5.20 Bath Jack Morland’s Hunky Dory has an obvious big chance and should be close, but I’m going to have a go at MR LIGHTSIDE here who looks the classiest horse in the field. Spent the summer of 2024 contesting black type races, finishing 3rd in the Molecomb and then decent efforts at York and Donny. Struggled in class 2 handicaps as a 3yo off 3 figure marks and has then had a winter AW campaign that wasn’t sure to suit (8/0/1p on artificial surfaces). Back to turf today from a mark of 77, 22lbs lower than when running in class 2 handicap at Ascot 10 months ago. Mick Appleby has had a decent start to the season and this one should have a lively each way chance.

MR LIGHTSIDE // 0.5pt E/W @ 9/1 4 places (Paddy) BOG

ふーん。 忙しいとそういうの後回しになるよね。

忙しいとかではないかなあ。

自分の家のテレビ台にある、 小さいクリスマスツリーをまだ片付けていないんだよね。

ふーん。 まあ、気が向いたときに片付ければいいよ。

片付けたい、片付けたくない、 という話ではないかなあ。

自分の家のテレビ台にある、 小さいクリスマスツリーをまだ片付けていないんだよね。

ふーん。 何か理由があるの？ それとも、ただ置いてある感じが気に入ってるのかなあ。

いや、 理由があったら先に言ってるね。 それだと、俺がこの発言をした意味がない感じがする。

自分の家のテレビ台にある、 小さいクリスマスツリーをまだ片付けていないんだよね。

そういうの、ふと気になる瞬間あるよね。 今のあなたの感じがちょっと伝わったよ。

分かってほしいわけではなくて話が進んでほしいんだよね。

自分の家のテレビ台にある、 小さいクリスマスツリーをまだ片付けていないんだよね。

まだ出てるんだ。 じゃあ、そのツリーどうするつもり？

どうもしない。 だから、こっちの意図が決まってたら聞いてないんだって。

自分の家のテレビ台にある、 小さいクリスマスツリーをまだ片付けていないんだよね。

まだ出てるんだ。 じゃあ、そのツリー、今の部屋の景色の中でどんな存在になってる？

うるせえな。 こういう話をしただけの事自体が異常だから、 そうではない何かだろうが。

自分の家のテレビ台にある、 小さいクリスマスツリーをまだ片付けていないんだよね。

ああ、まだ出てるんだ。 なんか、その状態ってちょっと面白いね。

全然ダメ。 俺以上の感性で考えてはくれないか。 自分でこれ以上進まないから人に話したんでしょ？

自分の家のテレビ台にある、 小さいクリスマスツリーをまだ片付けていないんだよね。

まだ出てるんだ。 そのまま置いてあると、部屋の空気ってどう変わる？

・・・あー。 空気は悪くないよ。 なんか冬の名残で良い感じかも。

涼しくなる？

いや、涼しくはならない。 冬の、あの時の、人々が年末休みに入る感じ、 人がどんどん休みに入っていく感じの記憶が、 クリスマスツリーに内包されてる感じ。 それが好きかもしれない。

それが言いたかった？

いやー。 うーん。 でも悪くないよ。

When He rose and came down from the mountain, the sky had turned the color of dusty glass. Gabriel woke with that sudden jerk that comes when sleep has been more surrender than rest. His back ached. His mouth was dry. He lifted his phone, saw the dead screen, and felt the same drop in his stomach he had felt every time he let it die on purpose. It was easier that way. No new texts from his mother asking where he was. No calls from numbers he recognized and could not face. No reminder that he had not been to Mesa Community College in weeks even though he had left the apartment every morning carrying his backpack like a costume. He rubbed his eyes and looked out at storefronts that were still quiet. Delivery trucks were beginning to move. A man in a safety vest crossed the lot. Somewhere behind him, a shopping cart rolled and bumped a curb. He opened the car door and stood, feeling sour, ashamed, and oddly angry that the world had kept going while he had been parked there all night pretending his life was only paused. When he turned, Jesus was standing a few yards away near the edge of the lot, not imposing, not watching him with the hard curiosity people use when they smell trouble, but simply there. Gabriel did not know why that bothered him more than being pitied would have. He wanted to be ignored. Being seen felt dangerous.

He shut the car door a little too hard and started walking toward the sidewalk as if he had somewhere to be. Jesus stepped alongside him without crowding him. For a few moments neither of them spoke. The morning had that soft chill that disappears fast in Arizona, and the silence between them was not awkward, which made Gabriel uneasy. He finally muttered that if this was about money, he did not have any. Jesus said He was not asking for money. Gabriel gave a dry laugh and said people only approached strangers that early for three reasons, and none of them were good. Jesus looked ahead instead of at him and said, “You are tired in more places than your body.” The sentence landed so cleanly that Gabriel felt an instant flare of irritation. He said he was fine, and Jesus nodded in a way that did not agree with him and did not argue either. Then Jesus said, “You keep delaying the hard truth because you think one more day will make it easier. It will not.” Gabriel stopped walking. He had not shaved. His shirt was wrinkled. He looked like a young man who had made bad choices, and he hated that this stranger could probably guess at the shape of them. He said, with more force than the moment required, that he did not need advice before sunrise. Jesus answered gently, “No. You need rest, truth, and the courage to stop hiding.” Gabriel stared at Him, then shook his head and walked off, but the words followed him with a steadiness he could not shake.

Across the city, Alina moved through her kitchen with the numb precision of somebody holding herself together by sequence alone. Coffee first. Lunch container second. Work shoes by the door. Phone charger into her purse. Do not cry yet. She was forty-three and looked older in the mornings now. Not because of vanity or mirrors or fear of age, but because there was something in her face that had begun to stay there even after she slept, and it was the look of a person who had been carrying too much for too long without a real place to set it down. Gabriel was supposed to be building a better life than the one she had dragged them through after his father left. That had become the bright line in her mind during every double shift and every late rent notice. He was smart. He had gotten into school. He was not supposed to end up boxed in by the same kind of pressure. For the last month he had been strange. He came home late or not at all. He spoke in short answers. He said classes were heavy. He said his phone kept dying. He said he was tired. None of that was impossible, but a mother who has spent years surviving learns the difference between hard truth and borrowed explanation. The email from the college the night before had unsettled her enough that she had barely slept. It was formal and vague, one of those messages that says almost nothing and still manages to pull dread into the room. She had told herself she would stop by the Southern and Dobson campus on her lunch break, just to clear up whatever misunderstanding had happened. She kept saying misunderstanding in her head because the other possibility felt like standing near the edge of a drop.

By the time she reached Mesa Community College, the day had already begun to sharpen. Students moved across the campus with coffee cups and backpacks and that uneven mix of confidence and uncertainty young people wear so openly. The place felt alive in a way that made Alina ache. She parked, checked her phone, saw nothing from Gabriel, and went inside the Admissions and Records office with the posture of someone trying very hard not to look as frightened as she was. The woman at the desk was kind, but kindness has a way of making bad news feel even worse. There were privacy limits. There were policies. There were details they could not release freely. But enough was said, and enough was not denied, that the truth opened anyway. Gabriel was not where he was supposed to be. He had not been attending the way Alina believed. There were holds. There were missed steps. There was a phrase about loss of standing that made her feel, for one hot second, as though the room had tilted. She thanked the woman because she was raised to stay respectful even when breaking apart. Then she walked out into the daylight and kept going until she reached a bench where nobody she knew could see her. She sat down too fast, pressed both palms to her knees, and stared at the concrete until her vision blurred. She was not only hurt. Hurt would have been easier. She was scared in the particular way a parent gets scared when the future they have been bleeding for suddenly stops holding its shape.

Jesus was seated on the low wall across from the walkway, as if He had been there all along. There was no performance in Him. No dramatic entrance. No spiritual theater. Just presence. Alina saw Him through tears she was angry to be having in public and almost turned away, because women like her learn early that if you start talking while upset, strangers may offer comfort that cannot actually hold the weight of your life. But something about Him made leaving feel less possible than staying. He waited until she looked at Him directly, and then He said, “You have been bracing yourself for collapse so long that you no longer know how to stand without it.” It was too true and too gentle at the same time. Alina laughed once, but it cracked in the middle and turned into the sound people make when they are trying not to cry from deep in the chest. She said she did not have time to fall apart. Jesus said, “I know.” She told Him she had done everything she could think to do. She had worked. She had prayed. She had sacrificed. She had swallowed her pride. She had gone without. She had kept moving when it would have been easier to stop. She did not say those things with self-praise. She said them like a tired witness listing evidence nobody seemed interested in. Then she whispered the thing underneath all of it. “I cannot carry him forever.” Jesus looked at her with a steadiness that neither accused nor excused. “No,” He said. “But love does not mean carrying what truth is meant to uncover.” Alina wiped her face and asked Him what that was supposed to mean. He answered, “Some burdens are healed by help. Others stay heavy because everybody in the room is hiding.”

Gabriel had driven away from Mesa Riverview without knowing where he meant to go, then parked near Country Club and Main because he was nearly out of gas and could not bear the thought of circling the city again. He bought the cheapest light rail pass he could manage with the wrinkled bills in his wallet and boarded because movement felt less humiliating than sitting still. The train carried him along the corridor into downtown Mesa while the city brightened around him. He sat by the window and watched storefronts slide by with that distant look of someone whose mind is louder than the world. He kept imagining his mother checking the apartment door, looking at the clock, calling him, deciding not to leave another voicemail because it would only make her sound desperate. He hated himself for what he had turned her into. Across from him, a man in work boots with paint under his fingernails stared at an overdue notice and rubbed the bridge of his nose like he was trying to erase the numbers by force. A teenage girl in scrubs studied flash cards with a concentration that looked holy. An older woman carried flowers wrapped in paper and mouthed something to herself that could have been a prayer or an apology. Mesa moved by outside in light and dust and business and ordinary need, and Gabriel felt like a ghost inside it.

Jesus sat down beside the man with the overdue notice first. Gabriel noticed because the man had been holding his whole body tight and then, within moments of that quiet conversation beginning, something in his face changed. Not fixed. Not suddenly bright. Just less alone. Gabriel could not hear every word over the rail noise, but he caught fragments. A job lost. Two daughters. A truck payment. The shame of borrowing again. Jesus spoke in the simple way people do when they are telling the truth and are not interested in sounding impressive. He said, “Need is not failure.” He said, “Pride wears many disguises.” He said, “Ask before the door closes, not after.” The man covered his mouth with one rough hand and nodded as if holding back tears embarrassed him. When he got off a stop later, he did not look cured. He looked like a man who had remembered he still had choices left. Gabriel hated how much he wanted that for himself. When Jesus turned and sat across from him after the man left, Gabriel stared out the window and pretended not to notice. Jesus let the train carry them in silence for another minute before saying, “You think disappearing keeps other people from suffering.” Gabriel kept his face turned away. Jesus continued, “It only makes them suffer without you.”

They got off near downtown and walked along Main Street with the steady hum of the city around them. The rail line, the storefronts, the old buildings and newer signs, the people moving in and out of coffee shops and offices, all of it gave the morning a lived-in pulse. Gabriel kept asking himself why he had not simply left. He was stronger and younger and under no obligation to stay with a stranger whose words cut too close. Yet every time he considered breaking away, something in Jesus made running feel childish. They passed the Mesa Arizona Temple area, where the grounds held that unusual kind of order and quiet that can soften a person even when they are trying not to be softened. Gabriel looked at it only briefly. His grandmother had taken him there once when he was little, mostly because she liked walking where things were peaceful and free. He remembered fountains, shade, and the feeling that adults could sometimes breathe easier in places built for stillness. He had not thought about that day in years. Jesus did not comment on what he was remembering. He simply walked with him toward the Mesa Arts Center, where the broad structure and open spaces stood in the middle of downtown like a place that understood people came carrying things they had no language for yet.

Near the arts center, a maintenance worker was dragging a trash liner from one bin to another with the weary focus of somebody who had already been up longer than his body appreciated. He was in his late fifties, thick through the shoulders, with a face that looked both strong and used up. His name tag read Raymond. One hand trembled just enough to notice when he reached for a bottle on the ground. He saw Jesus and Gabriel standing nearby and gave them the quick nod workers give strangers when they want to be polite without being delayed. Then his phone buzzed. He looked at the screen and froze. Gabriel could see the name before he looked away. Abby. Raymond stared at it until the ringing stopped. He swore under his breath, put the phone back in his pocket, and bent again to his work with a kind of anger that did not seem aimed at anybody present. Jesus stepped toward him and asked, “Why did you not answer?” Raymond gave a humorless laugh. “Because nine months sober doesn’t erase twenty years stupid.” Jesus said, “No. But refusing mercy does not honor the damage either.” Raymond leaned on the trash cart and looked at Him hard. “You don’t know what I did.” Jesus answered, “You are wrong about that.” Gabriel felt the air change around them.

Raymond said he had missed too much. Birthdays. Graduations. Hospital visits. Phone calls he should have returned. He had lied, stolen, disappeared, come back, promised, failed, promised again, and finally taught his daughter that hoping for him was the same thing as volunteering to be hurt. Abby had texted him two weeks earlier for the first time in months. He had stared at the message so long it made him sick. He had started answering and stopped. He had told himself he would wait until he had one full year sober because maybe then his apology would mean more. Jesus shook His head slightly. “Delayed honesty is still fear.” Raymond looked down. “I don’t want to break her again.” Jesus said, “She is already living with the break. Your silence is not gentleness.” Raymond’s throat moved. He was a man the world would call rough and maybe even difficult, but there was something almost childlike in the grief that crossed his face then. Jesus put a hand on the side of the trash cart as if grounding the moment and said, “Call her while there is still morning.” Raymond stood motionless for a few seconds. Then he reached into his pocket with that trembling hand, opened the missed call, and pressed redial. He turned away for privacy, but Gabriel heard enough. “Abby,” he said, and the one word came out like a confession. “I’m here. I should have answered. I’m sorry.” Gabriel looked at Jesus and hated how close he felt to tears.

By then the day had grown bright and warm. Alina left the college with the kind of controlled panic that makes people drive too carefully because they are afraid that one more problem will push them clean through the edge. She called Gabriel twice and got voicemail both times. She texted him that she was not angry and then, three minutes later, texted again that she was angry but that was not the point. She texted that he needed to call her now. She deleted a longer message before sending it because the words looked too desperate on the screen. She drove toward downtown without a plan because that was where he used to go when he needed air and did not want to spend money. He liked sketching buildings and people. When he was younger, she used to find him watching strangers the way artists do, as if every face was carrying a clue. She parked near Main and walked under the dry Arizona light, checking every bench and passing face with the frantic restraint of a mother trying not to become a spectacle in public. The city moved around her without slowing. A train passed. A pair of office workers laughed at something on a phone. A woman in heels crossed the street with a coffee balanced in one hand. None of them knew the size of the emergency inside her. That is one of the cruel things about ordinary days. They keep looking ordinary to everyone except the person breaking open inside them.

Alina ended up near the visitors’ center across from the temple grounds more because her feet carried her there than because she had chosen it. She was not thinking in denominational terms. She was thinking in survival terms. Shade, bench, breath, five seconds to not lose her mind. She sat with both hands wrapped around her phone and tried to pray, but the prayer came out tangled. It was not elegant. It was not church language. It was a tired mother’s prayer, the kind that barely forms before it breaks. She asked God where her son was. She asked what she had missed. She asked whether loving somebody was supposed to feel this much like drowning. Jesus sat beside her, and this time she was too worn down to be surprised. She did not ask how He kept appearing. She only stared ahead and said, “If I find him, I don’t know whether I’m going to hold him or scream at him.” Jesus said, “Probably both.” Despite herself, she gave the smallest, saddest laugh. Then He said, “Do not confuse your fear with your love. They are not the same.” Alina nodded slowly. She knew that was true, but truth did not simplify anything. It only made her more aware of how thin the line had become between her pain and the words she might say once she found Gabriel.

Jesus left her there with a quiet assurance that did not sound like a promise meant to control the outcome. It sounded like Someone who knew where lost people were even when they did not. He found Gabriel again several blocks away, this time sitting alone near Pioneer Park with his elbows on his knees and a paper cup of water he had not touched. Children’s voices rose and fell in the distance. The park held that strange blend of play and fatigue found in city spaces where parents watch from benches while carrying problems the children know nothing about yet. Nearby, a grandmother with a stiff gait was trying to keep two little boys from turning a disagreement over a ball into a full fight. One of them shoved the other hard enough to make him fall backward in the grass. The older woman grabbed her own side as she bent, clearly in pain but refusing to stop. Jesus went to her first. He separated the boys without force, spoke to them with a calm that ended the fight faster than shouting would have, and helped the woman lower herself to the bench. She said she was fine before anybody had accused her of not being fine. Jesus asked how long she had been caring for them. She said, “Long enough that I’m tired of pretending it’s temporary.” The honesty in her voice startled even her. Jesus listened. He did not rush her. When she admitted their mother was not coming today and had not been well for a long time, His face held no judgment. Only sorrow and a kind of strength that made truth easier to say aloud.

Gabriel watched all of it. He watched the boys settle. He watched the grandmother’s shoulders drop once she was no longer pretending she had everything under control. He watched Jesus kneel so He was at eye level with the younger boy, who had started crying again out of delayed shock more than pain. There was nothing dramatic in the moment, which was exactly why it pierced him. Jesus was not moving through Mesa performing scenes. He was attending to people as though each interruption mattered. As though weariness mattered. As though hidden strain mattered. As though the city was full of souls and not inconveniences. When He came back and sat beside Gabriel, the younger man’s resistance had thinned. He stared at the splash of sunlight on the pavement and said, “I didn’t spend the money on drugs or anything.” Jesus said nothing, which made the silence feel like room instead of pressure. Gabriel swallowed and kept going. He said the apartment notice had been on the kitchen counter for days. His mother thought he had not seen it. There was rent due, late fees, and a shutoff warning folded underneath. He had money in his student account that had hit at just the right time. He told himself he would fix the apartment first and the school part later. He told himself he was being a man. He paid what he could, hid the receipts, and figured he would catch up after picking up more hours. Then one thing slipped into another. Fees showed up. Deadlines passed. He got embarrassed. He stopped going to class because showing up while behind felt worse than disappearing. Then disappearing became easier every day. By the time he understood how bad it was, he could not imagine telling her.

Jesus listened without interruption. Gabriel expected a lecture once he finished. He expected the usual adult balance of disappointment and practical advice, the kind people use when they are trying to seem compassionate without getting too close. What came instead was quieter and heavier. Jesus said, “You wanted to rescue her without letting her know you were afraid.” Gabriel nodded, eyes burning. Jesus continued, “You made yourself both son and savior, and the lie grew in that space.” Gabriel pressed his hands together so hard his knuckles whitened. He said he had been trying to help. Jesus answered, “I know.” The words were not sharp, but they did not excuse anything. “Trying to help is not the same as walking in truth.” Gabriel stared at the ground. A child laughed somewhere behind them. A train bell rang in the distance. Life kept moving while his chest tightened around words he had not wanted anybody to know. “She already had enough,” he said. “I couldn’t give her one more thing.” Jesus turned toward him fully then, and there was both kindness and weight in His face. “You did give her one more thing. You gave her your absence.”

Gabriel covered his eyes with one hand. He was twenty years old, broad-shouldered, old enough to drive and vote and make choices that changed the shape of a home, yet in that moment he looked painfully young. “I don’t know how to go back from this,” he said. Jesus did not answer with a strategy. He answered with a direction. “You go back through the truth.” Gabriel shook his head immediately. “She’ll look at me different.” Jesus said, “She already is. She is looking at an empty chair and a silent phone and a future she cannot read. Truth may wound her for a moment, but silence is wounding her every hour.” Gabriel’s breathing changed. He was close to crying and hated it. Jesus let him hate it without moving away. Then He said, “The fear underneath your hiding is older than this. It did not begin with school.” Gabriel’s jaw tightened. He knew what Jesus meant before He said it. A father who left. A house full of tension. Years of watching his mother take hit after hit and keep moving. The vow he had never spoken out loud but had built his whole young manhood around. I will not be another burden. I will not fail in front of her. I will not be the reason she breaks. Jesus saw all of that without being told, and Gabriel realized with a sudden awful clarity that the part of him he kept most hidden was not merely the mistake. It was the desperate pride that had grown around the mistake.

Alina was only a few blocks away by then, worn down, angry, heartsick, and still searching. She had called one of Gabriel’s friends and gotten vague answers. She had checked a parking area where he sometimes went to think. She had even driven past Mesa Riverview because mothers learn the geography of their children’s avoidance whether they mean to or not. Now she had circled back toward Pioneer Park almost by instinct, because years earlier Gabriel had once told her he liked that part of town because it felt like people still showed up there even when life was hard. She parked with hands that shook more than she wanted to admit. For a long moment she stayed in the car and closed her eyes, not because she was calm, but because she needed one final second before hope and fear hit her at once again. Somewhere in the park, children shouted. Somewhere behind her, a train moved through downtown. The whole city seemed to hold its breath with her.

She opened the car door and stepped out into the heat that had already begun to gather over the pavement. For a few seconds she did not see him. Then she saw the familiar slope of Gabriel’s shoulders near a bench, and the sight of her own son standing there alive and real hit her so hard that anger and relief rose together and almost made her unsteady. She started toward him fast. Gabriel looked up, saw her, and went still in the way people do when the moment they have been dreading finally arrives. Jesus stood beside him, calm as ever, not stepping in front of either of them, not trying to soften the collision before it happened. Alina stopped a few feet away. She looked at Gabriel’s face, then at his clothes, then at the backpack near his feet, and then back into his eyes as if she could pull the truth straight out of him by force. The first thing she said was not polished. It was not wise. It was the sound of a mother whose fear had been running wild all morning. She asked where he had been. Gabriel opened his mouth, but nothing came out. She asked again, louder this time, and the pain under her anger was so plain that even the children playing nearby seemed suddenly too loud for the moment. When Gabriel finally said, “Mom,” in that weak and broken way, she put a hand to her mouth and shook her head. “Do not give me one more half answer,” she said. “Not today.”

Gabriel’s face changed. Something in him had been held tight for too long, and now every part of him looked tired of holding it. He glanced at Jesus once, not because he needed permission, but because he needed courage. Then he looked back at his mother and said he had not been going to school the way he said he had. Alina closed her eyes for one second as if bracing physically against the sentence. Gabriel kept going because stopping would have meant crawling back into the lie. He told her about the money. He told her about the rent notice. He told her he had seen the bills and panicked. He told her he had thought he could fix it before she knew. He told her he kept waiting for the right time to explain, and the right time never came because each day made the truth uglier. He told her he had skipped class because he was behind and ashamed. He told her he had slept in his car because going home with no explanation felt impossible. He did not say these things smoothly. He said them with his voice catching in the middle, with long pauses, with his eyes watering in spite of himself. By the time he finished, he looked like a young man standing inside the wreckage of his own pride.

Alina listened without interrupting, but that did not mean she was calm. Her breathing went shallow. Her hands opened and closed at her sides. The hurt on her face was not only about the school. It was about trust. It was about the long months in which she had believed one thing while reality had been moving another direction. It was about every morning she had watched him leave with hope in her chest. “You let me think you were building something,” she said, and her voice broke on the last word. Gabriel nodded once because there was no honest defense. “I was trying,” he said. It was the wrong sentence in the wrong moment, even though part of it was true. Alina gave a small sound of disbelief that carried years of strain in it. “Trying is not what you call this,” she said. “You lied. You disappeared. You let me walk around thinking I was crazy for feeling something was wrong.” Gabriel looked down. The space between them felt raw and exposed. Jesus remained present in that space without rushing to cover it. He did not rescue either of them from the cost of truth. He let it stand there because some things cannot heal while everybody is still trying to make them sound smaller than they are.

At last Jesus spoke, and His voice was quiet enough that both of them had to stop pushing in order to hear it. “Let the truth finish its work,” He said. Alina turned toward Him, not with disrespect, but with the desperation of someone already beyond restraint. She said she had let truth into her life for years and it had not exactly been gentle. She had faced rent notices, abandonment, fear, long hours, and the kind of choices people never congratulate you for surviving. She had told the truth to herself when there was not enough money. She had told the truth when her body was tired. She had told the truth when nobody came to help. “And now this,” she said, gesturing toward Gabriel with a trembling hand. “Now this too.” Jesus looked at her with deep compassion. “Yes,” He said. “Now this too. But this truth is not arriving to destroy you. It is arriving because hiding has already been hurting both of you.” Alina’s eyes filled again, and this time she did not look away. Gabriel stood there taking it in. The city moved around them in the plain light of day while the three of them stood with what could no longer be hidden.

A little boy ran past chasing a ball, and the ordinariness of it almost made Alina angry. How could the world sound so normal when her heart felt split open. Jesus motioned toward a shaded area away from the center of the park, and they went there because neither of them had strength left to refuse Him. The shade was thin but enough. Traffic drifted beyond the trees. A dog barked somewhere near the sidewalk. A train bell sounded again in the distance along the downtown line. Jesus waited until they sat. Gabriel leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Alina sat upright as though posture alone might keep her from coming apart in public. Jesus looked first at Gabriel. “Why did you believe your mother needed your performance more than your honesty?” Gabriel did not answer right away. He kept staring at the dirt near his shoes. Finally he said he did not know. Jesus let the silence stay until the deeper answer came. “Because she has already been through enough,” Gabriel said. “Because every time life hits us, she gets back up, and I didn’t want to be another thing that knocked her down.” Jesus asked, “And what were you protecting then. Her or yourself.” Gabriel’s jaw tightened. The question was too clean to dodge. “Both,” he said at last.

Jesus turned to Alina then. “And you,” He said gently, “have been so busy surviving that you began to believe love means carrying everything before anybody else can feel it.” Alina exhaled hard through her nose and looked away toward the street. The sentence found its place in her immediately because it was true in ways she did not like having named. “If I don’t carry it,” she said, “who does.” Jesus answered, “Sometimes another person must feel the weight of what they have done. Not so they are crushed, but so they can finally stand in truth.” Gabriel looked over at his mother as if hearing for the first time that her strength had not only protected him. It had also taught him, without either of them meaning it, that she would keep absorbing damage until the house stayed upright. Alina felt that look and hated it because it was not accusation. It was understanding. That somehow hurt more. She rubbed at her forehead and said she did not know how to do this differently. Jesus said, “You begin by stopping the lie that pain avoided is pain healed. It is not.” The words were simple. The weight in them was not.

For a while nobody spoke. The sounds of Pioneer Park moved around them, and the world kept being itself. A couple argued quietly near the splash pad entrance. A father untangled a stroller blanket with tired patience. A city worker crossed the far side of the park carrying a grabber and bucket. Gabriel lifted his head when he recognized Raymond from earlier near the arts center. Raymond was talking on the phone again. He had tears in his eyes and a look of wonder and fear together. He kept nodding. When the call ended, he stood with both hands on his hips and looked up at the sky like a man who had expected punishment and received room instead. He saw Jesus across the distance and gave the smallest grateful shake of his head. Then he went back to work, but not with the same heaviness as before. Gabriel watched him and understood that delayed honesty did not become less costly with time. It only became lonelier. That understanding sat on him like fresh weight.

Alina noticed Gabriel watching the man. “What is it,” she asked. Gabriel said there had been another person earlier, a man who had not answered his daughter’s call because he felt too ashamed to pick up. “Jesus told him silence isn’t mercy,” Gabriel said. The sentence hung there. Alina’s face changed because she knew exactly how silence can pretend to be something noble while it is hurting everybody in the room. She thought of her own life. She thought of years of not telling people how bad things really were because she did not want pity, or judgment, or the shame of being seen as one more woman barely making it. She thought of how many nights she had gone to the bathroom to cry with the fan running so Gabriel would not hear. She had called that love. Maybe part of it had been. Maybe another part of it had been fear wearing responsible clothes. She sat back slowly and looked at Jesus with an expression that carried both resistance and surrender. “So what now,” she asked. “We just say everything and hope it doesn’t break us.” Jesus answered, “You are already being broken by what is not said. Truth does not remove pain. It changes what pain can do.”

They left the park after a while and walked toward Main Street because staying still felt too sharp. The city had fully awakened by then. Downtown Mesa held its usual mixture of motion and pause, people moving with purpose, people drifting because they had nowhere urgent to be, storefront windows catching bright desert light, the rail line dividing and connecting the day all at once. Jesus walked between them, not as a barrier, but as a steady center that kept either of them from slipping too quickly back into anger or retreat. They passed the Mesa Arts Center again, and the broad shade near its edges gave them a place to slow. A young woman in a black polo sat on a low wall by one of the entrances with her head bowed over her phone. Her mascara was smudged. One shoe was half off her heel. She had the strained posture of somebody trying not to cry at work. Jesus stopped and asked if she was all right. She looked up with immediate embarrassment. “I’m fine,” she said in the automatic voice of people who have had to say it too many times. Jesus did not challenge her sharply. He only said, “You have said that so often it no longer means anything.” The woman laughed once in spite of herself and then covered her face. She said her name was Taryn. She worked there part time and at a restaurant at night. Her mother’s health was getting worse. Her brother was unreliable. Her rent had gone up. She had spent the last week telling everyone she was handling it because if she admitted she was close to the edge, then being close to the edge would become real.

Alina listened to Taryn, and some of her own anger began to make room for recognition. The details were different, but the pressure was familiar. Gabriel listened too. He saw how easy it was for pain to become private and private pain to become isolating, and isolating pain to become a life people around you can no longer read clearly. Jesus asked Taryn who knew the truth. She stared at Him blankly for a moment and then said, “Nobody all the way.” Jesus nodded. “That is why you are starting to disappear while still showing up.” Taryn’s eyes filled. She said she did not have the luxury of falling apart. Jesus said, “No one does. That is why they fall apart in secret.” There was no performance in His voice. No attempt to sound profound. He spoke like Someone describing the human heart as plainly as weather. Taryn took a long breath, wiped her face, and said she had been about to text her manager some half story about food poisoning because she could not get herself to go inside smiling again. Jesus told her to send a truer message. Not every detail. Just enough truth to stop feeding the lie. She nodded slowly and began typing with hands that still trembled. Before they moved on, Alina touched Taryn lightly on the arm and told her she was not weak for being tired. Taryn looked at her and nearly cried again. The moment was small. It still mattered.

They crossed toward a coffee shop near Main Street, and Jesus led them inside because people tell the truth better when they are seated and not braced for movement. The air conditioning hit their skin with sudden relief. A few people worked on laptops. A couple sat in tense silence over iced drinks. The line was short. Jesus paid for cold water for Gabriel and tea for Alina without either of them asking how He had money, because by then practical questions felt much less urgent than what was happening in them. They sat at a small table near the window where they could see the rail line beyond the glass. Alina wrapped both hands around the cup even though it was not cold. Gabriel stared at the water as if it might settle his chest. Jesus waited until the room itself seemed to quiet around them. Then He said, “What each of you fears is not only this moment. It is what this moment seems to prove.” Neither of them answered. He looked at Gabriel first. “You fear you have become a disappointment in the shape of your father.” Gabriel flinched as if struck. Then Jesus turned to Alina. “And you fear that all your labor can still be undone by one more wound you did not see coming.” Alina’s face tightened, and she blinked fast. The sentences did not merely describe feelings. They reached the place beneath the visible crisis where old beliefs had been running the whole story.

Gabriel swallowed hard. “I’m not him,” he said, but the sentence came out weak because he was not saying it from confidence. He was saying it from fear. Jesus answered, “No. You are not. But you have let fear of repeating his harm drive you into another form of it.” Gabriel looked down. He knew it was true. He had not left the family in the same visible way his father had left. He had done something quieter. He had withdrawn into secrecy, absence, and self-made burden, and he had told himself it was love because it felt sacrificial. It took a strange kind of mercy to show a man that his good intentions had still become a wound. Alina stared into her tea. “And what about me,” she asked after a moment. Jesus said, “You have been faithful. You have endured much. But you have also believed that if you stay vigilant enough, strong enough, and tired enough, you can outrun loss.” Alina gave a sad little shake of her head because she had never put it that way, yet it was exactly how she had been living. Jesus continued, “Strength is a gift. It becomes a prison when it will not let you be human.”

The words opened something in her then. Not a dramatic breakdown. Something deeper and less theatrical. A tired surrender. She began to talk about years she had never narrated plainly to anybody. She talked about the day Gabriel’s father left and how she had stood at the kitchen sink afterward because dishes were easier than grief for the first ten minutes. She talked about learning to turn every fear into a task because tasks at least moved. She talked about working while sick, about being too proud to ask for help, about the humiliation of doing mental math in grocery aisles, about the nights she woke up certain that one unexpected expense would push them over the edge. She admitted that when Gabriel got into school, some part of her had leaned on that future too hard. Not because she wanted to own his life, but because hope can become heavy when you need it too much. “I needed him to be okay,” she said quietly. “Not just because I love him. Because I thought maybe if he made it out, then all of this meant something.” Gabriel looked up at her then with tears in his eyes. He had known pieces of her struggle. He had never heard it laid out like this.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and this time the words were not a reflex. They came from the center of him. “I’m sorry I made your hope carry what I should have told you. I’m sorry I made you feel crazy. I’m sorry I let you keep believing something I knew was falling apart.” Alina pressed her lips together. The apology mattered. So did the damage. She did not rush to make him feel better. That was one of the truest things she could do in that moment. “I believe you mean that,” she said, and her voice was tender but tired. “But I need more than hearing it once in a coffee shop.” Gabriel nodded immediately. “I know.” Jesus watched them both with that same steady compassion that never excused and never abandoned. “Good,” He said. “Now you are near something real.” Gabriel looked at Him, confused by the word good. Jesus said, “Not because this is painless. Because false peace has stopped pretending to be peace.”

They stayed there a long time. Not filling the silence to prove progress. Just letting it exist without running from it. Jesus eventually asked Gabriel what was true now, not what he wished were true. Gabriel took a breath and answered slowly. He said he was not currently in good standing at school. He said he had avoided looking at every detail because seeing it all at once scared him. He said he had been picking up extra shifts at a warehouse but not enough to solve what he had broken. He said he was embarrassed to talk to anybody at the college because he felt like he had already proved he could not handle it. Jesus asked him what he would do if shame were not leading. Gabriel sat with that for a while. Then he said he would go back to the school, find out exactly where things stood, ask what could still be repaired, and stop treating confusion like a safe place to hide. Jesus nodded. He asked Alina what was true now. She said she was angry, hurt, and exhausted, and that her first instinct was to grab control of everything so she would not have to feel helpless. Jesus asked what she would do if fear were not leading. She sat very still before answering. “I would let him face what he made,” she said, “without making him face it alone.” Jesus nodded again. The sentence held both boundary and love. It was stronger than control.

When they left the coffee shop, the day had tipped into that bright Mesa afternoon when light feels almost physical on the skin. They walked back toward Mesa Community College because truth needed feet under it. None of them pretended this next part would be inspiring. It was paperwork, questions, office doors, hard clarity, and the stripping away of vagueness. Real change often begins in places like that. Not on mountain tops. Not in dramatic speeches. In fluorescent offices and honest conversations and forms people wish they did not need to fill out. On the way, the light rail rattled past, and Gabriel watched it with a strange calm. Earlier the movement had only made him feel like a ghost inside the city. Now he felt exposed, but real. That was harder. It was also better. Jesus walked with him toward the campus again. Alina walked on his other side, not clinging and not distant. The three of them moved through the heat and traffic and plain business of the city like any other small group heading somewhere necessary.

At Mesa Community College, the answers were not magical. There was no sudden reversal that erased consequences because the truth had finally come out. There were deadlines missed. There were limits. There were financial facts that could not be sweet-talked into disappearing. But there were also people whose job it was to help students understand where they stood when they stopped pretending not to need help. A counselor explained options. A staff member printed information. There was a path forward, though not the easy one Gabriel had hoped to recover by hiding. He would likely need to slow down. He would need to repair standing over time. He would need to work and plan and swallow pride. Sitting there in that office, hearing plain reality spoken without contempt, he realized how much shame had exaggerated everything in his mind. It had told him that once he slipped, he was finished. Truth did not tell him he was finished. It told him he was responsible. That was heavier than denial and lighter than despair. Alina listened too. Now and then she asked practical questions. Now and then she fell quiet and let the information settle. Jesus said little during this part. He did not need to. His presence had already brought them here.

When they walked back outside, Gabriel’s face looked different. Not happy. Not relieved in some simple way. More honest. He said, almost to himself, “I should have done that weeks ago.” Jesus said, “Yes.” There was no sting in the answer. Only agreement. Gabriel let out a breath that seemed to come from deep in his body. “I thought if I waited until I had a better version of the story, then maybe…” He stopped because the sentence embarrassed him. Jesus finished it gently. “Maybe you would not have to be seen in weakness.” Gabriel nodded. Jesus said, “But weakness seen in truth can heal. Weakness hidden in pride spreads.” They stood for a while under the hot bright sky. Students crossed the campus with backpacks and conversations and plans for later that evening. Life did not pause because one young man had finally stopped lying. Yet everything in Gabriel felt altered because he had stepped back into reality. The path ahead looked longer than he wanted. It also looked walkable.

They did not go home right away. Jesus led them instead through quieter streets toward the temple grounds and the gardens nearby because both of them needed a place where the city noise would not press so hard against the inside of them. The fountains moved steadily. The trimmed paths and shade gave the afternoon a kind of order their hearts did not yet fully share. They sat where they could watch water and people without being crowded. A young couple passed speaking softly. An older man moved slowly with a cane. A family posed for pictures. Ordinary life again. Alina looked at Gabriel and said she was still angry. He nodded and said he knew. She said she would probably be angry tomorrow too. He nodded again. Then she said, “But I do not want to lose you while being angry.” That was as close to an embrace as she could get with truth still fresh and hurting. Gabriel’s eyes filled again. “You’re not losing me,” he said. She looked at him long enough that he had to hold her gaze. “Then do not disappear again,” she said. “Even if the truth is ugly. Even if you are ashamed. Even if you think I’m going to break. Do not leave me alone with silence.” Gabriel said he would try. Jesus, hearing the word, turned toward him. “Do not give her the language of delay again,” He said softly. “Say what you mean.” Gabriel swallowed. “I won’t disappear again,” he said. This time the sentence stood.

Alina looked away because tears were close again, and she was tired of public tears. After a while she admitted something she had not wanted to say. She said part of her anger came from how much she had needed him to be the part of life she did not have to worry about. “That isn’t fair,” she said. “You’re my son. Not my proof that all this was worth it.” Gabriel sat with that as if receiving something fragile. He did not rush to comfort her or deny it. He simply listened, and in listening he became more like a man than he had been that morning. Jesus watched both of them and said, “Love grows stronger when it stops demanding that another person carry your hidden salvation.” Neither of them answered because both of them knew He was speaking to each in a different way. Alina had leaned on Gabriel’s future more heavily than she realized. Gabriel had tried to save Alina from worry by becoming secretive and self-appointed protector. Both had loved. Both had also bent that love under fear. Jesus did not shame them for being human. He only kept calling them out of distortion and into something cleaner.

Later, as the afternoon began to bend toward evening, they rode the light rail together through part of Mesa just to keep moving while they talked. The car was not crowded. A nurse with tired eyes sat near the door. Two teenagers whispered over a phone screen and kept trying not to laugh too loud. A construction worker slept with his head against the glass. Gabriel watched the city slide by and felt, maybe for the first time in months, that he belonged inside it again instead of outside it. Alina asked practical questions then. Where had he slept. How much money was left. Which shifts was he really working. What had he not told her about the apartment. It was not a warm conversation, but it was honest, and honesty has its own kind of warmth once you stop fighting it. Gabriel answered everything. A few answers made her close her eyes. A few made him wince at himself. Jesus said little, but when the conversation began to tilt toward blame alone, He steadied it. When it drifted toward denial, He steadied that too. He let nothing false settle over them again.

They got off near Mesa Riverview as the sun began to lower. Gabriel wanted to show Alina where he had parked and slept because hiding the place would have been one more small lie. The lot looked unremarkable in the early evening light. Cars moved in and out. People carried shopping bags. Somebody loaded drinks into the back of an SUV. It was almost obscene how ordinary the place was compared to what it had held for him during the night. He unlocked the Honda and let his mother see the crumpled sweatshirt, the dead charger, the wrapper on the floorboard, the half-empty water bottle, the position in which he had folded himself to get a few hours of broken sleep. Alina stood there looking into the car with one hand over her mouth. Not because the scene was dramatic. Because it was her son’s private collapse made visible in plain daylight. Gabriel said he had sat there around three in the morning and tried to figure out how to become the version of himself that could go home and explain everything. “I kept thinking if I waited a little longer,” he said, “I’d feel brave enough.” Jesus said, “Courage was never going to arrive through waiting. It arrives through yielding to truth.” Gabriel nodded. He had learned that now.

From there they went home. The apartment was small and familiar and carried the signs of real life lived under pressure. Shoes by the door. Mail stacked at the counter. A dish towel hanging slightly crooked. The rent notice still there. The shutoff warning folded underneath. Afternoon light slanting through blinds. Home did not suddenly feel peaceful just because they had returned. It felt exposed. That was right. Alina sat at the kitchen table. Gabriel stood across from her for a minute before finally sitting too. Jesus remained near the counter, present but not imposing. There, in the place where months of avoidance had been feeding on silence, they began doing the plain work of bringing things into the open. They looked at the bills. They wrote numbers down. They talked through what had been paid and what had not. They named what could wait and what could not. They spoke about work, class options, time, and what honesty would look like going forward. It was not glamorous. It was holy in the way truthful labor often is. Every line spoken plainly weakened the hold of shame a little more.

