What I do know is what it felt like to live inside that question for several days with someone I care about.

I know the sadness of seeing harm reinterpreted as failure.

The anger of watching a system protect itself by placing all the blame on individuals.

The exasperation of circling the same logic with no exit.

The bewilderment of sharing a language but not a world.

And the hopelessness of realizing that, for my friend, the framework is not something that can be questioned from the inside.

That realization does not end the question.

It only makes it more urgent.

Because the danger is not just in holding a self-sealing view.

It is in inhabiting a system that reflexively reinterprets all disconfirming evidence, folds it over into something it is not, and calls that faithfulness.

On the last day of our email exchange, I told him I was planning to use this experience as the basis for my next essay.

He acknowledged that.

And that’s where it stands.

If he believes I’ve misrepresented what passed between us, he’s welcome to respond in the Substack comments or with me, personally.

Perhaps you have sometimes wondered how such a thing is possible. I have asked myself the same question in relation to my own life.

Before looking more closely at my own situation, let us examine the case of Japanese World War II soldier Hiroo Onoda, which may help us understand a persistent human tendency: the refusal, sometimes for years, to let contrary evidence reshape our prevailing view of reality.

Onoda was not a typical Japanese soldier. Before being sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines in December 1944, he trained as an intelligence officer at an elite military school specializing in guerrilla warfare and counterintelligence.

His orders were to destroy the airfield and pier there and harass the enemy. His commanding officer told him never to surrender and not to commit suicide, even if it meant being captured by the enemy. He was promised that, whatever happened, the Japanese military would one day return to retrieve him.

Onoda carried these orders and promises with him long after World War II ended.

He first heard news about Japan’s defeat and the end of the war a few months after the formal signing of Japan’s surrender.

A campaign of dropping leaflets throughout the island had started, declaring the news of Japan’s defeat and surrender, but when Onoda and the other men with him examined them, they concluded that they were fake, enemy propaganda.

Over the next twenty-nine years, each time more convincing evidence was presented that the war was over and he could safely come out of hiding, he continued to disbelieve it, finding new ways to dismiss it.

In Onoda’s imagined world, the newspapers dropped on the island showing daily life in Japan did not convince him that the war was over. Instead, they confirmed that the war was still going on.

If Japan had really lost the war, he reasoned, there should not have been any life in Japan. Everybody should have been dead, because he believed every Japanese citizen would fight to the death and never surrender to America.

Onoda believed that his country, and by extension himself, had been assigned the task of creating what was, at the time, referred to as the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Japan’s wartime vision of a Japan-led Asian bloc presented as liberation from Western colonialism.

Only after his former commanding officer came to the island in March 1974 and declared that the war was over and Japan had lost, could Onoda allow the evidence before him for years to penetrate his imagination and overturn his deeply held convictions.

At the end of his memoir, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, Onoda describes the scene of his departure from Lubang by helicopter the day after his surrender. In a moment of reflection as he looked down at the island where he had spent the last thirty years of his life, he wondered, “Why had I fought here for thirty years? Who had I been fighting for? What was the cause?”

Earlier in the memoir, he seems to hint at possible inner turmoil when he recalls looking out of his hotel window after returning to Tokyo:

“When finally I did see those thousands of cars in Tokyo, moving along the streets and the elevated expressways without a sign of war anywhere, I cursed myself. For thirty years on Lubang I had polished my rifle every day. For what? For thirty years I had thought I was doing something for my country, but now it looked as though I had just caused a lot of people a lot of trouble.”

Because the memoir ends with his 1974 return to Tokyo from Lubang, we cannot know for sure what internal changes he experienced after his surrender.

We do know that he eventually moved to Brazil, where he worked on a cattle ranch. Then, in 1984, at the age of sixty-two, he returned to Japan to work with young people through the Onoda Nature School.

He may have gradually constructed a new world of meaning and orientation, or he may have carried his old orientation forward into new circumstances without fully letting go of the old.

His memoir suggests that factual recognition and inner transformation are not the same thing. One can be brought face to face with reality and still have to reckon with the slower, more uncertain work of becoming someone who can actually live in relation to it.

In my case, what I had taken for granted as reality was, in fact, a reality of my own making. Through imagination, story, narrative, and truth claims, I constructed a world that felt solid, necessary, and true. I lived and moved confidently within that framework for decades.

When that world began to break apart, when the leaflets started falling and contradicting my carefully constructed world of beliefs and attitudes, I initially denied the conflicting evidence.

The first leaflet contained rumors that a highly respected leader in the organization had been drinking and using drugs. This was inconceivable to me. So, I denied the possibility.

I had been living for so long in this imaginative world that nothing from the outside could make its way in. As far as I was concerned, this was an unsubstantiated rumor meant to besmirch the reputation of a righteous man. It later turned out to be true.

The second leaflet announced that the wife of a popular and respected man in our faith community, whom I personally knew, one day, up and took her kids, and left her husband for good, never to return.

I would have readily dismissed this evidence as well, seeing it as another attempt to sully the reputation of a morally upright man, if not for the fact that I happened to be around on the day she left, at the time not knowing she and her kids were never coming back.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, cracking open the door a bit for me to take a closer look.

My denial of factual evidence up to then stemmed from the belief that I had been called by a transcendent God to carry out a special task through a specific organization sanctioned by God for that purpose.

This vision was shaped by an aspiration to help build a world of unity and cooperation among all nations and peoples, without physical violence.

How could these kinds of problems and behavior be a part of my imagined world? I asked myself.

As mounting evidence continued to contradict the story I had been telling myself for decades, I slowly confronted the frightening possibility that I would have to transform the way I saw myself and the world around me.

The implications of this realization felt like the floor I had been walking on suddenly giving way beneath me. It was as if a large hole had opened up in the middle of my chest, a hole so wide and deep, it took all my strength to get out of bed every morning and face the world.

And yet the way forward was not simply to adopt a better interpretation or quickly exchange one story for another.

The deeper task was to move through the discomfort of that collapse and let it affect the very center from which I understood myself.

That meant not only revising what I believed, but changing my relation to belief itself. It meant learning to live with less certainty, less defense, and less need to force reality into forms that could protect me from pain.

In that sense, the transformation was not primarily intellectual, though thought was part of it. It was existential. It involved a gradual reorientation toward myself, toward others, and toward the larger world I inhabit.

What changed was not only the content of my view, but the way I stood in relation to truth, vulnerability, and reality itself.

