keep the lights on

Hello friend—you’re receiving this email as a part of morning reading, a daily reflection on the parts of life worth living for that you signed up for sometime last year. I've got a laundry list of additions, designs updates, and website pieces I want to make, but ultimately, I just wanted to bring this back. Thank you for reading, and a very happy New Year. 

Keep the Lights OnJanuary 26th

Good morning, friend.At some point, sometime in your life, the switch of consciousness was flipped and you joined the rest of us trying to figure out what the hell happened. In the words of Douglas Adams, “in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and has widely been regarded as a mistake.”One day you didn’t exist, the next day you did exist, the day after that you were still trying to figure out all kinds of what, who, where, why, and when. It’s all quite shocking. If there is some kind of pre-flight mission briefing, we can’t remember it. No number of creation myths about the universe really seem to cover the abrupt and incredibly jarring experience of existing ourselves. If consciousness is the chief accomplishment of mankind, it sure seems like we’re handing it out awfully willy-nilly. The really interesting part, though? We all experience this the same way. Nobody gets to really know how they started. Nobody gets some kind of inside angle.More than a hundred years ago, Tolstoy wrote “the purpose of human life is to bring the irrational beginning of our life to a rational beginning”. You didn’t just wake up one day conscious—in a sense, you woke up today, conscious for the first time, being handed a life and history you only somewhat remember and most certainly didn’t choose.So you could get lost in the sauce of trying to figure out all the who's and what's and where's of the past…Or you could make it your mission to do your best to create a rational beginning out of irrational source material.Your call. Journal Prompt: What irrational thing can you bring into rationality today?