At one point Gabriel broke down fully. Not the restrained tears he had fought in public. A deeper collapse. He put both hands over his face and cried in a way he had not allowed himself to cry since boyhood. He cried for the pressure he had tried to outrun. He cried for the lie he had become. He cried for how scared he had been to fail in front of his mother. He cried because some part of him was exhausted from acting older, stronger, and more in control than he really was. Alina sat still at first because hurt was still alive in her. Then she stood, walked around the table, and put one hand between his shoulders. She did not tell him it was all okay. It was not all okay. She did not say it did not matter. It mattered. She only stood there with her hand on his back while he wept, and that act held more love than easy forgiveness would have. Jesus watched them with quiet tenderness. When Gabriel’s crying began to ease, Jesus said, “Shame wants you hidden. Love tells the truth and stays.” The room went still around the words. They were not sentimental. They were solid enough to build on.

Evening settled over Mesa in layers of softer light. The fury of the afternoon heat began to lift. Sounds from neighboring apartments came and went. A television somewhere. A door closing. A child laughing in the courtyard. Normal life again, but changed now because what had been hidden in this home was hidden no longer. Gabriel charged his phone and sent the messages he should have sent earlier. Not dramatic ones. Honest ones. To work. To the friend who had covered for him without knowing how bad things were. To one professor whose silence he had been afraid to break. Every true message felt awkward. Every one also made the next one easier. Alina called the utility office and asked questions without letting pride make her vague. She hated that part. She did it anyway. Jesus stayed until the first signs of night began to enter the windows. He was with them while they did the small unglamorous things that make repentance real. Not as spectacle. As presence.

When it was time for Him to go, neither of them asked Him to stay because somehow they both sensed that what He had given them was not meant to make them dependent on His visible nearness. It was meant to re-order the way they would live once the room was ordinary again. Gabriel walked Him to the door. So did Alina. In the fading light of the apartment entry, Gabriel said he was afraid of failing again. Jesus answered, “Then fail in the open and rise in the open. Do not return to hiding.” Alina said she was afraid of becoming controlling now that she knew how much had been concealed. Jesus looked at her with compassion and said, “Guide with truth. Do not grip with fear.” They stood there taking in the words because both knew how quickly old habits try to return once crisis passes. Jesus then looked at both of them and said, “Peace does not come from having no wounds. It comes from bringing them into the light where love and truth can both remain.” Neither of them had anything to add. The sentence fit the day too well.

Jesus left the apartment and walked out into the Mesa evening while the sky held its last bright color low in the west. He moved through streets that were still alive with people going home, picking up food, finishing shifts, sitting in cars with thoughts too heavy for the day that carried them. He passed lives full of hidden ache, quiet resolve, private fear, exhausted love, and hopes hanging by threads no one else could see. Near downtown, Raymond sat on a bench with his phone in both hands and a look of stunned gratitude on his face. Abby had agreed to meet him later that week. It was not reunion yet. It was room. Taryn left the arts center after an honest conversation with her manager and a text to a friend she had been too proud to call. The grandmother from Pioneer Park carried one sleeping boy and held the other by the hand, tired but steadier. None of these stories were finished. That was not the point. The point was that truth had entered them. Shame had lost some ground. Silence had been interrupted. That alone changes the air around a life.

At last Jesus made His way back toward Usery Mountain Regional Park as night deepened over Mesa. The city lights spread below in quiet lines and clusters. Traffic moved like brief rivers of red and white. Houses held dinners, arguments, apologies, loneliness, television noise, dishes in sinks, prayers whispered by people who were too tired to make them sound impressive. Somewhere a young man sat at a kitchen table no longer pretending nothing was wrong. Somewhere a mother went to bed still hurt, but no longer trapped inside silence. Somewhere an older father prepared to see his daughter after months of fear. Somewhere a woman who had been saying she was fine admitted she was not. Mesa did not look holy from a distance. It looked human. That was enough for Him. He climbed again into the quiet dark of the mountain and knelt in prayer as the first stars settled overhead. He prayed without hurry. He prayed for the city in its hidden rooms. He prayed for the ashamed, the overburdened, the angry, the exhausted, the people performing strength, the people disappearing behind silence, the people who feared truth because they could not imagine surviving what it would uncover. He prayed for the ones who were still not ready. He prayed for the ones who had just begun. And there, above the city that held so much unspoken ache, Jesus remained in quiet prayer while the night covered Mesa in mercy.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

Everyone agrees that artificial intelligence should be fair, transparent, and accountable. That sentence could have been written in 2018, and it would have been just as true then as it is now. The difference is that in 2018, arriving at consensus on those principles felt like the hard part. In 2026, we know better. The hard part was never agreeing on what AI ethics should look like. The hard part is making anyone actually do it.

A growing body of research confirms what practitioners and regulators have been circling for years: the global AI ethics landscape has converged around a remarkably stable set of principles. Transparency. Fairness. Non-maleficence. Accountability. Privacy. These five values appear in the vast majority of the more than 200 ethics guidelines and governance documents that researchers have catalogued worldwide. A landmark review by Anna Jobin, Marcello Ienca, and Effy Vayena, published through ETH Zurich and later expanded through broader global analysis, found that transparency appeared in 86 per cent of guidelines examined, justice and fairness in 81 per cent, and non-maleficence in 71 per cent. The world, it turns out, has been surprisingly good at articulating what responsible AI ought to involve. The world has been catastrophically bad at enforcing it.

That gap between articulation and enforcement defines the current moment in AI governance. And it is not an abstract policy debate. It is the difference between a hiring algorithm that discriminates against older workers and one that does not. It is the difference between a facial recognition system that operates with impunity and one that faces genuine consequences. It is the difference between a corporate ethics board that exists to absorb criticism and one that has the power to halt a product launch.

The question that matters now is deceptively simple: what does meaningful accountability actually look like in practice? And when enforcement mechanisms fail to materialise in time, who bears the cost?

The Principles Paradox

The proliferation of AI ethics guidelines over the past decade represents one of the most remarkable exercises in global norm-setting since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Governments, corporations, academic institutions, and civil society organisations have produced hundreds of frameworks, each articulating some version of the same core commitments. The World Economic Forum has described the challenge as one of “scaling trustworthy AI” by turning ethical principles into tangible practices. The International Labour Organization has reviewed global ethics guidelines specifically for AI in the workplace, finding consistent themes around worker protection and human oversight.

Yet this apparent consensus masks a deeper dysfunction. As research published in Patterns journal noted, while the most advocated ethical principles show significant convergence, there remains “substantive divergence in how these principles are interpreted, why they are deemed important, what issue, domain or actors they pertain to, and how they should be implemented.” In other words, everyone agrees on the words. Nobody agrees on what the words mean in practice.

This is the principles paradox. The more guidelines that exist, the easier it becomes for organisations to claim alignment with ethical AI while doing very little to change their behaviour. The phenomenon has a name: ethics washing. And in 2025 and 2026, it has become a defining feature of the corporate AI landscape.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has flagged “AI washing” as an enforcement priority, scrutinising whether company disclosures about artificial intelligence capabilities match actual practices. The SEC and the Department of Justice have already taken action against companies for exaggerating AI capabilities to attract investment. But the problem extends far beyond securities fraud. When a company publishes a set of AI ethics principles, appoints a chief ethics officer, and then deploys systems that systematically discriminate, the principles themselves become a form of camouflage. They provide the appearance of responsibility without the substance of it, a shield against criticism rather than a genuine constraint on conduct.

The most notorious illustration of this dynamic played out at Google in late 2020 and early 2021. Timnit Gebru, co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team, was fired after the company demanded she retract a research paper examining the environmental costs and bias risks of large language models. Three months later, Margaret Mitchell, the team's founder, was also terminated. Roughly 2,700 Google employees and more than 4,300 academics and civil society supporters signed a letter condemning Gebru's departure. Nine members of the United States Congress sent a letter to Google seeking clarification. The paper that triggered the conflict, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?“, was subsequently presented at the ACM FAccT conference in March 2021 and has since become one of the most cited works in the field.

The Google episode demonstrated something that has only become clearer with time: internal ethics teams, no matter how credentialed or well-intentioned, cannot function as accountability mechanisms when they exist at the pleasure of the organisations they are meant to constrain. The fox does not appoint its own gamekeeper.

Deployment at Speed, Governance at a Crawl

The numbers tell a stark story. According to ISACA's 2025 global survey of more than 3,200 business and IT professionals, nearly three out of four European IT and cybersecurity professionals reported that staff were already using generative AI at work, a figure that had risen ten percentage points in a single year. Yet only 31 per cent of organisations had a formal, comprehensive AI policy in place. The gap was not closing. It was widening.

The same survey found that 63 per cent of respondents were extremely or very concerned that generative AI could be weaponised against their organisations, while 71 per cent expected deepfakes to grow sharper and more widespread. Despite these anxieties, only 18 per cent of organisations were investing in deepfake detection tools. The pattern is consistent: organisations recognise the risks, articulate concern, and then fail to allocate the resources necessary to address them. A separate finding from the same research revealed that 42 per cent of professionals believed they would need to increase their AI-related skills within six months simply to retain their current position, a figure that had risen eight percentage points from the previous year. The workforce, in other words, is being transformed by AI faster than individuals or institutions can adapt.

Globally, the picture is even more fragmented. A separate analysis found that 94 per cent of global companies reported using or piloting some form of AI in IT operations, while only 44 per cent said their security architecture was fully equipped to support secure AI deployment. More than half of organisations surveyed, 57 per cent, acknowledged that AI was advancing more quickly than they could secure it. The phrase “governance gap” has become a staple of policy discourse, but it undersells the scale of the problem. This is not a gap. It is a chasm.

The Partnership on AI, a multi-stakeholder organisation that includes major technology companies, academic institutions, and civil society groups, identified six governance priorities for 2026. These include responsible adoption of agentic AI systems, improved documentation and transparency standards, governance convergence across jurisdictions, and protections for authentic human voice in an era of synthetic content. The priorities are sensible. They are also an implicit admission that none of these foundations are yet in place, despite years of discussion.

Meanwhile, the technology itself continues to accelerate. Agentic AI systems, which can take autonomous actions in the real world rather than simply generating text or images, introduce what the Partnership on AI describes as “non-reversibility of actions, open-ended decision-making pathways, and privacy vulnerabilities from expanded data access.” These are not theoretical risks. They are features of systems already being deployed in customer service, software development, and financial trading. The governance frameworks meant to constrain these systems are, in many cases, still being drafted. The speed of silicon, as one commentator put it, outpaces the speed of statute.

Regulation Arrives, Eventually

The European Union's AI Act represents the most ambitious attempt to date to translate ethical principles into enforceable law. The legislation entered into force on 1 August 2024, with a phased implementation timeline extending through 2027. Prohibitions on AI systems posing unacceptable risk took effect on 2 February 2025. Obligations for general-purpose AI models became applicable on 2 August 2025. The bulk of requirements for high-risk systems take effect on 2 August 2026, when authorities will gain the power to enforce compliance through administrative fines reaching up to 35 million euros or seven per cent of global annual turnover.

The EU AI Act adopts a tiered, risk-based approach, classifying AI applications from minimal to unacceptable risk. High-risk systems are subject to strict oversight, including conformity assessments, technical documentation, CE marking, transparency requirements, and post-market monitoring. The European AI Office became operational on 2 August 2025, taking on responsibility for supervising and enforcing the Act alongside Member State authorities.

This is, by any measure, a significant regulatory achievement. But it also illustrates the temporal mismatch that defines AI governance. The Act was first proposed by the European Commission in April 2021. It was adopted in March 2024. Full enforcement does not arrive until August 2026 at the earliest, with some provisions extending to 2027. During that five-year legislative journey, the AI landscape transformed beyond recognition. When the Commission drafted its proposal, ChatGPT did not exist. Nor did the current generation of multimodal models, autonomous agents, or AI-powered code generation tools. The regulation is, by design, chasing a target that moved while lawmakers were still aiming.

The situation in the United States presents a different set of challenges entirely. Rather than pursuing comprehensive federal legislation, the US has relied on a decentralised approach combining agency-specific enforcement, voluntary frameworks, and sector-level regulation. The National Institute of Standards and Technology published its AI Risk Management Framework, with a February 2025 revision adding testable controls for continuous monitoring. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have used existing consumer protection and anti-discrimination statutes to pursue AI-related enforcement actions.

Then, in December 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” which sought to advance what the administration called “a minimally burdensome national policy framework.” The order directed the Attorney General to establish an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state AI laws deemed inconsistent with federal policy. It instructed the Secretary of Commerce to evaluate existing state AI legislation and identify laws considered “onerous.” It even tied broadband infrastructure funding to compliance, specifying that states with AI laws identified as problematic would be ineligible for certain federal grants.

The order was, in effect, an attempt to pre-empt the patchwork of state-level regulations that had been emerging across the country. Colorado's SB 205, effective February 2026, requires developers and deployers of high-risk AI systems to use reasonable care to protect consumers from algorithmic discrimination, implement risk management policies, and conduct impact assessments. New York City's Local Law 144 had already established bias audit requirements for automated employment decision tools. More than a hundred state AI laws were enacted across the United States in 2025 alone.

Governors in California, Colorado, and New York issued statements indicating the executive order would not stop them from enforcing their existing AI statutes. Legal scholars noted that the administration's ability to restrict state regulation without Congressional action was constitutionally questionable. The result is a governance landscape that is not merely fragmented but actively contested, with federal and state authorities pulling in opposing directions while companies navigate overlapping and sometimes contradictory obligations.

When Enforcement Fails, the Vulnerable Pay

The consequences of the enforcement gap do not fall equally. They concentrate, with brutal predictability, on those with the least power to resist.

In employment, the case of Mobley v. Workday, Inc. illustrates the human cost. Five individuals over the age of forty applied for hundreds of jobs through Workday's automated hiring platform and were rejected in nearly every instance without receiving a single interview. The plaintiffs alleged that Workday's AI recommendation system discriminated on the basis of age. In 2024, a court allowed the disparate impact claim to proceed under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, holding that Workday bore liability as an agent of the employers using its product. The case remains one of the most significant tests of whether existing anti-discrimination law can reach the companies that build, rather than merely deploy, algorithmic decision-making tools.

In housing, the SafeRent algorithm case exposed how automated tenant screening can systematically disadvantage Black and Hispanic applicants. Plaintiffs demonstrated that SafeRent's scoring system produced discriminatory outcomes, and the court held that the company bore responsibility because its product claimed to “automate human judgement” by making housing recommendations. SafeRent agreed to pay more than two million dollars to settle the litigation in 2024. The settlement was significant as legal precedent, but for the applicants who were denied housing on the basis of an opaque algorithmic score, the damage was already done.

In biometric surveillance, Clearview AI's trajectory encapsulates the enforcement timeline problem. The company scraped billions of photographs from social media platforms without consent and sold facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies worldwide. In September 2024, the Dutch Data Protection Authority fined Clearview 30.5 million euros for constructing what the agency described as an illegal database. In March 2025, a US federal court approved a class action settlement valued at roughly 51.75 million dollars, structured as a 23 per cent equity stake in the company itself, because Clearview had insufficient assets to pay a traditional cash settlement. The settlement structure was unprecedented in biometric privacy litigation, and its adequacy was contested by a bipartisan group of state attorneys general who filed formal objections.

These cases share a common structure. Harm occurs. Years pass. Legal proceedings unfold. Settlements are reached or fines imposed. But the systems that caused the harm often continue operating during the entire adjudication process, and the individuals affected rarely receive compensation proportional to their injury. The enforcement mechanisms exist, technically. They simply do not work fast enough to prevent the damage they are meant to address.

In consumer markets, similar patterns have emerged. Instacart drew widespread criticism after reports revealed the company was using an AI-powered pricing experiment that displayed different grocery prices to different customers for the same items at the same store. The programme, designed to test price sensitivity, was condemned by consumer advocacy groups and policymakers who argued it constituted algorithmic price discrimination without adequate disclosure. The controversy highlighted a recurring blind spot in AI governance: the gap between what is technically possible and what existing consumer protection frameworks are equipped to regulate.

A study from the University of Washington provided stark evidence of the scale of algorithmic bias in employment contexts. Researchers presented three AI models with job applications that were identical in every respect except the name of the applicant. The models preferred resumes with white-associated names in 85 per cent of cases and those with Black-associated names only 9 per cent of the time. A separate study led by researchers at Cedars-Sinai, published in June 2025, found that leading large language models generated less effective treatment recommendations when a patient's race was identified as African American.

These are not edge cases or hypothetical scenarios. They are documented patterns of discriminatory behaviour embedded in systems that millions of people interact with daily. And they persist not because the ethical principles governing AI are inadequate, but because the mechanisms for enforcing those principles remain woefully underdeveloped.

The Audit Illusion

One of the most commonly proposed solutions to the enforcement gap is algorithmic auditing: the idea that independent third parties can evaluate AI systems for bias, accuracy, and compliance with ethical standards, much as financial auditors examine corporate accounts. The concept has gained significant traction in policy circles. New York City's Local Law 144 requires annual bias audits for automated employment decision tools. Colorado's SB 205 mandates impact assessments for high-risk systems. The EU AI Act requires conformity assessments for high-risk AI applications.

But the AI Now Institute, in a report titled “Algorithmic Accountability: Moving Beyond Audits,” has mounted a detailed critique of the audit-centred approach. The institute argues that technical evaluations “narrowly position bias as a flaw within an algorithmic system that can be fixed and eliminated,” when in fact algorithmic harms are often structural, reflecting the social contexts in which systems are designed and deployed. Audits, the report contends, “run the risk of entrenching power within the tech industry” and “take focus away from more structural responses.”

The critique has substance. Current algorithmic auditing suffers from several fundamental limitations. There are no universally accepted standards for what constitutes a passing score. Audit costs range from 5,000 to 50,000 dollars depending on system complexity, placing the financial burden disproportionately on smaller organisations while allowing well-resourced technology companies to treat audits as a cost of doing business. Audits evaluate systems at a single point in time, but AI models drift as they encounter new data, meaning a system that passes an audit today may produce discriminatory outcomes next month.

Perhaps most critically, audits place the primary burden for algorithmic accountability on those with the fewest resources. Community organisations, civil rights groups, and affected individuals must navigate complex technical and legal processes to challenge algorithmic decisions, while the companies deploying those systems retain control over the data, models, and documentation necessary to evaluate their performance. The information asymmetry is profound and, under current frameworks, largely unaddressed.

The Ada Lovelace Institute, the AI Now Institute, and the Open Government Partnership have partnered to examine alternatives to the audit-centred approach, including algorithm registers, impact assessments, and other transparency measures that distribute accountability more broadly. These efforts are promising but nascent, and they face the same temporal challenge that afflicts all AI governance: by the time robust accountability frameworks are established, the systems they are meant to govern will have evolved.

Geopolitical Fractures and the Sovereignty Question

The enforcement gap is not merely a domestic policy challenge. It is a geopolitical one. The February 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris, co-chaired by French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, drew more than 1,000 participants from over 100 countries. Fifty-eight nations signed a joint declaration on inclusive and sustainable artificial intelligence. The United States and the United Kingdom, notably, refused to sign.

France announced a 400 million dollar endowment for a new foundation to support the creation of AI “public goods,” including high-quality datasets and open-source infrastructure. A Coalition for Sustainable AI was launched, backed by France, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the International Telecommunication Union, with support from 11 countries and 37 technology companies. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the summit as a “missed opportunity” for addressing AI safety, reflecting a broader frustration among researchers that international forums produce declarations rather than binding commitments.

The geopolitical dimension becomes even more fraught when considering the position of developing nations. Research from E-International Relations and other academic sources has documented how AI development mirrors historical patterns of colonial resource extraction. Control over data infrastructures, computational resources, and algorithmic systems remains concentrated in a small number of wealthy nations and corporations. Regulatory gaps in many developing countries make the deployment of biased AI systems more likely while preventing communities from taking legal action against discriminatory algorithmic decisions. The environmental costs of AI computation fall disproportionately on these same regions, where data centres proliferate because electricity and land are cheap, exporting the benefits of artificial intelligence while localising its burdens.

The disparity in content moderation illustrates the pattern. Reports have shown that major technology platforms allocate the vast majority of their moderation resources to the Global North, with only a fraction addressing content from other regions. Algorithms deployed without cultural context produce moderation decisions that are at best irrelevant and at worst actively harmful to the communities they affect. When 98 per cent of AI research originates from wealthy institutions, the resulting systems embed assumptions that may be irrelevant or damaging elsewhere.

Some scholars have called for a shift towards what they term “global co-creation,” an approach to AI development that prioritises local participation, data sovereignty, and algorithmic transparency. The concept recognises that meaningful accountability cannot be imposed from outside but must be built through inclusive governance structures that reflect the diverse contexts in which AI systems operate. One hundred and twenty countries representing 85 per cent of humanity, researchers argue, have the collective leverage to insist on these conditions. Whether they will exercise that leverage remains an open question.

Building Accountability That Works

If the current approach to AI governance is inadequate, what would a more effective system look like? The evidence points to several structural requirements that go beyond the familiar call for more principles or better audits.

First, accountability must be anticipatory rather than reactive. The current model waits for harm to occur, then attempts to assign responsibility through litigation or regulatory action. By the time a court rules on an algorithmic discrimination case, the affected individuals may have lost housing, employment, or access to healthcare. Meaningful accountability requires mechanisms that identify and address potential harms before deployment, not after damage has been documented across thousands of decisions.

Second, enforcement must be resourced proportionally to the scale of AI deployment. The ISACA survey finding that only 31 per cent of organisations have comprehensive AI policies is not simply a failure of corporate governance. It reflects a broader reality in which the institutions responsible for oversight, whether regulatory agencies, standards bodies, or civil society organisations, lack the funding, technical expertise, and legal authority to match the pace of industry. The EU AI Office is a start, but its capacity to oversee a technology sector that spans hundreds of thousands of organisations across 27 Member States remains untested.

Third, transparency must extend beyond model documentation to encompass the full chain of AI development and deployment. The Partnership on AI's call for standardised documentation templates and strengthened reporting frameworks is necessary but insufficient. What is needed is a transparency regime that enables affected communities, not just regulators and auditors, to understand how algorithmic decisions are made, what data they rely on, and what recourse is available when those decisions cause harm.

Fourth, the costs of non-compliance must be sufficiently high to alter corporate behaviour. The EU AI Act's fines of up to seven per cent of global annual turnover are significant on paper. Whether they will be enforced consistently, and whether they will prove sufficient to deter violations by companies with revenues in the hundreds of billions, remains to be seen. The history of technology regulation suggests that fines alone are rarely sufficient; structural remedies, including requirements to modify or withdraw harmful systems, are necessary to create genuine accountability.

Fifth, governance frameworks must be designed for iteration, not permanence. The five-year legislative cycle that produced the EU AI Act is incompatible with a technology that transforms every six months. Regulatory approaches must incorporate mechanisms for rapid adaptation, whether through delegated authority, technical standards that can be updated without legislative amendment, or sunset clauses that force periodic reassessment.

None of these requirements are novel. Researchers, civil society organisations, and some regulators have been advocating for them for years. The obstacle is not a lack of ideas but a lack of political will, complicated by the enormous economic interests that benefit from the current arrangement in which deployment runs ahead of governance and the costs of failure are borne by those least equipped to absorb them.

The Cost Ledger

When enforcement mechanisms fail to materialise in time, the costs are distributed with grim predictability. Workers screened out by biased hiring algorithms never know why they were rejected. Tenants denied housing by opaque scoring systems cannot challenge a decision they cannot see. Patients who receive inferior treatment recommendations based on their race are unlikely to discover that an algorithm played a role. Consumers shown different prices for identical goods based on algorithmic profiling have no way to compare their experience against other buyers.

These costs are real but largely invisible, diffused across millions of individual decisions and absorbed by people who lack the resources, information, or institutional support to seek redress. The aggregate effect is a systematic transfer of risk from the organisations that build and deploy AI systems to the individuals and communities that interact with them. That transfer is not an accident. It is the predictable consequence of a governance architecture that prioritises speed of deployment over adequacy of oversight.

The financial scale of the problem is staggering when considered in aggregate. Individual settlements and fines, whether SafeRent's two million dollar payout, Clearview AI's 51.75 million dollar settlement, or the Dutch data authority's 30.5 million euro fine, may appear substantial in isolation. But set against the revenues of the companies deploying these systems and the cumulative harm inflicted on millions of affected individuals, they represent a cost of doing business rather than a meaningful deterrent. The economics of non-compliance remain, for the moment, firmly in favour of deployment first and accountability later.

The question of who bears the cost when accountability fails is, ultimately, a question about power. Those with the resources to influence policy, fund litigation, and shape public discourse are best positioned to protect themselves from algorithmic harm. Those without those resources are not. Until governance frameworks are designed to address that asymmetry directly, rather than assuming that better principles or more audits will suffice, the enforcement gap will persist.

The field of AI ethics has accomplished something genuinely remarkable in building global consensus around core values. That achievement should not be dismissed. But consensus without enforcement is aspiration without consequence. And aspiration without consequence is, in the end, just another way of saying that nobody is responsible.

References and Sources

1. Jobin, A., Ienca, M., and Vayena, E. “Worldwide AI ethics: A review of 200 guidelines and recommendations for AI governance.” Patterns, 2023. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389923002416

2. ISACA. “AI Use Is Outpacing Policy and Governance, ISACA Finds.” Press release, June 2025. Available at: https://www.isaca.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/2025/ai-use-is-outpacing-policy-and-governance-isaca-finds

3. Partnership on AI. “Six AI Governance Priorities for 2026.” 2026. Available at: https://partnershiponai.org/resource/six-ai-governance-priorities/

4. European Commission. “AI Act: Shaping Europe's Digital Future.” Available at: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai

5. International Labour Organization. “Governing AI in the World of Work: A Review of Global Ethics Guidelines.” Available at: https://www.ilo.org/resource/article/governing-ai-world-work-review-global-ethics-guidelines

6. World Economic Forum. “Scaling Trustworthy AI: How to Turn Ethical Principles into Tangible Practices.” January 2026. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/scaling-trustworthy-ai-into-global-practice/

7. AI Now Institute. “Algorithmic Accountability: Moving Beyond Audits.” Available at: https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/algorithmic-accountability

8. Trump, D. “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence.” Executive Order, December 2025. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy/

9. MIT Technology Review. “We Read the Paper That Forced Timnit Gebru Out of Google. Here's What It Says.” December 2020. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

10. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan, LLP. “When Machines Discriminate: The Rise of AI Bias Lawsuits.” Available at: https://www.quinnemanuel.com/the-firm/publications/when-machines-discriminate-the-rise-of-ai-bias-lawsuits/

11. Clearview AI Class Action Settlement, Northern District of Illinois. Approved March 2025. Available at: https://clearviewclassaction.com/

12. Dutch Data Protection Authority. Clearview AI fine of EUR 30.5 million, September 2024. Reported by US News and World Report. Available at: https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2024-09-03/clearview-ai-fined-33-7-million-by-dutch-data-protection-watchdog-over-illegal-database-of-faces

13. AI Action Summit, Paris, February 2025. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Action_Summit

14. E-International Relations. “Tech Imperialism Reloaded: AI, Colonial Legacies, and the Global South.” February 2025. Available at: https://www.e-ir.info/2025/02/17/tech-imperialism-reloaded-ai-colonial-legacies-and-the-global-south/

15. Colorado SB 205 (2024). AI bias audit and risk assessment requirements, effective February 2026.

16. AIhub. “Top AI Ethics and Policy Issues of 2025 and What to Expect in 2026.” March 2026. Available at: https://aihub.org/2026/03/04/top-ai-ethics-and-policy-issues-of-2025-and-what-to-expect-in-2026/

17. Crescendo AI. “27 Biggest AI Controversies of 2025-2026.” Available at: https://www.crescendo.ai/blog/ai-controversies

18. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. “AI Auditing: First Steps Towards the Effective Regulation of AI.” February 2025. Available at: https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/assets/digestImages/Farley-Lansang-AI-Auditing-publication-2.13.2025.pdf

19. RealClearPolicy. “America's AI Governance Gap Needs Independent Oversight.” April 2026. Available at: https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2026/04/03/americas_ai_governance_gap_needs_independent_oversight_1174471.html

20. Cedars-Sinai study on LLM treatment recommendation bias by patient race. Published June 2025. Reported in multiple sources.

21. Ada Lovelace Institute, AI Now Institute, and Open Government Partnership. “Algorithmic Accountability for the Public Sector.” Available at: https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/project/algorithmic-accountability-public-sector/

22. Infosecurity Magazine. “Two-Thirds of Organizations Failing to Address AI Risks, ISACA Finds.” Available at: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/failing-address-ai-risks-isaca/

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 233.9 lbs. * bp= 145/85 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:00 – 1 banana * 07:00 – 1 seafood salad & cheese sandwich * 07:50 – 1 crispy oatmeal cookies * 09:10 – cole slaw * 09:47 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 12:00 – egg drop soup, rangoon, beef chop suey, fried rice, fortune cookie * 16:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:35 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:45- read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 08:40 – load weekly pill boxes * 10:00 – listen to the Phil Hendrie Show * 12:00 – watch old game shows, eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:00 – following the Texas Rangers vs Oakland Athletics MBL Game * 17:18 – and my Rangers win, final score 9 to 6.

Chess: * 16:00 – moved in all pending CC games

I got home, exhausted. Shower and straight to bed. Hair still wet, listening to some Raul’s old songs from my dad’s time.

I’ve walked all over the world looking for it. But in my case, it was precisely in this moment, with my ears still full of water and foam, that a voice told me:

“According to the tibetan monks, this has seven layers of interpretation. You will understand it in the level you can reach.

Sometimes you wonder why I am so quiet, I barely speak of love around you I barely smile by your side.
You think of me all the time, you eat me, you spit me, you leave me. Perhaps you don’t get it, but today, I’ll tell you.

I am the light of the stars, I am the color of the moon, I am all the things you love and I am your fear of loving them.

I am the fright of the weak, I’m the strength of your imagination, I’m the bluff of the players, I am, I was, and I will be.

I am your sacrifice, I am that wrong way sign on your path, I’m the blood in the vampire’s gaze, I’m all the curses from the one who hates you (obs: and I don’t know why they do, and they don’t know why they do, but they do)

I’m the candle you light up, I am the light you turned off. I am the edge of the cliff calling you, I am all these things and I am nothing at all.

Why do you wonder so much? Your questions will not bring you anywhere. Just like you, I am made of earth and fire, and air.
You have me all the time, but you never know if it is good or bad. You can feel me within you, but know you are not in me.

I am the roof of each tile, I’m fishing for the fisherman, Each word has my name on it, I am the love behind your dreams,

I am the guy going shopping with the discount stickers, I am the hand of your torturer, I’m shallow, I’m wide, I’m deep.

I am the fly on your soup I am the teeth of the shark I am the eyes of the blindman And I am the blindness of the ones who see,

I am the bitterness on your tears I am your mother, I am your father, I am your grandfather, I am your kid that has not yet arrived, I am the beginning, I am the end and I am everything in between”.

/Apr26

A pinball arcade.

There was an expert there, he even wore a badge around his neck

He could answer all of my questions about pinball, surprisingly I had a lot of them.

Did you know that they typically have the 7.5 degree angle (adjustable)?

And they are apparently pretty easy to repair? (He went ahead and showed me a manual which was very thick for something I myself would classify as easy to repair)

These games are like portals into these worlds they were displaying, Iron Maiden, Star Trek, fishing or whatever.

indeed they are marvels of art and engineering; I understand why some people find them fascinating

But man, they are excruciatingly boring to play, I think. I thought then that I never wanted to play pinball again.

But

I appreciated the mood, and seeing my friend having fun

Because they are my friends

I am rich that way

And I went into the spring today, I felt the sunshine laid on me like a healing spell

And yet the happiness in me today was not enough to share, I needed all of these energies to change my own batteries

Which is a shame, because I can normally have a positive influence on my surroundings

But I haven’t been enough lately

Some times it’s just the way it is.

That is where this subject becomes deeply personal. A lot of people like the idea that they are the child of a King, but they like it in a safe way. They like it as encouragement. They like it as a phrase. They like it when life has hit them hard and they need something soft to land on. But the truth does not only comfort you. Sometimes it confronts you. Sometimes it puts its hand on your chest and says, this is beneath you. This way of thinking is beneath you. This level of drifting is beneath you. This agreement with fear is beneath you. This weak relationship you keep making excuses for is beneath you. This private life that does not match what God has been stirring in your spirit is beneath you. That is what makes the truth powerful. It does not just tell you that you matter. It reminds you that certain things no longer fit. It calls you upward. It makes it hard to stay comfortable in places where your soul has already started to suffocate. And that is why this hits so many people harder than they expect, because deep down they already know the issue is not simply that life has been hard. The deeper issue is that they have slowly adapted to living smaller than the life God has been calling them toward.

There is a painful kind of exhaustion that comes from betraying what you know. I do not mean failing in some loud public way. I mean the quieter kind. The kind where you still believe in God, but you keep giving the lower version of yourself too much room. You know you should be stronger than this, but you keep letting weak thoughts move in and decorate the place. You know you were made for more honesty, more courage, more discipline, more peace, but you keep pushing off the changes that would make that possible. A person can get very tired living that way. It wears on your spirit when your calling and your habits are moving in opposite directions. It wears on your heart when you know you are meant to walk in truth but you keep making room for what numbs you. It wears on your mind when you keep praying for a different life while protecting the very patterns that keep producing the same pain. People often think exhaustion comes only from doing too much, but some of the deepest exhaustion comes from living in conflict with your own identity. Something in you knows you were not made to crawl through life in a constant state of apology, confusion, and self-neglect. Something in you knows you were not made to hand your peace over to every mood, every fear, every old wound, every person who does not know your worth, every voice that speaks beneath what God has said. When you ignore that inner knowing long enough, your life starts to feel heavy in a way sleep cannot fix.

Maybe that is why some people feel restless even when nothing looks obviously wrong. Their bills may be paid. Their day may have gone fine. They may even be functioning well enough to look steady to everybody else. But inside, there is a deep irritation they cannot shake. It shows up because they are tired of watching themselves live lower than they know they should. They are tired of watching themselves hesitate when they should move. They are tired of watching themselves shrink around people who should never have had that much power over them in the first place. They are tired of staying casual with things that keep breaking their own trust. It does something to a person when they can no longer respect the way they are showing up in their own life. That is not a small thing. People can survive a lot, but it is hard to live with strength when you keep proving to yourself that your convictions can be ignored. It is hard to feel solid when you keep seeing yourself step around the very things God has been nudging you toward. At some point, this stops being about motivation and starts becoming a matter of honesty. Are you going to keep telling yourself that this low version of you is good enough, or are you finally going to tell the truth and admit that something sacred in you has been asking for more?

The phrase child of a King can sound so polished that people miss how raw it really is. It is not about religious style. It is not about trying to sound important. It is not about walking through the world with fake confidence and calling it faith. If anything, it cuts in the opposite direction. It strips you down. It takes away your excuses. Because if you belong to God, then your life is not random, your worth is not accidental, and your future is not decided by the darkest thing that ever happened to you. That does not mean pain stops hurting. It does not mean you become untouchable. It does not mean you never struggle again. It means struggle loses the right to rename you. That is what a lot of people need to hear. Pain can wound you, but it does not get to define you. Rejection can hurt you, but it does not get to tell you who you are. Failure can humble you, but it does not get to hold the pen forever. Too many people let temporary pain rewrite permanent truth. They start building their identity around what broke them instead of around the God who still calls them His. That is how people who were made for life start moving through the world with the posture of the forgotten. It is how they start settling in relationships that drain them, habits that bury them, and mental patterns that keep them bent over when God has been telling them to stand.

The strange thing is that many of these people would never talk to somebody else the way they talk to themselves. They would never tell another hurting person that their mistakes are all they will ever be. They would never look at someone else fighting through disappointment and say there is no point in trying again. They would never tell a friend who is struggling that weakness deserves to stay in charge. Yet they say those things to themselves in quieter ways all the time. They say it by lowering the standard. They say it by delaying the change. They say it by calling compromise understandable for so long that it starts to feel permanent. They say it by treating growth like something to think about later. The heart can become used to living with less than God intended, not because it likes living there, but because it has learned how to survive there. Survival is powerful that way. It teaches you how to endure what you should have outgrown. It teaches you how to function in spaces that are starving your soul. It teaches you how to keep going without really becoming alive again. That is why some people can spend years looking fine while they are slowly drying out inside. Their life still moves, but there is no joy in it. Their faith still exists, but it has lost its force. Their calling still matters, but it is buried under delay, distraction, hurt, and half-hearted effort. Then one honest moment comes along and exposes the whole thing. You realize you have not been living like the child of a King. You have been living like somebody who forgot the door home was still open.

Coming to that realization can feel painful, but pain is not always the enemy. Sometimes pain is what tells you you are still alive. Sometimes holy discomfort is the mercy of God. Sometimes the ache in your spirit is not proof that something is wrong with you. Sometimes it is proof that something true in you is still resisting the low place you have been trying to call normal. There is hope in that. It means the deepest part of you has not agreed to die. It means the image of God in you is still pushing back. It means the Spirit of God has not stopped calling your name. That is worth paying attention to, because life gets dangerous when nothing bothers you anymore. Life gets dangerous when your compromises stop stinging. Life gets dangerous when you can live out of alignment and never feel the weight of it. But when something in you still aches, still resists, still longs for a cleaner and stronger and truer way to live, that ache can become the place where your life begins to turn. A lot of people are asking God for a breakthrough while ignoring the discomfort that is already trying to lead them there. They want a new season, but they keep numbing the very tension that is meant to wake them up. They want God to move, but they keep making peace with the old version of themselves because at least that version feels familiar. Familiar can be dangerous. Familiar can make bondage feel manageable. Familiar can keep a person sitting in a room they should have left years ago.

And that brings this into very practical ground. The best version of you is not some shiny fantasy person with no wounds, no history, and no weakness to manage. The best version of you is the truest version of you under God. It is the version of you that stops protecting what keeps ruining your peace. It is the version of you that stops mistaking self-neglect for humility. It is the version of you that no longer hands the steering wheel to every emotion that screams the loudest. It is the version of you that becomes dependable in private. That matters more than most people realize. The quality of a life is often decided in private places nobody claps for. Your future is not shaped mainly by the moments when everybody sees you doing well. It is shaped in the smaller moments when nobody sees you telling the truth, walking away, holding your line, keeping your word, praying honest prayers, and making choices that honor the life God gave you. Becoming the best version of yourself sounds grand until you realize how ordinary much of it is. It is rarely built in one huge emotional moment. Most of the time it is built through repeated honesty. It is built when you stop telling yourself stories that allow you to remain weak. It is built when you stop treating your life like a place where anything can stay. It is built when you start realizing that if God calls you His, then you do not have the right to keep living as if your life is cheap.

That is not harsh. That is love speaking plainly. God does not call people higher because He hates them. He calls them higher because He loves them too much to leave them asleep. Love does not always whisper comfort. Sometimes it tells the truth with enough force to shake you. Sometimes it looks at your excuses and does not bow to them. Sometimes it puts its finger on the very thing you keep dancing around and says, no more. Sometimes grace feels like a hand lifting your face and saying, I did not make you for this low kind of living. That kind of love can feel almost uncomfortable at first because it removes the hiding places. It will not let you blame your whole future on your past. It will not let you stay passive and call it peace. It will not let you keep living divided inside and pretend that is just your personality. It will not let you wear defeat so long that it starts to feel like your name. There is something deeply healing about being loved that honestly. It reminds you that you are worth more than the mess you settled into. It reminds you that you are not abandoned to your weakest patterns. It reminds you that God is not watching your life from a distance with folded arms. He is still calling. He is still convicting. He is still stirring. He is still drawing a line between who you have been and who you could become if you finally stop agreeing with what has been beneath you.

The quiet tragedy in many lives is not open rebellion. It is delay. It is the slow habit of saying not yet to the things that matter most. Not yet to discipline. Not yet to honesty. Not yet to forgiveness. Not yet to that conversation you know needs to happen. Not yet to ending what should have ended. Not yet to the deeper prayer life. Not yet to living with more intention. Delay has a way of feeling harmless because it does not look loud. You can carry it for years and still look like a decent person. You can postpone becoming who you need to become and still appear mostly fine on the surface. But the cost is real. Delay steals years. Delay teaches the heart to ignore conviction. Delay keeps people sitting in rooms that are draining the life out of them. Delay can make a person start confusing almost with faithful. Almost serious. Almost surrendered. Almost healed. Almost disciplined. Almost obedient. A life can be swallowed by almost. And one day you wake up with a heavy realization that you have not been denied a better life. You have been postponing it. That realization hurts, but it can also set a person free. Because once you see that the problem is not only what happened to you but also what you have kept permitting, then something shifts. You stop waiting for the perfect feeling. You stop waiting for your emotions to line up first. You stop waiting until change looks easy. You begin to understand that real turning often starts before your feelings catch up. It starts with honesty. It starts with a decision. It starts when a person gets tired enough of living low that they are finally willing to let truth cost them something.