And perhaps that is the hardest kind of change: not replacing one framework with another, but the slow becoming of a person able to live without needing every question answered.

Recently, I pulled a printed photograph from among a heap of old pictures in my bedroom dresser drawer. Looking into the faces of the six adults in the photo, I realized that three of them had already died.

When they were alive, each seemed as if they would always be around, always a part of my life.

I felt pulled into the photograph, into memories of these men and women who had helped shape my life and whom I loved dearly. Now, each of them was gone from my life.

Never to be seen or heard from again—gone just like that.

The photograph raised a larger question: all of us will be part of this one day.

When our time comes, those who’ve loved us will also stare at our photo and feel that same sense of finality.

One of the men in the photo was my old boxing coach. I met him when I signed up for his boxing class at the local community college. In his late sixties, he had trained champions in the New York City area decades earlier.

We stayed in touch long after the boxing course I took with him ended, and over time became close friends.

I got to know his wife and children. I helped him with chores inside and outside his three-story home. Occasionally, we’d have lunch or dinner together. He used to bring me along to help with his annual boxing dinner event, where he honored former champions.

As time went by, we both got older, and I got busier with family and work. Gradually, we saw one another less and less.

One day, after a long stretch between visits, I went to see him.

After his assistant told me he was in his upstairs office, I went up to see him.

I found him in a wheelchair behind his desk, his back to me, staring out the window onto the street below. His hair was now snow white and nearly all gone, and he seemed much smaller. I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or awake.

I slowly walked up and stood behind him, wondering what he was thinking, how he was doing.

He never turned.

Two months later, he was gone.

One day, we are not going to wake up again.

Here one moment, gone the next.

It all started innocently enough.

One Saturday afternoon, while stretched out on our living room couch scrolling through YouTube on my phone, I stumbled across music reaction videos. Here, people who looked young enough to be one of my own kids expressed awe, admiration, and respect for the songs I listened to in high school and college.

As I lay there watching, a smile spread across my face, and a quiet warmth seemed to spread over my body. Watching young people from diverse backgrounds and musical interests react this way stirred up my own long-standing attachment to music and all it has carried for me over the years.

Gradually, I started making sure my phone was on the nightstand before going to bed. It became a familiar, needed presence I could turn to like a trusted friend.

I can now see that the familiar surrounding space filling the bedroom gradually faded from my awareness until little remained except the glowing screen in front of me.

A couple of nights ago, while reaching for the phone as I crawled into bed, I paused and stared at it in my hand. For a moment, the routine seemed strange. Here I was, preparing for sleep with a glowing screen inches from my face, voices and music flooding my ears. For the first time, I considered whether it would be better to stop bringing my phone to bed.

Over the next few nights, this question kept gnawing at me, but I still kept taking the phone to bed.

And then, one night, I didn’t put the phone on the nightstand. For the first time in months, the nightstand was empty.

When I lay my head on the pillow, the bedroom seemed to expand. My bed and the surrounding space, previously faded into the background, suddenly felt present again. Somehow it all seemed alive, almost as if the room itself were talking to me.

What’s happening? I asked myself.

Then I became conscious of the darkness in the room and how my body seemed to blend with it as I sank into the mattress.

I began to wonder whether I’d be able to fall asleep right away or lie awake for a long time.

Suddenly, several unrecognizable images, green and flesh-colored, appeared in rapid succession. Were my eyes closed when this happened? I couldn’t tell, and I had no idea where the images came from. Were those human faces I’d just seen? I asked myself. I couldn’t be sure.

At once, my thoughts turned to some recent family concerns. Faces, conversations, and situations involving specific family members began moving through my mind. I began to meditate on these concerns, consciously sending thoughts of love and care to specific family members.

With my eyes closed, I turned my attention to what might happen after I fell asleep. What kind of dreams might I have? Would I be ready for whatever came, especially if it brought fear or dread, as sometimes happened over the years?

Almost immediately, I found myself offering a simple prayer: I want to be ready for whatever comes, not trying to avoid or deflect it, but meeting it with courage, faith, and openness.

The empty nightstand had given something back to me I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.

It would be hard to go back.

But the story of this knee is much older than three months. It goes back to 2021, when swelling and discomfort finally brought me back to my knee doctor.

“Your knee,” he said, directing my attention to the X-rays on the screen, “shows signs of osteoarthritis. The degree of cartilage degeneration is more severe on the inside of the joint, and that’s likely where your discomfort is coming from. Because you’re not in significant pain right now, I’d be careful not to place too much stress on it, and if it gets worse, come back and see me.”

I trusted what my doctor told me. He came highly recommended by a close friend. At the time, I knew little about the inner workings of the knee.

The diagnosis worried me. This same doctor had already performed total knee replacement surgery on my left knee two years earlier. The first few weeks after that surgery, my wife had to wait on me hand and foot. It took nearly six months before I trusted the knee enough to return to work.

I didn’t want us to go through that experience again.

Unfortunately, my fears began to grow. Gradually, walking became increasingly difficult. With nearly every step, I felt a stabbing pain at the center of my kneecap. If you can imagine a hundred sewing needles clumped together, jabbing straight into your knee and then retracting, that’s what it felt like each time my foot hit the ground.

It seemed like my knee had a mind of its own, functioning according to its own logic, and there was little I could do about it. Before all of this, I just assumed my knee would always function smoothly. Now it had become something I constantly had to contend with, no longer silently cooperating.

All I knew was that I wanted the pain to go away. I feared I was slowly heading toward another knee replacement, and I felt helpless.

As all of this was happening, I kept recalling two earlier injuries to the knee, both of which I had pushed past without ever really dealing with them. At that time, my attitude toward doctors was to stay away from them as much as possible.

Both injuries resulted from my martial arts practice. The first injury frightened me more than anything else. During judo practice, my partner threw me in a way that rapidly twisted my right knee counterclockwise. As the knee twisted, I heard clicking and felt popping across the middle of the joint. My mind raced: What the hell just happened? As I hit the mat, I wondered if I’d be able to stand back up and walk.

To my surprise, I was able to get off the floor and move around without any pain or discomfort in the knee. I was shocked and relieved. As far as I was concerned, since there was no pain, no real injury had occurred, and I simply carried on with the remainder of the practice.

