First Hand
What I've lived and what I went and checked. One email a day, Monday to Friday.
I am sixty-five.
Eight of those years I was a monk. I buried a wife of twenty-nine. I raised two children on my own and taught them at home for eighteen years. I have published more than thirty books and sold tens of thousands of them in the street. At sixty, in the pandemic, I ended up living in a van.
Somewhere along the way I picked up a habit: I don’t take anyone’s word for it. I go and look, and I write it down. I have been doing that for forty-five years.
Every weekday, one short note. Two minutes.
What an ancient text has to say about the things that happen to all of us, always with the exact source. The body. Money and work. The machines. What institutions do when nobody is looking.
Forty-five years of going to look for myself. Including what I got wrong.
You don’t have to believe anything. Read it and judge for yourself.
If you are looking for a nice phrase to start the day, this is not for you. I only write down what I have put to use. Not things I read somewhere, but what is left after forty-five years of using them.