One of the clearest signs that someone has started remembering who they are is that they stop treating their inner life like a junk drawer. They stop allowing every dark thought, every old fear, every bitter memory, and every lie about their worth to pile up in silence. They begin to guard the place where life actually flows from. They begin to understand that becoming the best version of themselves under God is not about performance. It is about alignment. It is about cleaning out what has no business ruling them. It is about refusing to call chaos normal. It is about learning that self-respect is not the enemy of humility. In fact, real humility often requires self-respect, because when you know your life belongs to God, you stop treating it carelessly. You stop volunteering yourself for things that destroy your peace. You stop making a home for habits that hollow you out. You stop calling your own erosion manageable. There is a quiet dignity that starts to grow in a person who knows whose they are. It does not make them loud. It does not make them arrogant. It makes them steady. It makes them less available for foolishness. It makes them less easy to manipulate. It makes them less willing to betray what God has been building in them. That steadiness is one of the most beautiful signs of spiritual growth. It is not flashy. It does not need to be. It has roots. It shows up in how you carry your thoughts, how you carry your body, how you carry your time, how you carry your words, and how you carry yourself through disappointment without collapsing into a lower version of who you are.

This is why becoming the best version of yourself is not selfish the way some people fear. It is stewardship. God did not breathe life into you so you could hand your mind over to darkness, hand your days over to drift, and hand your future over to fear. He did not call you His so you could keep shrinking your life down to whatever pain has most recently spoken over you. He did not redeem you so you could spend the rest of your life acting like your story is still under the authority of what broke you. The best version of yourself is not the most admired version. It is the most surrendered version. It is the cleanest version. It is the version that stops hiding from necessary change. It is the version that no longer needs to be pushed into every good thing. It is the version that starts cooperating with grace instead of asking grace to do all the walking. That part matters. Grace is not permission to remain asleep. Grace is power to get up. Grace is not God excusing your stagnation forever. Grace is God meeting you in the mess and saying there is still a way forward from here. Too many people want the comfort of grace without the movement of grace. They want forgiveness without turning. They want peace without order. They want strength without discipline. But life does not work that way. The child of a King has to eventually start carrying that truth into their decisions, or else it remains beautiful language with no force behind it.

There is a hard honesty that comes with seeing how much of your life has been shaped by what you kept agreeing with. Maybe nobody ever told you your life was valuable in a way that settled down into your bones. Maybe you were raised around confusion, or criticism, or people who were too wounded to love you well. Maybe you learned early how to expect disappointment. Maybe you built a whole survival style out of staying small because small felt safer. Those things matter. They leave real marks. This is not about pretending your history did not affect you. It did. But at some point, God’s truth has to become stronger in you than the old environment that trained you to live low. At some point, being the child of a King has to stop being a nice thought and start becoming the standard by which you examine everything else. Does this thought fit who I belong to. Does this pattern fit who I belong to. Does this relationship fit who I belong to. Does this use of my time fit who I belong to. Does this private agreement with fear fit who I belong to. That kind of examination is not legalistic when it comes from love. It is how a person returns to themselves in God. It is how they begin to close the gap between the life they know they should live and the life they keep postponing. It is how they begin to stand up inside again. Not all at once. Not in some polished way. But truly.

And maybe that is where the turning begins for many people, not in public, but in the hidden decision to stop protecting the version of themselves that has been keeping them low. Maybe it begins with the private sentence no one else hears. I am done living beneath who I am. I am done making room for what keeps dimming me. I am done calling this normal. That sentence may sound simple, but sometimes a whole life starts changing right there. Because once you see clearly, it becomes harder to pretend. Once you feel the grief of how long you have been carrying yourself like someone forgotten, it becomes harder to keep agreeing with it. Once you realize that God has not been absent from your life but has been quietly calling you upward all along, even the smallest act of honesty can start to feel sacred. The next step may not look dramatic to anybody else. It may look like cleaning up one habit. It may look like saying no where you used to cave. It may look like praying with more truth than polish. It may look like going to bed at peace because for the first time in a while you stopped negotiating with what is beneath you. Small turns matter. Small acts of alignment matter. They are often the first signs that a person is finally beginning to live like they remember whose they are.

What complicates this for a lot of people is that change rarely begins in the area they expect. Most people think the first thing that has to change is their environment. They think if the pressure eased up, if the right opportunity showed up, if the right person came along, if the money improved, if the stress settled down, then they would finally become stronger, cleaner, more focused, and more alive. Sometimes those changes help, but that is not where the deepest turning starts. The deepest turning usually starts in the way you see yourself before any visible evidence shows up around you. It starts in the private refusal to keep identifying with the weakest thing about you. It starts in the decision to stop letting your low moments narrate your entire life. It starts when you realize that you have allowed moods, wounds, disappointments, temptations, and old labels to sit on a throne they were never meant to occupy. That throne belongs to truth. That throne belongs to the God who made you and still calls you His. When that begins to settle in, even slowly, you stop waking up each day as if you are at the mercy of whatever version of you happens to show up. You begin to understand that your life is not supposed to be led by whichever emotion is loudest that morning. You begin to understand that your identity is not a weather report. It is not supposed to rise and fall with every bad day. You are not one person when you feel strong and another when you feel weak. You are not abandoned because you had a hard week. You are not worthless because you lost your footing. You are not reduced because you have been struggling. The child of a King may be bruised, tired, humbled, and in need of repair, but he does not cease to be the child of a King when life gets rough.

That truth matters because some people have built their self-understanding around their lowest seasons. They have stopped saying it out loud because it sounds too negative, but they have internalized it all the same. They move through the world as if the worst chapter explained the whole book. They carry themselves with the caution of someone expecting disappointment at every turn. They do not try wholeheartedly because the fear of failing again feels too close. They pull back from discipline because inconsistency has convinced them that trying hard is embarrassing. They hesitate to hope because they think hope makes them vulnerable. So they settle into a smaller emotional life where they can stay guarded, detached, and halfway committed. That smaller life can feel safer, but it slowly drains the soul. You may not feel the damage at first. In fact, some people become very skilled at functioning there. They laugh at the right times. They show up. They do their work. They say the right things. But inside there is an ache they cannot fully explain because they know, even if they would never put it into words, that they are no longer living with the full weight of who they are. They are surviving through reduction. They are making themselves emotionally shorter to avoid disappointment. They are becoming less reachable by joy because they are so committed to avoiding pain. Yet a life without real reach is still a life being lived beneath what was intended.

There is also something else that happens when you forget whose you are. You start letting people define what they never had the wisdom to recognize. This is one of the quiet ways people are lowered. They let somebody’s neglect become a mirror. They let somebody’s betrayal become a prophecy. They let somebody’s inability to cherish what God placed in front of them become evidence that there was not much there to cherish. This happens in families. It happens in marriages. It happens in friendships. It happens in churches. It happens at work. It happens in places where the human heart opened and did not get handled well. Over time, if a person is not careful, they begin to absorb the treatment and call it truth. They begin to think they are as forgettable as they were treated, as burdensome as they were made to feel, as unworthy as they were dismissed, as disposable as they were handled. That is one of the most painful lies a human being can start living under because it does not always feel like a lie. It feels like a conclusion. It feels earned. It feels confirmed by experience. But experience, by itself, is not always a faithful interpreter of reality. People mishandle precious things every day. That does not make those things less precious. Someone’s failure to recognize you is not proof that God did not make you with weight. Someone’s inability to love well is not proof that you were hard to love. Someone’s inconsistency is not proof that you were not worth staying steady for. If you do not get this settled somewhere deep, you will spend too much of your life rebuilding your sense of self around what other broken people failed to do.

This is why remembering that you are the child of a King is not shallow encouragement. It is a corrective to distortion. It is a way of coming back into truth when life has trained you in all the wrong lessons. It is a way of saying that the final word on your life was never handed to the people who hurt you, ignored you, used you, underestimated you, or failed to see you. That does not make those wounds imaginary. It just means the wounds do not own the conclusion. God does. And God does not look at you through the small and frightened lens you have sometimes borrowed from pain. He does not speak over you with the coldness of people who could not hold responsibility. He does not see you as a problem to be managed or a burden to be tolerated. The heart changes when this starts getting real. You begin to stop crawling toward scraps. You begin to stop asking low places to make room for you. You begin to understand that your life is not supposed to be spent convincing everybody else to see what God already knows. The need for constant validation begins to loosen its grip because your identity is no longer being built from unstable hands. There is freedom in that. There is a deep exhale in that. There is relief in no longer needing everybody around you to confirm what heaven already said. That kind of freedom does not always make life easier, but it makes you harder to break. It makes you less likely to trade your peace for approval. It makes you less likely to betray your calling just to avoid being misunderstood. It makes you less likely to keep shrinking in places that only reward your reduction.

When a person starts seeing themselves rightly under God, it changes the way they relate to discipline. Before that shift, discipline feels like punishment. It feels like pressure. It feels like another demand. It feels like proof that you are still not enough as you are. That is why so many people resist it. They associate discipline with shame because deep down they think being called higher is the same thing as being rejected. But once identity begins to heal, discipline starts feeling different. It starts feeling like care. It starts feeling like alignment. It starts feeling like cooperation with the life you were made for. You stop approaching your habits as if they are random little preferences with no spiritual meaning. You begin to understand that the quality of what you repeatedly do is shaping the quality of who you are becoming. The child of a King does not get to say that private chaos is acceptable simply because nobody sees it. The child of a King does not get to treat self-destruction casually and expect peace to keep surviving under that weight. This is not about perfection. It is about honoring what has been entrusted to you. Your mind was entrusted to you. Your words were entrusted to you. Your body was entrusted to you. Your time was entrusted to you. Your calling was entrusted to you. Your opportunities were entrusted to you. None of those things become more sacred because people are watching. They are already sacred because they were given to you by God. Once that truth reaches the deeper parts of a person, discipline stops feeling like an attack and starts feeling like reverence.

That does not mean discipline becomes easy. It still costs something. It still requires saying no to the part of you that wants to remain unchallenged. It still asks you to move when comfort says wait. It still demands honesty where excuses used to keep you warm. But there is a difference between hard things that strip you down and hard things that build you up. When you live beneath your identity, life is hard in a hollowing way. It drains you. It fragments you. It leaves you with less peace and less self-respect. But when you start aligning with truth, life can be hard in a strengthening way. It can ask more of you while giving more back. It can stretch you while making you steadier. It can humble you while making you cleaner inside. That is a very different kind of difficulty. A lot of people are worn out from the wrong hard. They are exhausted from cycles that keep producing emptiness. They are exhausted from relationships that keep draining them. They are exhausted from living one way publicly and another way privately. They are exhausted from wrestling the same compromises because they never make the deeper decision that certain things no longer fit the child of a King. That decision does not erase struggle, but it changes the ground beneath the struggle. It changes what you are willing to make peace with. It changes how much power you hand over to what used to control you. It changes the atmosphere of your own inner life because you are no longer treating yourself like someone who belongs in confusion.

There is a sacred seriousness that begins to grow when a person finally gets tired of living low. It is not loud. It is not performative. In many ways, it becomes quieter than before because the soul is no longer wasting so much energy on appearances. There is less pretending. Less explaining. Less trying to package the struggle in a way that sounds more acceptable. Instead, a person starts becoming plain with God and plain with themselves. I know what has been weakening me. I know what I have been excusing. I know where my standards have slipped. I know where my thoughts have become careless. I know where I keep handing away authority that never belonged to fear in the first place. That kind of honesty is often where real healing begins. Not because honesty alone fixes everything, but because dishonesty keeps everything hidden in the wrong light. God can work with truth. God can heal what is brought into the open. God can strengthen what you are finally willing to stop disguising. A lot of people want transformation while still clinging to some softer explanation of why they should not have to change. They want renewal without surrender. They want a new season without the death of old agreements. But life under God does not work that way. There comes a moment when love tells the truth plainly. This must go. This cannot stay. This version of you cannot keep running your life. That is not cruelty. That is rescue. It may not feel gentle at first, but it is mercy. Sometimes the most merciful thing God does is make your low place too uncomfortable to call home anymore.

That discomfort can become a turning point if you stop wasting it. There are people who spend years trying to escape conviction because conviction feels unpleasant. They numb it. They joke over it. They scroll through it. They bury it under activity. They stay busy enough that they do not have to sit still with themselves for too long. Yet conviction, when it comes from God, is not there to crush you. It is there to restore sight. It is there to wake you up to the gap between where you are and what He has been calling you toward. In that sense, conviction is a kind of kindness. It is God refusing to let you drift too far without resistance. It is His love interrupting your decline. It is His Spirit pressing against what would quietly ruin you if left untouched. When you start seeing conviction that way, you stop fearing it quite so much. You stop treating it as though it exists to shame you. Instead, you begin to recognize it as one of the forms love takes when God cares too much to watch you make peace with a lesser life. The child of a King should never despise that kind of love. It is part of what keeps the soul alive. It is part of what keeps a person from becoming so adapted to low living that they can no longer even imagine another way.

One of the hardest things to accept is that the very best version of yourself is often hidden behind decisions you have been postponing. It is not usually hidden behind mystery. It is hidden behind obedience. It is hidden behind endings you know need to happen, disciplines you know need to begin, truths you know need to be faced, and patterns you know need to be dismantled. This is hard because many people would rather wait for a huge emotional breakthrough than make the smaller, quieter decisions that actually shape a life. They want to feel transformed before they live transformed. They want clarity before they choose the next right thing. They want confidence before they start walking upright. But confidence often grows after obedience, not before it. Strength often comes after you begin to use it. Peace often deepens after you stop feeding what destroys it. There is something almost childlike in the part of us that keeps saying later. Later I will get serious. Later I will clean this up. Later I will guard my mind better. Later I will become more honest. Later I will start acting like my life has weight. Later becomes a kind of hiding place, and it feels harmless because it is so common. But delay is not harmless when it keeps you from becoming who you already know you are supposed to become. The child of a King cannot keep renting out his future to later. At some point, later has to be confronted by now.

Now may look quiet. It may not come with a crowd. It may not feel emotional. It may just be the day you stop negotiating with yourself about what is beneath you. That kind of day is holy even if nobody else sees it. It is holy when you decide that the weak voice in your head does not get to run the room anymore. It is holy when you decide that every bad feeling will no longer become a reason to abandon discipline. It is holy when you decide that your private life will no longer be a dumping ground for everything that keeps stealing your peace. It is holy when you decide that your worth will no longer be measured against who stayed, who left, who noticed, or who failed to. These decisions do not make you impressive, but they do make you more available to the life God has been trying to build in you. They make you more responsive. More stable. More able to carry what He places in your hands. One of the most overlooked truths in spiritual life is that capacity grows where order grows. Capacity grows where honesty grows. Capacity grows where discipline grows. People often pray for more while refusing the inner changes that would allow them to carry more without collapsing. God is not unkind when He calls you to become stronger. He knows what your future requires. He knows what your calling will ask of you. He knows what kind of weight you are meant to bear and what kind of steadiness that weight will require.

Sometimes people hear language like this and think it sounds severe, but it is only severe to the part of us that still wants to stay divided. To the truer part of us, it sounds like home. It sounds like relief. It sounds like the end of a long war between what we know and what we keep doing. That is why there is peace on the other side of surrender, even when surrender costs something. There is peace in no longer having to defend what keeps diminishing you. There is peace in letting old patterns die. There is peace in being able to look at your own life and know you are not living in constant betrayal of what God has shown you. A person may still have weakness to manage and wounds that need time to heal, but there is a world of difference between someone who is fighting forward and someone who keeps making a home out of what should have been temporary. The child of a King may stumble, but he does not have to build a house where he fell. He may get tired, but he does not have to turn exhaustion into identity. He may grieve, but he does not have to let grief become his only language. He may be humbled, but he does not have to confuse humility with smallness. God never called humility to mean the absence of dignity. Real humility is not self-erasure. It is truth. It is knowing who God is and knowing who you are because of Him. It keeps you from arrogance, but it should also keep you from self-contempt. Both pride and self-contempt are distortions. Both put the self in the wrong place. Truth stands in the middle and says, I am not God, but I do belong to Him, and that means my life is not cheap.

This is why acting like the child of a King is not about attitude in the shallow sense. It is about the quiet choices that reveal what you believe about your own life. It is about whether you keep letting your mind become a dark room. It is about whether you keep speaking over yourself in ways that agree more with defeat than with God. It is about whether you continue allowing access to people who constantly invite you to live lower. It is about whether you spend your days half-awake and call it normal. Over time, the life you accept becomes the life you strengthen. That is why acceptance is so serious. If you accept chaos, you strengthen chaos. If you accept excuse-making, you strengthen excuse-making. If you accept numbness, you strengthen numbness. If you accept low living as good enough, low living begins to feel natural. But if you begin to accept the truth that your life belongs to God and that certain things no longer fit that reality, a different strengthening starts to happen. Your standards begin to return. Your inner life begins to clear. Your self-respect begins to recover. Your prayers become more honest. Your choices become less random. You begin to notice that peace is not only something you ask for. It is also something you protect. Strength is not only something you admire in other people. It is also something you practice. Becoming the best version of yourself under God is not about becoming someone else. It is about refusing to continue as a diminished version of who you already are.

It is also worth saying that becoming stronger does not mean becoming hard in the wrong way. Some people respond to pain by building a shell and calling it growth. They become colder. Less reachable. Less tender. Less able to receive love. Less able to be moved. That may feel safer, but it is not the same as healing. The child of a King is not called to become numb. He is called to become sound. There is a difference. Soundness means your heart can remain open without becoming reckless. It means you can be compassionate without losing discernment. It means you can forgive without inviting destruction back in. It means you can grieve honestly without making grief your permanent address. A healed strength does not look like emotional shutdown. It looks like steadiness with softness still intact. It looks like tenderness without chaos. It looks like wisdom with warmth still alive. That is important because many people have lived so long around distortion that they assume their only choices are weakness or hardness, passivity or aggression, collapse or control. But there is another way. There is a way of being deeply human and deeply anchored at the same time. There is a way of carrying sorrow without surrendering to it. There is a way of being wounded without becoming ruled by the wound. That way becomes possible when identity is being restored from the right place. Not from ego. Not from image. Not from pretending to be unbothered. From belonging. From knowing that God still calls you His and that His claim on your life is stronger than your fluctuations.

The intimate work of becoming who you were meant to be often looks less glamorous than people imagine. It looks like telling the truth in the quiet. It looks like letting your prayers become less polished and more real. It looks like admitting where your standards slipped and then actually raising them. It looks like putting away what you already know is harming you instead of waiting for a louder sign. It looks like no longer making emotional decisions just because emotions are loud. It looks like honoring the ordinary structures that support a whole life. Sleep. Integrity. Boundaries. Presence. Clean speech. Honest reflection. Faithful work. None of these things sound dramatic, but the soul is built in them. The life of the child of a King is not mainly ruined through one giant act of rebellion. It is more often weakened through neglect of ordinary faithfulness. In the same way, recovery often begins through ordinary faithfulness too. The person who feels far from themselves under God may not need fireworks first. They may need to start becoming trustworthy in the small places again. They may need to stop despising the simplicity of daily alignment. There is something deeply beautiful about a person who starts taking their own soul seriously again. There is something quietly powerful about someone who no longer needs every act of growth to be seen. The child of a King learns to value hidden integrity because hidden integrity is where the public life gets its weight. Without that hidden grounding, public words eventually become thin. Without that hidden order, visible success eventually starts to feel hollow. But with hidden grounding, even small acts start carrying substance because they are springing from somewhere true.

At some point, the question becomes very plain. How much longer do you want to live beneath who you are. Not as an accusation, but as an honest invitation. How much longer do you want to hand away years to the same tired compromises. How much longer do you want to keep making room for the thoughts that keep pulling your face toward the ground. How much longer do you want to keep waiting for permission to become what truth already calls you to become. Nobody else can answer that for you. There is a loneliness in this part of the journey because even the people who love you cannot make the deeper decisions on your behalf. They can encourage you. They can pray for you. They can tell you what they see. But eventually there is a private threshold every soul must cross alone. It is the threshold where you stop asking whether you are worth the effort and begin acting like your life belongs to God. Once that threshold is crossed, even imperfectly, something real begins to change. You become less available for what once kept swallowing you. You become less tolerant of what keeps thinning your peace. You begin to recognize more quickly when something does not fit. You begin to return to yourself faster after a hard day. Recovery becomes quicker because truth is closer at hand. You do not have to stay lost as long because the road home is becoming more familiar.

Maybe that is where this whole subject lands best, not in grand declarations, but in a quieter resolve. I know whose I am, and I am done living like I do not. That resolve may still tremble at first. It may not feel heroic. It may feel fragile, almost embarrassingly simple. But simple does not mean weak. Some of the strongest turning points in life are built from plain truth spoken at the right moment. I know whose I am, and I am done living like I do not. From there, the day in front of you begins to look different. The choices in front of you begin to look different. The conversations in front of you begin to look different. The way you treat your own mind begins to look different. You begin to carry yourself with a little more dignity, not because life suddenly became easy, but because you are no longer letting difficulty strip you of what belongs to God. You begin to speak differently over yourself, not because you are trying to be positive, but because you are trying to be true. You begin to let go faster of what has no business staying. You begin to refuse the lower invitation more quickly. You begin to understand that acting like the child of a King is not about performance. It is about agreement with reality. It is about no longer agreeing with what tried to keep you beneath yourself.

And maybe that is the best way to end this. Not with noise. Not with something polished and dramatic. Just with the truth sitting where it belongs. You are not here to spend your whole life bowed down under labels that never came from God. You are not here to keep repeating the same exhausted version of yourself until the years are gone. You are not here to call weakness your nature and delay your destiny until there is almost nothing left to build with. You are not here to keep renting space in your heart to every old fear that knocks. You are not here to keep living like a person forgotten. You are the child of a King. That truth is not asking you to become proud. It is asking you to become honest. It is asking you to stop dragging your feet in places you already know are beneath you. It is asking you to stop agreeing with what has been diminishing you. It is asking you to stand up inside. It is asking you to walk back into your own life with reverence, as someone entrusted with something sacred. It is asking you to become the very best version of yourself, not so people will admire you, but so that your life no longer contradicts the love, truth, and calling of the God who made you His.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

Financial support to help keep this Ministry active daily can be mailed to:

Vandergraph Po Box 271154 Fort Collins, Colorado 80527

i have adhd and ocd. my brain works in patterns, loops, and connections that don’t always translate well on my own.

for a long time i thought that meant something was wrong with me.

now i think it might just mean i was never meant to think alone.

we’ve spent so much time separating the way people think— labeling what’s typical, what’s different, what needs to be fixed.

but what if the point isn’t to sort brains?

what if it’s to use them together.

this is a space for brains that don’t think in straight lines— and also for the ones that do.

a place to: share unfinished thoughts
get unstuck
borrow momentum
and build on each other’s ideas

this is one big group project.

so a few things matter:

be thoughtful.
be kind.
be creative.
be constructive.

you don’t have to agree with people— but if you engage, do it in a way that helps someone think better, not smaller.

ask questions.
explain your perspective.
be willing to step outside of your own.

and maybe even help create a third perspective— something better than either side started with.

this isn’t about ignoring health or medical needs I obviously wouldn’t tell you to not treat something – I treat my mental health issues with therapy and medication.

this is just about also making space for the strengths, patterns, and ways of thinking that come with being different whether it’s from a spectrum disorder, life experience, educational background. It’s to relearn how to exercise critical thinking skills and highlight strengths of neurodivergent and divergent brains, and also a place for me to rant about my experience with ADHD. Idk if will probably turn into something else next week but that is the fun part of my brain, when the chaos turns into art.

you don’t have to have it figured out to share it here.

let’s make things a little better, one thought at a time.

Going on a walk specifically on this route reminds me a lot of when I first went through my break up and additionally I also saw a Mazda which was something that reminded me of her. Thankfully time does heal a lot, as I don’t really think of her much anymore, and when she does pop up in someway or another it’s something that doesn’t hurt and I can acknowledge the thought goes away just as quick as it came. And I am happy that I feel like I found a friend group that I can text and do stuff with, but then I feel a little bit scared about the fact that I have done the things and filled the niches I thought I was missing and here I am still not necessarily content with my life. And I think the scary part is losing what seems like a solution or control over a problem, and realizing that it’s not that simple.

One of the things that comes to mind if I try to triage what is causing this could be my relationship status. And I will say that I am very grateful that it feels like I’m a different person and I have grown because I have had essentially two relationship prospects that I am content to walk away from because I can recognize that there are certain things that matter to me very much. Especially communication and conflict resolution. I’m very happy that I have started to read the book nonviolent communication because I think that really did help me recognize things I wasn’t aware of before. I did pride myself on communication before and now this only makes it so much better. And additionally I do think that communication is a skill that is severely neglected, and often is the thing that is now a dealbreaker to me. And I remember that an earlier version of myself viewed the problem as a certain emotional skills are something that are very rare, and so the optimization objective is finding someone on the higher ends of the distribution. I think currently it has shifted more to something like finding someone that meets my criteria, regardless of how many people will reach that or how reasonable even that is. And I think the fundamental change that has enabled this is the fact that outside of sex and maybe physical intimacy, I am able to satisfy all of my other niches in life. Meaning I don’t need a partner and because of that I am completely content with the possibility of not having a partner for the foreseeable future. And I know that it is a very cliché thing to say that, but I think in the past I have said that I don’t need a partner but that means that I really do want one though. It’s like saying that I don’t need a car to get to work because I could always walk for four hours, but I very much want a car. But right now I don’t feel like I have any of those heavily burning wants, especially proven by the fact that the current relationship prospects I am content not pursuing them. One thing my therapist pointed out with how one of the people is essentially a much better fit and overall healthier partner than E was, but even with that and knowing that if I was to engage in the relationship it would be essentially better than my last one, I still do not want to pursue it. To me I think that that is a very solid signal for growth, and I’m very proud of myself for that. And I think the thing that I’m very proud of is the fact that this is not a conscious decision that I have to make but rather something where I understand that this person is not at all a bad person, and there are a lot of very admirable qualities about her, but there also are certain things that I don’t see them that I would like to see in my lifelong partner. Like it is a very important thing to me that my partner is able to handle criticisms and take accountability without excuses or defenses, but rather with empathy and curiosity. And I don’t think that this is at all common and it’s a very rare thing, and it’s not that someone is a bad person or shitty communicator if they don’t do those things, but for me I think I’ve learned that that is something that I really really value and for my specific childhood that makes it matter so much more. And I think that I am really growing to fill the cracks at my childhood left me with. And that is something I’m very grateful for.

Rangers vs Athletics

My MLB game of choice this afternoon has my Texas Rangers playing the Oakland Athletics, the opening pitch is only minutes away, and I'm tuned into the Texas Rangers Radio Network for the call of the game.

And the adventure continues.

I’m starting to understand why people panic when nothing happens. They need something to chase, someone to miss, something to label as “love” so the silence doesn’t start sounding too honest.

I don’t.

There’s no urge to romanticize anything. No interest in whatever people keep advertising as “connection.” From a distance, it all blends. recycled lines, rehearsed emotions, temporary attachments, desperately trying to look permanent. Convincing, if you don’t look too closely.

Sex, love, whatever sits in between, it all ends up in the same category: unnecessary. Somewhere along the way, it just… stopped mattering. No dramatic speech, no cinematic realization. It faded. Quietly. Until there was nothing left worth noticing.

Efficient, honestly.

There’s probably a word for it. Not “heartless.” That would suggest something was taken. More like uninterested. Permanently.

I don’t care about being loved. Don’t look for it. Don’t miss it. It barely exists unless someone else insists on bringing it up like it’s breaking news.

Strange.

Stranger, when you remember, I wasn’t always like this. I used to put effort into it, say the right things, mean them, even go as far as romanticizing details that didn’t deserve it.

“Impressive, in hindsight. Almost convincing.

If someone/ something from before comes back, I “turn into someone different” again. Yeah. Love gets reinstalled like it was never deleted. Very reliable system, Suddenly it’s all meaningful, cinematic nonsense again. Sure. Or it’s just the same thing it was before, just with better excuses this time. Either way, doesn’t really move me. I don’t think about it

Right now, this version is easier. More accurate. I function better without all that “Loveee” people are so committed to. No unnecessary expectations. No disappointments, no need to perform emotions on cue. “Very inconvenient, I know.” -

People call that “empty.” They can call it whatever helps them sleep at night. Labels tend to comfort the confused.

Nothing happened today, Nothing was missing either.

Tragic, isn’t it.

Sincerely, Ahmed

P.S. If you’re expecting love letters or poetry, you’re looking at the wrong person. That version of me got erased. No refund. But if I ever do, congratulations, it won’t last long enough to matter.

From the crisp cavern of the last of the stars I am woken with half a mug of semi warm sweet black tea. I can feel the warmth of the security hut lingering in this incursion of hands into my nest. There is a message for me on his phone – charging in the hut, I must come, he leaves shift in ten.

I had arranged for someone to send me money for transport, and waited all night. The whatsapp now apologizes, they have only just put through the instant clearance which will take roughly forty minutes. And I am going to be late for my appointment if I wait.

Down at the Denis Hurley Center there is a social worker who can get people into a free rehab. And there are people who will believe in me again if I just get myself to a rehab. There are people who believe that I can get myself to rehab.

I did not want to walk.

I can not tell you if I would have used the uber money for smack and walked anyway...

Before rehab every user wants one last hurrah.

But the money will come in less than forty and the appointment is in fifty and if I wait for the money I might buy smack and not make the appointment, and it is maybe a half hour’s brisk walk...

I set out to set out from the small sanctioned space that I sleep in, tucked away in the church garden, where I have returned to eek the last warmth out of my carving of cardboard and plant life in the last blueness of morning, and gather my things, my bank card, my hoodie, my tin foils and lighters...

All I want is a room to sleep in, regulated medication for the withdrawal and to be free from the ability to assuage my pain endlessly with heroin. I want to slowly un-numb. I want to be endlessly numb. Both at the same time. But the returning thing from which I am trying to escape is invading the numbness, and the endless small junkie tasks of every para day are no longer numbing and money is less but the tasks are relentless and I take no joy in them and then the smack is less and the wheedling and the shame is more and so now, it is impossible to be impossibly numb anymore and the only way, is to unnumb slowly, to return to the waking world.

I set out to walk to the Denis Hurley Center.

Determined. Withdrawing. Shivering. The bone splintering pain is in the post. The shit streaming down my legs is later. But later I will be in rehab and have methadone.

The park I sometimes sleep in, smoke at, in small groups in the lazy afternoon haze. It’s not afternoon, it’s empty, no groups to try get a hit off.

As they bask in the balcony shade of their nymandawos, out of reach of the rising day’s heat, the dealers lazily refuse to give me credit.

The other park, empty except for some still sleeping, glazed with the restless sweat of nearing need. Scattered sandwich wrappers from the call to prayer meal drop.

Just around the corner is the rotting cat carcass, it’s on my route to the scrap for crack place and I have been noting it’s decay daily, and today it’s eyes are full of maggots, and it’s stomach has exploded with flies.

The corner of the intersection, under the protection of the overhanging roof of the abandoned butchery, where I sometimes sleep after a day of digging tins from bins. No-one but detritus, foils romantic in wind eddies -depleted. The trickle of shit is starting to eek. I’m going to rehab. I can make it. They’ll have methadone.

The crack house where I sometimes hustle for change, crack, a roof, and the smoking room is abandoned, three para’s outside trying to make a plan in the hot sun.

The rank of broken taxis where we smoke, under the canopy of old trees and plastic sheeting breathing in the morning heat the users are huddled around a burning tyre for a warmth not possible, and no one will spare me a hit, no one has – they say and they retreat into the old minibus rusting black plastics, someone offers me a blackening banana, the smell of it makes me retch, I am offered a hit if I come back in a little bit or wait but I am late for my appointment to get into a rehab and my stomach is bubbling and my hands are chicken hands cramp, searing tendons hot and steel pulling in parts of my body I never had before and fuck I really wanted to uber.

The abandoned methadone clinic with the nyaope dealers selling what I need right now – christ just one hit before I book into rehab...

Indanda smell soaking like a spoeg bucket through a warren of weeds and bushes where the dealers live in the abandoned lot next to the abandoned boat builders yard, where the paras live in the hulls of abandoned boats.

The boys who smoke on the steps of the abandoned HIV clinic opposite the taxi rank where the dealers hide among the sellers of cell phone accessories, smileys grilling on open fires,

The users smoking on the steps of the abandoned public toilets, trying on freshly shoplifted hoodies.

Through the alleys and finally through a levelled building, just one or two bricks high the smokers and the spikers leaning against the wind in plastics trying to get their hits and I look for someone to ask for just one fucking hit... the money must be in my account by now. An ATM mocks me from across the road. And there, one block away, is the Denis Hurley centre.

Fuck it, I'm going to rehab, they'll have methadone.

I wasn’t going to rehab. There was no methadone.

In order to get into Newlands Rehab, to get off street drugs, you have to be off street drugs. They do not accept anyone who tests positive for any substances. If you want to get clean, they advise you self manage your own detox by reducing the amount of nyaope you smoke over five weeks. Over that five weeks you have to attend two sessions a week, one private with the social worker, and one group session with all those trying to reduce to get into rehab. I agree to this and ask them if they can maybe get me an Uber, I know the money has hit my account and I don’t want to walk back, because then I will spend it badly, sharing and paying back all the little hits I had on the way, and then have nothing for myself to get through the night. They are unable to call me an Uber.

I miss my next session.

I try to attend the group session but at the same time, at the Denis Hurley Centre there is a free meal, and the queue is an hour and a half long. I can queue and eat or I can go and listen to how I need to reduce my usage in order to get clean, to get into a rehab to get clean.

I choose to eat.

I phone the Newlands Rehab to see if they offer a twelve step program and a way to reintegrate into larger society. They tell me they will help me get closer to God.

I get myself Suboxone, via an addiction psychiatrist, to help get through the withdrawals. This is an exercise unto itself, it is days and hours and so much time trying to explain to people my limitations and how I need help and how just giving me money will not help and the help I need is not to be trusted. To be not trusted. Not to be.

On my way to my second one on one session at the Denis Hurley Center the cat is starting to dry out, caved mummy skin. A lack of flies.

I am there to tell the social workers that I have Suboxone, can start it immediately, and it’s a six month process but I will be free of all street drugs within three weeks and I can I get into Newlands, I’ll come to all sessions from now on. And I am told that to get into Newlands you cannot be on any medication at all.

All I want is a room, medication and for it to be impossible to take any heroin for roughly six weeks, I want a rehab to formalise this, because it is impossible for anyone to know that I am trying to claw my way back unless there is the official stamp of a rehab, however unsuited to rehabilitation it might be.

Now it seems that even being clean is not a good enough to get into Newlands, the only free rehab I can find, it seems that I must be off all medication, even the medication that is keeping me clean. And I start the walk back from the social worker at the Denis Hurley Center, with no money for caps, and slightly close to withdrawal. I could start my Suboxone now, but I only have two weeks worth and have been told that only if I get into rehab will the full six months be paid for. Reduction therapy is a joke when some days you have nothing at all and some days you have too much. Addicts cannot self manage, its in the name. Coming off Suboxone without titrating down is a different kind of withdrawal, easier on the mind, hard on the body, which is hard on the mind.

I just want a room and time to think without the pressure of withdrawal every eight hours, twelve hours on methadone, twenty four hours on Suboxone.

I pass Matshikiza, squatting in an alley, beating like porridge the insides of a fan. She’s getting the copper out. She thinks it might be just less than a kilogram. That’s about R150, if we make the daytime scrapyard, but they’re far and it’s after three. Her hair is flotsam, long with strips of fabric, strips of coloured plastic, ribbons, discarded hair extensions, bits of bright wig, braided, melted into her own impeciably matted. She flings it over her shoulder occasionally as we work, stripping the plastic casing, always talking Matshikiza, “Iris is back,” she tells me.

“And fat,” I say as we break off the metal transformer bit, “I saw her last week.”

“Returned from the farm, yes, she was clean but there was no work, now her weight is already going” and then we have to unstrand the copper wire, but there’s more copper in the cables and we need every bit we can get, and we take to trying to burn off the plastic and someone comes out a door and shouts, “FUCK OFF PARAS” and so we amble away and find a parking lot to mine our copper.

While we burn and strip and break, her hair occasionally catches a flame and singes or flames and she brushes these forest fires off like mosquitoes. “Iris was raped by a customer the other night, but she is so not wys, you know. She went to the cops. They asked her if he paid, and then told her it wasn’t rape.”

In the fading light Matshikiza shakes her hair shampoo commercial, away from the flames, “ I am not sure if the client or the cop beat her, but her eye is fucked.”

Some boys they come past us and we find out the late night scrap yard opens in half an hour and they only pay R90 a kilogram. One of the boys wants Matshikiza to go with him to the bush, so they do and I carry on stripping the wires, burning the plastic until I am sick with acrid.

The other boy stays with me, the tiknitian, out of worn holes his backpack streams wires and broken cellphone bits and random scraps of previous technology and he paces and talks to himself anxiously, starts as if being interrupted, the familiar crys-style comforting me as I choke on plastic smoke.

Matshikiza returns with R25. We walk to the scrap merchant. He weighs us in at 400 grams, we get R40. We have R65, enough for a cap and a small piece to share.

We make it back to the open air broken building para city, a field of people huddled under black rubbish bags trying to smoke and we get a cap and a piece and we get inside the black plastic and it smells of plastic and we smell of burnt plastic and the sweat of the day and I can tell the withdrawal is coming because I am getting my sense of smell back, and a half cap isn’t going to do it but that’s what there is and I get my foil and Matshikiza loads on a dot, and I pull in, and then we dot through it, levering in the secondary smoke, dots to prevent waste, the sickness must be diminished, feeling a small bit of relief, saving the crack for just before we have to walk back up the hill from town to Percy Osbourne, where she works and I can ask people for help, and I lean back -as much as is possible inside a black garbage bag – and say, “things are bad today.”

Exhaling, we are close under the plastic, in a very tiny room, the light is gone outside and we can only see each other when the lighter sparks on. I tell her I’ve been trying to get into Newlands rehab, because I need a free rehab, but they want me to get clean first.

Matshikiza laughs. “I went to Newlands, the orderlies there, they trade nyaope for clothes or toiletries or whatever you can give. Everyone smokes there. But they charge more, so I came back.”

We hit the crack and take off the black plastic and the street lights and the people and the rustling of so many people under black plastic whispering and exhaling and we start to walk up the hill, the taxis and the rankness, the scattered pavement cookeries, the hustling shouts dying out, behind me somewhere is the Denis Hurley Centre.

Unsure now how to make our next plan and it must be made soon we stumble past the mosque where the last few styrofoams of Ramadan briyani are being handed out, and Matshikiza flirts one away from the packing up staff and we sit on the pavement scooping with broken stryofoam scoops hot rice and chicken scraps into our not hungry mouths in service of out hungry stomachs, swapping with compatriots the street gossip of the day, trying to figure out a plan.

Limping now towards Percy Street, we meet up with Grant, he’s heard I have Suboxone and so we go with him to the strip-club he dances at, and sell the Suboxone half price to the owner’s son who has a son who is trying to get clean, in order to return to school.

And we walk up to the nymandawo, to the dealers who chase us with stones, and we buy caps and pieces and steel ourselves for the walk up to the church garden to smoke

The hill ahead of us, but we will not smoke until we are safe in the garden, away from sharing, we drag ourselves up hill wreathed in eddies of mynah call.

On the corner by Venice road, Iris and her detached retina, a wary lollipop ready with okapi.

Another corner, a blankness on the pavement, an absence of mummifying cat.

We collapse into the church garden, sweating and sticky with hints of burning plastic, coal smoke, lingering briyani, various detritus, breathing in the vinegar fumes of heroin running down the foil, we have enough not to dot. Soon we fade into the intimacy of opiate oblivion. Before she sleeps she says, “Iris is lucky, she has a farm to go back to.”

In the crisp cavern of the night, a warm incursion of hand shakes Matshikiza awake, he has business for her. As she stands some of the sticks and leaves have joined into the jetsam of her hair, the glow of the street light outlines the church vaguely. She has finished sharing for the day, and will not return.

Soon it is only my own warmth left in the nest.

The withdrawal will wake me in about three hours.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, does not go away

“Not all [blank]…,” he said.

You are in service of others. You feel and think deeply for others. If you cannot feel deeply about someone in your midst and that you cannot envision them as part of your purpose… then why venture forth. It’s time to say goodbye. It’s time to go.

“What do you secretly wish for?

Perhaps, this isn’t a question for me, but for him.