The second injury happened years later during a self-defense class. My instructor was demonstrating a judo sweep, and I landed forcefully on the inside of my right knee. Upon impact with the mat, a piercing pain shot through the inside of the joint, as if the tip of a sword had penetrated deep into the knee.

Unlike the earlier incident, this time, as I picked myself up, a hot, burning sensation flooded the inside of my knee, and when I stepped forward, sharp pain pulsed through my knee. Embarrassed more than anything else, I tried to ignore what had just happened and gutted out the rest of the practice as best I could. But I knew an injury had occurred.

For several days, I could hardly put pressure on the knee, walking with a slow, deliberate limp. Gradually, the pain went away on its own, and I was able to resume my practice. It felt like the knee had completely healed.

From the beginning of my training, I could feel the stress certain kicks and judo throws placed on my knees. I always pushed through the discomfort and pain anyway. Martial arts became part of my professional training while working in executive protection for high-profile individuals. At the time, I had made up my mind that if my knees ended up worn out or damaged down the line, that was a price I was willing to pay.

For the next three years, my knee became something I had to think about all the time. Simple activities like going for a walk or meeting up with people in public places were always accompanied by this nagging pain with every step I took. Constant swelling and a lingering sense of heaviness in the knee became an unwanted companion. I could no longer run, and sitting cross-legged on my meditation cushion became increasingly painful.

What I couldn’t see at the time was how completely I had adapted to living with the knee. I no longer expected the pain to go away. The discomfort became part of my everyday experience, something I quietly and reluctantly accepted. My knee became more like a separate part of my body, always demanding attention and limiting my comfort with nearly everything I did.

There was no way I was going to go back to my knee doctor for another X-ray. I did not want to hear that another knee replacement was only a matter of time. Looking back now, I cannot remember making any real effort to strengthen the knee or improve what was happening until one day last year, when I had a conversation with my oldest son about it.

After dinner one night, as we talked about what I could do for the knee, he suggested, “Before you get too old, why don’t you have the surgery done? You might be prolonging the inevitable, and the longer you wait, the longer it will take you to recover. The surgery you had on your left knee was successful, and it seems to have solved the problem. Why not just get it done?”

His suggestion was sound and based on the fact that my surgeon had taken a severely compromised knee and replaced it with one that functioned normally again. I went from limping around like Chester on Gunsmoke to what now feels like a normal knee again. Yet, something in me resisted his suggestion.

About a year earlier, I came across several well-known studies involving patients with chronic knee conditions facing surgery as a last resort. The patients were led to believe that surgery had been performed on them when, in fact, it had not.

In some cases, patients who were given these sham procedures reportedly improved. These reports raised questions about the role of expectations, beliefs, and the mind in pain and healing. At the time, though, my interest remained mostly intellectual. I was fascinated by the possibilities these studies pointed toward, but never seriously considered how my situation might improve if I actually applied some of the ideas they were exploring.

During a recent visit to my son’s house to see our newborn grandson, he suggested I check out a professional sports medicine facility to see how they might help with the knee. I found myself immediately getting excited about the possibility, even though I had never seriously pursued anything like that before.

The following week, I found myself at this facility. I remember standing there in front of the kinesiologist, pointing to my swollen knee. After explaining the history of the knee, he hooked me up to three different machines for ten minutes at a time, telling me these treatments could help increase blood flow, reduce swelling, encourage healing, and loosen scar tissue. At the end of our session, I could see the swelling had gone down a lot, but the sharp, shooting pain was still there with each step.

I returned four more times over the next few weeks. By the time my wife and I were ready to return home, the swelling seemed to be under control, and on occasion, while walking around during the day, I’d suddenly realize that I was walking and the knee felt almost normal.

The first time I experienced little or no pain in the knee, it was a shock. I’d gotten so used to walking around in a constant state of nagging pain that suddenly being without it seemed almost alien.

YouTube videos explaining the mechanics of the knee became an important part of learning about how the joint functions and responds to injury and trauma. As I learned more about the intricate relationship between muscles, ligaments, bones, cartilage, and nerves, it felt like discovering an unexplored world inside my own body.

The more I watched, the more I found myself marveling at what it actually takes for our knees to function properly. I began to realize how much I’d taken for granted what my knees had quietly done for me over the years, and also how my lifestyle and habits may have contributed to their deterioration.

As the knee slowly began responding, I found myself relating to it differently. While walking, I’d quietly talk to the knee, sometimes imagining it moving smoothly with each step. During rehab exercises, I began paying close, gentle attention to how the joint actually functioned, how muscles, tendons, and movement all worked together. Somewhere along the way, this evolving relationship with my knee deepened into a growing appreciation for the remarkable complexity and quiet intelligence of the human body.

Today, my knee feels lighter with less discomfort and pain. That’s today. I’m not sure what tomorrow will be like.

Whether my knee will continue to improve or eventually require surgery is not of primary concern right now.

What stays with me most through all of this is the mystery of how debilitating or life-threatening conditions can slowly or suddenly emerge, often without us even noticing what has been building beneath the surface for years.

Perhaps by learning to pay attention and listen more carefully to what our bodies may be communicating through pain, tension, fatigue, limitation, or even silence, we may discover ways of living with greater care and attentiveness.

At the start of my senior year of high school, I found myself drawn to books about improving my attitude and outlook on life.

I turned to titles such as Psycho-Cybernetics, Thoughts Through Space, and How to Use the Power of Prayer for solace, guidance, and inspiration.

At eighteen, I couldn’t name what was going on, but moving in this direction felt natural.

These books suggested that human beings possess underused mental and spiritual capacities, and that through certain techniques and practices, life could be dramatically improved.

At the same time, they implied the self needed to be healed, empowered, or expanded.

However, I wasn’t aware of these deeper implications. I simply experienced the books as hopeful, inspiring, and filled with possibility.

Few, if any, of my classmates shared my enthusiasm, and I never mentioned any of this to my mom or dad.

For weeks, I had been having a hard time falling asleep at night. I would turn on my transistor radio next to my bed and listen softly to my favorite AM station out of Chicago, WCFL. The reception was often spotty, and I’d feel a small sense of relief whenever I turned the dial just so and locked in a clear signal of the music I liked. WCFL was located several hundred miles from where I lived in New York.

When sleep didn’t come, I would sometimes lift my leg up into the air and let it drop back onto the bed, almost as if I were trying to exhaust myself physically.

During this time, something else started happening.

As I struggled to relax and drift off to sleep, I would suddenly feel as though some force were trying to enter my body.

