Reflections on Paolo Bacigalupi's "Navola"
Some reflections on the fiction of Paulo Bacigalupi
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Exploring human flourishing in a complex technological world.
I am a writer and builder. My work embodies the tensions of our time. How can we be relentlessly human in a dehumanizing age? What does it mean to live well in a complex world? Where do we find the hope and imagination to build a better future?
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Day 21: The Wilderness Cathedral
Day 20: The Call to Return
I have been here before: yearning to remain on vacation forever, but feeling the inevitability of return, gathering on the horizon like a change in the weather.
Day 19: A Hard Reckoning
Maybe that is today's task, I think: to battle this demon, to face something in myself even harder than the mountain.
Day 18: The Art of Departure
Now I find myself contemplating what it means to intentionally depart a place. The easy thing would be to simply jump in the van and leave. I want better than that; I want a departure that both honors this place and safeguards it in my memory.
Day 17: Steinbeck, Lee, and the Chinese Railroad Workers
Day 16: Desolation Wilderness
Day after day, this trip reminds me: take nothing for granted. Experience everything. There is so much life to be had.
Day 14: The Art of Arrival
It was such a simple but deeply countercultural ritual, taking so much time to truly arrive in a place.
Day 15: Confidence, Endings, and Beginnings
I needed to decisively commit to an ending before I could reap the benefits of a new beginning. Once I took that step, things fell into place quickly.
Day 13: The Experiencing Self, the Remembering Self, and the Art of Weaving Time
A well-lived life thus entails hard inner work on two fronts: training ourselves to live more fully in the present, and becoming better custodians of our own past.
Day 11: The Anguish of Our Finitude
Even here, on a timeful vacation, Hannah and I must make choices about the life we want, the way we want to be in the world.
Mark D. Jacobsen — Relentlessly Human
Reflections on building and human flourishing in a complex technological world.