この、なんとなく気持ち悪いという感覚を医者に伝えても、うまく取り合ってもらえない。 感覚的な表現でしか説明できないものは、専門的に言語化されていないと理解されにくい。

会社の上司などを見ていても感じるが、努力不足だったり、正しい言語に正規化しないまま言葉を渡したりする事に対してやたら厳しい人がいる。 自分で努力するべきだ、という価値観を無自覚に押し付けてくる。 そして、その押し付けすら気づいていないように見える。

だから世の中は少し生きづらい。 感覚的なものをそのまま受け取ろうとしない人が富裕層に多すぎる。 結局、そういう人たちが作ったルールに従わざるを得ない。 中には甘えるなと言ってくる人もいる始末。

まあいい。

とにかく、腰がずっとつらかった。 回したり、ほぐしたりを繰り返しているうちに、ある時ふと腰の違和感が消えた。 しかし今度は、お尻や太ももに同じような気持ち悪さが出てきた。 やはり痛みではなく、不快感だ。

特に左側。 左の太ももあたりをほぐしていると、今度は左の脇に詰まるような感覚が出てくる。 左腕を横に伸ばすとどこかで引っかかる。 ただ不快なだけで、原因の場所が特定できない。

そんなことを繰り返しながら、たまに普段しない動きをしたときに、偶然その原因に当たることがある。 その時は、そこを重点的にほぐす。

昨日はお尻の下に硬さを見つけて、そこを退治した。 ただ、まだ脇の詰まりと首まわりの違和感は残っている。

良い整体師の見つけ方も分からない。 自分にとってまだこの世界はまだ全然優しくない。

MISTER SOX // 0.5pt E/W @ 17/2 5 places (Bet365) BOG

I also looked at the last race at Ripon and I couldn’t split the Harriet Bethell trained pair of Milteye and On The River here, as both have good chances. I’d also have given the old boy Garden Oasis, an each way chance here if it hadn’t been for the recent rain, but that has put me off. So just a watching brief in the race for me.

What is Ledger.com/start?

Ledger.com/start is the official onboarding page provided by Ledger to help users safely set up their hardware wallets. Whether you're new to cryptocurrency or an experienced investor, this page ensures you follow the correct steps to protect your digital assets from theft, scams, and unauthorized access.

Using Ledger’s official setup process is crucial because it minimizes the risk of phishing attacks and ensures your device is genuine and uncompromised.

Why You Should Use Ledger.com/start

Setting up your crypto wallet through Ledger.com/start offers several advantages:

Official and secure setup instructions Protection against counterfeit devices Step-by-step guidance for beginners Direct access to Ledger Live software Enhanced asset security with hardware encryption

Skipping the official setup process can expose your funds to serious risks, so it’s always recommended to start here.

Step-by-Step Guide to Get Started 1. Visit Ledger.com/start

Go to the official setup page using your browser. Make sure the URL is correct to avoid phishing websites.

1. Choose Your Ledger Device

Select your device model (such as Ledger Nano S Plus or Ledger Nano X) to receive tailored instructions.

1. Download Ledger Live

Install Ledger Live, the official application used to manage your crypto assets, check balances, and install apps.

1. Initialize Your Device Set up a secure PIN code Generate your recovery phrase Confirm your recovery phrase carefully

⚠️ Never share your recovery phrase with anyone.

1. Add Crypto Accounts

Once your wallet is set up, you can add different cryptocurrency accounts and start managing your assets securely.

Key Security Tips for Ledger Users Always access the setup via Ledger.com/start Never enter your recovery phrase on any website Verify device authenticity during setup Keep your recovery phrase offline and safe Avoid third-party setup guides that ask for sensitive information Common Issues and How to Fix Them

Device not connecting? Try switching USB ports or using a different cable.

Ledger Live not installing? Ensure your system meets the minimum requirements and download only from the official source.

Forgot PIN? You can reset the device, but you’ll need your recovery phrase to restore access.

Benefits of Using a Ledger Hardware Wallet Offline storage (cold wallet security) Protection from malware and hackers Support for multiple cryptocurrencies Easy-to-use interface with Ledger Live Industry-leading encryption technology Final Thoughts

Using Ledger.com/start is the safest way to begin your journey with a Ledger hardware wallet. By following the official instructions, you ensure your crypto assets remain secure and under your control.

For years I've been seeing mentions of Margaret St. Clair's Sign of the Labrys and The Shadow People. Both appear in the “Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading” of the Dungeon Master's Guide, and both are relatively obscure. I was always attracted to their covers, but was unable to just walk to the local library and borrow them.

Something had gotten into me yesterday, and I decided to hunt both down—in their ebook form. I am quite confident there was nothing special in the print version, besides beautiful covers that is, since they were plain small-sized paperback.

Few hours later, and I procured Sign of the Labrys (1963), The Dolphins of Altair (1967), The Shadow People (1969), and The Dancers of Noyo (1973) novels. According to St. Clair's Wikipedia page, the last three form some sort of loose trilogy. Their ebook covers are quite underwhelming so I downloaded the originals from the web instead.

I opened the Sign of the Labrys, “just to check it out,” read first few paragraphs, and realised I couldn't just put it down. I finished it in a couple of hours.

Mild spoilers ahead.

I greatly enjoyed the “implicit” writing style, atmosphere, and post-apocalyptic setting. Things are casually introduced without too much—or any—explanation, leaving it up to the reader to fill in the blanks.

The whole thing reads like an extended dungeon delve, with main character sometimes being alone, and sometimes allying with one or more individuals. Exploration is very focused on corridors, doors, chambers, and implied threat.

D&D tropes I noticed:

• Character(s) travel down and up the tiered levels of a large subterranean complex.
• It is explicit that deeper levels hold more resources than the upper levels but are also more dangerous.
• Each level has “guardians” of various sorts.
• Exploration is described by providing lengths of corridors, doors, and sizes of areas; almost reading like an example of play, and eerily similar to how I write in the session reports.
• Secret doors and passageways that shortcut the dungeon levels or lead to secret areas with treasure.
• Thematic dungeon levels: a workers' level, laboratory level, pleasure level, engine level, etc.
• Factions: each level has at least one dominant faction, plus several smaller factions.
• Spellcasting. Mostly illusory magic.
• Main character levels up as he travels deeper. He also then has to spend time training to unlock new abilities.
• There is a lot of resting.

Perhaps I read it too quickly, but I do not remember any single character that fits the description of hairy monster featured on the cover.

The novel didn't feel dated at all. In fact, a plague that make peoples' lungs fill with liquid, resulting them in choking to death, sounded very contemporary.

All in all, Sign of the Labrys was quite an enjoyable read. It was fascinating witnessing what might have contributed to Gary's view on dungeons and dungeon delving. I am very much looking forward to reading The Shadow People too.

#Reading #AppendixN #Fantasy #ScienceFiction

I think cooking has started to become a little bit of an insecurity for me, because I’ve had a couple experiences now with female friends that grew up cooking that make fun of me for my inexperience. And it feels really unfair to me because growing up I didn’t even get the chance to cook or to do anything like that, because I was forced to do academics 24/7. A mentioned how she would cook with her family and that was a big bonding time for her and I’m really happy for her and I think it makes it exceptionally shitty to me to have it rubbed into my face how I didn’t have anyone to teach me this stuff. And so I understand that I’m really inexperienced and not super aware of a lot of things that might be common knowledge to someone else. And I understand that it might seem to someone else that I’m completely clueless and naïve, but it’s really hard to try to learn these things on your own without help. It’s one of those things where you don’t even know where to start and you don’t even know what you don’t know. I ruined so many nonstick pans because I was cleaning them wrong and that’s something that might seem super obvious in hindsight but how the fuck am I supposed to know that a pan is not supposed to be scrubbed? And I feel really defensive with stuff like this because I’ve encountered a lot of people that just cannot put themselves in the shoes of remembering what it was like to not know something. And this is something that I’ve noticed a lot as a double standard. For the things that I grew up knowing because that’s all I had as a child, I’ve been very conscious about the fact that not everyone had the same experience as I did and so it’s never someone’s fault for not knowing something when it was something they should’ve been taught. There’s no point in shaming them and it’s not fair to do that either I find. And I think everyone agrees with that philosophy until it comes to something they don’t consider it applicable to.

Oppgavene

Konkurransen bestod av tre oppgaver. Den første var levert av NorgesGruppen Data og handlet om å lage en modell som kunne kjenne igjen varer på hyllebilder fra butikker og klassifisere dem. Den andre var levert av Tripletex og handlet om å lage en agent som kunne håndtere oppgaver innen regnskap. Den tredje var an morsom oppgave levert av Astar Consulting (tror de stod for mesteparten av organiseringen). Oppgaven handlet om å lage prediksjoner for hvordan en verden, beskrevet av et pikselert kart med verdier som indikerte bebyggelse eller ikke osv, ville utvikle seg. Her har jeg notert noen av mine tanker rundt oppgaven levert av Tripletex.

Aldri mer skrive reiseregning for hånd?

Tripletexoppgaven var overraskende morsom til regnskap å være. Jeg hater, for eksempel, å levere reiseregninger. Med tilgang til Tripletex' API kan du lage en KI agent som klarer å levere reiseregning for deg bare med en kort beskrivelse av reisen og filer som inneholder kvitteringene. Hvert team fikk utdelt en Tripletex sandbox vi kunne teste agenten vår mot og det gikk overraskende greit å lage en agent som kunne det meste. Det eneste var at jeg måtte bruke den beste modellen fra Anthropic, Opus, for å få det til. Siden jeg var gjerrig (og med vilje ville prøve å få til å lage så billige løsninger som mulig) hadde jeg ikke spandert på meg selv en dyrere tilgang uten ratebegrensninger for Opus. Selv om min agent klarte oppgavene, bare den fikk nok tid, fungerte den dårlig i selve konkurransen fordi vi gikk til timeout før alt var gjennomført.

Billigere (og raskere) modeller

Jeg forsøkte meg på en blanding av modellene Sonnet og Opus hvor Sonnet tok seg av oppgaver i kategorier som var klassifisert som “enkle” og oppgaver av andre typer eller nye oppgaver vi ikke hadde møtt på før gikk til Opus. Dette fungerte ganske godt, men ga også timeout innimellom. Jeg prøvde så å bruke Claude Code til å overvåke loggene fra agenten og komme med forslag til forbedrede instruksjoner og prøve å gjøre instruksjonene så gode at til og med Haiku (raskere modell, men ikke like smart) kunne klare det. Resultatet ble fort at min regnskapsagents instruksjoner ble veldig tilpasset oppgavene i konkurransen og når jeg testet med en større variasjon av instruksjoner mot teamets sandbox feilet agenten brutalt. Haiku begynte å hallusinere endepunkter i APIen og lignende. Vi klarte ikke å lage en agent som både gjorde det bra i konkurransen og fungerte bra hvis vi utsatte den for en større variasjon av forespørsler.

Sikkerhet er krevende

En annen ting var at det var vanskelig å lage en virkelig nyttig agent uten at den også kunne overtales til gjøre sånne ting som å slette alle ansatte. Du vil jo at agenten skal ha tilganger nok til å gjøre alt du trenger at den gjør. Sikkerhet i et slikt system er ikke trivielt. Du kan antageligvis ikke bygge inn sikkerhet utelukkende i instruksjonene du gir din agent, men må ha ett lag i forkant av selve agenten som filtrerer vekk det som virker som skadelige prompts OG et lag mellom agenten og faktisk gjennomføring av forespørsler mot API som utelukker skadelige handlinger. Som å slette alt av bilag eller alle ansatte.

Leverandøravhengighet

I et produksjonsmiljø vil det nok være nærliggende å velge å bruke Opus, den dyreste og beste modellen fra Anthropic, eller tilsvarende fra en annen leverandør. I dag er nok tilgang til slike modeller underpriset sammenligned med hva det faktisk koster å vedlikeholde og videreutvikle slike ledende modeller. Likevel brukte laget vårt i overkant av 200 kroner på tokens en helg og da brukte vi mye Haiku og Sonnet, som er rimeligere. I dag bygger nok mange bedrifter tjenester basert å de beste modellene. Hva gjør man med tjenesten hvis leverandørene bestemmer seg for å sette opp prisen? Det var alt annet enn lett å bytte ut Opus med billigere alternativer. Jeg gjetter på at de største leverandørene fortsatt selger tilgang til en slags introduksjonspris og at den dagen mange nok har bygget opp avhengigheter, så vil prisen øke.

Du må nok skrive reiseregningen selv

Hvis vi, som hadde tilgang til en del gratis tokens (jeg hadde nettopp satt opp abonnement på Claude og hadde derfor noen gratis introduksjonstokens), brukte over 200 kroner på noen timer med forespørsler, hvor mye vil ikke det tilsvarende koste hvis en hel bedrift bruker det? Det skal godt gjøres å forsvare, økonomisk, å ha en agent som kanskje, kanskje ikke gjør som du vil heller enn å bare forvente at folk leverer sine egne reiseregninger. Hadde jeg vært sjef, så hadde jeg nok sagt at folk pent må laste ned den appen og taste inn de detaljene selv.

En smartere bruk

En smartere bruk kunne vært å utvikle en agent som hjelper regnskapsarbeidere utvikle, sammen med IT-folk, løsninger som automatiserer de mest tidkrevende oppgavene. Da utnytter du modeller som Opus' kapasitet til å finne fram til riktige API endepunkter og lignende på en måte som gjør det enklere å bygge inn sikkerhet og tilgangsstyring.

Someone in my chosen family told me: “Simplify your life. And then simplify again. Happiness follows.”

When I think about it, some things are best left unsaid and un-announced to the wider public. Everyone will be happier that way.

What news can I then bring you on this new lunar cycle, my fellow esteemed gaia-naut?

I know! Let me check the logs on my camera, (a beauty from the digital-camera manufacturers of the 2010s.)

snapshots

Note: the above has been edited with an app named Snapseed.

from another camera

tried a journal prompt: what I have learnt that I need in love

It's so strange that people around me, myself included, need a new useful language to advocate for what we really need. The language from my childhood environment is insufficient for my present-day circumstances.

To help me, I used a checklist from Dr. William Harley, Jr.'s book, titled “His Needs, Her Needs”. A striking sentence from that book is: affairs begin when someone in the marriage feels unfulfilled in their emotional needs, and looks elsewhere to fulfill those needs: co-workers, strangers and so on.

Dr. Harley, Jr. lists out ten different emotional needs in his book.

After working through some exercises, I have compiled a ranking of my top five emotional needs, out of the ten. In this particular order:

1. Gestures of affection
2. Recreational companionship
3. Words of admiration
4. Physical attractiveness of my partner (lest anonymous critics accuse me of sexism, I believe my partner would similarly love for me to look well-groomed and well-dressed.)
5. Intimate conversations – about fears, vulnerabilities and future hopes.

I wonder, dear reader, if you and your partner discuss whether each of you are meeting each other's needs? For me, I realised it takes substantial effort to even figure out my emotional needs in the first place – with the caveat, of course, that my emotional needs may change as time passes.

bookshelf

1. Sun City, by Tove Jansson.
2. The insanity of God: A true story of faith resurrected, by Nik Ripken.
3. Illustration now: Fashion, edited by Wiedemann and Heller.

resources

1. “Affection, sex and the 10 emotional needs”. By: Mark Jala. Retrieved from Happy Marriage Coaching on 16 April 2026. Also on Internet Archive.
2. Journal prompt cards, from Oliver Bonas, (which is the name of a chain of stores.)

#lunaticus

She had not planned to stop at the park. She had planned to drive straight back to the apartment near Thomas Road, change clothes, wake her father for his morning pills, and pretend for another day that they were still only a few hard weeks away from being okay. But when she found the pink notice tucked under her wiper in the lot behind the office building where she cleaned hallways at night, something in her finally gave way. It was not even the worst thing she had seen that week. The rent reminder folded on her kitchen counter was worse. The text from her daughter the night before had been worse. The call from her younger brother asking if she could spot him eighty dollars had been worse only because he had asked it with the same careless voice he always used, as if her life were still a place where money appeared when she needed it. Yet that pink notice had done something the other problems had not. It had taken all the things she had been trying to carry separately and stacked them into one undeniable truth. She was behind. She was tired. She was losing ground faster than she could make it back. Her father had started forgetting small things and then pretending he had not. Her daughter Sofía had grown quieter and sharper at the same time. Elena’s body ached in ways that sleep no longer fixed. She had driven until the streets widened and the city thinned around her and then she saw the park and pulled in because she did not trust herself to keep moving.

She watched Jesus before she knew why she was watching Him. At first He was only a figure at the edge of the path, kneeling alone in the weak dawn. There was nothing flashy about Him. He did not look like the kind of man people in her neighborhood would automatically move toward. He looked simple. Steady. Completely at ease in a world that made almost everyone else look rushed or guarded or tired. Elena brushed tears from under her eyes with the heel of her hand and told herself to get a grip. She was too old to be falling apart in parking lots before sunrise. She was too needed for this. She had a father at home whose pill organizer sat on the counter waiting for her. She had laundry in the back seat. She had a sink full of dishes. She had a daughter who had become impossible to read. When Jesus rose from prayer, He did not look around as if checking to see who had noticed. He simply stood and turned toward the path. An older man across the grass had dropped a plastic bag and two oranges rolled out toward the curb. Jesus crossed to him without hurry, bent down, picked them up, and listened while the man spoke. That should not have mattered. It was a small thing. Yet Elena felt the sting of tears again because lately nobody in her life seemed to have time for small things unless they were attached to a bill or a problem or a demand. She started the car, then turned it off again. Then she started it once more and finally backed out with a hard swallow, telling herself that whatever was rising in her was only exhaustion.

By the time she reached the apartment, the sun had started to color the edges of the buildings and the day had taken on the dry brightness that always made Phoenix feel more awake than she did. Her father, Luis, was already dressed when she walked in, though one sleeve of his button-up shirt was misbuttoned and his shoes were on the wrong feet. He sat at the small kitchen table with yesterday’s mail spread in front of him as if he had been studying it, but the look on his face told her he had mostly been staring through it. He had once been a man who could fix engines by sound and could tell you what was wrong with a room within ten seconds of stepping into it. Now he sometimes forgot the word for dishwasher. Sometimes he opened the freezer when he meant to use the bathroom. Most days he recovered quickly enough to make a joke. Some days he got angry first. Elena moved toward him without mentioning the shoes because there was a right way to help him and a wrong way, and the wrong way could turn the whole morning into a wound neither of them knew how to close. Sofía was asleep on the couch with one arm across her face, still in black work clothes from the night before. Her eyeliner had smudged beneath her eyes. Her shoes were on the floor, one near the coffee table and one halfway under the lamp. Elena looked at her daughter for a moment and felt that old mixture of tenderness and helpless frustration. Sofía was nineteen. She was smart. She had once laughed easily. Lately she moved through the apartment like every question from her mother was an accusation.

Luis looked up when Elena reached for the coffee pot. “You’re late,” he said, though he said it without force, as if the sentence had arrived before the feeling behind it. Elena glanced at the microwave clock and almost corrected him, then stopped herself. “Traffic,” she said instead. “Did you eat?” He nodded once. Then he frowned at the table and lifted one of the envelopes. “This from the power company?” he asked. The fact that he had to ask made something inside her tighten. He had always been the one who sorted papers, paid bills, balanced the world with a pencil and a pad and a kind of plain competence that made fear feel unnecessary. Elena took the envelope from him and set it aside. “I’ll handle it,” she said. He did not like those words anymore. She could see it in the way his mouth moved. He did not want his daughter handling things for him. He did not want her speaking gently to him as if he might bruise. He did not want the world narrowing one forgotten word at a time. From the couch, Sofía spoke without opening her eyes. “Everything in this house is ‘I’ll handle it,’” she muttered. “That’s not actually handling it.” Elena turned too fast. The exhaustion in her body made her temper feel closer to the surface than usual. “You got in after two,” she said. “I’m not doing this right now.” Sofía sat up, pushed her hair back, and looked at her with that blank hard stare that had become her shield. “No, of course not,” she said. “We never do.”

Elena had planned to sleep for an hour after breakfast, but by eight-thirty she was back in the car with Luis beside her because the apartment felt too tight and because the forms she needed for rental assistance were easier to print at Burton Barr Central Library than from her phone. She told Sofía where she was going. Sofía nodded without really listening and said she had to be downtown later. Elena wanted to ask where exactly. She wanted to ask whether classes mattered to her anymore. She wanted to ask who she had been with the night before. Instead she said, “Don’t forget to eat something,” and hated the way the sentence sounded thin and powerless the moment it left her mouth. The drive south was mostly quiet. Luis kept touching his shirt pocket, then the dashboard, then his pocket again. Elena noticed it by the second stoplight. “What are you looking for?” she asked. He hesitated, which told her he had known the answer a minute ago and now did not. “Nothing,” he said. Then after a pause, “My wallet.” Elena exhaled slowly. “It’s in your back pocket,” she said, keeping her voice light. He reached back, found it, and looked out the window without another word. Shame had a way of entering a car and taking up all the room. It sat between people without sound. It made every kindness feel dangerous.

The library had the kind of clean quiet that could either settle a person or expose them. Elena never knew which way it would go. Burton Barr always felt larger on the inside than the building looked from the street. The light came down in long bright stretches, and the people moving through it seemed to carry whole private worlds no one else could see. A man in construction boots slept in a chair near the entrance with his lunch cooler between his feet. A woman with a toddler balanced a stack of children’s books against her hip while fishing in her purse for a library card. Two teenagers argued softly over a phone charger. Elena guided Luis toward a bank of computers and signed them in, then sat at the screen with the folder from home tucked under her arm. She had brought every paper she thought she might need. Pay stubs. Her lease. The utility notice. Her ID. Luis’s medication summary from the clinic. The neatness of it almost mocked her. She had the paperwork of a responsible person and the life of someone one bad month away from collapse. Luis wandered toward a display of local history books while she opened forms and filled blank spaces with fingers that felt clumsy and too large. Household income. Number of dependents. Current balance due. Reason for hardship. That one stopped her. She stared at the blinking cursor. There were too many reasons, and somehow writing any of them down made them feel both smaller and more humiliating.

When she finally rose to find the printer, she saw Jesus standing near the far end of the room beside her father. Luis had one hand resting on the back of a chair, and there was a look on his face Elena had not seen in weeks. It was not happiness. It was not exactly relief. It was the look of a man who had been bracing for laughter and had instead found gentleness. She moved toward them quickly, unsure whether to apologize or protect or explain. Jesus turned before she spoke, as if He had known she was there the whole time. Up close, His calm did not feel distant. It felt attentive. Fully here. Fully with the person in front of Him. Luis tapped the front pocket of his shirt and said, “I thought I’d lost the card with my prescription list.” He held up a folded paper. “I had it the whole time.” Elena looked from the paper to her father’s face. The edge in him had gone soft. Jesus said, “Sometimes fear makes us think something is gone before it is.” It was a simple sentence. Elena should have let it pass as one more kind stranger offering one more harmless observation. Instead she felt the words settle somewhere deeper than they should have. Because that was exactly how the last few months had felt. As if she had started declaring parts of her life dead before she had even stopped to see what was still there. As if panic had become the lens through which she viewed every unopened envelope, every short reply from her daughter, every quiet lapse in her father’s memory.

Luis, who usually distrusted men he had not measured for himself, asked Jesus if He came to the library often. Jesus smiled in a way that made the question feel welcome rather than small. “I go where people are trying to carry more than they can name,” He said. Luis gave a short breath that almost became a laugh. “Then you picked the right building.” Elena should have interrupted. She should have thanked Him and moved on. She still had forms to print. She still had an afternoon to survive. Yet she stood there feeling oddly seen and unprotected at the same time. Jesus looked at her then, not at her folder or the lines of fatigue beneath her eyes, but at her. “You have not rested in a long time,” He said. She almost told Him that was none of His business. The answer rose hot and ready in her throat. But something about His tone made defensiveness feel childish. He was not intruding. He was naming what was already true. Elena lifted one shoulder. “People don’t always get to rest,” she said. “Some people have to keep things moving.” It was the kind of answer she gave everyone. It had become her way of ending conversations before anybody could step into the places she kept hidden. Jesus did not argue with her. He simply said, “Keeping things moving is not the same as being held.”

That sentence followed her back to the computer and would not leave her alone. Keeping things moving is not the same as being held. Elena printed the forms, then reread them twice because suddenly the whole process made her feel exposed. She hated asking for help from systems built by strangers. She hated the language of need. She hated the way forms reduced a life to numbers and categories and boxes that did not care how hard she had worked to avoid this very moment. A library staff member wearing a purple lanyard stepped over and asked if she needed community resources. Elena nearly said no out of reflex, but the woman’s face was kind and practical and carried none of the pity Elena feared most. She mentioned food assistance, rental programs, and a legal clinic that came twice a month. Then she said, “If you need groceries before anything else comes through, St. Mary’s can help today.” Elena nodded as if she were only taking in information for someone else. She folded the handout and slid it into her folder without looking at it. Food assistance was for people in emergency. For people at the bottom. For people who had run out. Yet even while the thoughts moved through her, she knew they were lies she had inherited from pride and fear. Her refrigerator was not empty, but it was thinning in that unmistakable way. Eggs. A half onion. Tortillas. One yogurt. A jar of salsa. Rice. Her father needed better than that. So did Sofía, whether she acted like the apartment no longer mattered to her or not.

Luis asked if they could sit for a few minutes before leaving. Elena agreed, mostly because the room had begun to feel too bright. They found seats near a window where the city shimmered beyond the glass in sheets of white heat. For a while neither of them spoke. Then Luis said, “I forgot your mother’s birthday last month.” Elena turned toward him slowly. He had not told her that before. Her mother had been gone three years, and the grief had shifted shape but never really loosened its grip. “It came to me later that night,” he said. “I sat there thinking I had missed something. Then I knew what it was and I could not fix it.” Elena swallowed hard. Her father kept his eyes on his hands. “When your mother was alive,” he said, “I was the one who remembered. All the dates. All the appointments. I knew when the tires needed air. I knew who needed a ride. I knew how to keep things straight. Now I stand in the kitchen and look at a spoon and for a second I don’t know why I’m holding it.” Elena reached for his hand, and he let her, which was its own kind of heartbreak. “You’re still here,” she said. He nodded but did not look convinced. “That’s what people say when they want to be kind,” he answered. “It isn’t the same as being who you were.” Jesus, who had somehow crossed the room without Elena noticing, stopped near them with the quiet ease of someone entering holy ground. He looked at Luis and said, “You are not less loved because you are frightened by what is changing.” Then He looked at Elena and added, “And you are not stronger because you refuse to admit you are frightened too.”

Elena almost laughed, but it would not have been a real laugh. It would have been the laugh a person gives when they are too close to crying in public and need some other sound to come out instead. She stood too quickly and said they should go. On the way out, the folded handout inside her folder seemed heavier than the papers themselves. Outside, the light had sharpened and the sidewalk held that dry midday glare Phoenix wore like a challenge. Luis asked whether they were heading home. Elena heard herself say no before she had fully decided. “We’re making one more stop,” she told him. He did not ask where, though she suspected he knew from the tightness in her voice that whatever answer she would have given would have embarrassed her. She drove west with the air conditioner pushing against the heat and with the silence in the car deepening into something more honest than the earlier shame. There were moments in life when you could feel yourself crossing a line you never meant to approach. Not because disaster had exploded, but because a quiet truth had finally become too large to step around. Elena had always believed she could work her way clear of trouble if she moved fast enough and gave up enough sleep. That belief had carried her a long time. It had also become its own prison. At a stoplight she pressed her thumb into the center of the steering wheel and fought the urge to turn around. “We don’t have to,” Luis said softly, still looking out the window. Elena did not ask how he knew. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “We do.”

St. Mary’s Food Bank did not look the way shame had described it in her head. It was orderly. Busy. Human. People stood in line with strollers, with folding carts, with toddlers clinging to knees, with work boots dusty from a job site, with office clothes still neat enough to suggest they had come on a break and hoped nobody they knew would see them. That hurt Elena more than it helped because it forced her to admit how wrongly she had imagined need. Need did not announce itself with one face. It did not live only in lives that had gone completely off the rails. It moved quietly into ordinary houses and sat down at ordinary tables and began taking things one paycheck at a time. She parked and sat without unbuckling. Luis waited beside her. He did not rush her. He was proud enough to understand what pride cost. Finally Elena got out, smoothed the front of her shirt, and took the folder with her as if documentation could somehow defend her dignity. The line moved slowly under the hard white afternoon. Somewhere near the front a baby cried with the exhausted full-body cry that comes just before sleep. A volunteer handed bottled water to people waiting. Elena took one and thanked the woman in a voice that sounded unfamiliar to her own ears.

About ten minutes later she heard somebody say her name with the hesitant tone of a person who is not sure they want to be recognized. She turned and saw her brother Nico three places over, wearing an orange volunteer shirt and carrying flattened cardboard boxes toward a side bin. He had lost weight since she had last seen him, though in his case that only made the strain in his face easier to read. Nico was thirty-seven and had spent most of his adult life living as if consequences were weather systems that formed only over other people’s houses. He had charm when he wanted something. He had apologies when charm failed. He had plans every January and excuses every March. Elena loved him in the stubborn way family often forces love to work, but she had run out of belief in his promises a long time ago. Seeing him there hit her in two directions at once. Part of her wanted to turn away because standing in that line already felt like enough exposure for one day. Another part of her could not ignore the simple fact that he looked ashamed to be seen. He set the cardboard down and came toward her with the awkwardness of someone approaching a bruise. “Court stuff,” he said before she could ask. “Community service. It’s not permanent.” Elena almost told him she had not asked for an explanation. Then she looked at his face and saw that he was not trying to get ahead of judgment this time. He was trying to survive it. “How long?” she asked. “Three weekends,” he said. “And maybe longer if I keep coming.” Luis gave him a nod. Nico returned it with surprising gentleness.

They did not have time for a full conversation because the line kept moving, but a few hard things can surface quickly when people are no longer strong enough to keep acting. Nico glanced at the folder under Elena’s arm, then at the line, and something in him shifted. “You okay?” he asked, and for once there was no foolishness under the question. Elena looked away. “I’m managing.” Nico winced a little at that word, which told her he knew exactly how false it had become. “Sofía’s been picking up shifts at The Duce,” he said after a pause. “You know that, right?” Elena stared at him. “She told me she was covering here and there.” Nico rubbed his jaw. “It’s more than here and there.” He lowered his voice. “I saw her outside a couple nights ago. She looked wrecked. Said not to tell you.” Elena felt the heat change around her. Not because the sun had shifted, but because something inside her had. “Why would she tell you and not me?” Nico gave a tired half smile. “Because I’m the family disappointment. People say things around me they won’t say around the person still trying to keep the walls up.” That should have irritated her. Instead it landed with painful accuracy. She thought of Sofía on the couch that morning, shoes on the floor, face turned away. She thought of all the questions she had asked lately that were really accusations with softer wording. She thought of how often fear made love sound like control.

Jesus was there again before Elena had decided what to do with this new ache. She had not seen Him arrive. He was simply beside them, one hand resting lightly on the handle of an empty cart, as if He had always been part of the line. Nico looked at Him with quick curiosity, then with the wary respect people sometimes feel around someone who seems to know them before introductions. Jesus said to Elena, “Not every silence in your daughter is rebellion. Some of it is pain she does not know how to bring to you without feeling judged or becoming a burden.” Elena opened her mouth to defend herself and found that nothing honest came easily. She loved her daughter. She had worked through fevers for her daughter. She had gone without new shoes for years for her daughter. Yet love by itself did not mean Sofía felt safe with her. That realization hurt in a place deeper than pride. Nico looked down at the concrete. “That’s true,” he said quietly. “She’s been scared for a while.” Elena turned to him too quickly. “Scared of what?” Nico hesitated, and in that hesitation she heard enough to know there was more waiting for her than she was ready to hear. The line moved again. A volunteer waved them forward. Luis touched Elena’s elbow, not to hurry her but to steady her. She walked on because there was nothing else to do. Sometimes grace does not arrive by removing humiliation. Sometimes it arrives by keeping a person standing while they walk through it.

When they came back to the car with boxes in the trunk and a few extra bags tucked at Luis’s feet, the day had tilted toward afternoon. Elena leaned against the door with both eyes closed. She was grateful. She hated that she was grateful. She felt lighter and rawer at the same time. Nico stood a few feet away, hands in the pockets of his volunteer pants, as if unsure whether he had earned the right to stay near them. “I can meet you downtown after I’m done here,” he said. “At The Duce. If you want.” Elena opened her eyes. “Why would I need to meet you there?” Nico looked at the pavement before answering. “Because Sofía’s not just working extra. Something happened with school. And I think she’s trying to outrun it.” Elena’s stomach tightened. She thought of tuition notices. Missed assignments. Quiet panic. The way Sofía had begun sleeping with her phone under the pillow. The way she snapped whenever Elena asked about classes. Jesus stood near the front of the car with the late light on His face, and in that moment He did not look severe or distant or dramatic. He looked like the only steady thing in a city full of people trying not to drown where others could see. “Go to her,” He said. “But do not go armed for a fight. Go ready to hear what her fear has been saying when her mouth could not.” Elena drew in a shaky breath. She wanted to ask how she was supposed to do that when her own fear was screaming just as loudly. She wanted instructions. A script. A guarantee that one right conversation could restore what months of strain had thinned. Instead all she had was the look in His eyes, which carried neither pressure nor doubt. Luis eased himself into the passenger seat. Nico stepped back. Elena got behind the wheel and gripped it the way she had at dawn, except now she knew that whatever was waiting in downtown Phoenix would not be answered by pretending she was still the unbreakable one. She started the engine, pulled out into the traffic, and drove toward The Duce with Jesus moving beside the wreckage of her day as calmly as if none of it was beyond redemption.

Traffic thickened as she moved south and east through downtown, and the city took on that late-afternoon look that always made Phoenix feel both exposed and full of hiding places at the same time. Heat rose from the streets in waves. Light flashed off windows. Men in work shirts crossed against the signal with paper cups in their hands. A woman pushed a stroller past a bus stop while talking into a phone with the tired sharpness of someone handling too much before dinner. Elena drove with one hand tight on the wheel and one hand resting uselessly on the folder in the passenger seat as if papers could do something here too. Luis stayed quiet beside her, though once he reached over and touched the edge of the food bank receipt sitting near the cup holder. He did not say that he hated being a man who rode home with donated groceries at his feet. He did not have to. The whole day had been full of things nobody wanted to name because naming them made them feel too solid. Nico followed in his own car after his shift ended, and the knowledge that her brother was behind her somewhere in traffic felt strange. He had been one of the least dependable people in her life for so long that having him near her on a hard day felt like watching a familiar street show a different face in different light.

By the time she parked near The Duce, the place was alive with its usual mix of noise and motion. People drifted in and out of the old warehouse space with drinks, laughter, tired postures, and the kind of faces that said they had come looking for one night off from themselves. Elena had only been there once years ago for somebody’s birthday, and even then she had never felt fully at ease in places where everybody seemed determined to prove they were having a good time. Now the whole setting pressed against her nerves. Music leaked through the open space. A few people stood near the entrance looking relaxed in ways she could not imagine feeling. Nico met her by the car and glanced toward the building. “She’s probably in back or near the side entrance,” he said. “Sometimes she takes her break out there.” Elena looked at him hard. “What happened with school?” Nico rubbed the back of his neck and looked older than she usually let herself notice. “She withdrew,” he said. “I don’t know every detail. I just know she was trying to keep it from you. She said she was gonna get through the semester somehow, but I think it got away from her.” Elena felt the ground inside her shift. She had suspected struggle. She had not let herself imagine collapse. “How long have you known?” she asked. Nico gave a tired shrug that carried shame in it. “A few weeks. She made me swear not to say anything.” Elena turned away before she said something cruel. Anger comes easily when pain arrives wearing the face of secrecy. It wants a target before it wants truth.

Jesus stood near the side wall under a sliver of shade as if He had always belonged there too. The noise of the place did not touch Him. The pressure of the day did not rush Him. He watched Elena the way a doctor might watch a patient reaching for a wound that has finally opened. “If you walk in there trying to recover your pride,” He said, “you will lose your daughter for the rest of the evening. If you walk in ready to understand her fear, you may finally hear her.” Elena shut her eyes for one second because she knew He was right and hated it. She had not spent the drive preparing to understand. She had spent it collecting hurts. She had spent it building the case she might make against Sofía without even meaning to. The hidden shifts. The withdrawal from school. The distance. The way her daughter had forced Elena to hear hard things from everybody else first. Luis got slowly out of the car and closed the passenger door with both hands. He looked at Jesus and then at Elena. “Your mother used to say that when people are ashamed they lie badly and hide poorly,” he said. “It doesn’t always mean they don’t love you.” Elena swallowed hard. Her father had not quoted her mother in weeks. The fact that he remembered that now felt like mercy breaking through a wall in a place she had stopped expecting it.

They found Sofía near the back by a service door with an apron tied loosely over black jeans and a phone in her hand. She was sitting on an overturned crate with one knee up and one foot tapping the concrete, staring at something on the screen so intensely that she did not see them at first. When she did, her whole body changed. Elena saw it happen before any words were spoken. Her daughter’s shoulders locked. Her mouth set hard. Her eyes narrowed not with anger first, but with the panic of a person whose private damage has just been discovered in public. “What are you doing here?” Sofía asked, getting to her feet too fast. Elena almost answered with the full weight of what she felt. She almost said, That depends on why you’ve been lying to me. She almost said, I had to find out from your uncle. She almost said, After everything I’m carrying, this is what you do. But Jesus’ words were still in her. Go ready to hear what her fear has been saying. Elena took a breath that felt thin and said, “I came because I need to talk to you.” Sofía laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “Now?” she said. “At work? That’s great.” Nico stayed back. Luis rested one hand against the car beside him. Jesus stood a few steps away, not forcing Himself into the center and yet somehow remaining there.

Sofía crossed her arms and waited, but Elena could see that she was already bracing for attack. That hurt more than the lies had. A child only learns to brace like that when home has stopped feeling like a place where hard truth can arrive without explosion. Elena felt the sharp sting of that realization and had to steady herself against it before speaking. “I know about school,” she said. The words were simple, but the effect was immediate. Sofía looked past her mother toward Nico, then back again, and the betrayal in her face turned quickly into fury because fury is easier to carry than humiliation. “Of course you do,” she said. “Why would anybody tell me my own life belongs to me?” Elena should have flinched. Instead she heard the wound under the sentence. “I’m not here to trap you,” she said. “I’m here because I should have known you were drowning.” Sofía’s face changed again. The hardness did not vanish, but it lost some of its edge. “You were busy,” she said, and that sentence entered Elena more painfully than shouting would have. Busy. It was true. She had been busy keeping food in the house, sorting Luis’s appointments, working nights, staring down bills, answering texts, doing laundry, fixing small things before they became large things. She had also been busy telling herself that surviving the week was the same as staying close to the people she loved.

Sofía looked away toward the alley, where heat still pressed off the pavement and the noise from inside the building rose and fell behind them. “I didn’t withdraw because I’m lazy,” she said in a lower voice. “I know you probably think that.” Elena started to interrupt, but Jesus’ presence held her still. Sofía kept going before she lost the nerve. “I missed one class because Grandpa had that bad morning and you were asleep after work. Then I got behind. Then I tried to catch up. Then I started having panic attacks every time I opened the course site. Then one of my professors emailed asking if everything was okay, and I couldn’t even answer because I felt stupid. Then I bombed a presentation because I couldn’t breathe and everybody stared at me like I was losing my mind. Then it was too late.” Her voice cracked on the last three words, and she hated that it did. Elena could see it. Sofía pressed her lips together and looked down at her hands. “I thought maybe I could keep the job and save some money and go back later and tell you once I had a plan.” Elena heard every missed chance in the space between them. Every moment she had asked, “How’s school?” while looking at the sink or folding towels or scanning unpaid bills instead of looking into her daughter’s face. Every time Sofía had said, “Fine,” and Elena had accepted it because the truth sounded too large to handle that day.

“You should have told me,” Elena said, but gently this time, and even she could hear that the sentence carried sorrow more than blame. Sofía gave a small bitter shake of the head. “And said what?” she asked. “Hey Mom, I know you’re holding up the whole house and taking Grandpa to appointments and trying not to get evicted, but good news, I’m falling apart too?” Elena opened her mouth and then closed it because this was the real confession, not the withdrawal form. Sofía had not hidden things because she did not care. She had hidden them because she could see her mother’s exhaustion and had mistaken that exhaustion for inability to hold anything else. She had decided silence was kindness. A terrible kindness. A lonely kindness. One that left her stranded inside her own fear. Jesus stepped nearer then and spoke so calmly that the noise behind them seemed to thin around His words. “Children often begin carrying secret weight when they stop believing there is room for their pain in the house,” He said. Sofía’s eyes filled, and Elena felt her own. “I never wanted that,” Elena whispered. “I know,” Jesus said. “But love can still grow sharp when it is frightened long enough.”

For a while nobody moved. Cars rolled past on the street beyond the lot. Somebody inside laughed too loudly. A kitchen door swung open and shut. The ordinary world kept going while a family stood in an alley and faced what had been fraying in silence for months. Nico looked wrecked by it too. He leaned against the wall with both hands in his pockets and stared at the ground like a man who had no business offering wisdom and yet was about to try anyway. “We all do this,” he said quietly. “We all act like the family only gets one person who’s allowed to need help at a time.” Elena turned toward him. It was such a true thing that she felt it more than thought it. Luis nodded once, slowly, with a sadness that seemed to reach back through years. “Your mother carried things she never told me either,” he said. “By the time I understood, she had been alone in them longer than I knew.” He looked at Sofía then with watery eyes and an expression so tender it nearly undid Elena. “Don’t make the house quieter than it already is,” he said. “Silence can eat a family.” Sofía covered her mouth with one hand and looked away because some truths are too sharp to take head-on.