It felt as if my spirit, or some part of me, was being squeezed out and off the side of the bed. I fought against this sensation inch by inch, feeling as though I were trying to claw my way back into my body.

If this had been a one-off experience, I’d probably have forgotten about it. But this happened several more times over a few weeks. I had no idea what was going on.

I first corresponded with the author, Harold Sherman, when ordering his book How to Use the Power of Prayer. When the book arrived, I found a small prayer meditation pamphlet tucked inside the book jacket.

On the typed pamphlet, Sherman had written a personal note encouraging me to use this seven-point meditation each night before bed. As I read it, I felt my body begin to relax and sink more deeply into the bed. I told myself I now had a way to protect myself from this strange experience, and that perhaps I could finally fall asleep more easily.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but looking back, I can see how his personal correspondence may have encouraged me during a sensitive and uncertain time in my life.

Not long afterward, I ordered his book Thoughts Through Space. It arrived a few weeks later in an oversized brown padded envelope. To my surprise, inside was a thick hardcover copy of the book. I had been expecting a paperback.

The book felt heavy in my hands. Its dark blue cover and gold-lettered title gave it the appearance of something old and important, while the thick, parchment-colored pages made it feel as though it belonged to another era. It even carried a slight musty smell.

Sitting on my bed in my downstairs basement bedroom, I opened to the front cover and was thrilled to discover Sherman’s handwritten inscription directed to me:

“Dear John: My thoughts go out through space to wish for you the finest things in life!”

In the weeks that followed, I began using these books in an effort to make things better.

I recited the prayer meditation each night before going to bed. This practice gave me a warm feeling of being held and protected by an invisible force I hoped would watch over me and protect me.

From Psycho-Cybernetics, I started to rehearse in my mind’s eye successfully shooting foul shots on the basketball court, hoping to improve my performance and increase my chances of becoming a starter on the high school team.

In Thoughts Through Space, I was fascinated by the idea that thought itself could travel and influence the mind of another. At night, lying in bed, I would focus my thoughts outward toward a high school friend, as if I might be able to reach his mind and send him messages.

Looking back, I can see that each of these approaches, though different in form, pointed in the same direction.

Whether it was prayer, visualization, or directing thought outward, each suggested something within me needed to be improved, strengthened, or brought into alignment.

Only later would I begin to recognize how easily this way of thinking can also carry the sense that something about the self needs fixing or repair.

What I did not yet understand was how naturally this longing could evolve into a search for a more complete and authoritative vision of reality.

Over time, that search would lead me into deep involvement with a religious movement that appeared to provide the right answers to my most pressing questions.

I felt fortunate to have found a story large enough to make sense of my life. It gave me a way to stand in the world with confidence and conviction about the future.

My steps grew lighter. There was more energy and bounce in my stride. My posture straightened. I smiled a lot more. I felt a renewed sense of purpose and meaning to my life.

But over time, things began to happen that gradually loosened the certainty I had once carried so completely.

I recall an experience during this period involving a co-worker who invited me to attend a Sunday service at his church. At one point during the service, a slim, elderly-looking man with silver-gray hair came to the front to give his personal testimony of faith. Early in his remarks, he said:

“I must be different than most people. Because, since the beginning of my faith journey many years ago, I’ve not changed one iota regarding my conviction about the truth of our teachings.”

Sitting there next to my co-worker, I marveled at what he had just said. Here was a man involved with his faith for decades who had not altered his views about his church and its teachings one bit. I took him at his word.

On my train ride back home afterward, I thought a lot about what this man had to say. What struck me was not whether he was right or wrong, sincere or insincere.

It was the realization that I could never again inhabit certainty in quite the same way.

The sentences came quickly, almost like a stream of consciousness. There was no pause to question what I was saying. What I was writing felt straightforward and factual, almost self-evident.

I finished the letter with the sense that I had said what needed to be said.

At the time, I wouldn’t have described this as believing something. It felt more like stating what was already the case.

Years later, while trying to reorganize a box of old correspondence, I came across an envelope with his name on it. Inside were several letters he had written in response

One in particular stood out. In it, he said that after reading my letter, he had thought what a loss it was to the Catholic Church that I had not become a priest.

“It’s your church’s gain,” he wrote, “but our loss.”

I remember reading that and recognizing something familiar in it. The same sense of certainty that had been present when I wrote to him was reflected back to me in his reply.

Looking back, that period of my life carried a particular momentum. Situations were addressed and resolved. Questions led to answers that felt complete and final.

That didn’t remain.

I watched the wife of a close friend load her minivan with belongings, her three children beside her, and drive away from the home they had shared for twelve years.

There had been no visible break, no noticeable conflict. One day she was there, the next she was gone. Where had she gone? What would happen to her and her children?

I remember standing there, waiting for some way to understand what had happened. Thoughts began to form, but they didn’t settle in the way they once would have. Nothing fully closed around it.

That wasn’t an isolated moment.

I began to notice it in other situations. During that period, questions arose that the answers I had once taken as complete no longer settled. The familiar sense of resolution didn’t come.

At one point, after an experience that brought up strong physical and emotional reactions, I sat with someone who offered a way to understand it.

As he spoke, I could feel something well-known beginning again, the movement to organize what had happened into something that could be understood and settled.

I started to follow it, with the sense it might take me somewhere I hadn’t been able to reach before.

It felt like it might finally come together.

Then I stopped.

Not because it didn’t make sense. Not because it was wrong.

But because the same movement was there again, the pull to be taken somewhere I hadn’t been able to reach before.

I saw the movement itself.

The attempt to resolve, to fix.

That movement was there again.

And with it, everything I had turned to before.

It was all there.

But it no longer held.

Over time, other things began to fall away.

Books once cherished no longer held my attention. Programs and podcasts that once promised to lead somewhere no longer held their pull.

What remained was not a new conclusion, but no conclusion.

And yet, nothing else seemed to stop.

Conversations continued. Decisions were made. The day moved as it always had.

What was no longer there was the sense that something still needed to be settled.

I’m sitting at my desk again now, writing this.

The same movements are still here. Thoughts form. Words appear. Memories come and go.

But they don’t land in the same way.

What stands out is not how that earlier certainty disappeared.

What stands out is that it is no longer here.

And there is no clear sense that it needs to return.

Just this, as it is, in the middle of an ordinary moment.