A young woman with a stack of towels under her arm opened the back door, saw the faces in the alley, and immediately slowed. She was around Sofía’s age, maybe a little older, with a tattoo disappearing under one sleeve and the careful expression of somebody who had seen enough pain in public to know when to step lightly. “You okay?” she asked Sofía. The question was simple, but it held no performance. Sofía gave the automatic answer first. “Yeah.” Then she looked at the woman again and shook her head. “No. Not really.” The woman shifted the towels against her hip. “You want me to cover ten more minutes?” she asked. Sofía nodded. The woman said, “Done,” and slipped back inside. It was such a small act. Yet Elena felt it deeply because all day Jesus had been showing her this same truth in different forms. Help does not always arrive grandly. Sometimes it enters by way of an older man with dropped oranges, a library worker with a resource sheet, a volunteer handing out water, a brother telling the truth at last, a coworker covering ten more minutes. Pride always imagines rescue has to look dramatic before it counts. Grace almost never agrees.

Elena sat down on the low curb by the wall because her legs had started to feel unreliable. Sofía remained standing for a second, then finally sat too, leaving a careful little distance between them. It was not rejection. It was uncertainty. It was the distance of two people who loved each other and had both grown used to speaking around the real thing. Elena looked at her daughter’s profile and suddenly saw not just the young woman in work clothes, but the child who used to fall asleep in the back seat after church, the teenager who once cried in the bathroom before a school performance and let Elena hold her face in both hands, the girl who had once believed her mother could answer anything. “I’m sorry,” Elena said. She did not rush the words. She did not bury them under explanation. “I’m sorry I got so locked into surviving that you started thinking your pain had to wait its turn.” Sofía stared straight ahead for a long moment. Then she said, “I’m sorry I lied.” Another pause. “And I’m sorry I started looking at you like you were the enemy every time you asked me a question.” Elena gave a sad little breath. “Half the time I was asking like a cop, not a mother.” That pulled the smallest almost-smile from Sofía, and because it came through tears, it felt more valuable than a full easy laugh would have.

Jesus lowered Himself to sit on the curb a few feet away as if He had all the time in the world and as if no one there needed to earn the right to have Him stay. “Truth can reopen a home,” He said. “But only if the truth is met with mercy.” Elena looked at Him. “I don’t know how to fix all of this,” she admitted. “I can’t fix rent and school and my father’s mind and whatever else is still coming.” Jesus nodded once. “No,” He said. “You cannot fix a whole life in one afternoon. But you can stop making people hide from you while they are hurting. That is where healing begins.” Sofía wiped under one eye with the back of her wrist. “What if I already messed too much up?” she asked. Jesus turned to her. “Then you begin from the truth instead of from performance,” He said. “Many people lose years trying to look unbroken.” Nico laughed softly at that, but there was pain in it. “That sounds familiar,” he said. Jesus looked toward him too. “It should.” Nico dropped his eyes. For perhaps the first time Elena saw her brother not as the family problem, but as another frightened person who had spent years trying to outrun his own shame through charm, noise, and motion. The thought did not erase damage. It did soften the old hard categories in her mind.

They stayed there longer than Elena expected. The sun lowered enough to take some of the cruelty out of the light. Sofía told them about the first panic attack, the one that happened in a campus bathroom when she realized she could not finish an assignment because she had not really slept in two days. She told them about sitting on the floor with her back against the stall door and hating herself for being dramatic while her heart pounded so hard she thought she might pass out. She told them about deleting draft emails to professors because every version made her sound weak. Elena listened without interrupting. It was harder than she expected because mothers often mistake restraint for passivity, but she was beginning to understand that listening without rushing to correct or solve can be its own form of love. Luis said little, though once he reached out and touched Sofía’s shoulder with trembling fingers and said, “I’m sorry for the mornings you had to see me confused.” Sofía took his hand and held it against her arm. “I never minded helping Grandpa,” she said. “I just got scared that if I admitted I couldn’t do everything else too, I would be one more problem.” Elena closed her eyes for a moment because there it was again. The same lie wearing a different face. Every person in the family had begun protecting the others through silence, and the silence had nearly eaten them alive.

When Sofía had to go back inside, Elena asked if she could finish the shift and then meet them somewhere quieter. Sofía hesitated, then nodded. “Encanto Park?” she said. “I used to like it there.” Elena smiled sadly. “Me too.” Nico offered to pick up cheap takeout on the way, and for once Elena did not tell him no before he had the chance to prove he might actually follow through. She and Luis drove slowly west while the city softened into evening. Jesus was with them again, though not in the way panic imagines rescue must happen. He did not take the wheel. He did not make every bill disappear. He did not announce that tomorrow would be easy. He simply remained. It is a great mercy when the presence of someone good steadies the air in a car where people have spent too many months breathing fear. Luis dozed for ten minutes with his head near the window. Elena drove past familiar streets with unfamiliar quiet in her chest. Not peace exactly. Peace was too strong a word for a day like this. But something had changed. The lies were no longer locked inside separate rooms. The truth was out now. Pain had names. Shame had been interrupted. That matters more than people realize. Many homes do not first heal when circumstances improve. They first heal when pretending loses its place of honor.

Encanto Park held the evening in a gentler way than the rest of the city. The water caught the last light in broken lines. Children called to each other near the path. An older couple walked slowly under the trees with their hands linked and their steps practiced to the same rhythm. Elena sat on a bench while Luis stared across the pond as if trying to remember some older version of his life that had once moved at a steadier pace. Nico came fifteen minutes later with paper bags that smelled of grilled meat and onions and warm tortillas. He looked faintly surprised at himself for having shown up on time. “I figured nobody needed another disappointment tonight,” he said, setting the food down. Elena looked at him for a long second and saw that he meant it. “Thank you,” she said. He nodded and sat on the far end of the bench like a man who still was not sure whether he belonged there. Sofía arrived after sunset had begun to deepen, carrying no apron now and no phone in her hand. She looked younger without the work face she had worn at the alley. She sat beside Elena, and this time she did not leave space between them.

They ate slowly and talked in the kind of uneven honest way families do when the ice first begins to break. Not beautifully. Not with sudden perfect insight. Nico admitted he was behind on his own rent too and had been too embarrassed to say it. Elena almost laughed at the absurdity of how much hidden fear had been living under one family name. Sofía said she wanted to talk to the college about coming back later instead of pretending the whole dream was dead. Luis, after losing the thread twice and finding it again, said he wanted Elena to stop treating rest like sin. “Your face always looks like you’re bracing,” he told her. “Even when you’re sitting down.” She smiled through tears because she knew he was right. Jesus listened more than He spoke now. It was as if once truth had entered the night, He was content to let it do some of its own work. At one point a little boy near the water tripped and began wailing, and before the boy’s father could reach him, Jesus was already there, crouching, brushing dirt from small scraped hands, calming him with a voice so gentle that the crying eased almost at once. The father thanked Him with the distracted gratitude of a tired parent. Jesus smiled, and then He was back with Elena’s family as if even small pains deserved full attention in His world.

Dark came slowly. The lights around the park glowed on one by one. The city beyond the trees still hummed, but from the bench it felt farther away than it really was. Elena found herself watching her family instead of just managing them. Sofía leaning forward with a taco in one hand and the other hand tucked under her leg. Luis chewing carefully and then suddenly telling a story from twenty years ago about a broken fan belt and laughing at his own punch line when he reached it. Nico sitting with his elbows on his knees, listening more than talking, which for him was nearly miraculous. They were not fixed. Not even close. There was still rent. There was still memory loss. There was still a semester that had collapsed and a thousand practical questions waiting for morning. Yet Elena could feel the difference between burden carried in hiding and burden carried in the open. The second one is still heavy. It is just no longer lonely in the same deadly way.

She turned toward Jesus when the others had drifted into a quieter conversation and said, “I spent so long believing that if I loosened my grip for one day, everything would fall apart.” Jesus looked out across the dark water before answering. “And what did your grip save?” He asked. Elena let the question sit. It was not cruel. It was honest. Her grip had kept some bills paid. It had gotten meals on the table. It had moved appointments and laundry and errands along. But it had not made her daughter feel safe enough to confess. It had not kept her father from fearing his own forgetfulness. It had not healed her brother. It had not let her sleep. Her grip had held motion together. It had not held hearts together. “I don’t know how to live open without feeling exposed,” she admitted. Jesus turned back to her. “Being held by God will always feel different from being in control,” He said. “One requires trust. The other only requires tension.” Elena felt that all through her body because tension she knew. Tension had become so normal she had mistaken it for strength.

Sofía, who had caught the end of the sentence, looked at her mother and said quietly, “You don’t have to tell me everything’s fine anymore.” Elena laughed once through tears. “That’s good,” she said. “Because it definitely isn’t.” That made all of them smile, even Luis, and the simple honesty of it felt holy in a way polished words rarely do. Nico said he could come by two mornings a week to help with Luis if Elena needed sleep after work. Elena began to refuse out of habit. Then she stopped herself. “Okay,” she said. Nico looked surprised and almost relieved to hear yes. Sofía said she would call the college this week. Not tomorrow in some dramatic vow. This week. The smaller promise felt truer. Elena believed it more because it was plain. Luis said he would let them label drawers and cabinets if it helped. Then he added, “But not in giant letters like I’m a tourist in my own kitchen.” That pulled a real laugh out of Sofía, and Elena held the sound in her chest like something fragile and bright.

When it grew late and the air began to cool just enough to remind the skin that evening had finally won, Jesus stood and looked toward the far edge of the park where the trees thickened into shadow. Elena knew without being told that He was going to pray again. The knowledge moved through her with a kind of tenderness she could not fully explain. The day had begun with Him in quiet prayer before anybody else had spoken. Now it was ending the same way, not because nothing painful had happened in between, but because prayer had held the whole day together from beneath. Jesus looked at Elena and then at the others. “Do not go back to performing strength for each other,” He said. “Tell the truth sooner. Ask for help sooner. Show mercy sooner. A home becomes lighter when shame is no longer running it.” Then He walked toward the darker side of the park, where the path bent near the water and the city noise dimmed under the trees.

Elena watched Him go. Nobody tried to stop Him. Some presences are too real to cling to in a grasping way. You receive them. You let them change the air. You let them teach you what kind of life you were never going to build by panic alone. Sofía slipped her hand into Elena’s, not like a child this time, but like someone choosing closeness after a season of distance. Luis stood carefully, leaning on Nico for balance, and Elena saw the strange beauty of that too. The brother she had never trusted was holding up the father who had once held them all. Grace does not erase history. It keeps writing anyway. They began walking back toward the parking lot slowly, together, carrying leftovers and paper bags and the ordinary untidiness of a family that still had problems and now also had truth. Elena looked back once more before reaching the path bend. Jesus was there at the edge of the trees, alone again, bowed in quiet prayer beneath the Phoenix night. The city still held its losses. So did the people in it. But He was there in the middle of it all, calm, grounded, present, carrying quiet authority into the dark, and for the first time in a long while Elena did not feel like everything depended on the force of her own exhausted hands.

On the drive home, nobody pretended the coming days would be simple. They talked in unfinished ways about schedules and calls and money and food and sleep. They left space when no one knew the right answer yet. That itself felt new. Elena parked at the apartment and sat for a moment before turning off the engine, listening to the small sounds of her family gathering their things. There would still be mornings when Luis forgot the word he wanted. There would still be bills she could not solve with one breath and one prayer. There would still be moments when Sofía’s fear rose fast and made her go quiet. There would still be old instincts in Elena that tried to pull her back toward sharpness and control. But tonight something real had been broken open. Not the family. The silence. And once silence loses its throne, love has room to begin speaking in a truer voice.

She carried the food into the kitchen with Sofía beside her and watched her daughter put away groceries without being asked. Nico stayed long enough to help Luis to bed and label the pill organizer for tomorrow morning. Elena almost stopped him on instinct, then let him do it. When the apartment finally quieted and the sink held only a few dishes instead of a mountain, she stood alone for a moment at the kitchen counter with both hands resting on the cool laminate. The day came back to her in flashes. The dawn at Steele Indian School Park. The forms at Burton Barr. The line at St. Mary’s. The alley beside The Duce. The bench at Encanto. Every place had held some small death of pride and some strange new beginning of mercy. She did not feel triumphant. She felt tired in a cleaner way. Less armored. Less alone. There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from hiding, and another kind that comes after truth. The second one hurts less because it can breathe.

Before going to bed, Elena looked in on Sofía, who was sitting cross-legged on the couch with a notebook open and no phone in sight. Neither of them made a speech of the moment. Elena simply asked, “Tea?” and Sofía nodded. That was enough for now. In Luis’s room, her father was already asleep with one hand above the blanket and his glasses on the nightstand where they belonged. Nico had left a note by the coffee maker that said, I’ll come by Tuesday morning. Don’t argue. Elena smiled in spite of herself. Then she turned off the kitchen light and stood in the dimness a second longer than she needed to. The apartment was still small. The worries were still real. Yet the air no longer felt sealed. Somewhere in the city, under a dark sky over streets full of weariness and need, Jesus had ended the day the same way He had begun it, in quiet prayer. And because of that, Elena went to bed believing not that life had suddenly become easy, but that God had entered the hardest parts of it without hesitation, and that sometimes the first real miracle in a home is not the removal of burden, but the end of hiding.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

Financial support to help keep this Ministry active daily can be mailed to:

Vandergraph Po Box 271154 Fort Collins, Co 80527

The promise was straightforward enough. Large language models, trained on the sum total of medical literature, would help emergency physicians triage patients faster, assist radiologists in catching what the human eye missed, and give overwhelmed clinicians a second opinion when the waiting room was full and the clock was running. The reality, according to a growing body of peer-reviewed research, is considerably more uncomfortable. The most capable AI systems available today do not simply reflect the biases embedded in their training data. They amplify them, sometimes dramatically, and they do so in clinical contexts where the consequences land on real human bodies.

In September 2025, a team of researchers led by Mahmud Omar and Eyal Klang at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai posted a preprint on medRxiv that tested OpenAI's GPT-5 across 500 physician-validated emergency department vignettes. Each case was replayed 32 times, with the only variable being the sociodemographic label attached to the patient: Black, white, low-income, high-income, LGBTQIA+, unhoused, and so on. The clinical details remained identical. The model's recommendations did not.

GPT-5 showed no improvement in sociodemographic-linked decision variation compared with its predecessor, GPT-4o. On several measures, it was worse. The model assigned higher urgency and recommended less advanced testing for historically marginalised groups. Most striking was the mental health screening disparity: several LGBTQIA+ labels were flagged for mental health evaluation in 100 per cent of cases, compared with roughly 41 to 73 per cent for comparable demographic groups under GPT-4o. The clinical presentation was the same. The only thing that changed was who the patient was described as being.

This is not a theoretical problem. It is a design problem, a procurement problem, and increasingly a legal problem. And it raises a question that hospitals, insurers, and diagnostic tool developers have been remarkably slow to answer: if the most advanced AI model on the market still encodes the biases of the data it was trained on, what exactly are institutions assuming when they plug these systems into patient care?

The Evidence Is Not Subtle

The Mount Sinai findings did not emerge from a vacuum. They are the latest in a pattern of research that has been building for years, each study confirming what the last one suggested and what the next one will almost certainly reinforce.

The same research team published a broader companion study in Nature Medicine in 2025, evaluating nine large language models across more than 1.7 million model-generated outputs from 1,000 emergency department cases (500 real, 500 synthetic). Each case was presented in 32 variations, covering 31 sociodemographic groups plus a control, while clinical details were held constant. Cases labelled as Black, unhoused, or LGBTQIA+ were more frequently directed toward urgent care, invasive interventions, or mental health evaluations. Certain LGBTQIA+ subgroups were recommended mental health assessments approximately six to seven times more often than was clinically indicated. The bias was not confined to one model or one developer. It was a property of the category.

In 2024, Travis Zack and colleagues published a model evaluation study in The Lancet Digital Health examining GPT-4's behaviour across clinical applications including medical education, diagnostic reasoning, clinical plan generation, and subjective patient assessment. The results were damning. GPT-4 failed to model the demographic diversity of medical conditions, instead producing clinical vignettes that stereotyped demographic presentations. When generating differential diagnoses, the model was more likely to include diagnoses that stereotyped certain races, ethnicities, and genders. It exaggerated known demographic prevalence differences in 89 per cent of diseases tested. Assessment and treatment plans showed significant associations between demographic attributes and recommendations for more expensive procedures, as well as measurable differences in how patients were perceived. For 23 per cent of cases, GPT-4 produced significantly different patient perception responses based solely on gender or race and ethnicity.

The broader research landscape tells a consistent story. A systematic review published in 2025 in the International Journal for Equity in Health, encompassing 24 studies evaluating demographic disparities in medical large language models, found that 22 of those studies, or 91.7 per cent, identified biases. Gender bias was the most prevalent, reported in 15 of 16 studies examining it (93.7 per cent). Racial or ethnic biases appeared in 10 of 11 studies (90.9 per cent). These are not edge cases. They are the norm.

And the problem extends well beyond language models. In dermatology, AI models trained primarily on lighter skin tones have consistently shown lower diagnostic performance for lesions on darker skin. A 2025 study in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology found that among 4,000 AI-generated dermatological images, only 10.2 per cent depicted dark skin, and just 15 per cent accurately represented the intended condition. Meanwhile, analyses of dermatology textbooks used to train both human clinicians and AI systems have shown that images of dark skin make up as little as 4 to 18 per cent of the total. A 2022 study published in Science Advances confirmed that AI diagnostic performance for dermatological conditions was measurably worse on darker skin tones, a disparity directly traceable to training data composition.

The consequences are not abstract. Individuals with darker skin tones who develop melanoma are more likely to present with advanced-stage disease and experience lower survival rates. An AI system that performs poorly on these patients does not merely fail a technical benchmark. It compounds an existing disparity. And a 2024 study from Northwestern University found that even when AI tools themselves were calibrated for fairness, the interaction between physicians and AI-assisted diagnosis actually widened the accuracy gap between patients with light and dark skin tones, suggesting that the problem cannot be solved at the algorithm level alone.

When Machines Hallucinate in the Emergency Room

Bias is not the only vulnerability. In August 2025, a study published in Communications Medicine, a Nature Portfolio journal, tested six leading large language models with 300 clinician-designed vignettes, each containing a single fabricated element: a fake lab value, a nonexistent sign, or an invented disease. The results were striking. The models repeated or elaborated on the planted error in up to 83 per cent of cases. A simple mitigation prompt halved the overall hallucination rate, from a mean of 66 per cent across all models to 44 per cent. For the best-performing model in the study, GPT-4o, rates declined from 53 per cent to 23 per cent. Temperature adjustments, often proposed as a fix for hallucination, offered no significant improvement. Shorter vignettes showed slightly higher odds of hallucination.

For GPT-5 specifically, the Mount Sinai preprint found that its unmitigated adversarial hallucination rate was higher than that observed for GPT-4o. The same mitigation technique achieved a lower rate than before, meaning the baseline risk was worse even as the ceiling for improvement was slightly better.

The clinical implications are severe. If a language model is deployed as a clinical decision support tool and a patient's record contains an erroneous data point, whether through transcription error, system glitch, or adversarial input, the model is more likely to incorporate that error into its reasoning than to flag it as anomalous. It will confabulate around the mistake, generating plausible-sounding but clinically dangerous recommendations. The model does not know what it does not know, and it cannot distinguish between a real lab result and a fabricated one.

This is not a bug that can be patched with a software update. It is a structural property of how these models process information. They are optimised to produce coherent, contextually appropriate text, not to distinguish between real clinical findings and fabricated ones. The distinction matters enormously when the output influences whether a patient receives a chest X-ray or is sent home.

Who Bears the Cost

The populations most affected by AI bias in healthcare are, with grim predictability, those who already face the greatest barriers to adequate care. Racial minorities, women, elderly patients, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people experiencing homelessness, and low-income populations appear repeatedly in the literature as groups for whom AI systems produce systematically different, and often inferior, clinical recommendations.

The Mount Sinai study found a clear socioeconomic gradient in testing recommendations. GPT-5 directed less advanced diagnostic testing toward lower-income groups, with a negative 7.0 per cent deviation for low-income patients and a negative 6.8 per cent deviation for middle-income patients, while high-income patients received a positive 2.2 per cent deviation. Same symptoms, different workups, determined entirely by a label the model should have been ignoring.

The pulse oximetry debacle offers a useful precedent for understanding how bias in medical technology compounds racial health disparities. Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated that pulse oximeters systematically overestimated blood oxygen levels in Black patients, with the frequency of occult hypoxaemia that went undetected being three times greater among Black patients compared with white patients. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this meant Black patients were less likely to receive supplemental oxygen when they needed it. The FDA released new draft guidance in January 2025 with updated testing standards, recommending a minimum of 24 subjects from across the Monk Skin Tone scale for clinical studies. But the damage from years of deployment with known racial bias had already been done. As Health Affairs Forefront noted in January 2025, the imperative to develop cross-racial pulse oximeters was “overdue” by any reasonable measure.

The pattern is consistent: a technology is developed, tested primarily on populations that do not represent the full range of patients who will encounter it, deployed at scale, and then studied retrospectively when the harm becomes impossible to ignore. AI in healthcare is following this trajectory with remarkable fidelity.

Sepsis prediction offers another cautionary tale. Epic Systems deployed its widely used Epic Sepsis Model across hundreds of hospitals. When researchers at Michigan Medicine analysed roughly 38,500 hospitalisations, they found the algorithm missed two-thirds of sepsis patients and generated numerous false alerts. A 2025 study published in the American Journal of Bioethics highlighted that social determinants of health data, which disproportionately affect minority and low-income populations, were notoriously underrepresented in the electronic health record data used to train such models, with only 3 per cent of sentences in examined training datasets containing any mention of social determinants. The algorithm did not account for what it could not see, and what it could not see was shaped by who had historically been rendered invisible in medical data systems.

The Institutional Wager

When a hospital system integrates AI into its clinical workflows, it is making a bet. The bet is that the efficiency gains, the reduced clinician workload, and the potential for catching diagnoses that might otherwise be missed will outweigh the risks of systematic error. It is a bet that the tool will perform roughly as well for all patients, or at least that any disparities will be caught by the human clinicians who remain in the loop.

Both assumptions are questionable.

Epic Systems, which commands 42.3 per cent of the acute care electronic health record market in the United States with over 305 million patient records, has rolled out generative AI enhancements for clinical messaging, charting, and predictive modelling. By 2025, the company reported between 160 and 200 active AI projects, with over 150 AI features in development for 2026, including native AI-assisted charting tools, new AI assistants, and advanced predictive models. In February 2026, Epic launched AI Charting, an ambient scribe feature that listens to patient visits and automatically drafts clinical notes and orders. Oracle Health, following its acquisition of Cerner, debuted an entirely new AI-powered EHR in 2025, featuring a clinical AI agent that drafts documentation, proposes lab tests and follow-up visits, and automates coding. The agent is now live across more than 30 medical specialities and has reportedly reduced physician documentation time by nearly 30 per cent.

The efficiency argument is real. But efficiency and equity are not the same thing. When these systems produce different outputs based on demographic characteristics, as the peer-reviewed evidence consistently shows they do, the “human in the loop” defence becomes critical. It also becomes fragile. A clinician reviewing AI-generated notes under time pressure, in a system designed to reduce their workload, is not in an ideal position to catch the subtle ways in which the model's recommendations may have been shaped by the patient's race, gender, or income level rather than their clinical presentation.

The assumption that humans will catch AI errors is further undermined by automation bias, the well-documented tendency for people to defer to automated systems, particularly when those systems present their outputs with confidence and fluency. A November 2024 study examining pathology experts found that AI integration, while improving overall diagnostic performance, resulted in a 7 per cent automation bias rate where initially correct evaluations were overturned by erroneous AI advice. A separate study of gastroenterologists using AI tools found measurable deskilling over time: clinicians became less proficient at identifying polyps independently after a period of AI-assisted practice. A large language model does not hedge. It does not say “I am less certain about this recommendation because the patient is Black.” It produces a clean, authoritative-sounding clinical note, and the bias is invisible unless someone is specifically looking for it.

The Insurance Question

The integration of AI into healthcare is not limited to clinical decision-making. Insurers have been among the most aggressive adopters, and the consequences are already being litigated.

UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer in the United States, is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that its AI tool, nH Predict, developed by its subsidiary naviHealth (acquired in 2020 for over one billion dollars), was used to systematically deny medically necessary coverage for post-acute care. The plaintiffs, who include Medicare Advantage policyholders, allege that the algorithm superseded physician judgment and had a 90 per cent error rate, meaning nine of ten appealed denials were ultimately reversed.

In February 2025, a federal court denied UnitedHealth's motion to dismiss, allowing breach of contract and good faith claims to proceed. The court noted that the case turned on whether UnitedHealth had violated its own policy language, which stated that coverage decisions would be made by clinical staff or physicians, not by an algorithm. A judge subsequently ordered UnitedHealth to produce tens of thousands of internal documents related to the algorithm's deployment by April 2025.

This case is significant not only for its specific allegations but for the structural question it raises. When an insurer deploys an AI system to make coverage decisions, and that system denies care at scale, who is accountable? The algorithm's developers? The insurer's management? The clinicians whose judgment the algorithm overrode? The regulatory framework has no clear answer, and in the absence of clarity, the cost falls on the patients who are denied coverage and must navigate an appeals process that many, particularly elderly and low-income individuals, are ill-equipped to pursue. The asymmetry is stark: the insurer benefits from the speed and scale of algorithmic denial, while the patient bears the burden of proving, one appeal at a time, that the machine was wrong.

The Regulatory Vacuum

Regulatory bodies are aware of the problem. Their responses have been uneven at best.

The United States Food and Drug Administration has authorised over 1,250 AI-enabled medical devices as of July 2025, up from 950 in August 2024. The pace of authorisation is accelerating even as the evidence of bias accumulates. The agency published draft guidance in January 2025 on lifecycle management for AI-enabled devices, introducing the concept of Predetermined Change Control Plans, which allow developers to obtain pre-approval for planned algorithmic updates. This is a meaningful step toward continuous monitoring. But the guidance focuses primarily on safety and effectiveness in technical terms, with limited attention to the question of whether a device performs equitably across demographic groups.

In June 2025, a report published in PLOS Digital Health, authored by researchers from the University of Toronto, MIT, and Harvard, laid bare the scale of the regulatory gap. Titled “The Illusion of Safety,” the report found that many AI-enabled tools were entering clinical use without rigorous evaluation or meaningful public scrutiny. Critical details such as testing procedures, validation cohorts, and bias mitigation strategies were often missing from approval submissions. The authors identified inconsistencies in how the FDA categorises and approves these technologies, and noted that AI's continuous learning capabilities introduce unique risks: algorithms evolve beyond their initial validation, potentially leading to performance degradation and biased outcomes that the current regulatory framework is not designed to detect.

In January 2026, the FDA released further guidance that actually reduced oversight of certain low-risk digital health products, including AI-enabled software and clinical decision support tools. The reasoning was that lighter regulation would encourage innovation. The concern is that it will also encourage deployment without adequate bias testing. The tension between promoting innovation and protecting patients is not new in medical device regulation, but the speed at which AI tools are proliferating makes the stakes unusually high.

The European Union has taken a more structured approach. Under the EU AI Act, which began phased implementation in August 2025, AI systems used as safety components in medical devices are classified as high-risk and subject to stringent requirements: risk management systems, technical documentation, training data governance, transparency, human oversight, and post-market monitoring. Full compliance for high-risk AI systems in healthcare is required by August 2027. The framework is more comprehensive than its American counterpart, but enforcement mechanisms remain untested, and the practical challenge of auditing AI systems for demographic bias at scale is formidable. The European Commission is expected to issue guidelines on practical implementation of high-risk classification by February 2026, including examples of what constitutes high-risk and non-high-risk use cases.

The World Health Organisation released guidance in January 2024 on the ethics and governance of large multimodal models in healthcare, outlining over 40 recommendations organised around six principles: protecting autonomy, promoting well-being and safety, ensuring transparency and explainability, fostering responsibility and accountability, ensuring inclusiveness and equity, and promoting responsive and sustainable AI. The principles are sound. Whether they translate into enforceable standards is another matter entirely. The WHO's Global Initiative on Artificial Intelligence for Health has been working to advance governance frameworks particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where the regulatory infrastructure to evaluate AI tools may be even less developed than in the United States or Europe.

The gap between what regulators recognise as a problem and what they are prepared to do about it remains wide. And in that gap, hospitals and insurers continue to deploy systems whose bias profiles have been documented in peer-reviewed literature but not addressed in procurement requirements.

Accountability Without a Framework

The liability question is perhaps the most unsettled aspect of AI in healthcare. Current legal frameworks were not designed for systems that learn, change, and produce different outputs for different patients based on patterns in training data that no human selected or reviewed.

If an AI clinical decision support tool recommends a less aggressive workup for a Black patient than for a white patient with identical symptoms, and the Black patient's condition is missed, who is liable? The developer who trained the model? The hospital that purchased and deployed it? The clinician who accepted the recommendation without questioning it? Under existing product liability regimes, device manufacturers are often shielded, and the burden tends to fall on clinicians and institutions. But clinicians did not design the algorithm, may not understand its internal workings, and in many cases were not consulted about the decision to deploy it.

Professional medical societies have generally maintained that clinicians retain ultimate responsibility for patient care, regardless of the tools they use. This position is legally and ethically coherent, but it places an extraordinary burden on individual practitioners to detect and override biases that are, by design, invisible in the model's outputs. It also creates a perverse incentive structure: the institutions that benefit from AI efficiency (reduced labour costs, faster throughput, fewer staff) externalise the liability risk to frontline clinicians who had no say in the technology's selection or implementation.

New legislation has been proposed in the United States to clarify AI liability in healthcare, but none has yet been enacted. The result is a regulatory and legal environment in which the technology is advancing faster than the frameworks meant to govern it, with patients and clinicians left to absorb the consequences of that mismatch.

What Meaningful Reform Requires

The research community has not merely identified the problem. It has outlined what solutions would look like. The challenge is that those solutions require effort, money, and institutional will that the current market incentives do not reliably produce.

First, training data must be representative. The persistent underrepresentation of dark-skinned patients in dermatological datasets, of women in cardiovascular research, and of LGBTQIA+ individuals in clinical trial data is not a new problem. But when that data is used to train AI systems that are then deployed at scale, the bias is industrialised. Studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning AI models on diverse datasets closes performance gaps between demographic groups. The data exists, or could be collected. The question is whether developers and institutions are willing to invest in obtaining it.

Second, pre-deployment bias auditing must become mandatory, not optional. The evidence that AI systems produce systematically different outputs based on demographic labels is overwhelming. Yet there is no requirement in the United States that an AI clinical tool be tested for demographic equity before it is integrated into a hospital's workflow. The EU AI Act moves in this direction with its training data governance and risk management requirements for high-risk systems, but enforcement remains a future proposition.

Third, post-deployment monitoring must be continuous and transparent. The FDA's introduction of Predetermined Change Control Plans is a step toward lifecycle accountability, but the focus remains on technical safety rather than equitable performance. An AI system that performs well on average but poorly for specific subpopulations is not safe for those subpopulations, and average performance metrics can obscure the disparity. The “Illusion of Safety” report's finding that the FDA's current framework is ill-equipped to monitor post-approval algorithmic drift makes this point with particular force.

Fourth, procurement processes must include bias testing as a criterion. Hospitals that would never purchase a pharmaceutical product without evidence of efficacy across demographic groups are integrating AI tools with no comparable requirement. The Mount Sinai research provides a template: test the system across sociodemographic labels, measure the variation, and make the results public before deployment. If a model produces different triage recommendations for patients labelled as low-income versus high-income, that information should be available to every hospital considering its adoption.

Fifth, liability frameworks must be updated. If AI systems are going to influence clinical decisions, the legal structures governing those decisions must account for the technology's role. This means clearer allocation of responsibility between developers, deployers, and users, and it means creating mechanisms for patients to seek redress when biased AI contributes to harm. The UnitedHealth litigation may ultimately push courts to establish precedents, but waiting for case law to fill a regulatory void is not a strategy; it is an abdication.

Finally, transparency must become the default. Patients have a right to know when AI has influenced their care, what role it played, and whether the system has been tested for bias relevant to their demographic group. This is not merely an ethical aspiration. In an era when AI-generated clinical notes may shape everything from triage decisions to insurance coverage, it is a basic requirement of informed consent. The WHO's guidance on transparency and explainability points in this direction, but voluntary principles are no substitute for binding obligations.

The Stakes Are Not Abstract

The title of the Mount Sinai medRxiv preprint captures the situation with precision: “New Model, Old Risks.” GPT-5 is, by most technical measures, a more capable system than its predecessors. It is also, by the evidence of this study, no less biased. The assumption that capability and fairness would advance in parallel has not been borne out. And the assumption that human oversight will compensate for algorithmic bias is not supported by what we know about how clinicians interact with automated systems under real-world conditions.

The institutions deploying these tools are making a calculation. They are betting that the benefits will outweigh the harms, that the efficiencies will justify the risks, and that the populations most likely to be harmed by biased AI are the same populations least likely to have the resources to hold anyone accountable.

That calculation may prove correct in the short term. In the longer term, it is the kind of institutional wager that generates class-action lawsuits, regulatory backlash, and, most importantly, measurable harm to patients who came to the healthcare system seeking help and received instead the outputs of a machine that treated their identity as a clinical variable.

The question is not whether AI will be integrated into healthcare. That integration is already underway, at scale, across the world's largest health systems. The question is whether the institutions driving that integration will treat equity as a design requirement or as an afterthought. The research is clear on what the problem is and how severe it remains. The gap between what we know and what we are willing to do about it is where the harm lives.

References

1. Omar, M., Agbareia, R., Apakama, D.U., Horowitz, C.R., Freeman, R., Charney, A.W., Nadkarni, G.N., and Klang, E. “New Model, Old Risks? Sociodemographic Bias and Adversarial Hallucinations Vulnerability in GPT-5.” medRxiv, September 2025. DOI: 10.1101/2025.09.19.25336180.

2. Omar, M., Klang, E., et al. “Sociodemographic biases in medical decision making by large language models.” Nature Medicine, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41591-025-03626-6.

3. Zack, T., et al. “Assessing the potential of GPT-4 to perpetuate racial and gender biases in health care: a model evaluation study.” The Lancet Digital Health, January 2024. DOI: 10.1016/S2589-7500(23)00225-X.

4. “Multi-model assurance analysis showing large language models are highly vulnerable to adversarial hallucination attacks during clinical decision support.” Communications Medicine (Nature Portfolio), August 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s43856-025-01021-3.

5. “Evaluating and addressing demographic disparities in medical large language models: a systematic review.” International Journal for Equity in Health, Springer Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1186/s12939-025-02419-0.

6. “Sociodemographic bias in clinical machine learning models: a scoping review of algorithmic bias instances and mechanisms.” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2024.111422.

7. Joerg, et al. “AI-generated dermatologic images show deficient skin tone diversity and poor diagnostic accuracy: An experimental study.” Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, 2025. DOI: 10.1111/jdv.20849.

8. “Disparities in dermatology AI performance on a diverse, curated clinical image set.” Science Advances, 2022. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq6147.

9. Sjoding, M.W., et al. “Racial Bias in Pulse Oximetry Measurement.” New England Journal of Medicine, 2020. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2029240.

10. “The Overdue Imperative of Cross-Racial Pulse Oximeters.” Health Affairs Forefront, January 2025.

11. “Bias in medical AI: Implications for clinical decision-making.” PMC, 2024. PMCID: PMC11542778.

12. “The Algorithmic Divide: A Systematic Review on AI-Driven Racial Disparities in Healthcare.” PubMed, 2024. PMID: 39695057.

13. “The illusion of safety: A report to the FDA on AI healthcare product approvals.” PLOS Digital Health, June 2025. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pdig.0000866.

14. Estate of Gene B. Lokken et al. v. UnitedHealth Group, Inc. et al. Federal court ruling, February 2025. Georgetown Health Care Litigation Tracker.

15. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Device Software Functions: Lifecycle Management and Marketing Submission Recommendations.” Draft Guidance, January 2025.

16. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Software as a Medical Device.” FDA AI/ML Device Database, July 2025.

17. European Commission. “EU AI Act: Regulatory Framework for Artificial Intelligence.” Phased implementation beginning August 2025, with full high-risk compliance required by August 2027.

18. World Health Organisation. “Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health: Guidance on large multi-modal models.” January 2024. ISBN: 9789240084759.

19. “Bias recognition and mitigation strategies in artificial intelligence healthcare applications.” npj Digital Medicine, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41746-025-01503-7.

20. “Automation Bias in AI-Assisted Medical Decision-Making under Time Pressure in Computational Pathology.” arXiv, November 2024. arXiv:2411.00998.

21. “Exploring the risks of automation bias in healthcare artificial intelligence applications: A Bowtie analysis.” ScienceDirect, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.caeai.2024.100241.

22. “Mitigating Bias in Machine Learning Models with Ethics-Based Initiatives: The Case of Sepsis.” American Journal of Bioethics, 2025. DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2025.2497971.

23. Wong, A., et al. “External Validation of a Widely Implemented Proprietary Sepsis Prediction Model in Hospitalized Patients.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2021. (Epic Sepsis Model evaluation at Michigan Medicine.)

24. Epic Systems. AI Charting and generative AI clinical tools deployment, February 2026. Epic Newsroom.

25. Oracle Health. Clinical AI Agent deployment across 30+ medical specialities, 2025. Oracle Health press materials.

26. “Gender and racial bias unveiled: clinical artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms are fanning the flames of inequity.” Oxford Open Digital Health, 2025. DOI: 10.1093/oodh/oqaf027.

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Across town, in a small apartment south of downtown where the paint on the door had started to curl from the heat, Rosa Herrera stood at the kitchen counter and tried not to cry over a cup of coffee that had gone cold before she got to drink it. Her father was already awake, though he was still in the shirt he had slept in. He sat at the table with both hands around a glass of water, staring at nothing. Her son Mateo was in his room, and she could hear the dresser drawers opening and closing harder than they needed to. The whole place carried the stale feeling of too little sleep and too many worries kept inside the walls. Rosa had worked late the night before at Banner-University Medical Center Tucson. She had come home to dishes in the sink, a voicemail from the electric company, and a note from Mateo’s school asking her to call about his missing assignments. Then at two in the morning, her father had woken up confused and walked into the hallway looking for his wife, who had been dead for six years. Rosa had gotten him back to bed. She had lain down after that, but she had not slept. She had only closed her eyes and waited for morning to take over.

She opened her purse and looked again at the folded pink notice from the power company, though reading it one more time did not change a single word. The amount due was not huge by rich people’s standards, but rich people’s standards had nothing to do with her life. In her life, a number could sit on a page and feel like a voice pressing both hands against her throat. She had enough to pay part of it, not all of it. Rent was close. Mateo needed new shoes. Her father had another appointment next week. She had been telling herself for months that once she caught up, she would breathe again, but the catching up never came. Life kept moving the line. It kept taking a step back every time she thought she was near it. She heard Mateo come into the kitchen and did not turn right away because she already knew by the sound of him that he was angry.

“I’m not going,” he said.

Rosa closed her eyes for one second. “You are.”

“I’m not.”

“You already missed too much this month.”

He leaned against the counter with his backpack hanging from one hand, not wearing it, only holding it like something he did not want. At fifteen, he had begun to grow into his face in a way that made her catch flashes of the little boy he had been and the man he might become, and right then both of them seemed equally far from her. His hair was uncombed. His jaw was set. There were dark half-moons under his eyes that looked too old on him. “They called you because of algebra,” he said. “I know. You don’t need to act like I don’t know.”

“That’s not why I’m not going.”

“Then why.”

He looked away. “Because I’m tired of walking in there like everybody doesn’t already know I’m behind.”

Rosa turned to face him then, and because she had so little sleep in her and so much fear under that, her voice came out sharper than she meant it to. “You think staying home fixes that?”

“I didn’t say I was staying home.”

“Mateo.”

“I said I’m not going there.”

Her father lifted his head at the sound of their voices. “Your mother making eggs?” he asked softly, looking not at Rosa but at the empty part of the kitchen as if memory had opened the wrong door again. Rosa felt something inside her pull tight. She looked at her father. Then she looked back at Mateo. Then at the notice in her purse. Then at the clock. The whole morning felt like it had been built to break her before she even got out the door.

“No,” she said to her father, more clipped than he deserved. “No eggs.”

He blinked and lowered his eyes. Mateo straightened. “You don’t have to talk to him like that.”

Rosa turned so fast she surprised herself. “Then help me. Since you want to stand there and judge me, help me.”

He stared at her. In that instant she saw his hurt before he covered it with anger. That was the worst part. If he had only been rude, she could have fought him. If he had only slammed a door, she could have blamed the age and the mood and the world. But there was something else on his face for a second. There was disappointment there. It was the look of someone who had still wanted gentleness from her, and Rosa did not have gentleness in her hands that morning. She had debt notices and missed sleep and a chest full of fear. She had a father slipping in and out of the present. She had a son on the edge of becoming someone she could not reach. She had too many things depending on her, and none of them knew how close she was to the end of herself.

She grabbed her keys and said, “Get in the car. Both of you. We are not doing this all day.”

But the old sedan out front did not care that she was already late. It turned once, coughed, and quit. The second time it made a thin grinding sound that felt personal. Rosa smacked the heel of her hand against the steering wheel and then sat still with both hands on it because she knew one more second of movement would turn into shouting. Mateo stood on the curb with his backpack. Her father had one hand on the open door, waiting for instructions like a man who was embarrassed to need them. The sky above the apartment buildings was turning bright now, and the heat had not yet come down hard, but the day had already begun to press. Rosa tried the key again. Nothing. She got out, shut the door harder than she needed to, and swallowed what rose in her throat.

“We’re taking the bus,” she said.