It’s not just about the rope. You're watching how the cowboy works with its motion without forcing it. It may look like it’s all in the wrist, but the whole body has to be aligned just right to keep those loops from collapsing to the ground, going slack and lifeless. The rope tends to follow when it’s handled just right.

The wind doesn’t respond in quite the same way.

No cowboy in his right mind would try to lasso the wind with his rope, would he?

Human ingenuity has found ways to harness the wind through sails, windmills, wind turbines, and gliders, but it cannot be captured or controlled. It can only be influenced, channeled, and adapted. It moves on its own terms, not ours.

And yet, that doesn’t stop us, does it? We look for methods, techniques, breakthrough moments, and new information, trying to get somewhere else, moving beyond where we currently stand.

We aren’t talking here about business acumen, time management, or career-track programs, which can all be measured and improved through the implementation of proven strategies. This is something else.

In those areas, progress is enhanced by controlling clear inputs, monitoring measurable outputs, and producing repeatable gains. But what if what we’re touching here doesn’t yield to control at all?

Is there a way this “wind” can be experienced as it is, without trying to harness it, control it, or influence it? What might that be like, not trying to get somewhere else, but remaining within what already is?

Or do we find ourselves trying to locate it, name it, describe it, and sort out what it can and cannot do?

If I had followed that path, much of my life would have been structured in advance. I would still have faced the question of how to live, but it would have unfolded within a shared framework rather than one I had to construct alone.

Some people say they knew from a young age what they wanted to do and simply followed it. Maybe they are fortunate in that way. For many of us, though, there is no clear path. We are left to piece things together ourselves, deciding what matters without a common map. That was certainly true for me.

For much of history, that burden was carried differently. Religious traditions offered shared beliefs and practices that oriented a person’s life. They did not remove uncertainty, but they gave it a shape and a place. This was my experience while living for decades inside a tradition that helped me better understand the meaning of my life and my place in the world.

Today, that shared framework has largely given way to something else: a world where the individual is responsible for determining meaning, truth, and purpose. You can hear it in the language we use. We are told to find our purpose, do what we love, and build a life that feels authentic. I first noticed this back in the early 1970s, with the sudden surge in popularity of self-help books, seminars, and workshops that emphasized self-discovery and personal development.

What are we already living inside of?

We move through daily life under these assumptions so naturally that they rarely come into view. They shape how we think, choose, and judge what matters, often without our noticing. I rarely questioned it.

Even our deepest questions—why am I here, what is the purpose of life—are asked from within this same self-referential frame. I remember sitting in a field overlooking a valley, asking myself what my life meant, and realizing that no shared answer was waiting for me. Whatever answer I arrived at would have to be my own.

What are we living inside of?

People respond to this in different ways. Some turn toward religious communities, where belief and practice offer a way to receive answers rather than construct them alone. I can see the appeal in that, especially in contrast to the endless stream of systems, programs, and advice all promising clarity or transformation.

Others take a different route, identifying as spiritual but not religious. They tend to distrust large institutions, especially religious ones, and place authority within personal experience. I have felt that pull as well, the desire for meaning without submission to something that feels imposed from the outside.

Still others approach these questions without reference to any higher authority, or remain uncertain about whether such answers can be known at all. And many people, occupied with work and relationships, rarely dwell on these questions in explicit terms. Even when I was fully immersed in pursuing a spiritual path, I often found little time outside of working and raising a family to focus on such concerns.

But across all these differences, the underlying situation remains the same: we are expected to determine for ourselves what is true, what matters, and how to live.

Before trying to answer those questions, it may be worth seeing that situation more clearly and recognizing how much it already shapes our answers.

At around ten years old, my Nana would sometimes take me to our local Catholic church on Saturday mornings to visit the fourteen “Stations of the Cross.” For those of you who didn’t grow up in the Catholic faith, the Stations of the Cross are a devotional practice that retraces the final events of Jesus Christ’s life, from his condemnation to his crucifixion and burial. Here’s how those visits went.

Starting at the back of the church, we would stand in front of station number one. On the wall in front of us hung a framed panel with bas-relief figures and scenes, sculpted in a plaster-like material that projected outward from the surface. Seven stations lined the left side of the church, and seven lined the right.

Holding my Nana’s hand, she would begin praying in a whisper, barely audible, for about thirty seconds. Then we would move on to the next station and do the same. This continued until we had prayed at all fourteen.

As we moved from one station to the next, Nana would explain that Jesus was being mistreated by people who did not know that God was living inside him. I remember feeling a sense of awe as I looked at each scene, wondering how one man could affect so many lives. I also remember thinking that God must be sad to see Jesus being treated this way.

Why was he treated so badly?

What did he do wrong?

Growing up in America in the 1950s through the late 1960s, I assumed God’s existence as a living reality, a fact of life. God was alive in the “heavens,” and He was always around in my life, up to and including punishing me for my bad deeds. (Ouch.)

During this time, broadly speaking, that orientation was shared across much of American culture. The prevailing Protestant-Catholic-Jewish consensus held that God exists, human beings are morally accountable to God, the universe has inherent meaning, and religion plays a legitimate role in public life. Differences certainly existed, yet these traditions largely agreed that the universe is a sacred, ordered reality, and that human beings occupy a defined place within it.

Today, holding such a view about God or the cosmos can seem peculiar or impractical, like reaching for a long-forgotten home rotary phone to call your best friend, only to realize the world no longer works that way, especially if you grew up in the 1990s or beyond.

Back when I was growing up, our rotary phone sat on the end table next to our living room sofa. If it rang, whoever was nearby answered it. Conversations took place within earshot of others in the room. Calls were often short because someone else might need to use the phone. If you called someone and they weren’t home, you waited. Communication belonged, in a sense, to the household. And in the house I grew up in, with seven siblings, there were plenty of fights over access to the phone.

Over time, that familiar rotary phone got replaced by the touch-tone keypad phone. Because my dad worked for the old New York Bell Telephone Company, he was able to get us one of these new phones, which he mounted on the wall in our kitchen. We were amazed at how quick and easy it was to dial a phone number using this keypad, compared with the slow turn of the rotary dial and its steady clicking as it returned to where it started, replaced now by a series of quick electronic beeps.

A few weeks later, our dad came home with what seemed like a magical device, a thirty-foot extension cord that made it possible to stretch the phone receiver all the way down the hallway and around the corner toward the bedrooms. I can still recall pulling that cord down the hallway and around the corner, trying to find a quiet place to talk with my girlfriend.