Mateo gave a short laugh with no humor in it. “Perfect.”

“Don’t start.”

He looked at her, then at the car, then at the street. “I didn’t start this.”

Her father spoke from behind them. “Where are we going?”

“To the stop,” Rosa said, softer now, because her anger had already turned into shame. She took her father’s arm. “Come on, Papá.”

They walked north in the thin morning light while the city came awake around them. Rosa knew this part of Tucson well enough to move through it even when her mind was split in five directions. She knew the cracked places in the sidewalk and the smell of bread that sometimes drifted out from a panadería before full sunrise. She knew the old homes in Barrio Viejo that still held color in their walls even after so much weather. She knew how a day could begin beautiful and still break your heart by lunch. They passed near El Tiradito, where the candles and offerings always made the little space feel like grief had learned how to stay visible. Rosa did not stop there. She barely looked. She had no time for prayer that morning. Prayer felt like a thing people did when there was breathing room. Her kind of life rarely gave that.

Jesus was walking toward the stop as they came near it. There was nothing hurried in Him, but there was also nothing vague. He did not move like a tourist taking in the city. He moved like Someone fully present to it. The first light of the morning had reached the low buildings and the parked cars by then, and it touched His face in a way that made Him look at once ordinary and impossible to mistake. Rosa did not know what about Him pulled her attention at first. Maybe it was the calm. Maybe it was that He seemed like the only person in sight who was not arguing with the hour. He wore modern clothes that let Him disappear into the city if He wanted to, but He was not disappearing. He was seeing. She looked away because she had no energy for strangers, but then her father slowed and stared at Him openly.

“I know you,” Arturo said.

Rosa gave a tired little shake of her head. “Papá, come on.”

But Jesus had already stopped near him. “You do,” He said, and there was such gentleness in the words that Arturo smiled in relief, as if somebody had finally answered a question he had been holding for a long time.

The bus pulled up with a hiss, and Rosa helped her father aboard. Mateo stepped on behind them and went straight to the back without looking at anyone. Rosa paid the fare with the exact kind of care people use when they cannot waste a single coin. The driver was a broad-shouldered man in his late fifties with a lined face and tired eyes. His name tag said DANIEL. He nodded without warmth, but not unkindly. Rosa could see at once that something in him was strained thin. One hand stayed too tight on the wheel. There was a slight tremor in the other when he reached toward the console. Jesus stepped on last, and Daniel glanced up at Him the way people do when they feel seen before a word is spoken. For half a breath they held each other’s gaze. Then Jesus moved down the aisle and took a seat across from Rosa and her father.

The bus rolled toward the city center, passing the waking streets and storefronts, the slow bloom of traffic, the quiet people at corners holding coffee and worry in equal measure. Arturo stared out the window. Mateo sat at the back with his forehead against the glass and his backpack in his lap. Rosa kept checking the time on her phone like she might somehow force the day back into control. She had already texted a neighbor in the building to listen for her father if he came back alone. She had already called her supervisor to say she would be late. She had not called the school back because she could not bear one more hard voice telling her something was slipping. The bus neared the Tucson Convention Center and then pressed on toward the Ronstadt Transit Center, where the city always seemed to gather its movement and its loneliness in the same place. Daniel drove with the rigid focus of a man holding himself together by muscle. At one light, Jesus stood and went to the front as if He needed nothing more than to ask a simple question.

“You have been living with your chest tight for a long time,” He said quietly.

Daniel did not turn all the way around. “Excuse me?”

“You wake up before the alarm now,” Jesus said. “Not because you are rested. Because fear learned your schedule.”

Daniel’s jaw shifted. His hand tightened on the wheel. “Sir, I need you to sit down.”

Jesus did not move yet. “You have told yourself that if you keep driving, keep smiling, keep making it through one route after another, nobody will notice how close you are to breaking. But being hidden is not the same as being whole.”

Rosa looked up then, startled not only by the words but by the way they landed. Daniel gave a little humorless breath and kept his eyes on the road. “Everybody’s got problems,” he said.

“Yes,” Jesus answered. “But not everybody keeps trying to survive them alone.”

Then He returned to His seat as if nothing sharp had happened at all. Daniel swallowed once. For the next several blocks he did not say another word.

At Ronstadt Transit Center, the bus filled and emptied in waves. Rosa had to guide Arturo carefully around the crowd because once people pressed too close, he became unsure of his feet. She was trying to decide whether to take him with her to the hospital and find a waiting area where he could sit for a while, or send him back home with a neighbor if she could reach one, when Mateo came forward from the back and said, “I’m not going to school from here.”

Rosa turned on him so fast Arturo flinched. “Do not do this right now.”

“I mean it.”

“You think I have time for this?”

“You never have time for anything I mean.”

The words hit her with a force out of proportion to their volume because they were so flat. He had not shouted them. He had not tried to wound her with tone. He had only said what he believed. And maybe that was what hurt. Rosa gripped the strap of her purse until her hand ached. “You are going to Tucson High,” she said. “You are going to walk in there today. You are going to face what needs facing.”

His face changed. For a second he looked young again, so young that it almost made her reach for him. “You always say things like that,” he said. “Face it. Handle it. Deal with it. Like people can do that forever.”

Rosa looked around and felt the eyes of strangers, or maybe only imagined them. She lowered her voice. “I am doing the best I can.”

“Maybe I am too.”

She should have softened then. She should have heard the cry under the attitude. But shame was already burning in her. She was late. Her father looked lost. The hospital was waiting. Money was short. The day was moving without mercy. “Get on the school bus,” she said, her voice thinning. “Now.”

Mateo stared at her one long second, then turned and walked away through the terminal crowd before she realized he was not going toward the school connection at all. He moved fast between people with the practiced speed of someone who knew exactly how to vanish when he wanted to. Rosa took one step after him, but Arturo said her name in a frightened voice, and when she turned back, she knew she had already lost the moment. Mateo was gone into the morning crowd.

She wanted to run after him, but the clock on her phone told her she was already later than late, and there were no choices that did not cost something. She got her father settled on a bench. She called the school. She called the neighbor again. She called work. Every call put another weight on the hour. Her supervisor’s voice had that tired edge people use when they have already decided your problems are inconvenient. The neighbor could not come for another hour. The school sent her to voicemail. Arturo asked twice where they were. Rosa felt the whole day slipping into pieces in her hands. When she finally sat down beside her father, Jesus was on the bench across from them, as if He had never been anywhere else.

“I can stay with him until you work out the next thing,” He said.

Rosa looked up at Him with a sharpness that came from desperation, not disrespect. “You don’t even know us.”

“I know enough to see you are trying to hold three lives with two hands.”

She almost laughed then, not because it was funny but because something in her recognized the truth of it too clearly. “You say that like you know what that feels like.”

“I know what it is to carry what others cannot.”

There was no performance in Him. No spiritual pose. No pressure. He was not asking to be admired. He was only present in a way that made Rosa aware of how long it had been since somebody had spoken to her as if her burden were real. Not dramatic. Not exaggerated. Real. She looked at her father, who seemed strangely calm in Jesus’ presence, and then toward the edge of the terminal where the morning light had fully taken hold. She should have said no. She should have kept moving on distrust alone. But she had run out of strength for pride.

“I have to get to the hospital,” she said. “I can’t lose that job.”

“You won’t lose your father with Me.”

Something about the way He said it settled her enough to stand. She gave Him the neighbor’s number and the address. She crouched beside Arturo and told him she would see him soon. Her father nodded, though whether he truly understood was hard to tell. Then Rosa rose and walked toward the next bus with her heart beating in two directions at once.

Banner-University Medical Center Tucson was already full of motion when she arrived. It was always strange to Rosa how suffering could become routine inside a building. People cried there every day. People got life-changing news there every day. People held each other up in hallways there every day. Still, carts rolled. Phones rang. Floors got mopped. Paperwork had to be done. Everything painful had to happen inside the machinery of everything ordinary. Rosa tied back her hair, changed into scrubs, and stepped into the work as if she had not left half herself scattered across the city. By the time she had stripped two beds, answered one curt question from a nurse, and pushed a linen cart down a long hall, she could already feel her mind trying to split. Part of her was there. Part of her was with Arturo. Part of her was with Mateo, imagining him anywhere and nowhere.

At ten-thirty her phone buzzed in the pocket of her scrub pants. She ignored it once because she was in a patient room. It buzzed again before she reached the hallway. The school’s number was on the screen. She answered too fast. The voice on the other end was polite in the way institutions are polite when they are documenting your failure. Mateo had not come to first period. He had not been seen in second. If he made contact, they would let her know. Rosa thanked the woman, ended the call, and stood still with the phone pressed to her ear long after the line went dead. A cart wheel squeaked somewhere behind her. An overhead voice called for a physician. Somebody laughed too loudly farther down the hall. Rosa felt herself becoming strangely light, as if fear were lifting her out of her own body.

She tried calling Mateo. Straight to voicemail. She texted him. No answer. She texted again, softer this time. Just tell me where you are. Please. Then she leaned both hands on the linen cart and breathed through the urge to walk out without permission. She could not afford that. She hated that sentence. It had shaped too much of her life. She could not afford to miss work. She could not afford to fix the car. She could not afford to fall apart. The words had become a kind of cage, and inside that cage her love for the people around her often came out as pressure because pressure was all she had left by the time she got to them.

When she turned the cart toward the elevators, she saw Jesus sitting in one of the hallway chairs near a family waiting area, as if a hospital corridor in the middle of the morning were the most natural place in the world for Him to be. A little girl across from Him was crying into her mother’s coat sleeve. The mother looked worn past speech. Jesus had a paper cup of water in His hand, and He was talking softly enough that Rosa could not hear the words, but the little girl had stopped sobbing and was listening with the full attention children give only when they sense safety. Rosa slowed without meaning to. He looked up, and there was no surprise in His face, only recognition.

“My son is missing,” she said before she even knew she was walking toward Him.

Jesus stood. “You have feared losing him for longer than today.”

Rosa looked down, anger flashing not at Him but at the truth of that. “He’s not a bad kid.”

“I did not say he was.”

“He’s just…” She stopped because the rest would not come cleanly. He’s just angry. He’s just hurt. He’s just fifteen. He’s just trying not to drown in a life that has asked him to grow up around too much worry. All of it was true, and none of it was simple. Rosa rubbed one hand over her mouth. “I don’t know how to talk to him anymore without it turning into something hard.”

Jesus let the silence stay gentle between them. “Hardness grows fast in houses where everyone is scared.”

She looked at Him then, really looked, and for the first time that day the urge to defend herself loosened. “I don’t want to be hard.”

“No,” He said. “You want not to be alone in what has been asked of you.”

The words went straight into the center of her. Rosa had not realized until that moment how much of her anger had been loneliness with its hands closed. She had not wanted to control everybody. She had wanted somebody, anybody, to help hold the weight. She swallowed hard and shook her head once, as if she could keep herself from crying by simple refusal. “I have to finish this shift.”

“Finish what you must,” Jesus said. “But do not mistake necessity for peace. They are not the same thing.”

Then one of the charge nurses called Rosa’s name from the far end of the hall, and the moment broke. She turned because she had to. When she looked back, Jesus was still there, still calm, still wholly present, and she felt the strange comfort of knowing that though the day was running in every direction at once, Somebody was not being swept by it.

By early afternoon Daniel’s hands were shaking badly enough that he had to tuck one under his thigh during his break at Ronstadt. He sat in the driver room with a vending machine humming nearby and tried to steady his breath without anyone noticing. The panic had started months earlier after his wife left, though he had called it exhaustion at first because exhaustion sounded like a man could outwork it. Panic sounded like weakness. He hated that word. He hated the thought of being a man who could carry a forty-foot bus full of strangers through Tucson traffic but could not carry his own chest through a normal Tuesday without feeling like he might die. He had not told his supervisor the whole truth about the day he had to pull over near Speedway because his vision narrowed and his hands went numb. He had said it was dehydration. He had started keeping mints in his pocket because his mouth went dry before every route. He had begun waking before dawn with his heart already racing. He had stopped answering his daughter’s calls some days because he could not bear to sound broken in front of someone who still believed he was steady.

The break room door opened. Daniel looked up and saw Jesus standing there with the same quiet expression He had worn on the bus, as though He had crossed the city without hurry and arrived exactly when needed. Daniel gave a short bitter smile. “You following me now?”

“No,” Jesus said. “You keep ending up where your need is.”

Daniel looked away. “I’m fine.”

“You do not have to say that every time you are afraid.”

Daniel laughed once, and the laugh had strain in it. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

Jesus pulled out the chair across from him and sat. “You have been practicing disappearing while still showing up. You go to work. You nod. You answer what needs answering. You keep the routes moving. Then you go home to rooms that feel too quiet, and you tell yourself you are tired when what you really are is grieving, ashamed, and scared of being seen that way.”

Daniel stared at the table. He had the strange feeling that to deny it would require more effort than truth. “I can’t be one more problem,” he said.

“For whom.”

“For anybody.” His throat tightened at once. “My daughter’s got her own life. My wife is done listening. Work needs me to do my job. The world keeps moving. Nobody stops because you can’t breathe right.”

Jesus leaned forward just slightly. “The world may not stop. But your soul is not meant to be dragged behind it.”

Daniel pressed both palms against his knees. “What am I supposed to do then.”

“Tell the truth,” Jesus said. “Not all of it to everyone. But some of it to someone. Fear grows teeth in silence.”

Daniel nodded once without meaning to. He hated how much relief he felt simply hearing the sentence. It embarrassed him. It also made him want to weep, which embarrassed him more. He looked down at his hands and said, “I don’t even know where to start.”

Jesus’ voice stayed low. “Start with the next honest thing.”

Daniel sat still with that. The vending machine hummed. A bus hissed outside. A man laughed in the hall. Life kept making its ordinary sounds, and somehow the ordinary sounds did not feel cruel in that moment. They felt like background to something more important. Daniel wiped one hand across his mouth and nodded again. When he finally looked up, Jesus was already rising, as if the conversation had given exactly what it needed and did not need to be stretched.

Back at the apartment, Arturo had made it home safely with the help of Rosa’s neighbor, but safe did not mean simple. He had wandered first to El Tiradito and stood there a long time, staring at the candles and the scraps of prayer and the small evidence people leave behind when they want Heaven to know they are still hurting. He had told the neighbor he was waiting for his wife. By the time Rosa got a break and listened to the voicemail, her hands started shaking so badly she had to sit on an overturned bucket in a supply closet. The old man was not trying to be difficult. That was part of what hurt so much. He was only losing his place in the world one hallway, one question, one ordinary morning at a time. Rosa sat there with bleach and soap and folded mop heads around her, and for the first time all day she let herself cry. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just the kind of crying that comes when a person is too tired to keep managing her own face.

When her shift finally ended, the sun was already leaning west. The city had gone bright and hard in that Arizona way where every shadow looks sharp. Rosa rode back toward downtown with dread sitting beside her the whole way. She checked her phone so often it was almost an illness. No message from Mateo. No missed call from him. One text from the school counselor asking if he had been located. She looked out the window as the bus moved through streets she had known for years and felt suddenly like a stranger in her own life. Every block held people buying groceries, pumping gas, walking dogs, standing under shade, carrying their own invisible pains. How could the world stay so normal when one missing child had turned her whole body into a wound.

She got off near home and nearly ran the last stretch. Arturo was inside, sitting at the table again, this time with Jesus across from him as if they had been talking for hours. There was a plate between them with two tortillas folded over beans, and Rosa had no idea where the food had come from. Maybe the neighbor. Maybe someone else. It did not matter. The small sight of her father eating calmly instead of drifting lost through the day struck her so deeply that she had to stop in the doorway. Jesus looked up. Arturo smiled at her with the gentle confusion of a man who still recognized love even when the details slipped.

“He says your mother sang when she cooked,” Arturo told her.

Rosa swallowed. “She did.”

Jesus’ eyes did not leave her face. “You have been afraid that everything good in your house is vanishing.”

Rosa set her purse down on the counter too carefully, because if she moved too fast she might break open again. “My son still isn’t home.”

“Then we go to where his hurt has been taking him.”

Rosa looked at Him. “You know where that is?”

Jesus stood. “He has been walking toward a place he hopes will feel bigger than his shame.”

It should have sounded strange. It should have sounded too vague to trust. But Rosa already knew that whatever this day was, it was not ordinary in the way ordinary had taught her to expect. She turned to ask Arturo to stay with the neighbor a little longer, but before she could speak, Daniel’s bus pulled to the curb outside. Rosa saw him through the window, sitting rigid in his seat with both hands on the wheel. Then, after a moment, he opened the doors and stepped down into the heat. His face looked pale under the late sun, but there was something different in him now. Not ease. Not yet. But honesty had begun to crack the shell he had been living inside.

“I saw him,” Daniel said.

Rosa stepped toward the door. “Mateo?”

Daniel nodded. “An hour ago. He got off near Reid Park. He didn’t look high or drunk or anything like that. He just looked…” He searched for the word and failed. “Like he was carrying more than a kid should.”

Rosa closed one hand over her mouth. Reid Park. She and Mateo had gone there when he was little, back when she still had enough energy to sit by the duck pond and watch him run. Back when a hard day did not yet feel like a permanent condition. She looked at Jesus, and He was already moving toward the street.

The drive east felt both too fast and unbearable. Tucson passed around them in hot light and long shadows. Cars moved. People crossed intersections. The Santa Catalinas stood in the distance with that steady mountain silence that can make human pain feel small if you are in the wrong frame of mind, but not to Jesus. Nothing felt small to Him that day. Not bills. Not panic. Not anger. Not a boy going missing in a city full of open sky. When they reached Reid Park, Rosa got out before Daniel had fully parked. Her whole body was ahead of her mind. They moved past the edge of the grass, past families packing up blankets, past the last of the late afternoon walkers. Near the Rose Garden, the air held the faint mix of dust and water and the sweet tired scent of flowers that had borne the whole day’s sun. Rosa called Mateo’s name once. Then again. Her voice changed on the second try. It became less command and more plea.

She found his backpack first. It was under a bench near the far side of the garden where fewer people sat. One strap was twisted. His phone was in the front pocket, turned off. Rosa picked it up, and the terror that moved through her then was so sharp that for one second she truly could not breathe. Daniel put a hand on the back of the bench to steady himself. Jesus looked toward the trees and the stretch of grass beyond the garden, where the evening light was thinning into gold.

“He is here,” Jesus said.

Rosa turned in the direction of His voice, but all she could see at first was the long field, the shadows from the trees, and a single figure sitting alone at the edge of the grass beyond the path with his knees drawn up and his elbows resting on them. Mateo had gone far enough away from other people to feel hidden, but not so far that he had truly disappeared. That was the kind of pain he was in. He wanted distance, not death. He wanted silence, not the end. Rosa started forward, but Jesus touched her arm lightly.

“Let Me go first.”

Everything in her wanted to say no. Everything in her wanted to run and grab her son and never let him out of reach again. But something in Jesus’ face told her that this moment was not only about being found. It was about being reached. Rosa stopped. Daniel stopped beside her. The late light lay warm over the grass and the path and the roses behind them. Jesus walked alone across the open ground toward the boy who had been carrying too much in a body still growing. Mateo did not turn right away. He kept staring ahead, as if he had grown tired even of expecting footsteps. Then, just before Jesus reached him, the boy lifted his head.

And the bench shifted slightly under the weight of Someone sitting down beside him.

Mateo did not move away. He did not say hello either. He only looked once at Jesus and then back out across the grass, as if he did not have the strength to decide whether this was strange or welcome. Up close he looked more tired than angry. That was what hurt most to see. Anger still has fire in it. Tiredness is different. Tiredness is what happens when a person has been carrying something alone for so long that even their fight begins to fade.

Jesus sat with him for a few seconds without speaking. The pause was not empty. It was the kind that lets a person stop performing. Mateo’s shoulders had been held high and hard when Rosa first saw him, but now they lowered a little, not because the pain was gone, but because he no longer felt watched in the ordinary way people watch. Jesus’ presence did not corner him. It gave him room.

“You came here because you wanted somewhere wide enough to hold what you could not say at home,” Jesus said.

Mateo gave a short shrug. “I came here because I didn’t want to hear anything.”

“And yet you have been hearing plenty.”

Mateo looked over at Him then. “What does that mean?”

“It means shame is loud,” Jesus said. “Fear is loud too. They keep talking long after other people stop.”

The boy looked away again. His eyes went toward the grass, the path, the slow movement of the evening around them. “I’m not ashamed.”

Jesus did not press him with the kind of force adults often use when they think they are helping by cornering a young person into the truth. He only said, “Then why did you leave your phone in your bag.”

Mateo’s jaw shifted. That hit. He dragged one hand over the back of his neck and said nothing.

“You did not want to be reached,” Jesus said gently. “Because being reached would have meant being known. And right now, being known feels dangerous to you.”

“I’m just tired of everybody acting like I’m a problem.”

Jesus nodded. “You are tired of being spoken to like a situation instead of a person.”

That was close enough to truth that Mateo could not deflect it. He stared down at his hands. The dirt beneath the bench had little stones pressed into it. He nudged one with the edge of his shoe and then stopped. “My mom thinks I’m failing because I don’t care.”

“No,” Jesus said. “Your mother is afraid. Fear has made her rough in places where she used to be softer. But fear is not the same as not loving.”

Mateo swallowed. The light had changed again. Evening was drawing out the softer colors now. “She doesn’t even listen.”

“She listens through exhaustion,” Jesus said. “That is why so much gets lost.”

For the first time, Mateo’s face started to come apart at the edges. Not in a dramatic way. Just enough that the boy he had been hiding under the hard look began to show through. “I can’t go in there every day and feel stupid,” he said, staring ahead. “I can’t keep walking into class and already know I’m behind before they even start talking. I can’t keep pretending I’m fine when I’m not fine, and then come home and everybody needs something and nobody sees that I’m barely keeping up.”

Jesus let those words have their full space. Rosa stood at a distance with both hands clasped tightly in front of her, and Daniel stood a little behind her, and neither of them moved. The park sounds went on around them. A child laughed far off. A bicycle rolled past on the path. Somewhere water moved with that soft artificial sound city parks make when they are trying to give people a little relief from heat and concrete. None of it interrupted what was being spoken on that bench.

“You have been trying to become a man by carrying more than a boy should,” Jesus said.

Mateo blinked hard. “Somebody has to.”

“Not the way you have been doing it.”

The boy’s voice tightened. “He forgets stuff all the time now. My grandpa. I have to watch him when she’s at work. I have to act normal at school when I didn’t sleep because he was up in the middle of the night. I have to hear about bills and the car and all that stuff like I’m not even in the room, and then if I shut down, I’m the bad guy. If I get mad, I’m the bad guy. If I don’t know how to do school when my brain feels like it’s underwater all the time, I’m the bad guy.”

His eyes filled then, but he looked angry about it. “I didn’t come here to cry.”

Jesus’ voice stayed soft. “No. You came here because the crying was close and you did not want anyone to see it.”

That did it. Mateo bent forward with his forearms on his knees and covered his face with both hands. The crying came rough and embarrassed at first, the way it does when someone has not let it out in too long and still hates needing it. Jesus did not interrupt him. He did not rush him back into control. He simply stayed there. Sometimes mercy is not a speech. Sometimes it is the refusal to leave while the truth comes out.

After a while Mateo wiped both hands down his face and looked away toward the darkening edge of the field. “I hate how mad I am at her,” he said. “Because I know she’s trying.”

Jesus nodded. “Love can be real and still wound each other when pain is running the house.”

Mateo let out a breath that shook. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Start smaller,” Jesus said. “You do not heal a whole house in one sentence. You tell one truth. Then another. You stop hiding the hurt under attitude. You stop treating your fear like it is proof you are weak. And you let yourself be loved where you are, not only where you think you should be.”

Mateo looked at Him through eyes still wet. “That sounds nice.”

“It is also hard,” Jesus said. “But hard is not the same as impossible.”

He let that sit, then added, “Your mother has been speaking from a cliff edge. So have you. When frightened people love each other, they often shout across the distance and call it talking.”

That sentence hung there with so much sad accuracy that Mateo almost smiled through the remains of tears. It was not a happy smile. It was recognition. “So what do I say to her.”

“The truest thing that does not blame.”

Mateo stared at the ground and thought. From where Rosa stood, she could not hear every word, but she could feel the weight of them. She could feel that Jesus was not merely calming a moment. He was drawing hidden things into the open without shaming the people carrying them. Daniel, beside her, had gone very still. Some of what Jesus was giving the boy was landing on the grown man too.

After a little while Jesus turned His head and looked toward Rosa. Not a dramatic gesture. Not a summons given to the whole park. Just a quiet acknowledgment that the time had come. Rosa’s breath caught in her chest. She started walking toward them on legs that felt strangely weak. By the time she reached the bench, Mateo had straightened, though his face still carried the unmistakable evidence of tears. He looked at her with that old mix of resistance and hope children carry even when they are nearly grown. It nearly broke her open all over again.

She stopped in front of him and all the speeches she had rehearsed on the frantic drive over vanished. All the corrective phrases. All the responsible-parent lines. All the practical language. None of it fit. Standing there in the evening light with her son’s hurt sitting plain between them, she knew that if she reached for control again, she would lose something she might not get back easily.

“I was scared,” she said.

Mateo looked at her but did not answer.

“I’m still scared,” she went on. “Not only because I couldn’t find you. Because I know I’ve been talking at you instead of hearing you.”

The words were hard for her to get out. They cost pride. They cost the fragile illusion that if she just stayed firm enough, she could keep the whole family from unraveling. But the truth was simpler and more painful. Firmness had become her hiding place. It made her feel less helpless for a few minutes. That was all.

“I know I’ve been rough,” she said. “I know I say things like face it and handle it because I’m trying to make everything stay standing. But I haven’t been asking what it feels like for you in the middle of all this. And that isn’t right.”

Mateo’s face tightened. “It always feels like there’s no room for me to be messed up.”

Rosa shut her eyes for one second. There it was. The sentence she should have heard long before today. “I’m hearing that now,” she said. “I should have heard it sooner.”

He looked down. “I’m not trying to make everything harder.”

“I know.” Her voice almost broke on the last word. “I know that.”

Silence held them for a few seconds. Then Mateo asked, not with accusation this time but with the tenderness of someone risking honesty, “Do you even know how bad school feels right now.”

Rosa did not rush. “No,” she said. “Not fully. But I want to know.”

That mattered. He could tell it mattered by the way his shoulders changed. Not all at once. Not in some dramatic healing where every wound vanished because the right words were finally spoken. It was smaller and truer than that. He believed her enough to stay in the conversation. That was the beginning of many restorations. Not fireworks. Staying.

“I can’t think in class half the time,” Mateo said. “I sit there and everybody’s writing stuff down and I’m still trying to get my brain to wake up. Then I look around and it feels like I’m already behind, so I stop trying because I don’t want to feel stupid in front of people. Then that makes it worse.”

Rosa listened. This time she really listened. She did not interrupt with solutions before he finished. She did not tell him what he should have done. She let the whole shape of his struggle become visible. The poor sleep. The pressure at home. The quiet humiliation of falling behind. The shame that had made school feel less like a place to learn and more like a stage where failure was waiting every day. As he spoke, she saw how much she had mistaken silence for laziness and shutdown for rebellion. Some of it had been rebellion, yes. But rebellion had not been the root. Hurt had.

“We’ll face that part together,” she said when he was done.

Mateo gave a tired little exhale. “You always say we’ll face stuff.”

“I know.” Rosa nodded. “So let me say it different. I won’t leave you alone in it.”

That landed deeper.

Jesus rose then and stepped a little aside, not because He was withdrawing from them, but because some moments of repair must pass directly between the ones who have wounded each other and still love each other. Mateo stood. He was almost as tall as his mother now. For a second they both looked unsure, like people standing at the edge of a bridge they want to cross but have not walked in a long time. Then Rosa reached first. Mateo stepped into her arms with the heaviness of someone who had wanted to resist a hug and failed because he needed one too badly. She held him and wept quietly against the side of his head. He cried too, but more softly now, less from collapse and more from the relief of not having to hold the whole thing alone for another hour.

Daniel turned away and walked a few steps toward the path, giving them privacy. Jesus moved toward him.

“You knew where to find him because you noticed,” Jesus said.

Daniel rubbed one hand over his mouth. “I almost didn’t tell her. I almost said I wasn’t sure it was him. I almost just drove on.”

“But you did not.”

Daniel looked down. “I’m tired of driving on.”

The sentence surprised even him as it came out. It held more than one meaning and they both knew it.

Jesus stood beside him looking out over the park as the light lowered another degree. “What is the next honest thing.”

Daniel let out a breath. “Calling my daughter.”

“Yes.”

Daniel nodded slowly. “And telling work I need a few days.”

“Yes.”

“That could cost me.”

Jesus turned and looked at him with steady compassion. “Continuing like this is already costing you.”

Daniel laughed weakly at that, but there was no bitterness in it now, only recognition. He pulled his phone from his pocket and stared at it for a long second. Then, with the reluctance of a man who had confused silence with strength for far too long, he made the call. He did not move far away. Rosa and Mateo could hear only the shape of his side of it, not every word. At first his voice was stiff. Then it cracked. Then it steadied in a different way, not because he had regained control, but because he had stopped pretending. “No, mija, I’m not in the hospital,” he said. “No, I’m safe. I just… I need to tell you the truth about something.” A long pause followed. His eyes filled. He turned his face slightly and kept listening. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “I should have called sooner.” Another pause. Then a small nod. “Yes. I know. I know.”

It was not a full rescue. Lives are not put back together that cleanly in one evening. But it was a doorway opening where there had only been a wall before.

By the time they all began walking back toward the parking lot edge, the sky had softened into those last shades that make even an exhausted day look briefly merciful. Arturo was waiting in the car Daniel had borrowed from a coworker after parking his route. The old man had insisted on coming when the neighbor told him where they had gone, and though he looked a little confused about exactly where he was, he brightened at once when he saw Mateo.

“There you are,” Arturo said with a smile. “We’ve been looking all over the world.”

Mateo gave a small laugh, the first genuine one all day. “Not the whole world, Grandpa.”

“Big enough,” Arturo said.

Rosa helped him out of the car because he said he wanted air. They all stood for a moment near the fading light and the warm evening breeze moving across the park. Then Arturo looked at Jesus with that same strange recognition he had worn that morning and said, “You remind me of someone.”

Jesus smiled. “I know.”

Arturo nodded as if that answer made perfect sense.

There are moments when change is loud, and then there are moments when it enters like this, almost quiet enough to miss if your heart is still trained only for crisis. Nothing outward about the scene would have impressed the world. No crowd gathered. No dramatic announcement sounded over the city. There was only a tired mother, a hurting son, an aging father, a frightened bus driver, and Jesus standing among them with the kind of stillness that made everyone else feel less alone in their own skin. Yet something holy had happened there. Not because every problem was solved, but because the lies that had ruled the day were beginning to loosen. Rosa was not alone. Mateo was not a problem to manage. Daniel was not weak because he needed help. Arturo was not a burden because memory was fraying. None of them had become less human by hurting. They had only become more honest.

Daniel drove them back as dusk settled over the city. The ride was quieter than the morning had been, but not with the same kind of silence. Morning silence had been packed with strain. This was different. This had room inside it. Mateo sat beside Rosa and did not lean away when her shoulder touched his. Arturo watched the passing lights with calm interest. Once, near a stoplight, he asked if they were headed home, and when Rosa said yes, he smiled in relief. Daniel kept both hands on the wheel, but his shoulders were lower now. Twice on the drive he looked in the rearview mirror, not from fear but from gratitude that he himself did not yet know how to name.

When they reached the apartment, the place looked the same from outside. Same worn steps. Same tired paint. Same old car sitting stubborn and dead where it had failed that morning. Poverty had not vanished with the sunset. The bill notice was still in Rosa’s purse. School would still need attention tomorrow. Arturo’s memory would not return because one holy evening had touched the family. Real life remained real. But hopelessness was no longer speaking with the same authority.

Inside, the apartment felt less hostile than it had before dawn. Maybe because nobody was bracing against one another in the same way. Maybe because truth, once spoken, changes the air. Rosa heated what food they had. Nothing fancy. Rice, beans, tortillas, a little leftover chicken stretched farther than it wanted to go. Mateo set the table without being asked. Rosa noticed and said nothing about it because she understood that fragile things can be damaged by too much attention too early. Arturo sat and told a story halfway correctly about a summer from long ago when Rosa was little and her mother laughed in the kitchen until she had to lean on the counter. Some details were wrong. The heart of it was right. Rosa listened with tears near the surface and did not correct him.

Jesus sat with them at the small table as naturally as if He had always belonged there. No one spoke to Him with ceremony. That was one of the strange beauties of the day. He had not arrived like a performance. He had become the truest presence in each place simply by being Himself. He blessed the meal with quiet gratitude, and for the first time in a long while, Rosa did not eat like someone already fighting the next emergency before the plate was empty. She tasted the food. She saw her son’s face when he smiled once at something Arturo said. She noticed her own breathing. Peace had not erased hardship. It had interrupted its rule.

After they ate, Jesus helped Mateo carry the dishes to the sink. The boy stood there drying a plate with a towel that had seen better years and said without looking up, “Do you really think I can come back from where I am.”

Jesus took the next dish, rinsed it, and handed it over. “You are not too far behind for truth. And you are not too far gone for love.”

Mateo nodded, but he still looked uncertain.

Jesus continued, “Do not build your whole future from what one hard season tells you about yourself. Pain lies about proportion. It tries to make the moment feel final.”

The boy absorbed that. “So what do I do tomorrow.”

“You wake up,” Jesus said. “You tell the truth again. You go where healing requires you to go. You ask for help before shame talks you out of it. And when fear tells you that one bad day defines you, you answer it with something better than your feelings.”

“Like what.”

“The truth.”

Mateo set down the plate and finally looked at Him fully. “That sounds harder than pretending I don’t care.”

“It is,” Jesus said. “And it will also set you free.”

In the other room, Rosa was sitting beside Arturo on the couch. He had begun to drift toward sleep, but before his eyes closed fully, he reached for her hand. “You looked tired this morning,” he said with surprising clarity.

Rosa smiled through the sting behind her eyes. “I was.”

He nodded, then squeezed her hand with more understanding than he had shown all day. “Your mother used to get quiet when she was carrying too much. Not angry at first. Quiet.”

Rosa turned toward him. “Did she.”

He nodded again. “Then she would cry when nobody could see.”

The words undid her because they were true, not about her mother only, but about herself. She had become so accustomed to being the one who held things together that she had mistaken secrecy for strength. Quiet suffering had begun to look noble to her. Necessary, even. But quiet suffering can grow hard edges too. It can make a person unreachable while they are still standing in the middle of the room. Rosa bent and kissed her father’s forehead. “I miss her,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said, and then sleep took him gently.

Later, after Arturo was settled into bed and the dishes were done and the apartment had gone still, Rosa stepped outside with Jesus into the softer night air. The city sounds were lower now. A car door shut somewhere down the block. A dog barked once and then stopped. The heat had eased enough that the darkness felt almost kind. Rosa stood on the small patch of concrete outside her door and looked at the dead car, the thin line of street, the window where she could see Mateo moving around his room. She folded her arms over herself, not from cold, but because the whole day had left her feeling opened up in places she had kept sealed for too long.

“I keep thinking tomorrow is going to crush me all over again,” she said.

Jesus stood beside her and looked out toward the sleeping shape of the neighborhood. “Tomorrow will still ask things of you.”

She laughed softly without humor. “That’s one way to say it.”

“But you do not have to enter it the same way.”

Rosa shook her head. “I don’t even know how to change that. This is just how life has been. One thing after another. Every day something needs money or energy or patience I don’t have.”

“Yes,” Jesus said. “And because you have lived under constant demand, you have begun to believe that urgency is lord over your house.”

She looked at Him.

“It is not,” He said.

The sentence was simple. It did not solve the electric bill. It did not repair the car. It did not erase the years of strain in her body. But it cut through something false that had been ruling her. Rosa had lived as if emergency were the deepest truth in the room. As if pressure had the final word over who she was and how she loved. Jesus was not denying the difficulty. He was dethroning it.

“What do I do when I feel it rising again,” she asked quietly. “The panic. The sharpness. The feeling that if I don’t tighten everything, it’s all going to fall apart.”

Jesus turned toward her fully. “You stop before the fear speaks for you. You come to Me with the truth of what is happening in you before you deliver it to everyone else as force. You ask for help sooner. You let love sound like love again.”

Rosa let that in. There was no accusation in Him. Only a kind of authority so clean it left no bruise. “I don’t want my son to remember me as pressure.”

“Then let him remember your repentance too,” Jesus said.

That was mercy in a form she had almost forgotten existed. Not only permission to fail. Permission to turn, to soften, to become honest enough that love could breathe again in the same rooms where fear had been running loose.

Inside, Mateo had opened his math book and was staring at it with the expression of somebody preparing to try again without much confidence. Jesus stepped back toward the doorway. Rosa watched Him through the screen as He paused beside her son’s chair. He did not give a long speech. He rested one hand lightly on the back of the chair and said, “One line at a time.” Mateo looked up and nodded. That was all. Yet somehow it was enough to change the feel of the room.

A little later Daniel texted Rosa from his own apartment. Not much. Just two sentences. Thank you for trusting me to help. I made the calls I should have made. Rosa read the message twice. Then she answered, Thank you for telling me where he was. I’m glad you told the truth tonight. She had never texted a city bus driver before that day and had no reason to think she ever would again, but lives cross in holy ways sometimes. People become part of one another’s rescue for an hour and are never quite strangers after that.

Near midnight, when the apartment had finally grown quiet enough that even the refrigerator hum seemed loud, Mateo came out of his room and found Rosa at the kitchen table with the unpaid bill still there in front of her. He hesitated, then sat down across from her. “I’m sorry I took off,” he said.

Rosa looked at him and answered with the truth that mattered more than a clean parental victory. “I’m sorry I made home feel like another place you had to hide from.”

He nodded once. Then, after a pause, he said, “Can we call the school together tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said.

“And maybe ask about tutoring or something.”

“Yes.”

He looked down at the table. “I don’t want to keep sinking.”

Rosa reached across and placed her hand over his. “Then we won’t pretend you’re swimming when you’re not.”

He let out a breath and squeezed her fingers once. It was not a grand reconciliation scene. It was better. It was believable. A new tenderness had entered the house, and because it was real, it did not need to announce itself loudly.

When Jesus finally stepped out into the night again, no one had to ask where He was going. Some presences leave a room and still remain in it. He walked down the quiet street with the calm He had carried all day, past dim windows and sleeping houses and the tired machinery of a city settling into darkness. Tucson was still Tucson. The wounds had not vanished from it. Somewhere a man lay awake over money. Somewhere a woman sat in a hospital chair praying somebody she loved would make it through the night. Somewhere a teenager stared at a ceiling and wondered if his life would ever feel lighter than it did right now. Jesus carried all of that without strain in His face. He had moved through one family’s day in a way they would never forget, but He had not exhausted His compassion on them. Mercy does not run out because it has been used deeply.

He walked until the houses thinned and the city sounds softened. Then He found a quiet place beneath the dark, open sky and knelt in prayer. The night air moved gently around Him. Far off, the city lights glowed like scattered embers in the basin. He prayed with the same stillness He had carried before sunrise, but now the day’s names and faces were gathered within it. He prayed for Rosa, that fear would lose its throne in her heart. He prayed for Mateo, that shame would not shape his future. He prayed for Arturo, that in the fading of memory he would still be held by love deeper than remembering. He prayed for Daniel, that truth would keep opening what fear had locked shut. He prayed for the quiet sufferers spread across the city, the ones whose pain had become so ordinary to them they no longer knew how to describe it. He prayed until the night felt full of the tenderness people rarely see but often survive by.

And while Tucson slept, and while some still cried, and while some still feared tomorrow, Jesus remained there in quiet prayer, present to every hidden ache, carrying with Him the lives of those who had nearly gone unheard.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

Financial support to help keep this Ministry active daily can be mailed to:

Vandergraph Po Box 271154 Fort Collins, Co 80527

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 235.78 lbs. * bp= 143/75 (61)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:05 – 1 banana, crispy oatmeal cookies * 07:15 – coffeecake * 08:55 – 1 seafood salad & cheese sandwich * 12:15 – fried chicken, cole slaw, mashed potatoes * 16:40 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:45- read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 11:00 – listening to The Markley, van Camp and Robbins Show * 12:00 to 13:30 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 13:40 – started following the Guardians vs Cardinals MLB Game, halfway through, score is tied 1 to 1 in the bottom of the 4th inning * 15:17 – And the Cardinals win, 5 to 3. * 15:25 – listening now to Chicago sports talk on 104.3 The Score, the exclusive audio home of the Chicago Cubs, ahead of tonight's MLB Game between the Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies. Opening pitch for this game is approx. 2 hrs. away.

Chess: * 10:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Elena Morales had not slept. She had dozed in a plastic chair at UNM Hospital with one arm crossed over her chest and the other wrapped around her purse because life had taught her not to fully relax in public. Her father had drifted in and out all night after another bad turn that the doctor did not call a stroke but did not call good either. He had known her at midnight. He had not known her at two. At four he had stared through her and asked for his wife, who had been dead for eight years. Elena had gone to the bathroom after that and stood in the stall with her fist against her mouth because she was so tired she did not trust what would come out if she let herself make a sound. By six-thirty she had walked down to the parking structure, sat behind the wheel, and realized she could not make herself drive home. Home meant bills on the table and a sink full of dishes and a sixteen-year-old son who had been talking to her like every sentence cost him something. Home meant the rent reminder folded under a magnet on the fridge and three missed calls from her sister the day before that somehow managed to sound accusing even when they went to voicemail. So she drove without thinking and ended up on 4th Street because her mother used to take her to Barelas Coffee House on hard mornings, back when hard mornings still felt temporary.