Then came the invention of the cordless phone. Walking around the house without having to stand next to the phone, or worrying about pulling the phone off the wall by yanking the extension cord too hard, felt like a whole new level of freedom in the house. But the landline touch-tone phone was still, largely, the reliable go-to phone, because reception on these early cordless phones was often spotty.

As reception improved, these personal mobile phones began to shift communication away from a location-specific, shared setting toward something more private and individualized. The cordless phone freed people from being tied to a single place, but it had not yet become the center of daily life, still largely limited to phone calls and rudimentary texting. That shift would come with the arrival of the smartphone.

This expansion was already underway with the rise of the home personal computer and early internet, and later with the portable laptop, though each remained something one had to sit down to access. I can still remember in the early 1990s opening up my IBM Butterfly laptop and dialing up an internet connection via AOL (anyone else remember?).

In 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, what we once used only occasionally became something we could carry with us and access at all times. Communication, information, and interpretation moved into the same device, available almost instantly and in private. Over time, this not only increased access but also created a more continuous form of engagement, where the flow of information and perspectives became constant and varied.

Today, many of us use this device from the moment we wake to the moment we drift off to sleep. (I confess, guilty as charged.) New patterns of attention, habits of behavior, and increasingly, how we understand ourselves and the world around us are shaped by it.

What began as unlimited, private, individual freedom to access the world via the smartphone has, in some cases, become full immersion in a highly speculative digital sphere. Now, with AI, the phone begins to take on a role in our thinking, offering interpretations that shape how we understand our experience and, increasingly, how we understand ourselves.

What was once held within a shared and structured phone culture has gradually morphed into something far more individualized, continuous, and private. Where communication once took place within a common space, shaped by visibility and informal accountability, it now occurs largely in seclusion, on demand, and without the same shared reference points. This creates a new set of conditions in which each person is increasingly responsible for managing a constant flow of input, interpretation, and response, largely on their own.

Just as the evolution of the phone gradually shifted communication away from a shared, visible, and structured setting into something more individualized, continuous, and private, a corresponding change has taken place in how we try to make sense of our lives.

We are now expected, almost as a rite of passage, to figure out for ourselves what is true, what matters, and how to live. Where we once believed we were held by something larger than ourselves, a world understood to be divinely ordered, where direction was already given, we now see ourselves floating in a sea of limitless possibilities, none of which arrive with any shared sense of what to trust or how to proceed.

And so the responsibility shifts, often quietly but profoundly, onto the individual to sort, interpret, and decide. This pressure to navigate our lives, almost as if we have to invent a compass to direct ourselves, can become all-consuming and exhausting. The question of where we actually stand and what kind of world we are moving within remains largely out of view.

What matters, then, is not simply how to navigate this ever-widening field of conflicting options, but whether we have first taken the time to understand where we stand within it. Before deciding what to believe, what to pursue, or how to change, there is a prior task, one that is easily overlooked in a world that encourages relentless forward movement and continual response.

This is what we might call the task of orientation. Of coming to see, as clearly as we can, the ground we stand on and the conditions we live in. Without that, even the best forms of navigation may lead us in circles, like our pet dog chasing its proverbial tail.

The deeper challenge, then, is not simply to move with greater discernment within the field of conflicting options, but to see more clearly the field itself, how it is structured, what it assumes, and how it quietly shapes what feels possible, necessary, or true.

Orientation does not solve the problem of how to live, but it changes the ground on which that question is asked. And without that shift, we may continue navigating, even successfully, without ever quite knowing where we are or where we are headed.

Yet many of our difficulties in life arise from something we might call certainty inflation.

What’s that, you might ask?

A few years ago, while riding on the train with a friend of mine, we got into a conversation about what God is like, or what He is not like. He shared an experience in which the creator of all things, God, directly spoke to him, reassuring him that he is loved beyond measure. It was God’s voice, he claimed, that he heard inside his innermost being, and this unmistakable voice of God instantly flooded his whole body with a feeling of bliss and a “peace that passeth all understanding.”

At this particular time in my life, I was leaning more towards the perspective that such an idea was akin to a young child believing in the existence of Santa Claus. I started wriggling in my seat, feeling more and more agitated as he talked on about this loving God who spoke to him as a human father would speak to his children. I challenged him, and with arms flailing about, insisted that what he was saying about God was a figment of his imagination. My attitude was: How can you believe something so stupid? You fool!

Certainty inflation is what happens when confidence becomes identity, and disagreement feels like a threat.

You see, I once held the same notion about God that my friend was still holding: that God is like a loving father who wants to have a personal relationship with me. I can talk with Him, and He can talk with me. I can pray to Him, and if I try hard enough, God can answer my prayers. I lived in this identity for decades, and was convinced I knew what I was talking about! In fact, I told myself the trouble in the world was a direct result of human beings not holding the same view I held about this God.

As for my friend, we were close enough not to let this disagreement about God create a wedge in our relationship. Over the years of our growing friendship, we built up enough social currency to acknowledge that each of us was bigger than any particular strongly held viewpoint, which could potentially result in a serious friendship rupture.

Looking back on this scene, I can laugh as I see in my mind’s eye the cocky, self-assured attitude I held, as if I could possess the correct or true viewpoint on what God is and is not, or on any other topic, for that matter. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in human relationships or between unlike groups, cultures, or countries. Today I can see that what I carried that day was my own version of inflation certainty.

Whether it’s about politics, religion, environment, cultures, or whatever, the seeming need to be right or on the right side is not going to go away anytime soon. But what happens when we reduce life to stances of right versus wrong, good versus bad, truth versus lies? Do these attitudes and postures foster understanding and cooperation, or something else?

When we are so certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, are we expanding or contracting? Do we get bigger or smaller? If we feel the need to take a stance of “I’m right on this, and that’s it!” toward anything going on in the world, does this create more stability or fragmentation in ourselves or in relation to others?

What happens to curiosity, humility, surprise, and the capacity to be changed when we rush to explain and feel the urge to win?

Is there dignity in admitting to not knowing the answer?

In our current climate of social media platforming for clicks and likes, and the availability of instant information through AI, are we able to admit, with a calm, non-hurried presence, that as limited beings, we will never fully know or understand everything about anything?

What if our deepest strength lies in not knowing?

What if certainty is not what holds us together but keeps us apart from one another?