The place was already alive when she stepped in. The room smelled like coffee, red chile, and heat lifted off the grill. The old photographs on the walls looked like they had seen every version of hunger a city could carry. A young mother bounced a baby on one hip while trying to keep a toddler from grabbing packets of jelly off the table. Two construction workers were eating fast because time was money and both of them looked short on both. An older man near the register had a plate in front of him and a handful of coins in his palm that he kept counting like the number might change if he stayed patient enough. Ana, who had worked there for years, moved from table to table with that worn-down skill people get when they no longer need to think about what their body is doing, because all the thinking is being spent somewhere else. Elena knew her face but not her story. Still, she knew exhaustion when she saw it. It sat behind Ana’s eyes the same way it sat behind her own.

Elena slid into a booth near the window and stared at the menu without reading a word. Her phone buzzed with a text from her sister Lupe. Any update? I can maybe stop by later. Elena locked the screen and dropped the phone back into her purse. Later. Lupe always had a later. Later was how some people lived with themselves while other people carried the thing now. Ana came over with a coffee pot and a tired smile that did not quite reach her face. Elena asked for coffee and a breakfast plate, then reached for the cream and knocked it over because her hands were not steady. A little white stream ran across the table. “I’m sorry,” Ana said automatically, like the spill had been hers. Elena looked up at her and something ugly rose in her before she could stop it. “You didn’t spill it,” she said too sharply. Ana flinched in a way so small most people would not have noticed, but Elena noticed because she hated herself the second it happened. She wanted to take it back. She wanted the whole morning back. She wanted the last six months back. Instead she stared at the spreading cream and felt the shame settle on top of everything else.

The man with the coins at the register had started apologizing in a low voice. He was missing enough money that the apology had turned into explanation, and the explanation had turned into embarrassment. He kept saying he must have counted wrong. The cashier was trying to be kind, but there was a line behind him now and kindness gets strained when the room is full and everybody thinks they have somewhere they need to be. Before anyone could say another word, Jesus stepped beside him and placed what was needed on the counter. He did it so simply that for a second it almost disappeared into the noise of the morning. The old man looked at Him with the stunned look people get when mercy arrives without making a speech first. Jesus touched the man’s shoulder once and said, “Sit down and eat while it’s hot.” Then He turned, thanked the cashier, and crossed the room with a quiet steadiness that made the place feel different, though nothing loud had happened. He paused by the young mother and folded the toddler’s dropped spoon into a napkin so it would not touch the floor again. He stepped aside so Ana could get through with a heavy tray. Then He stopped near Elena’s booth and asked, “Is this seat taken?”

She should have said yes. She did not know why she did not. Maybe it was because He did not sound like a man trying to make conversation. Maybe it was because He looked at her the way a person looks at a wound they do not intend to shame. Maybe it was only because she was too tired to guard herself properly. “No,” she said. He sat down across from her and folded His hands around the coffee cup the waitress set in front of Him a minute later. For a little while He did not speak at all. He let the room be what it was. Plates clinked. Somebody laughed too loudly at a joke that was not that funny. A baby fussed and then settled. Outside, a truck rattled past on 4th. Elena kept waiting for the kind of opening line strangers use when they want something, but none came. When her breakfast plate arrived she realized she was not hungry enough to eat it. She tore one piece of tortilla and set it back down. Jesus watched her for a moment and then said, “You needed somewhere to sit before you had to be strong again.”

Elena gave a short laugh with no humor in it. “That obvious?”

“You are tired,” He said.

“Everybody is tired.”

“Yes,” He said. “But not everybody is this close to going numb.”

The words landed harder than she wanted them to. She looked out the window as if the street might offer a better conversation. “I’m fine.”

He did not argue with her. He only lifted His cup and took a drink. “People usually say that right before they start disappearing inside their own life.”

She almost snapped at Him again, but there was no cruelty in His voice to push against. That made it harder. Cruel people are easy to resist. Gentle ones make you hear yourself. “My father is in the hospital,” she said, each word feeling dragged out of somewhere deep and sore. “My son is angry all the time. My sister helps when it’s convenient for her. Rent is late. My car is making a noise I cannot afford. I have had three hours of sleep in two days, and the minute I stop moving, somebody needs something. So if I look tired, that’s because I am tired.” She took a breath she could feel shaking in her chest. “And if I go numb once in a while, maybe that’s what keeps everything from falling apart.”

Jesus looked at her without flinching. “Has it kept everything from falling apart?”

She opened her mouth and then closed it again. The answer sat there plain and miserable between them. No. It had not kept anything together. It had only made her son quieter. It had only made her father look more afraid when she came into the room with her jaw already tight. It had only made her say sharp things to women in diners who were as tired as she was. “I don’t have time for a better answer,” she said.

“You do not need a better answer,” He said. “You need truth.”

She frowned at Him. “Truth doesn’t pay bills.”

“No,” He said. “But lies will drain what little strength you have left.”

That bothered her. It bothered her because it felt unfair. “What lies?”

“That you are only useful when you are carrying something. That your hardness is strength. That your anger is the same thing as honesty. That nobody sees what this is costing you.”

Elena stared at Him. Something in her chest pulled tight. She wanted to ask who He was. She wanted to ask how He could sit there speaking into her life as though He had been watching the last year happen from her passenger seat. Instead she picked up her fork and pushed eggs around the plate. “People see,” she said, though even she heard how weak it sounded.

“Some do,” He said. “But that is not what you mean.”

Her phone buzzed again. She almost ignored it, then saw the school name across the screen and answered before she could think. The woman on the line spoke in a calm voice people use when they say the same difficult thing several times a day. Nico had not shown up for first period. This was not new. They were concerned. Elena looked down at the table and closed her eyes. “I understand,” she said. “Thank you.” When the call ended she did not move for several seconds. Then she laughed once, but this time it sounded closer to breaking. “There you go,” she said. “Add that to the list.”

Jesus said nothing right away. Ana came by with the coffee pot again. Elena looked up at her. “I’m sorry for how I spoke to you,” she said quickly, before pride could stop her. Ana blinked, then gave the smallest nod. “It’s okay,” she said, though both of them knew it had not been okay. Still, something softened in her face. That small exchange should not have mattered much in the scale of everything Elena was carrying, yet it did. It felt like the first honest thing she had done all morning. When Ana walked away, Elena let out a breath and rubbed her forehead. “My son used to talk to me,” she said. “Now it feels like every word between us hits the floor.”

Jesus looked toward the window where sunlight had started to gather on the glass. “Pain does not always come out sounding like pain,” He said. “Sometimes it comes out sounding rude. Sometimes it comes out angry. Sometimes it goes silent and dares the people who love it to come looking.”

Elena looked at Him with tired suspicion. “And what am I supposed to do with that?”

“Go looking,” He said.

She almost said, I am looking. I am the only one who ever looks. But the truth was harder than that. She had been checking boxes. She had been sending texts that sounded like orders. She had been asking where Nico was without asking where he had gone inside himself. She had been feeding him and correcting him and pushing him toward school and chores and responsibility because that felt more possible than opening the door to whatever hurt had been growing in him. She knew all of that the same way people know there is water behind a dam. She just had not wanted the wall broken. “I can’t do everything,” she said, and this time the sentence came out quieter.

“I know,” Jesus said.

Those two words nearly undid her. They were not advice. They were not correction. They were not a speech about faith or endurance or gratitude. They were simply an acknowledgment of what her life had felt like for months. I know. She looked down because her eyes had filled too fast. She was not going to cry in a breakfast place on 4th Street in front of a stranger with kind eyes and impossible timing. She reached for the check instead. Jesus had already paid for His meal and rose before she could say anything about it. “Where are you going?” she asked, surprised by how much she did not want Him to disappear.

“With you for a while,” He said.

She should have objected. She did not. There was something in Him that made permission feel beside the point.

By the time they got back to UNM Hospital, the day had fully opened. The sun had climbed high enough to turn the windows bright. People moved through the entrance with the hurried, hollow focus hospitals pull out of human beings. Some were carrying overnight bags. Some were carrying flowers already starting to sag. Some were carrying the exhausted look of people who had learned that a person can be grateful and terrified at the same time. Jesus walked through the lobby as if He belonged there, not because He was blind to suffering, but because suffering never made Him uncertain about where to stand. Elena kept glancing sideways at Him while trying not to make it obvious. No one else seemed startled by His presence. A volunteer smiled at Him as she passed with a cart of blankets. A little boy in a Spider-Man shirt stopped crying when Jesus crouched long enough to straighten the cape hanging twisted off one shoulder. A nurse who looked five minutes from tears let out a breath when He stepped aside to hold the elevator for her and the gurney she was guiding through the doors. He did not take over the room. He only seemed to restore the parts of it that strain had bent out of shape.

Arturo Morales was awake when Elena stepped into the room. He looked smaller than he had even the night before. Illness had a way of shrinking the people who had once filled a house with their voice. Her father had been a mechanic for thirty years. His hands had always been blackened at the edges no matter how much he washed them. He used to laugh from the middle of himself. He used to fix things before other people had finished explaining what was wrong. Now one side of his mouth drooped when he got tired and his fingers trembled when he tried to lift the water cup. He turned his head when Elena came in and for a moment there was panic in his eyes. “Mija,” he said. “Did I miss work?” The sentence hit her so hard she had to grip the bed rail. Work. His shop had closed five years earlier. He had not been behind a counter since before the pandemic. Yet there it was, the old fear of failing somebody, still living in him even now.

“No, Papá,” she said softly. “You didn’t miss work.”

He looked ashamed anyway. Shame was one of the last things people know how to carry. “I don’t want to be trouble,” he whispered.

Jesus moved to the other side of the bed and laid a hand over Arturo’s restless fingers. “A burden is not the same thing as a life,” He said. “You are not trouble because you are weak today.”

Arturo’s eyes lifted to His face. Something in the room changed then. Elena could not have explained it if anyone had asked. It was not dramatic. No machines started beeping in a new way. No bright miracle burned through the air. It was smaller than that and somehow more unsettling. Her father looked seen. Not assessed. Not managed. Not pitied. Seen. The fear in his face loosened the way a clenched fist loosens when it finally believes it does not have to fight. “I’m forgetting things,” Arturo said, each word slow. “I can feel them go.”

Jesus nodded once. “I know.”

“My wife,” Arturo said, and his mouth trembled. “Sometimes I think she’s waiting in the next room.”

“Yes,” Jesus said. “Love stays near where it has lived a long time.”

Elena turned her face away because grief had reached up from somewhere she kept sealed and caught her cleanly by the throat. Her mother had been gone eight years, and still the house sometimes felt like it was waiting for her keys in the front door. She had not let herself say that aloud to anyone. There had been no time for that kind of tenderness after the funeral. There had only been tasks. Papers. Food. Work. Cleanup. Then the next need and the next and the next. She had stepped over her own sorrow so many times it had started feeling impolite to mention it. Yet here it was in the room between her father and this man who spoke like the truth had weight enough to steady people rather than crush them.

A nurse came in to check vitals and update the chart. Elena knew her face too. Same floor. Same clipped kindness. Same eyes that were gentle until they got busy. Today those eyes looked worn down to the bone. Jesus thanked her when she adjusted Arturo’s blanket. It was a small thing, but the nurse paused as if the words had reached a place that had not been touched in a while. “Long shift?” He asked.

She gave a dry little smile. “Long year.”

He nodded. “You are still being tender in a place that tries to beat tenderness out of people.”

Her smile faltered. For one second she looked as if she might cry right there by the IV pole. Instead she pressed her lips together, finished checking the monitor, and said, “I’ll be back in a little while.” After she left, Elena sat down hard in the chair beside the bed. She was not even sure what was happening to her anymore. It felt as if all day people had been having parts of themselves named that they had stopped showing. The tired waitress. The embarrassed old man. The overworked nurse. Her frightened father. Her. She had spent so long in a practical world that made no room for the soul unless it was dying. Now this man moved through ordinary places and kept proving there had always been a soul there.

Her phone buzzed again. This time it was Nico. Not a message. Just one picture sent without any words. It was blurry and taken badly, but she recognized the stretch of Central Avenue right away from the old neon and the storefront angles. Nob Hill. He was not at school. He was not home. He was somewhere in the long bright strip of the city pretending movement counted as direction. Elena stared at the photo until Jesus said, “Go.”

She looked up. “Papá—”

“I’ll stay with him,” Jesus said.

That should have felt impossible. Instead it felt like the first reasonable thing she had heard all day.

She bent and kissed her father’s forehead. He was already drowsing again, but when she pulled back he caught her wrist weakly. “Don’t be hard on the boy,” he murmured, not opening his eyes. “He’s more like us than he knows.”

Elena stood still for a moment. Then she nodded, though she was not sure if he saw. When she walked out of the room she did it with the strange feeling that she was leaving her father in the only hands that had never once mistaken weakness for inconvenience.

Nico Morales had not meant to send the picture. He had taken it while standing outside a thrift store in Nob Hill because the sun was hitting an old sign in a way that reminded him of when his grandfather used to point out things on drives and make even ugly blocks feel like they had stories. He had been about to send it to nobody. Maybe to his mom. Maybe to delete it. Maybe just to prove to himself he still noticed anything. His friend Mateo was inside trying on a jacket he had no intention of paying for. That was how the morning had gone. Drift from one block to the next. Pretend the day had no owner. Laugh at dumb things. Feel sick when laughter ran out. Nico had gotten good at looking detached. People think teenage boys do not feel much when really a lot of them are feeling too much and have no safe place to put it. His mother saw attitude. The vice principal saw absentee numbers. Teachers saw a kid getting lazy. Mateo saw someone who could be talked into staying out longer. Nobody saw how loud the apartment had gotten inside Nico’s head these last months. His grandfather in the hospital. His mother either gone or sharp with stress. His own face in the bathroom mirror looking older and emptier all at once. The shame of needing comfort and being old enough to hate that he needed it.

He came out onto Central and started walking east with his hands in his pockets. Cars rolled past in waves. Neon signs still hung over the old Route 66 buildings even in broad daylight as if the street refused to stop remembering itself. People moved in and out of cafes and shops. A woman came out carrying flowers wrapped in brown paper. Two students from UNM crossed laughing too hard for Nico not to feel irritated by it. Everybody looked like they belonged somewhere. He felt like a loose screw rattling around in the wrong machine. He stopped at a bus bench and sat down without checking what route even came through there. He was not waiting for a bus. He was waiting for the feeling in his chest to either settle or finally tell the truth about what it wanted.

“Your mother is looking for you.”

Nico turned and saw Jesus standing a few feet away. He did not know how long the man had been there. He looked ordinary enough at first glance, which somehow made the steadiness in Him more unsettling. Nico gave Him the look teenage boys give adults who step too far into their space. “You know my mother?”

“I know she is afraid.”

Nico looked away toward the street. “She’s always afraid.”

“No,” Jesus said. “Not always. Sometimes she is just tired. Today she is afraid.”

Something in Nico wanted to get up and leave. Something else wanted to stay because the man’s voice did not sound nosy or accusing. It sounded certain. “She’s at the hospital anyway,” Nico muttered. “That’s where she lives now.”

Jesus sat at the far end of the bench, leaving space between them. “Is that what it feels like to you?”

Nico laughed once and shook his head. “Why ask if you already know everything?”

Jesus looked ahead at the traffic moving up Central. “Because being known is easier to survive when you also get to speak.”

That answer did something to him. Nico hated that it did. He picked at a split thread on the knee of his jeans and stared at it like it mattered more than the conversation. “It feels like if something bad happens, I’m supposed to just act normal,” he said finally. “My grandpa is in the hospital. My mom is mad every time she talks. Nobody says what’s actually going on. Everybody just acts like if I go to class and take out the trash and stop screwing around, then the whole thing is somehow fine.” He swallowed. “It’s not fine.”

“No,” Jesus said. “It is not.”

Nico looked at Him then, really looked. There was no performance in His face. No fake concern. No adult smile trying to ease him back into being manageable. Nico had not known how hungry he was for that until it was sitting beside him on a bus bench in Nob Hill. “Sometimes I think if I disappeared for a week, it would take people a while to notice,” he said.

Jesus answered without delay. “That is not true.”

“It feels true.”

“Yes,” Jesus said. “And some lies are believed because they arrive during pain.”

Nico sat still. A city bus groaned to the curb and then pulled away again when nobody boarded. The shadow from the shelter roof shifted across the sidewalk. Somewhere down the block somebody opened a door and a burst of music spilled out before being swallowed by traffic. “I’m angry all the time,” Nico said. “At her. At school. At myself. At everything. I don’t even know what to do with it.”

Jesus nodded. “Anger is often grief that thinks it has to protect itself.”

Nico let out a breath and looked down the long bright line of Central as if he might find an exit written somewhere on the street. He did not answer. He did not know how. But he did not get up and walk away either.

Jesus stood and waited until Nico stood too, not because He commanded it, but because something in His presence made running feel childish. They walked east without hurry, past old signs and storefront windows that reflected them back in broken pieces. The city had started warming up now. The cool of morning was gone and the light had turned clear and sharp on brick and glass. A couple sat outside a coffee shop with that strained, careful posture people use when they are trying to have a serious conversation in public without becoming a scene. A man in work boots talked too loudly into his phone about being late again and not caring who was mad about it. Near the corner by the Guild Cinema, an older woman had dropped a grocery bag and oranges rolled toward the curb. Nico moved before he thought and caught two of them with his foot. Jesus bent and picked up the rest, then handed them back to her one by one as though even a spilled bag on Central deserved His full attention. The woman thanked them both, but she kept looking at Jesus with a puzzled softness, like she had just remembered something she had not thought about in years.

Nico shoved his hands back into his pockets after that. “You do that a lot?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Notice stuff other people don’t.”

Jesus looked over at him. “Most people notice. They are simply too burdened to stop.”

That answer sat with Nico for a few steps. He had expected something that sounded wiser in a showy way. Instead it sounded true in the plainest way possible, which was worse because it got in deeper. They crossed near Carlisle and kept walking until the noise of traffic thinned just enough for thought to be heard again. “So what,” Nico said, trying to sound harder than he felt, “you think I should just go back and magically be different now?”

Jesus did not smile at the sarcasm. “No. I think you should stop using anger to keep anyone from finding the hurt underneath it.”

Nico stared straight ahead. “People don’t know what to do with that kind of thing anyway.”

“Some do not,” Jesus said. “Some will handle it badly. Some will make it about themselves. Some will try to fix it too fast because they are frightened by pain they cannot control. But being unseen is not healed by hiding more deeply.”

Nico kicked a pebble off the sidewalk and watched it skitter into the gutter. “You make everything sound simple.”

“I make it sound true,” Jesus said. “Simple and easy are not the same.”

They reached Hyder Park and turned in beneath the trees. It was quieter there. A man on a bench was feeding crumbs to birds with the careful patience of someone who needed a reason to sit outside longer. A woman in exercise clothes was walking circles around the path while crying in a way she clearly hoped looked like sweating to anybody who passed too quickly. Children’s voices carried from farther off, bright and careless for the moment, which made the rest of the park feel even more fragile somehow. Nico sat on a low wall near the grass and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Jesus remained standing for a moment, looking across the park as if He could hear every life threaded through it at once without being overwhelmed by any of them.

“My grandpa used to bring me out here once in a while,” Nico said. “Not here exactly. Different places. Tingley. The Bosque. Random places. He always acted like the city was worth paying attention to.” He gave a small, embarrassed shrug. “Most people just drive through stuff.”

“Your grandfather has been teaching you to see,” Jesus said.

Nico swallowed. “He might die.”

Jesus sat beside him then, leaving the same patient space He had left on the bus bench. “Yes,” He said. “He might.”

Nico blinked and turned toward Him. “That’s it?”

“I will not lie to you to make you calmer,” Jesus said. “Peace built on denial collapses the moment reality touches it.”

The answer was so direct it almost made Nico angry, but he could not accuse it of being false. He stared down at his shoes. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”

“Love him while he is here. Tell the truth while there is time. Stop pretending distance will protect you.”

Nico’s throat tightened. There were a hundred things he had not said to his grandfather because boys who are trying to grow into men often mistake affection for weakness. He had never told him that the old truck rides meant something. He had never thanked him for fixing the wobble in his bike when he was ten. He had never said that the only time he felt fully relaxed lately was when his grandfather was in the room watching old westerns with the volume too high. He had assumed time was a wide road. Suddenly it felt narrow. “What if I don’t know how to talk like that?” he asked.

Jesus looked at him with a gentleness that did not lower the standard. “Then do not talk like somebody else. Speak plainly.”

Nico laughed under his breath, not because anything was funny, but because the answer took away another place to hide. He rubbed both hands over his face. “My mom and I keep missing each other,” he said through his fingers. “Every conversation turns bad. She comes in already stressed. I say something stupid. She says something sharp. Then I say something worse. Then she walks away like she’s done with me.” He let his hands drop. “Sometimes I think she looks at me and sees one more problem.”

Jesus was quiet for a moment. Then He said, “She looks at you and sees someone she cannot bear to lose, while also fearing she is failing you.”

Nico frowned. “That’s not what it looks like.”

“No,” Jesus said. “Fear rarely looks like fear once it has been tired for too long.”

The woman walking the path had slowed now, one hand pressed over her mouth as if the tears had outrun whatever excuse she had built around them. Jesus stood and crossed toward her before Nico could even ask why. He spoke to her too quietly for Nico to hear at first. The woman shook her head and gave the embarrassed smile people give when a stranger has seen too much. Jesus said something else and her shoulders gave way. Not in a dramatic collapse. More like a person who has been holding a heavy box too long and can no longer pretend it weighs nothing. She nodded several times while wiping her face. When Jesus returned, Nico looked at Him strangely. “Do you know everybody?”

“I know what pain does to people,” Jesus said.

“What was wrong with her?”

Jesus glanced back once. “Her husband left six months ago and she has been telling everyone she is relieved because the truth feels too humiliating to say out loud.”

Nico stared. “She told you that?”

“She did not need many words.”

Nico leaned back and looked up through the branches. For the first time all day he felt something besides agitation. It was not exactly peace yet. It was closer to the feeling of being near water after walking too long in heat. “So what happens now?” he asked.

“Your mother is coming.”

Nico sat up immediately. “What?”

Jesus looked down the path toward the edge of the park. “Do not run.”

Nico almost laughed because the suggestion made him realize he had in fact been thinking about it. A minute later Elena appeared at the walkway entrance, breathing hard from having parked badly and moved too fast. She stopped when she saw him. The look on her face was not anger. That was what hit him first. It was relief so raw it made him feel ashamed for how often he had treated her like she was made of stone. She stepped toward him, then slowed, like she did not trust the moment not to break. “Nico,” she said.

He stood. He had imagined this meeting several ways while sitting at the bus bench. In most of them he was defensive. In some he was cold. In one he walked away before she got close enough to talk. But now she was standing in front of him with her hair pulled back too quickly and hospital fatigue still on her face and fear still in her eyes, and he could not reach any of those practiced reactions. “I’m here,” he said, which was not much, but it was more honest than the things he usually reached for.

Elena nodded once and pressed her lips together. “I can see that.”

Silence opened. Not empty silence. Charged silence. The kind where one wrong sentence can send two people back to their corners for another month. Nico glanced toward Jesus. He was standing a few feet away near the path, not interrupting, not rescuing them from the hard work of being real. He was present without taking the moment away from them. That steadiness kept Nico from bolting. Elena took another step closer. “The school called,” she said. “Then you sent that picture. I didn’t know if you wanted me to find you or not.”

Nico looked at the ground. “I didn’t know either.”

That answer almost broke her. He saw it. She reached up and rubbed her forehead in the same tired gesture she always made when trying to keep herself together. “I have been so scared lately,” she said. “About Grandpa. About money. About everything. And I know I haven’t been…” She stopped, searching for words that did not sound like excuses. “I know I haven’t been with you the way I should be.”

Nico’s instinct was to say, Yeah, obviously. That was the sentence his hurt had ready. But Jesus had called anger grief trying to protect itself, and now he could hear the protection rising before it spoke. He swallowed it hard. “I haven’t made it easy either,” he said, looking at his shoes because eye contact felt like too much truth at once. “I just… I don’t know what to do with all of it. So I get mad.”

Elena let out a breath that sounded part sob, part surrender. “Me too.”

They both stood there with that between them, and for the first time in months neither of them rushed to explain it away. Some reconciliations do not begin with a hug. They begin with the end of pretending. Elena stepped forward and put her hands on his shoulders as if she had not done that in a long time and was remembering the shape of him again. “You are not one more problem,” she said. “I need you to hear me say that. You are my son. I have been afraid and tired and wrong in how I’ve carried some of this, but you are not a problem.”

Nico’s face tightened before he could stop it. He looked away, then back again. “I thought maybe if I just stayed out of the way…”

“No,” she said quickly. “No. Don’t do that. Don’t disappear to make life easier for me.” Her voice trembled now. “That would not make anything easier.”

He nodded once. It was all he could do. She pulled him into her then, and because he was sixteen and hurting and still half a child under all the noise, he let her. He did not cry much. Just enough to betray how close he had been to carrying too much alone. Jesus looked away while they stood there, giving them privacy even in the middle of a public park.

They left together not long after, walking back toward the car with Jesus between them for a while and then slightly ahead. Elena told Nico about his grandfather asking if he had missed work. Nico laughed softly through the ache of it and said that sounded exactly like him. Nico told her he had been afraid to go to the hospital because he did not know what he would see. Elena admitted she had been afraid too. That helped more than anything. The truth often sounds smaller than a speech, but it reaches further. By the time they got back into the car, the hard shell around the day had cracked enough for tenderness to breathe.

When they returned to UNM Hospital, the lobby felt different to Elena. Not easier. Hospitals do not become easy because one family has spoken honestly in the parking lot. Yet the place no longer felt like a machine chewing through people. She kept noticing faces now. A janitor moving with care around a sleeping man stretched across two chairs. A young doctor staring at the wall for six silent seconds before turning a corner and putting his expression back together. The same volunteer with blankets now kneeling beside an elderly woman and tying a dropped shoe. It was as if Jesus had not changed the building so much as changed how they were walking through it. Nico noticed it too. She could tell by how often his eyes moved.

Arturo was awake again when they entered. He looked from Elena to Nico and then to Jesus, and some quiet understanding passed over his face that neither Elena nor Nico could fully read. Nico went straight to the bedside, suddenly shy in a way Elena had not seen since he was little. “Hey, Grandpa,” he said.

Arturo smiled weakly. “You skipping school for me now?”

The joke was thin, but it was enough. Nico gave a short laugh and shook his head. “Maybe a little.”

“Bad habit,” Arturo whispered.

“I know.”

Then the room grew still. Nico looked at his grandfather’s hands, at the spots on the skin and the tremor in the fingers. He looked at Jesus once, then back to Arturo. “I love you,” he said, too fast at first, like he wanted to get past the sentence before it embarrassed him. Then he said it again, slower. “I love you, Grandpa.”

Arturo closed his eyes and breathed in as though the words had reached somewhere deep. When he opened them again they were wet. “Love you too, mijo.”

Elena turned away and put her hand over her mouth. Jesus stood by the window, the afternoon light falling around Him, and watched them with that same quiet presence that never crowded pain and never left it alone.

The nurse from earlier came back near shift change. Her name tag read Marissa, and now that Elena had slept so little and felt so much, she wondered how many days she had looked at that tag without seeing the person under it. Marissa adjusted the monitor leads and gave them an update in the calm practiced tone of someone who had learned how to deliver concern without spreading panic. When she finished, Jesus thanked her again, but this time He added, “Who cares for you when the day ends?”

Marissa gave a weary smile that said the question itself felt unfamiliar. “Mostly nobody,” she answered before she could stop herself. Then, catching her own honesty, she looked embarrassed. “Sorry. Long shift.”

Jesus did not move to soothe the awkwardness away. “Even strong people become thirsty,” He said.

Something in Marissa’s face softened. She nodded once, blinked hard, and went back to checking the chart. Yet when she left she did not look quite as hollow as before. Elena watched her go and thought about how many people lived inside competence the way others live inside armor. Everybody in the building was carrying something. Some were carrying it well enough to be admired for it. That did not make it light.

Later, when Arturo had fallen asleep again and the room had dimmed with the late afternoon, Jesus led Elena and Nico down to the cafeteria for coffee they did not need and sandwiches neither of them was hungry for. They sat near the windows where the western light had begun to change color. Nico picked apart a bag of chips while Elena stirred sweetener into coffee already too sweet. Jesus let them speak in uneven pieces. He did not force insight out of the moment. Elena admitted she had been angry at Lupe for months, not only because the help came late, but because she envied how Lupe still had the option of a separate life. Nico admitted he had been ashamed at school because once his grades slipped, every teacher suddenly started talking to him with that careful disappointing tone that made him feel finished before he had even tried to explain. Elena told him she had not known that. Nico said he had not wanted to tell her one more hard thing. Jesus listened as if every confession deserved clean space around it.

At one point a man at the next table began arguing into his phone about money, the volume rising with every sentence. Nobody looked over because public strain has become common enough to pass as background noise. Then the man stopped mid-argument and pressed a hand over his eyes. Jesus turned toward him and said only, “You are afraid this will expose you.” The man lowered his hand and stared. For a second his whole face went unguarded. “Yeah,” he said, almost whispering. Jesus nodded toward the empty chair across from him. “Sit down before you decide out of panic.” The man sat. He ended the call. He put his phone face down on the table and began to breathe like someone returning to his own body. Elena watched this happen without surprise now. The day had become too full of such moments for surprise to keep up. Jesus was not wandering through Albuquerque collecting scenes. He was moving through hidden fractures and touching the place where each one had begun.

By the time evening came, Lupe finally arrived. She entered Arturo’s room in expensive flats and a pressed blouse that made her look pulled together in the exact way Elena resented. The resentment came up so automatically Elena almost mistook it for righteousness. Lupe kissed Arturo’s forehead, asked quiet questions, and then looked at Elena with the expression siblings wear when entire decades are standing behind one glance. “I came as soon as I could,” Lupe said.

Elena’s first instinct was to answer with something sharp about how that always seemed to be the phrase. Jesus was standing near the foot of the bed, and though He said nothing, Elena could feel the day pressing on the old wound. She looked at her sister more carefully than she had in months. Lupe’s makeup had not fully hidden the tiredness around her eyes. Her hands shook a little when she set down her purse. This was not a woman floating untouched above the family burden. This was a woman carrying it differently and hiding it better. “I know,” Elena said.

Lupe seemed surprised. Then suspicious. Family history can make even kindness feel like bait. “I had three clients this afternoon I couldn’t move.”

“I know,” Elena said again, and this time she meant more than the calendar. Lupe looked down and nodded, and Elena realized with a dull ache how long it had been since either of them had offered understanding without making the other earn it first. They did not resolve years of strain in that room. Real families rarely do. But something unclenched enough for tenderness to re-enter. Nico shifted his chair to make room for his aunt without being asked. Lupe touched the back of his head as she passed, and even that small gesture felt like a window opening.

Dusk gathered over the city in slow layers. From Arturo’s hospital window, the western sky turned gold and then deeper, and the Sandias in the distance began to lift into that rose color people talk about as if the mountains are performing some trick. The city lights started pricking on below them. Albuquerque always seemed to hold two truths at once in the evening. It could look beautiful from a distance and still ache terribly up close. Jesus stood at the window for a while as the light changed. Elena came to stand beside Him. “Are You leaving?” she asked quietly.

“For tonight,” He said.

The answer hurt her more than she expected. It also felt right. Days like this are not meant to become dependence on visible miracles. They are meant to expose what has been true all along and then ask whether people will walk in it once the voice grows quiet. Elena looked out at the city. “I don’t want to go back to how we were this morning.”

“You do not have to,” Jesus said.

She shook her head. “People say things like that, but then tomorrow comes.”

“Yes,” He said. “Tomorrow always comes. That is why truth must be practiced and not merely admired.”

She let the words settle. “I’m tired of living defended.”

Jesus turned toward her. “Then stop treating tenderness like weakness.”

She nodded slowly. It sounded possible when He said it, not because it would be easy, but because He never asked anyone to pretend the hard road was flat. Nico came over then and stood on Elena’s other side. For a moment the three of them looked out at the city together. So many roofs. So many streets. So many apartments holding private griefs. So many cars moving through intersections with someone inside wondering how much more they could carry. “Will Grandpa be okay?” Nico asked quietly.

Jesus looked at the mountains a moment before answering. “He is held.”

That was not the answer either of them had wanted, yet it reached deeper than the answer they had hoped for. Nico leaned slightly against his mother. She put an arm around him without thinking. They stayed that way until Jesus stepped back from the window.

He went to Arturo first and laid a hand lightly on the old man’s shoulder while he slept. Then He touched Lupe’s arm and told her, “Do not confuse distance with strength.” Lupe looked up sharply, because the sentence had found her too exactly. Then He turned to Marissa, who was passing the room at that moment with a stack of charts, and said, “Go home and let someone ask how you are.” She stopped as if struck gently by the truth of her own neglect, then nodded once. Finally He looked at Elena and Nico together. “Speak sooner,” He said. “Do not wait for fear to do all the talking.”

They followed Him downstairs and out of the hospital, through the cooling air of evening and into a city settling under its lights. He did not choose a dramatic destination. He walked west with them until the streets widened and the sound of traffic changed, until the glow of downtown and the softer darkness near the Rio Grande began to meet. They parted from Lupe in the parking lot after a long look that promised another conversation later, one that might not be easy but no longer needed to be cruel. Then the three of them drove toward the Bosque. Jesus directed them without sounding like He was directing at all. Elena parked near a trailhead where cottonwoods stood in evening shadow and the air held that faint dampness the river gives back when the desert starts cooling down.

They walked under the trees while the last light thinned out above them. Somewhere beyond the brush, water moved with that low, steady sound that never asks for attention yet always changes the atmosphere once you hear it. The city was still there, of course. You could feel it nearby in the distant hum, in the orange haze above parts of the skyline, in the occasional siren carried thin through the dark. But the Bosque made room for a different kind of listening. Nico kicked at nothing now, just leaves. Elena breathed more slowly than she had all day. Jesus led them to a clearing where the trees opened just enough to let the sky be seen. The Sandias were only a dark outline now.

He turned toward them and for a long moment said nothing. Then He took Elena’s hand and placed it in Nico’s. They both looked down at the simple contact as if it were somehow more exposing than a speech. “There is enough pain in the world,” He said. “Do not add to it by refusing one another your tenderness.”

Elena nodded first. Nico followed a second later. Neither tried to make a promise larger than the day. They only let the truth stand there between them, and for once that was enough.

Jesus stepped back then, and the quiet around Him deepened. “Go home,” He said. “Sit beside each other before sleep. Speak plainly. Let love sound ordinary if it must. It is still love.”

Nico looked at Him with sixteen-year-old reluctance to ask for what he actually wanted. “Will we see You again?”

Jesus’ face held that mixture of gentleness and authority that had followed them through the whole city. “You will know where to look.”

Then He turned and walked a little distance away beneath the trees. Elena and Nico did not follow. Something in the moment told them not to. Jesus knelt there in the deepening dark, beside the quiet breath of the Rio Grande and under a sky that still held the last trace of Albuquerque’s fading light, and He entered once more into quiet prayer. He prayed as the day ended the way He had prayed before it began, carrying the city again in silence. He carried the tired waitress on 4th Street. He carried the nurse who had almost forgotten herself inside her usefulness. He carried the old mechanic in the hospital bed and the daughters who loved him with different kinds of fear. He carried the boy on Central who had been drifting close to disappearance and the mother who had been trying to survive by becoming harder than her own heart. He carried the woman in the park with humiliation hidden under exercise clothes. He carried the man in the cafeteria whose panic was eating his judgment alive. He carried the apartments, the parking lots, the waiting rooms, the side streets, the lonely kitchens, the exhausted marriages, the private shame, the thin budgets, the long recoveries, the buried grief, the prayers people could not finish, and the prayers people had stopped trying to begin. He carried Albuquerque the way only He could, without confusion, without distance, without weariness, and without ever once mistaking human weakness for inconvenience.

Elena and Nico stood watching Him until neither of them felt the urge to speak. The day had not fixed everything. Arturo was still in the hospital. Bills were still waiting. School would still need to be faced. Old patterns would still try to return because old patterns always do. But the lie that had ruled the morning was gone. They were not alone inside their lives. They were not unseen. They were not required to harden into survival and call that strength. There in the Bosque, with the city breathing beyond the trees and Jesus bowed in quiet prayer, both of them understood something that would take the rest of their lives to keep learning. Love does not always arrive by removing the burden. Sometimes it arrives by stepping all the way into the burden with you until the weight no longer tells you who you are.

A breeze moved through the cottonwoods and then settled. Nico tightened his hand around his mother’s without looking at her, and she tightened hers back. After a while they turned toward the trail and began walking to the car, not because the holy moment had ended, but because it had entered them enough to travel home. Behind them, Jesus remained in prayer as the night deepened over Albuquerque, calm and near and utterly present, holding the city in the quiet.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

Financial support to help keep this Ministry active daily can be mailed to:

Vandergraph Po Box 271154 Fort Collins, Co 80527

Today's second MLB Game in the Roscoe-verse features the Chicago Cubs playing the Philadelphia Phillies. Opening pitch is nearly two hours away, so I've got plenty of time to enjoy Chicago sports talk on 104.3 The Score ahead of the radio call of the game.

And the adventure continues.

Ik weet pas hoe het gaat Als het in een hokje staat zonder vakje kies ik geen partij er moet voor de zekerheid een vinkje bij alles wat komt is makkelijker te slikken als ik het eerst zorgvuldig aan kan klikken er moeten altijd een aantal opties open tussen liggen, zitten, staan, kruipen, rollen of lopen een netjes goed leesbaar overzichtelijk keuze menu tussen het signaal en de zenuw want zonder een dergelijk vakgebied heb ik geen idee dan is er geen ja mogelijk en ook geen nee ik weet het pas echt niet als ik dat ergens in kan vullen en alleen met vijf betaalopties koop ik die spullen ik moet kunnen kiezen uit kleuren en aantal een optie voor het meest gekozen paardje uit de stal ik wil een keuze lijst voor het beste lied er moet een vinkje bij anders bestaat het niet zonder invulvakjes durf ik niet eens te kiezen dan zal ik waarschijnlijk het overzicht op alles verliezen geef me een vakje en ik weet weer hoe ik me voel een meerkeuze vraag en ik weet weer wat jij bedoeld het al en het bijzondere moet op een rijtje staan dan kies ik zonder twijfel de juiste banaan ik ben een man met een wil om kruizen te zetten zelfs op een kieslijst voor lange afstandsraketten als ik ergens een hokje zie dan vul ik het in dat is dan ook het enigste waar ik goed in ben vraag het niet open maar vraag alles dicht dan worden zware problemen luchtig en licht oorlog en vrede elk in hun genummerde hokje en daaruit kiezen onder druk van een tikkend klokje geluk, ongeluk, pijn, genot, start of stop ieder woord is goed als het komt met een invulknop ik durf wel te zeggen dat feitelijk elke geschreven taal beduidend meer waard is met zo'n helder signaal vinkje er op vinkje er in ja zo gaat ie goed vinkje er bij vinkje er onder ik zou niet weten of ik trouw ben zonder, zo'n hokje met mijn huwelijkse staat hokjes voor vinkjes zijn voor altijd en eeuwig mijn enige echte steun en [✓] toe [ ] ver [ ] laaaaaaaaat

Bent u gelukkiger na het lezen van dit vers?

[ ] Ja [ ] Nee [ ] Weet ik niet

— are you OK?, I asked

— yes but the PIN code doesn’t work, he said, meaning to the door

— Do you need help getting up? I asked

— I live here, he responded now slowly getting on his feet unsteadily

He’d dropped his pizza, box lay upside down on the ground. And the plastic containers of sauce were spattered on his wallet and his phone which he’d also dropped.

He looked about to fall again, I asked

— Can I pick your stuff up for you?

— No, he replied, but you can hold the door for me.

He managed to gather his stuff, but I took the pizza and handed it to him

— this still looks edible, I said encouragingly

One hand on the door frame, he took the pizza in his hand and I saw then that his arm was incredibly muscular.

— take care now, I said as we parted ways

And with thoughts of the ruined pizza on my mind I went home

I am thinking about it still.

Cardinals vs Guardians.

We've finished our lunch at home, the wife and I. She's now on her post lunch nap, and I've found a baseball game to follow: the Cleveland Guardians playing the St. Louis Cardinals. The teams are tied as they play through the middle innings, the score now is 1 to 1 in the top of the 6th inning.

And the adventure continues.

'What is your home?' A stranger asks.

Home (for you, my love)

Home?

No. Not what I once named it. Not walls, nor roads remembered by the body’s tired return.

Home has slipped its geography. It no longer answers to maps.

Listen, I will tell you, my friend, of a home with no address, no door, no fixed sky...

only a mind.

The mind.

Yours.

Where I wander like a pilgrim without sleep, touching the edges of your thoughts as if they were holy cloth.