Recently, I’ve been watching short videos of unsuspecting passersby on a crowded public sidewalk responding to a message board next to a portable electronic piano with the written invitation: Play Me! :)

After sitting down behind the piano and tinkering with the keys, a man dressed in blue farmer coveralls and a long-sleeve plaid flannel shirt, with a baseball-style cap dangling off to the right side of his head, approaches the piano. In a thick southern drawl, he starts to talk as if he’s making an announcement over the PA at Grand Central Terminal. His arms flail about like he’s just stepped on hot coals in his bare feet, and he blurts out:

“Golly gee! Would you mind if I try to play? My nephew’s been teaching me a song…”

A few people quickly agree to the stranger’s request, springing up from their seat and stepping around to the front of the piano. Others stop what they are doing and sit there like a frozen statue. On occasion, an individual will shrug their shoulders and tilt their head to one side, as if signaling an attitude of “whatever.” In nearly all cases, the stranger is allowed to sit down at the piano.

He starts striking the piano keys with only his two index fingers, stumbling to and fro across the keyboard as if it’s the first time he ever tried to play the piano. Responses by the observer to this seeming lack of skill range from boredom to impatience.

Suddenly, the seemingly talentless stranger launches into an expert rendition of a complex classical piano piece that seems to shift this momentary space being shared by two strangers. At the sound and sight of a prior inept piano player now transformed before their eyes into a virtuoso, faces soften and bodies shift. The observer is now focused on the dazzling piano playing taking place in the middle of the day on this crowded city street.

And then, he cuts his playing short, jumps up from his stool, looks at his wrist watch, and blurts out:

“Opps! I gotta run. I have a concert I’m going to, and I’m late.”

And with that, the stranger runs down the sidewalk like a bat out of hell, quickly disappearing into the crowd. The observer is left standing there alone.

In many of these clips, the observer doesn’t immediately move on. They look around, sometimes waving their hands or shaking their heads with facial expressions that hover between disbelief and amazement, as if something just happened and they aren’t quite sure how to make sense of it yet.

A casual reading of this street encounter between two strangers can easily be described as an imaginative prank that created a brief “gotcha moment” for the unsuspecting passerby. But if you have a chance to view multiple clips of these moments, subtle signals are showing up, in different ways, indicating something other than just being fooled might be registering during these encounters.

Merely observing what took place only from the outside and concluding that it was nothing more than a clever trick is not unlike examining a human body solely by its outward form and deciding that this is all there is to a human being. The observation itself is not wrong, but it assumes that anything not visible in that moment doesn’t matter. In both cases, what we conclude depends greatly on how we choose to look.

When the stranger swiftly disappeared, the passerby was left standing alone, and nothing obvious had changed. The hustle and bustle of the street returned, bodies continued to mosey along, and that moment dissolved back into the flow of the day. And yet, for that brief stretch of time, the usual demands and concerns of daily life seemed to recede into the background, and something hard to name briefly took shape between player and observer.

How often do moments like this pass through our day unnoticed, not because they don’t happen, but because they can be difficult to stay with once they do. This essay does not attempt to name what was present in that shared space or suggest how to recover it. It simply pauses long enough to notice that such moments occur, and that noticing them may already be a different way of being in the world.

Is there a shared ground we can stand in that does not depend on a belief system, a worldview, privileged insight, or a set of propositions that demand agreement? If it is not a doctrine to be affirmed, a practice to be mastered, or a hidden truth accessible only through special insight, revelation, or experience, then what does this shared ground actually look and feel like?

In childhood, our experience of this shared ground takes shape before self-reflection. Babies, infants, and children learn what the world is like not through propositions or truth claims, but through the rhythms, responses, and atmospheres that surround them. Before a child can choose values or construct meaning, they absorb a sense of whether life is trustworthy, whether their presence is welcomed, and whether they belong somewhere without having to earn it. These early formations do not tell the child what to think, but they quietly teach how to stand.

When this early sense of standing is conditional or untrustworthy, it often goes unnoticed until much later in life. As adults, we interpret the resulting strain as a personal problem to be solved rather than a formative absence to be understood. We work harder on ourselves, refine our strategies, and seek insight, therapy, discipline, or meaning systems that promise coherence and security. Much of what passes for adult growth, then, is not transformation so much as repair, an ongoing effort to stabilize a sense of ground that was never fully secured in the first place. The self becomes an ever-present project because it was never allowed to rest as a presence that was already enough.

What this shared ground is, then, is not an idea to be grasped, but a condition already at work in us. It is the given capacity to remain present to life as it unfolds, to bear experience without having to secure it first with explanation or justification. This ground shows up as a quiet steadiness beneath our thoughts and emotions, a basic resilience that allows us to meet joy and loss, success and failure, without losing our footing entirely. It does not eliminate pain or difficulty, but it makes endurance possible without requiring constant self-defense. In this sense, the ground is not something we stand on so much as something we are already standing within, a sustaining context that holds life even when our interpretations falter.

What makes this ground genuinely shared is that it does not depend on agreement, belief, particular experiences, performance, or cultural alignment to function. People can stand within it while holding very different interpretations of the world, different stories, practices, and commitments.

Across religious, secular, and cultural differences, human beings still bear loss, uncertainty, love, responsibility, and time in remarkably similar ways. The ground operates not at the level of conclusions, but at the level of capacity, the capacity to remain present, to endure, to respond, and to carry life forward even when meaning is contested or unclear. Because it does not ask us to think the same thoughts or tell the same stories, it can quietly hold differences rather than erase them. In a pluralistic world, this kind of ground does not unify us by agreement, but by participation in the same fragile, sustaining conditions of being human.

A significant barrier to inhabiting this shared ground is the persistent human impulse toward rightness and distinction. Even practices that begin as sincere attempts to heal, awaken, or ground ourselves can quietly turn into markers of moral or spiritual superiority. Insight becomes a form of currency. Experience becomes a credential. Access, whether through religious belonging, specialized training, rare encounters, or costly practices, can start to function as proof of having arrived somewhere others have not.

At that point, grounding subtly shifts from something shared to something possessed. This is often the demarcation line. Practices may genuinely help stabilize, clarify, or open the self, but when they become the basis for status, authority, or exclusion, they no longer point beyond themselves. The shared ground gives way to hierarchy, and orientation once again becomes something one must earn, defend, or display.

Part of what complicates this search for shared ground is our collective exhaustion with how easily meaning hardens into tribal identity. Religious traditions that once offered orientation often became tools for exclusion, coercion, or moral superiority, and the damage they caused was real. In response, many learned to distrust the religious impulse itself, treating it as inherently dangerous or regressive.

But the vacuum left by this rejection has not made us less tribal, only differently so. Belonging still forms around identities, ideologies, and experiences, often with the same patterns of certainty, boundary-making, and dismissal of outsiders. The problem, then, is not that humans seek shared ground, but that we have become wary of anything that resembles it, even when its absence leaves us fractured and alone.

Having rejected the tyranny of abusive religious authority and power, we now find ourselves confronting a subtler tyranny, one in which meaning fragments into rival camps and orientations, and the self is left to negotiate belonging without any ground sturdy enough to hold us together. The freedom to choose without coercion or limits becomes the dominant refrain of modern life, at times resembling a kind of secular religious fervor.

When someone is no longer standing by constant effort alone, the change is rarely dramatic. Life does not suddenly become easier or more certain. What shifts instead is the constant bracing that once accompanied everyday decisions. There is less urgency to secure meaning before acting, less pressure to interpret every experience as evidence of success or failure. Responsibility remains, but it is no longer carried as proof of worth.

Standing within what already holds us does not eliminate struggle, disagreement, or loss. It does, however, change how those realities are borne. Failure no longer threatens total collapse. Difference does not immediately demand withdrawal or domination. Time feels less like a countdown and more like something that can be entered and endured. One still chooses, still acts, still responds, but not as though everything depends on getting it right.

This is not a higher state, privileged insight, or final arrival. It is a quieter way of inhabiting life, one in which meaning is not constantly assembled, defended, or performed. The self is still present, but it is no longer the sole load-bearing structure. Something else is doing part of the holding, even when we cannot name it.

Across this series, we have traced how modern life fractures the self, how we respond to that fracture, and how much effort goes into holding ourselves together once shared orientation dissolves. What emerges here is not another response to manage, but a different way of seeing the problem itself. The deepest question is no longer how the self can repair itself, but whether we have forgotten that standing was once something given before it ever became something achieved.

If the modern struggle has been shaped by the loss of inherited ground, then the work before us is not repair, mastery, privileged insight, or a return to what once was, but learning how to stand again within what has always already been holding us. This does not require agreement, belief, or special access. It does not ask us to be certain, only present. Nor does it require asserting superior truth claims or dismissing claims that do not align with our self-constructed views of reality.

Perhaps the simplest image of this shared ground has been with us all along. Long before we choose, decide, believe, or construct meaning, the human heart is already at work. It sustains life without instruction, agreement, or effort on our part. It does not ask whether we are ready, worthy, certain, or aligned. It simply beats, holding us in existence moment by moment. We do not manage it into action or earn its reliability. We learn to trust it by living.

Standing on ground we did not create will never feel triumphant. It feels quieter than that, more like a release from the need to keep proving, securing, or justifying our place in the world. Life still asks much of us. But when the ground is trustworthy, we no longer have to hold everything together by effort alone. We can finally begin, not by constructing meaning, but by inhabiting the life that is already here.

So, the next time you feel the familiar pressure to fix, secure, or explain your life, it may be worth pausing long enough to notice whether that urgency reflects a lack of insight or a deeper exhaustion from standing alone. What if nothing new needs to be added, and the invitation is simply to stop bracing and let yourself rest within the ground that has been carrying you all along, long before you knew how to name it?

A note for readers:

This seven-part essay series will soon be gathered into a seven-module exploration available on my Everyday Spiritual Health website. The essays you have read here form the narrative backbone of that work.

The modules are not designed as a program to complete or a system to adopt, but as a structured way of slowing down and staying with the questions we have been circling together, questions about meaning, orientation, disorientation, and what it might mean to stand in the world without having to construct everything from scratch.

More details will be shared in the coming weeks.

That is enough. Anything more would feel like marketing.

The relentless demand for total self-authorship, the kind Friedrich Nietzsche gave voice to, and the kind that quietly shapes modern lives from an early age, can be exhausting and isolating. Over time, the effort required to keep meaning intact begins to feel less like freedom and more like fatigue.

But what if the problem is not simply fragmentation, or the absence of the right response to it, but something more basic: how people are first oriented to live within a sense of meaning that does not begin and end with the self?

If orientation is something we absorb long before we know how to examine it, then the question is not merely how fragmented adults recover meaning and grounding, but how people are first taught to stand in the world at all. Long before beliefs are chosen or frameworks questioned, we learn by osmosis what claims our attention, what demands performance, and what quietly goes unanswered.

I have seen a different form of early orientation up close. When my wife’s nephew came to the United States for middle school and high school, he struggled deeply during his first few years. Much later, he told us how isolating and overwhelming that transition had been. Yet there was one thing he never questioned: he did not want to disappoint or embarrass his parents.

That obligation was not something he reasoned his way into or chose after reflection. It was already there, quietly shaping how he endured the experience. He cried in private, gritted his teeth, and made it work, not because it was easy, but because he knew where he stood. This kind of early formation carries its own costs, which are real and should not be minimized. Still, it reveals what it means to be oriented by something that precedes personal choice.

We are not born into the world only to carve out a life according to our own inclinations, preferences, or capacities. Long before choice, repair, or reorientation become conscious tasks, we are already being invited to stand somewhere. A world receives us, not as a blank slate to be engineered, but as a place with contours, rhythms, and claims that precede our approval or disapproval. Orientation, in this sense, is not something we invent after the fact, but something we learn to inhabit. The ground was already there before we knew we needed it.

From the very beginning, we breathe in and out Earth’s atmosphere tens of thousands of times a day, long before we are capable of noticing, choosing, or questioning what we are breathing.

What this suggests is that our deepest struggle may not be how fragmented adults repair and ground themselves after the damage is done, but how we are first taught to stand in the world at all. Modern life assumes orientation is something we assemble later, under pressure, after losses and missteps force us to take stock. As a result, much of what we call meaning becomes a form of continual repair, managing fractures that might never have needed fixing if the ground beneath us had been trustworthy from the start.

Yet this raises a more fundamental question: whether there is a way of standing that does not originate in self-construction, but in something already given, something we step into rather than invent. A way forward that doesn’t try to recover a lost past or impose another doctrine. The next essay turns toward that possibility, asking what it might mean to stand on ground we did not create, and to be oriented by what precedes choice rather than by what must be endlessly maintained.