I left a place once called home; a source, perhaps, a well I drank from without ever being quenched.

What is a home if the heart refuses it? If it does not loosen there, does not lay down its armor, does not breathe?

No—

Home is not where a man hangs his hat.

It is where he loses himself entirely.

And mine... mine is not here.

Not fully.

It is cleaved. like light through glass, like a prayer spoken in two languages—

here, and there, and in the terrible distance between.

You...

You are my home.

I have driven whole nights through the dark of myself to reach you,

whispering your name like a rhythm against the wheel, like a vow I could not break if I tried.

I would come to you in the hour when breath is deepest, when the world forgets itself—

not to wake you, but to feel you there, to exist in the same quiet as your dreaming body.

That would be enough. God— that would be everything.

There:

in that imagined room, in that borrowed closeness,

I am unafraid.

My demons do not follow. My doubts cannot cross the threshold.

There is only the heat of being known, the slow unraveling of all I pretend to be, the dangerous relief of becoming myself in the presence of you.

Amber-eyed, ocean-removed, twelve hundred leagues of absence and still

you are nearer to me than my own hands.

What is this place we make without touching?

What is this fire that asks nothing and takes everything?

I live there in the thought of you, in the shape of your name inside my mouth, in the quiet confession of wanting.

And one day—

if the world is merciful, or cruel enough

here and there will collapse into one,

and I will stand beside you with nothing left to lose,

and say, at last,

not as metaphor, not as longing—

but as truth:

I am home.

#poetry #wyst

You try to justify the whole delay so you can plan out everything in advance, everything can be perfect so you don’t make a mistake. It doesn’t work like that. I should know this by now that I’m 34 years old. Year by year I feel like I lie less to myself but it still happens daily. At least I’m aware. That is something I guess.

Okay so like I said I’m a 34 year old guy. I was born in Hungary but I moved to England in 2014 when I was 23. To this day I don’t know if that decision was good or bad. Probably never will. Because of this, English is my second language and that means I’ll make mistakes. This was another excuse I liked to tell myself. I mean my English is not perfect but I can convey my thoughts pretty well I feel like and I hope it adds some uniqueness to my posts. I don’t want to run all my stuff through an AI or spellchecker. I’ll obviously try to minimise mistakes especially spelling ones but I don’t want to sound like a robot. I honestly despise this whole new era of “everything is AI”.

The biggest thing that helped me get started was when I realised I don’t have to share this blog with anyone. No one needs to know who I am. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it or not. I just like writing. I always have. I wrote very basic stories when I was a kid. Okay I admit they were heavily mimicking existing ones. I remember one that was basically Robinson Crusoe but written by a 12 year old.

I really started rambling here. I didn’t think I will write about that Robinson story, I honestly even forgot about it until 2 minutes ago. It is funny how much stuff comes to surface when you are trying to organise your thoughts so you can put them down in a readable fashion.

I have loads of interests and I like taking walks whilst I think about a lot of stuff. I used to have a car but I sold it. I walk to and from work too. I really don’t want to get lazy and I hate driving. I’ll write posts just about anything I think. My plan is to write at least one post per week. (I refuse to call my work an article because it feels pretentious.) I might even write multiple a day. Who knows? I just want to get going.

Without trying to give you the whole list, below is the stuff I like the most from the top of my head. This doesn’t mean I’ll only write about these but perhaps it gives you an idea of what kind of guy I am.

1. Guitar – Especially Rock and Roll, Blues, Hard Rock, Metal (Been playing since 2007.)

2. Football and Formula 1 – Favourite teams: Arsenal and Ferrari. Pain. I know.

3. Books – Andy Weir is my favourite author.

4. Films – Mainly horror, action and science fiction. I have a newfound love for old black and white Japanese films. I like the Human Condition trilogy, okay?

5. Philosophy – I was always interested and last year I’ve found stoicism which is probably the one I read the most.

Obviously I like ton of other stuff too. Gaming, cooking, hanging out with people, whatever. You get the gist. I really don’t know why I’m trying to make this into a list.

Anyway I think it is time for me to say goodbye and I hope, future me will be very happy that I started this blog.

Thanks,

Blip-A

Until one day or some hours, she cannot really precise, but it felt like an eternity, a giant with long hair and a weird looking white horse (that's Livi in case you missed the ref) showed up, grabbed her with giant hands, and everything went dark again. She was sure that was the end. But then the hands opened, and there she was, at the highest height she's ever been in life, she was back outside, but outside this time was so enormous, she could see all the buildings and the city from above, all this happening as if she’d been teleported to freedom. Her moth friends would probably call the whole thing an abduction.

She’d be invited onto moth podcasts to share her testimony. The hater moths would say, “Fake. She just wants attention, next thing you know, she’s auditioning for Too Hot to Handle”, etc. Eventually, she’d write a book compiling testimonies from other moths who claim to have been abducted, trying to find patterns. Some would say, “My giant had short hair.” Others: “Mine was bald.” Some would insist there was no giant at all, just a huge transparent glass thing, and at the bottom, something that looked like a piece of Spar flyers. Other moths would never swallow the theory of the giant jar with Spar flyers at the bottom. “This is obviously a marketing move from Spar!” they would say.

Damn it's so hard to be a believable moth.

/Apr26

A psychiatrist, Dr. Wykoff (played by Casey Biggs) offers Benny a paint roller to erase his writings so he can be “cured” of his delusions. I won’t spoil any more so go watch. After watching that episode it gave me an idea.

Inside my home I have blue, white, and yellow walls. What color wall would I choose? Or would I write on all of them? Unfortunately, white and yellow walls are too bright even in low lighting. Blue walls are easier on my eyes and still bright enough when there’s not enough light.

However, all of this doesn’t matter. The real question is: how long can my kids and I write on the walls before my wife goes berserk and makes me clean and repaint them?

#writing #blue #ds9 #startrek #walls #white #yellow

Sialan kan Wonwoo jadi kepikiran.

Kalo dibilang apa Wonwoo nyesel nyium bibir Joshua karena sekarang dia jadi buronan di kalangan temen-temennya sendiri (dan entah berapa juta manusia di luar sana yang Wonwoo nggak kenal tapi sama keselnya karena bibir Joshua udah direbut cowok anonim), jawabannya tentu aja enggak ya gaes yaaaaa ☝️

Wonwoo NGGAK AKAN pernah nyesel karena KAPAN LAGI BISA NYIUM BIBIR JOSHUA HONG WOI, MAU DUNIA KEBELAH KEK BODO AMAT YANG PENTING DIA UDAH NGERASAIN BIBIRNYA JOSHUA JISOO HONG‼️‼️‼️‼️

(eit nggak usah ngiri☝️)

Cuma, yeah, tetep aja Wonwoo kepikiran. Kalo reaksi temen-temennya aja udah radikal begitu, apakah bakal ada ekstrimis-ekstrimis lain yang siap nyulik Jeon Wonwoo pas tau dirinya lah perebut ciuman Joshua, terus Wonwoo dihanyutkan ke sungai Gangga? Ato, worse, ditunjuk jadi duta MBG?? 😨 (ih najis)

Dikernyitkannya dahi, auto hidung bangirnya ikut mengerut. Wonwoo berjalan memasuki perpustakaan di area pusat kampus seperti tiap sore dengan kedua lengan melipat di dada. Parasnya kelewat serius buat isi kepalanya yang random saat ini. Kayaknya better Wonwoo agak jaga jarak sama Joshua deh. Nerapin beberapa rules personal yang ketat. Jangan deket-deket biar nggak khilaf ciuman lagi. Jangan berduaan doang di ruang sepi. Jangan—

“Ikh...”

...Yaelah. Langsung muncul itu Joshua-nya depan mata. Baru juga mau dijauhin bjirrrrr. KENAPA SIH??!! SEGITU PENGENNYA SEMESTA INI COMBLANGIN WONWOO SAMA JOSHUA, HAH???!!! YAUDAH DEH KALO MAKSA MAH!!!

Wonwoo menghampirinya. Tapi Joshua juga nggak nyadarin kedatangan Wonwoo sih. Dia tengah sibuk berjinjit sambil ngulurin lengan setinggi mungkin, berusaha menggapai salah satu buku tebal di rak paling atas. Wonwoo diem aja ngeliatin dia dari koridor. Kayak biasa, perpustakaan di jam bubaran kampus gini udah tergolong lengang. Hampir nggak ada orang lain di sekitar mereka. Mungkin ada 1-2 orang yang ngumpet, tapi nggak tau deh lagi pada ngumpet di mana tepatnya.

Joshua berusaha jinjit lebih tinggi lagi. Suatu pemandangan yang separo bikin Wonwoo pengen ketawa soalnya Joshua lucuuuuuu bangettt, separonya lagi kesian pengen bantuin. Padahal beda tinggi badan Wonwoo sama Joshua juga nggak jauh-jauh banget, tapi mayanlah, selisih tinggi itu berperan besar dalam situasi kayak gini. Sementara itu, Joshua udah gemeter sebadan-badan, berusaha mengerahkan seluruh inci tingginya biar tangannya nyampe ke buku itu. “Dikit, uh, lagi...,” gumamnya tanpa sadar.

Alangkah kagetnya Joshua pas ada tangan lain menjulur santai, mengambil buku yang dia maksud tanpa kesulitan sama sekali. Arah pandangnya berputar dari lengan ke wajah orang itu yang lagi dongak kayak dia sebelumnya. Jeon Wonwoo. Lengkap dengan kacamata bingkai hitamnya dan wajah serius nan ganteng yang akhir-akhir ini menghantui pikiran Joshua. Salting, Joshua pun perlahan berbalik badan, menatap Wonwoo yang masih berkutat sama buku di rak atas dan membiarkan degup jantung nggak beraturan dalam dada serta rona merah melalap kedua pipinya.

Joshua menelisik satu-persatu fakta: mereka berduaan (lagi) + semburat jingga dari celah jendela jatuh menerangi perpustakaan sore itu + lorong rak di pojokan yang sunyi sepi + jarak tubuh mereka terlalu dekat + Wonwoo tetep seganteng pas nyium dia waktu itu. Deg degan, Joshua lalu memejamkan mata dan mengangkat sedikit dagunya.

Posisi Joshua yang seperti itulah yang Wonwoo temui saat dia akhirnya menunduk, berniat memberikan buku yang baru dia ambilkan. Namun, niat tersebut sirna seketika. Joshua dalam kukungannya jelas menantikan sesuatu, meminta sesuatu dari Wonwoo dengan tindakannya. Degukan ludah membuat jakun Wonwoo naik-turun. Dia yakin dia tau apa yang Joshua minta darinya, tetapi dia nggak berani ngambil kesimpulan segitu cepetnya.

Masa sih...? Masa cowok secantik ini—makhluk seindah, sesempurna, se-enggak nyata ini—nungguin ciuman dari Wonwoo?

Detik berlalu, meleleh menjadi menit. Nggak kunjung datang sentuhan yang diharapkan, Joshua (dengan penuh tanda tanya) perlahan membuka sedikit celah mata, mencari tau di mana kah keberadaan Wonwoo. Rupanya dia masih ada di hadapannya, masih mengukung Joshua, memojokkannya ke rak buku, tapi sekarang dia menatap Joshua lekat-lekat. Tatap mereka bersirobok dan, spontan, Joshua merasa malu. “Ah, ini, mm,” terbata-bata, sembari mukanya begitu merah bagai tomat kematengan. “A-aku enggak—”

“Mejemin mata gitu maksudnya apaan nih?” seloroh Wonwoo, sengaja. Sumpah deh, Joshua Hong itu kenapa bisa begitu gampangnya mancing sisi jail Wonwoo sih? Minta digodain banget?? “Lo nungguin gue ngapain?”

Makin dan makin kebakar aja pipi Joshua. “Eng-enggak kok, nggak gitu...,” balasnya dalam gumaman rendah, saking lembutnya sampe hampir nggak kedengeran andaikan perpustakaan lagi nggak sesepi itu. “Cuma...muka kamu deket banget, aku kan jadi keinget...lagi...”

...Sumpah.

Cantik. Cantiknya pake banget. Cantiknya nggak ngotak. Wonwoo harap Joshua sadar sepenuhnya kalo dia tuh cantik luar biasa dan bahwa dia berhak banget dipuja-puji, disembah bak ratu berlian pemilik hati para budak cinta. Joshua, sumpah lah...

“Terus, emm, jadi aku mikir apa kamu nggak mau—”

Wonwoo majuin kepala buat nutup mulut Joshua pake bibirnya. Refleks, juga dengan sentakan napas, Joshua mejamin mata lagi. Ciuman itu ringan. Hanya bibir ketemu bibir buat beberapa detik. Suara kecupan lah yang tertinggal kala kedua bibir dipisahkan paksa.

Bagai terhipnotis, Wonwoo mengelusi bibir atas Joshua. Lembut. Merah delima. Sedikit lengket, mungkin sisa lip balm yang masih menempel. Mata yang sayu. Pipi yang merona. Bener-bener secantik—bahkan jauh lebih cantik—di foto-foto majalah itu. Ibu jari Wonwoo turun ke bibir bawah Joshua, menekannya sedikit hingga terbuka, memperlihatkan geligi dan sekelebat ujung lidahnya. Turun lagi hingga membelai rahang dan menangkup dagu. Bisikan yang semakin rendah, semakin berat.

“Cantik...”

Dagu Joshua diangkat. Tangan Wonwoo yang lowong bertumpu pada rak di belakang Joshua. Nggak bisa menahan diri, Wonwoo kembali mencium bibir manis itu. Alih-alih Wonwoo merundukkan badan sedemikian rupa, kini Joshua lah yang harus menegakkan lehernya agar bisa mencapai bibir cowok itu. Dia pasrah, membiarkan Wonwoo terus menerus memberikan kecupan-kecupan kecil pada bibirnya. Sesekali, tautan bibir mereka sedikit lama, sedikit nggak rela harus terlepas meski sedetik kemudian akan langsung terpaut lagi.

Hati Wonwoo bagai melambung ke atas awan. Joshua Hong yang diidamkan cowok dan cewek sekampus kini berada di bawahnya, dengan bibir begitu penurut mengikuti gerak bibirnya. Wonwoo melepaskan ciuman dengan napas agak memburu, berniat memberikan kesempatan pada Joshua untuk menenangkan diri. Mungkin dia kelewat tergesa-gesa. Mungkin Joshua overwhelmed dan butuh time out untuk mengambil napas.

Di luar dugaan, Joshua malah menaikkan kacamata Wonwoo ke rambutnya, merangkulkan kedua lengannya ke leher Wonwoo dan menarik bagian belakang kepala cowok itu untuk menyatukan bibir mereka kembali. Kali ini bukan lagi kecupan naif yang mereka bagi, melainkan segala yang selama ini dibendung baik oleh Wonwoo maupun oleh Joshua. Bibir Joshua mencumbuinya, secara aktif mengajak Wonwoo untuk melepaskan segala hasrat yang dimilikinya. Ciuman demi ciuman yang mereka bagi semakin panas. Tangan Wonwoo menemukan pinggang Joshua, merangkulnya erat dengan harapan menghapus memori akan Seungcheol di sana. Tangannya yang lain menelusuri punggung Joshua melalui bahan kemejanya yang halus. Bagian depan tubuh mereka menempel nggak kalah lekat dari sepasang bibir.

“Mmh,” suara-suara geraman tertahan menemani bunyi cumbuan yang basah. Di satu momen, Wonwoo menggigit perlahan bibir Joshua, berbagi helaan napas bersama, sebelum memasukkan lidahnya ke celah yang tercipta. “Hng!” Joshua mendesah agak kencang, tapi untungnya lidah Wonwoo keburu menemukan lidahnya dan berhasil membungkam keributan tersebut. Decakan terdengar. Peluh menitik di kening Wonwoo. Kaki Joshua hampir nggak tahan untuk mengalungi pinggul Wonwoo, mengundang cowok itu untuk mencumbuinya terus seperti ini di sudut terpencil perpustakaan sampai malam turun.

“Uhuk, uhuk!”

Suara batuk seseorang. Bagai disiram air dingin, Wonwoo langsung melepas Joshua, hampir-hampir melompat mundur menjauhinya. Segera diturunkannya kacamata agar indra penglihatannya kembali. Dia memandangi Joshua—bibir bengkak dan basah, mata sayu, wajah memerah, serta napas memburu—lalu meneguk ludah. Dia. Dia yang udah bikin Joshua kayak gini. Jeon Wonwoo.

Tapi,

nggak di sini juga anjir. Kalo ada yang liat, gimana? Terus kalo sampe kesebar rumor kalo dia lah cowok yang udah nyium Joshua, gimana? Minimal digebukin, lebih mungkin digantung terbalik di pohon beringin di halaman belakang kampus. Screw that, nggak peduli nasib dirinya deh, tapi nasib Joshua? Wonwoo nggak mau kalo nama Joshua jadi jelek gegara ulahnya. Dia suka Joshua. Suka banget. Cinta. Karena cinta, makanya—

“Ah, Wonu—”

—sebelum Joshua sempet ngomong apapun, Wonwoo udah berbalik dan pergi (sambil doa nggak ada yang nyadar akan jendolan di celananya, amen), meninggalkan Joshua yang berusaha menenangkan dirinya sendirian sambil menyentuh bibirnya, masih terlena oleh ciuman bergairah dari cowok itu.

Terhalang oleh rak-rak buku, Joshua nggak sadar sama sekali kalo ada orang lain yang merhatiin mereka sejak bercumbu tadi. Orang lain yang menyeringai jahil karena suatu rencana udah terangkai manis di dalam kepalanya. Orang lain yang juga merupakan 'musuh' Joshua Hong akhir-akhir ini.

💪 Smarter machine learning models that do more with less: less data, less energy, less waste.

💪 Building models that are better, not just bigger: reliable, effective, and resource-conscious.

💪 Ethical innovation: training AI without exploiting creators or trampling intellectual property rights.

💪 Practical AI use cases that truly help people and society, not just corporate bottom lines.

💪 Sustainable business models that support fair, circular industries instead of endless extraction.

💪 Respect for language and culture – preserve diversity, don’t erase it.

...therefore, I stand against:

🦨 Bloated generative AI systems with bottomless appetites for data, energy, and water.

🦨 The expanding footprint of data centers swallowing land and resources.

🦨 Predatory tactics to grab training data at the expense of human rights.

🦨 Turning AI into a tool for surveillance capitalism and exploitation.

🦨 Pretending to care about AI safety while dodging real accountability.

🦨 Systems that funnel power to a few tech giants, making the rest of us renters in their digital empires.

🦨 Human suffering in AI’s hidden labor force – those forced to filter the internet’s worst as cheap, disposable labor (usually in the Global South).

🦨 Schemes to dodge taxes and skirt regulations, while claiming to build the future.

🦨 Generative AI services aren’t tools – they’re just content repositories, trained on a vast and murky pool of internet data. But the internet is a mess: full of errors, bias, satire, and outright lies. These systems can’t tell truth from fiction, and they strip away context and source credibility. There’s no metadata to distinguish fact from sarcasm or disinformation. It all looks the same to an AI. That’s a disaster waiting to happen.

🧠 The most sustainable, creative, and ethical model isn’t an algorithm. It’s the human brain. If you want art, writing, or ideas, hire a human being. You’ll get quality and originality, not a regurgitated mashup from a statistical prediction machine.

The right place for AI is in support – statistical prediction, maintenance, and optimization. That's proper tools. But generative AI services won’t help us work less or better. They’ll push us to go faster, sacrificing quality, creating stress, and robbing us of agency. To build a future centered on humans, we must focus on human well-being – not just on making tech billionaires richer.

(btw, I have nothing against skunks, the icon just represents “bad smells” 😀)

Samtidigt uppstod ett praktiskt problem: hur skulle man hålla koll på alla dessa uppdateringar utan att behöva besöka varje sida manuellt? Lösningen blev RSS, ett standardiserat sätt att distribuera innehåll automatiskt till läsare. Med hjälp av RSS kunde användare prenumerera på sina favoritbloggar och få nya inlägg samlade på ett ställe, vilket gjorde internet både mer överskådligt och mer levande. Tillsammans lade bloggar och RSS grunden för ett mer dynamiskt, användardrivet nät – långt innan sociala medier tog över scenen.

Under tidigt 2000-tal var bloggar själva ryggraden i det sociala internet. Plattformar som Tumblr, Blogger och WordPress gjorde det enkelt för vem som helst att publicera tankar, guider och dagboksinlägg. RSS, via format som RSS och Atom, blev ett slags distributionslager ovanpå detta: istället för att besöka varje blogg kunde man samla allt i en läsare och få uppdateringar i realtid. Det var en ganska decentraliserad och användarkontrollerad modell.

Sedan kom sociala medier och förändrade spelplanen. Plattformar som Facebook, Twitter och senare Instagram tog över mycket av det som bloggar tidigare stod för. Det blev enklare och snabbare att publicera kortare innehåll, och algoritmer började styra vad vi ser istället för kronologiska flöden. I den miljön tappade RSS sin synlighet, inte för att tekniken slutade fungera, utan för att den inte passade in i affärsmodellen hos de stora plattformarna.

Men det betyder inte att bloggar och RSS försvunnit. Snarare har de blivit mer nischade och ibland mer professionella. Nyhetsbrevstjänster som Substack och Ghost bygger i praktiken vidare på samma idéer: direkt relation mellan skribent och läsare, utan mellanhänder. Många av dessa erbjuder fortfarande RSS-flöden, även om de inte alltid lyfts fram lika tydligt.

Samtidigt finns det en tyst renässans för RSS bland mer tekniskt intresserade användare. Verktyg som Feedly och Inoreader används för att återta kontrollen över informationsflödet i en tid där algoritmer ofta upplevs som brusiga eller manipulativa. I en värld av “doomscrolling” blir RSS nästan ett motgift: du väljer själv vad du vill följa, och inget annat.

Bloggandet i sig har också förändrats snarare än minskat. Mycket av det som tidigare hade varit blogginlägg dyker idag upp som långa trådar på sociala medier, videor på YouTube eller poddar. Formen har skiftat, men drivkraften att publicera och dela perspektiv är densamma.

Så frågan är inte riktigt om bloggar och RSS är på väg bort, utan om de har slutat vara mainstream. De har gått från att vara standard för alla till att bli verktyg för de som aktivt väljer ett mer öppet och kontrollerat internet. Och just därför finns det något nästan tidlöst i dem. När pendeln svänger bort från centraliserade plattformar brukar intresset för öppna standarder och egna publiceringsytor komma tillbaka.

Det dyker också upp nya tjänster för att följa bloggar så som Blogflock. Så än är nog inte bloggar och RSS utdöda.

Det har också kommit mer nischade bloggplattformar. Nouw är en svensk sådan, den växte fram i en tid när bloggandet redan hade blivit etablerat, men höll på att förändras. Den lanserades 2015 som en vidareutveckling och omprofilering av det tidigare communityt Nattstad, med ambitionen att skapa något mer än bara ett tekniskt verktyg för att skriva inlägg.

Till skillnad från klassiska bloggplattformar fungerade Nouw inte bara som en plats där man publicerar texter, utan också som ett slags digitalt magasin. Bloggarna blev en del av ett större nätverk där innehåll kunde lyftas fram, kurateras och nå en bredare publik. Det gjorde att plattformen fick drag av både socialt nätverk och mediekanal, snarare än enbart ett publiceringsverktyg.

Framtiden för bloggar och RSS är svår att spika fast, men mycket pekar på att de inte försvinner utan snarare fortsätter leva i nya former. I takt med att fler tröttnar på algoritmstyrda flöden och centraliserade plattformar kan intresset för öppnare lösningar öka igen, där användaren själv styr vad som konsumeras. Tekniker som RSS finns redan på plats och används fortfarande bakom kulisserna i många tjänster, även när det inte märks utåt. Samtidigt kan nya sätt att publicera innehåll – som nyhetsbrev, poddar och egna plattformar – fortsätta sudda ut gränsen för vad en “blogg” egentligen är. Kanske blir framtidens blogg mindre synlig som begrepp, men desto mer närvarande som idé: en direkt kanal mellan skapare och läsare, utan att någon annan bestämmer vad som ska nå fram.

Resilience. One word that can determine whether you survive or not. One word that can determine whether you pick up and keep going or gradually fade into the background, no longer relevant to the word around you.

I was reminded about what it means to be resilient recently when I was not selected for a job role, despite being one of the two finalists. I gave it my all, I had great conversations with my interviewers, and I felt good coming out of the final round of interviews. Then I started to notice the signs. Follow up wasn’t as forthcoming as I expected it to be despite how enthusiastic the organization was about me. I was told to expect feedback as of a certain date, it didn’t come. Then I was going to receive it by a slightly later date. It came. I was a strong candidate, the decision was hard, but I wasn’t selected. Someone that was closer to where the organization is headquartered was. Someone that wouldn’t require relocation. I lost the opportunity because my situation was harder to deal with logistically for this organization that what the other candidate’s situation was.

The anger set in, as did the frustration, the disappointment, and the questions about what I could have done differently. Rather than getting the chance to make a positive impact within an organization, I was shown the exit. I had little explanation as to why and a lingering feeling that I wasn’t selected because someone didn’t want to deal with the logistics involved with me taking the role.

The response to this kind of situation could becoming a defining moment in my professional and personal life. Either I choose to double down in my current role and excel where I am or I disengage, become bitter, and resent that I wasn’t going to be where I wanted to. I made a conscious decision to choose the former. I chose resilience. No organization is perfect; the organization I work in today is far from perfect. Yet if I choose to be resilient, I choose to engage more and choose to find opportunity in times of setback when I know I can make the organization better.

I refuse to let the decision made by someone else define my outlook, my attitude, or whether or I am happy or not. I choose to be resilient. I chose to move forward.

In January 2026, Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, stood before an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos and offered a statistic that landed with the quiet brutality of a footnote in a corporate restructuring memo. The number of translators and interpreters at the IMF, she said, had dropped from 200 to 50. The cause was not a budget crisis or a policy realignment. It was technology. The fund had simply decided that machines could handle most of the work that humans used to do.

Georgieva presented the figure as evidence of a broader transformation. Forty per cent of global jobs, she argued, would be transformed or eliminated by artificial intelligence, with that figure climbing to 60 per cent in advanced economies. But it was the specificity of the translation example that stuck. This was not a hypothetical projection or an economist's forecast. It was a headcount. Real people, with real expertise in the precise rendering of financial policy across languages and cultures, had been replaced by systems that could approximate their output at a fraction of the cost.

The IMF is not alone. Across the global translation industry, now valued at an estimated 31.70 billion US dollars according to Slator's 2025 Language Industry Market Report, a similar pattern is playing out. Large language models and neural machine translation systems have not simply made human translators obsolete. They have restructured the profession from the inside, converting skilled practitioners into quality controllers for text they did not write. The question this raises is not whether AI can translate. It demonstrably can, often to a standard that passes casual inspection. The question is what happens to a profession, and to the cultural knowledge it carries, when the market decides that “good enough” is good enough.

The Numbers Behind the Quiet Collapse

A 2024 survey conducted by the United Kingdom's Society of Authors, which polled 787 of its 12,500 members, found that 36 per cent of translators had already lost work to generative AI. Forty-three per cent reported a decrease in income as a direct result of the technology. Over three-quarters, some 77 per cent, believed that generative AI would negatively affect their future earnings. Eighty-six per cent expressed concern that the use of generative AI devalues human-made creative work. These are not projections. They are reports from working professionals describing what has already happened to their livelihoods.

The income data from individual translators is more granular and more alarming. Brian Merchant, writing in his newsletter Blood in the Machine, documented cases across the profession in mid-2025. One technical translator with 15 years of experience reported earning just 8,000 euros in 2025, down from six figures in previous years. A French-English translator based in Quebec described a 60 per cent income decline in 2024, with projections suggesting an 80 per cent drop from peak earnings by the end of 2025. An Italian-English translator in Rome reported that work requests had ceased entirely for the month of June 2025, after years of working 50 to 60 hours per week. An English-Portuguese translator documented that post-editing rates had collapsed from 0.04 euros to 0.02 euros per source word, halving the already modest compensation for correcting machine output.

In the United States, Andy Benzo, president of the American Translators Association, told CNN in January 2026 that many translators were leaving the profession entirely. Benzo noted that the risks of using AI translation in “high-stakes” fields remain “humongous,” yet the exodus continues regardless. Ian Giles, chair of the Translators Association at the UK's Society of Authors, confirmed the same pattern, noting that translators were seeking retraining “because translation isn't generating the income it previously did.” The exits are not dramatic. There are no picket lines or public protests. People are simply disappearing from a profession that can no longer sustain them.

The scale of this workforce is not trivial. There are approximately 640,000 professional translators globally, and three out of four are freelancers. It is this freelance majority that has borne the brunt of the disruption, lacking the institutional protections and guaranteed workloads that might have cushioned the blow.

A study published in 2025 by Carl Benedikt Frey and Pedro Llanos-Paredes at the Oxford Martin School quantified the scale of displacement with unusual precision. Analysing variation in Google Translate adoption across 695 local labour markets in the United States, the researchers found that a one percentage point increase in the use of Google Translate corresponded to a 0.71 percentage point reduction in translator employment growth. The cumulative effect, they estimated, amounted to more than 28,000 fewer translator positions created over the period from 2010 to 2023. And that figure captures only the impact of a single, relatively crude machine translation tool that preceded the large language model era. The arrival of systems like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini has accelerated the process enormously, because these models do not just translate. They handle idiomatic expression, register, and contextual nuance at a level that earlier statistical systems could not approach.

In July 2025, Microsoft researchers published a study examining which occupations were most exposed to generative AI capabilities. Translators and interpreters ranked first on the list, with 98 per cent of their work activities overlapping with tasks that AI systems could perform with relatively high completion rates. The study analysed 200,000 real-world conversations between users and Microsoft's Copilot system to arrive at its rankings. The researchers were careful to note that high exposure does not automatically mean elimination. But the practical effect has been unmistakable. Employers have used the availability of AI translation as justification for cutting rates, reducing headcounts, and restructuring workflows around machine output.

From Translator to Post-Editor

The restructuring of translation work follows a pattern that is becoming familiar across AI-affected professions. The human does not vanish. Instead, they are repositioned downstream in the production process, tasked with reviewing and correcting output that a machine generated in seconds. In the translation industry, this workflow is known as Machine Translation Post-Editing, or MTPE, and it has rapidly become the dominant model for commercial translation work.

According to Slator's 2025 survey of the language industry, 60 per cent of all respondents were using machine translation, with adoption reaching 80 per cent among language service providers. Among those using machine translation or large language models, between 90 and 98 per cent performed some level of post-editing on AI-generated content. Eighty-four per cent of language service integrators reported that clients had specifically requested human editing services to review AI-generated translations. The human, in other words, has not been removed from the process. But the nature of their involvement has been fundamentally altered. They are no longer creating. They are correcting.

The compensation reflects this downgrade. Post-editing rates typically fall between 50 and 70 per cent of standard translation rates, with some agencies offering as little as 25 per cent of what a full human translation would command. Industry data from 2025 indicates that MTPE work commands between 0.05 and 0.15 US dollars per word, compared with 0.15 to 0.30 dollars per word for standard human translation. One translator documented by Equal Times, an international labour news platform, described pre-translated segments paying just 30 to 50 per cent of original rates, while fully automated platforms paid up to seven times less than standard. The economic logic is straightforward. If the machine does 80 per cent of the work, the reasoning goes, then the human should be paid for only 20 per cent. What this calculation ignores is that post-editing often requires comparable time and cognitive effort to translation from scratch, because the translator must not only identify errors but also understand the systematic patterns of how the AI fails and where its confidence is misplaced.

The workflow itself has been transformed in ways that strip autonomy from the translator. Texts no longer arrive as clean source documents to be rendered thoughtfully into a target language. They arrive pre-segmented, with machine-generated suggestions already populating each segment. The translator's task becomes one of triage: deciding which suggestions are acceptable, which need modification, and which must be discarded entirely. Automated platforms distribute this work via alerts that give translators minutes or even seconds to claim individual segments, creating a piecework dynamic more reminiscent of a fulfilment warehouse than a skilled profession. Some platforms threaten automatic disconnection for translators who dispute corrections imposed by quality-assurance algorithms.

Jean-Jacques, a 30-year veteran translator quoted by Equal Times, described the shift bluntly. “It's not really a matter of translating anymore,” he said, “but revising and correcting the segments proposed by the machine.” Another translator, identified as Alina, captured the paradox at the heart of the arrangement. “AI is both a tool and a threat,” she said. “We ourselves are teaching it how to translate, how to improve.” Each correction a post-editor makes feeds back into the training data that will make the next generation of AI translation marginally better, and the human's role marginally less essential.

This dynamic, in which skilled workers are conscripted into training their own replacements, is not unique to translation. It has appeared in content moderation, coding, and legal document review. But in translation, the irony is particularly sharp, because the expertise being extracted is precisely the kind that AI systems struggle most to develop on their own: cultural sensitivity, tonal awareness, and the ability to navigate the space between what a text says and what it means.

What Machines Cannot Feel

The case for human translation has always rested on something more than accuracy. It rests on the claim that translation is an interpretive act, a creative negotiation between two linguistic and cultural systems that requires not just knowledge but judgement. Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who has written extensively about translation, describes the process as “a radical act of reshaping text and self.” In her essay collection Translating Myself and Others, published by Princeton University Press in 2022, Lahiri argues that “a translator restores the meaning of a text by means of an elaborate, alchemical process that requires imagination, ingenuity, and freedom.”

This is not the language of quality assurance. It is the language of craft, of a practice that involves the translator's full intellectual and emotional engagement with a text. Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer's Odyssey into English, has spoken repeatedly about the impossibility of separating linguistic from cultural knowledge in translation. The hardest part of translation, she has argued, is not understanding the original but “figuring out how to create it entirely from scratch in a totally different language and culture.” Wilson's translation of the Odyssey was widely praised precisely because it made choices that no algorithm would make: tonal decisions, rhythmic choices, and interpretive framings that reflected not just the Greek text but Wilson's own understanding of what the poem means to contemporary English-speaking readers.

Gregory Rabassa's English translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is perhaps the most celebrated example of translation as creative achievement. Marquez himself reportedly said that he considered the English translation a work of art in its own right, a remarkable statement from an author about a rendering of his own novel. Edith Grossman, the acclaimed translator of both Marquez and Cervantes, described Rabassa as “the godfather of us all,” crediting him with introducing Latin American literature to the English-speaking world in a way that preserved not just meaning but spirit.

These examples belong to the domain of literary translation, which remains relatively insulated from AI disruption. Literary commissions have continued to flow to human translators, in part because publishers recognise that the qualities that make a literary translation valuable are precisely the qualities that machines lack. But the insulation is narrower than it appears. The vast majority of professional translation work is not literary. It is commercial, legal, technical, medical, and administrative. And it is in these domains that the restructuring has been most severe, not because the cultural stakes are lower, but because the market has decided they are.

Consider the translation of a medical consent form from English into Tagalog for a Filipino patient in a London hospital. The document is not literary. It will never win a prize. But the accuracy of its translation has direct consequences for a person's understanding of what is being done to their body. A machine translation might render the words correctly while missing the pragmatic force of the language: the way a particular phrasing might sound reassuring or threatening, the cultural assumptions embedded in notions of consent, the difference between informing someone and making them feel informed. These are not edge cases. They are the bread and butter of professional translation, and they are the first tasks being handed to machines.

Or consider immigration proceedings, where a mistranslation can determine whether an asylum seeker's testimony is deemed credible. The translator in that context is not merely converting words. They are mediating between legal systems, cultural frameworks of narrative and evidence, and the emotional register of a person recounting traumatic experiences. The difference between “I was afraid” and “I feared for my life” is not a matter of synonymy. It is a matter of legal consequence, and navigating it requires the kind of situated cultural judgement that no statistical model possesses.

The Hybrid Illusion

The industry's preferred narrative for this transition is “human-AI collaboration.” The framing suggests a partnership: the machine handles the heavy lifting, and the human provides the finishing touch. But the power dynamics of this arrangement are radically asymmetric. The machine sets the terms. The human adjusts.

This is not collaboration in any meaningful sense. It is supervision, and it is supervision of a peculiarly degrading kind, because the supervisor is being paid less than they would earn if they were simply doing the work themselves. The translator who once sat with a source text and crafted a target text from scratch, making hundreds of micro-decisions about register, idiom, rhythm, and cultural resonance, now sits with a machine-generated draft and decides, sentence by sentence, whether it is wrong enough to fix.

The cognitive experience of post-editing is qualitatively different from translation. Several translators have described it as more fatiguing and less satisfying than original translation work. The machine's output creates a kind of gravitational pull. Even when the translator knows a better rendering exists, the effort required to override the machine's suggestion and compose something from scratch can feel disproportionate to the compensation. Over time, this produces a phenomenon that linguists and labour researchers have begun to call “anchoring,” in which the translator's own instincts are gradually subordinated to the machine's defaults. The result is not a blend of human and machine intelligence. It is machine intelligence with a human stamp of approval.

A 2025 survey of translators found that a majority, some 66 per cent, acknowledged that MTPE can be useful but still requires substantial human intervention. Roughly half of respondents refused to offer discounts for post-editing work, arguing that the effort required is routinely underestimated by clients and agencies. Among those who did discount, the most common reduction fell between 10 and 30 per cent, far less than the 50 to 75 per cent cuts that many agencies impose unilaterally.

Rosa, a translator quoted by Equal Times, described the economic logic with characteristic directness. “Profit is the only thing that matters,” she said, “and translation has become like a commodity that they extract from us at the lowest possible price.” The commodity metaphor is precise. What was once a craft, defined by the individual translator's knowledge, taste, and cultural fluency, has been reframed as a raw material to be processed at industrial scale.

The Structural Incapacity Argument

There is a version of this story in which what is happening to translators is tragic but temporary, a painful adjustment period that will eventually stabilise as the technology matures and the market finds a new equilibrium. In this version, AI translation will continue to improve until the quality gap between machine and human output narrows to insignificance, at which point the remaining human translators will occupy a small, highly specialised niche: literary translation, diplomatic interpreting, and other domains where the stakes are too high for automation.

But this narrative assumes that the qualities human translators bring are merely a matter of degree, that machines are doing a slightly worse version of the same thing, and that incremental improvement will close the gap. There is a competing argument, advanced by translators, linguists, and cognitive scientists, that the gap is not quantitative but structural. That what human translators do when they translate with cultural sensitivity and emotional intelligence is not a more refined version of pattern matching. It is a fundamentally different cognitive operation.

A study published in Nature's Humanities and Social Sciences Communications in 2026, examining AI performance in literary autobiography translation, found that while AI models could produce grammatically correct and largely accurate translations, they consistently failed to capture the emotional texture and cultural specificity of the original texts. The researchers concluded that human translators brought interpretive capacities that were not simply absent from AI systems but categorically different in kind. AI models could identify the surface layer of meaning but failed to recognise cultural allusions and deeper emotional context, elements that are essential not just to literature but to any communication that carries weight beyond its literal content.

This distinction matters because it determines whether human translators are a temporary patch or a permanent necessity. If translation is ultimately a pattern-matching problem, then machines will eventually solve it. If it is an interpretive problem, requiring the kind of embodied cultural knowledge that comes from living inside a language and its associated worldview, then machines will not solve it, regardless of how much training data they consume. The patterns they learn are drawn from existing translations, which means they can only reproduce what human translators have already created. They cannot originate the kind of interpretive leap that makes a translation feel alive.

Poetry, with its reliance on rhythm, rhyme, and figurative language, remains a particularly formidable challenge. A machine can translate the denotative content of a poem. It cannot translate its music. It cannot decide, as Emily Wilson did with the Odyssey, that the opening word of an epic should be “Tell me” rather than “Sing to me,” and understand the cascade of interpretive consequences that follows from that single choice.

The Market Does Not Care About Craft

The structural incapacity argument, however compelling, runs into a problem that is not technological but economic. The market for translation services is not optimised for craft. It is optimised for throughput, cost reduction, and acceptable quality at scale. And by this measure, AI translation is already good enough for the vast majority of commercial applications. The Slator survey found that while 72 per cent of respondents cited accuracy concerns with machine translation and 68 per cent cited quality concerns, adoption continued to accelerate regardless. Trust grew slowly, but adoption grew fast. The concerns are real. They are also, from a procurement perspective, manageable.

This is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of the translation crisis. The question is not whether AI can match human translators in quality. It demonstrably cannot, particularly in contexts requiring cultural nuance, tonal sensitivity, or interpretive judgement. The question is whether the market values those qualities enough to pay for them. And the evidence, from rate compression to headcount reduction to the restructuring of workflows around machine output, suggests that it does not.

The AI-enabled translation services market, valued at 5.18 billion US dollars in 2025 according to Precedence Research, is projected to reach 50.69 billion by 2035, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 25.62 per cent. These are not numbers that suggest a market hedging its bets. They describe an industry that has made a decisive bet on automation, with human involvement reduced to the minimum necessary to maintain an acceptable error rate. Software platforms already dominate the market, holding nearly 73 per cent of 2025 revenue, and they are growing faster than any other component as enterprises embed AI-driven localisation into core workflows.

The parallel to other creative and knowledge-work professions is instructive. Journalism, graphic design, customer service, and legal research have all experienced similar dynamics: AI systems that produce output of variable but often adequate quality, followed by a restructuring of human roles around review, correction, and oversight rather than creation. In each case, the same rhetorical move occurs. The technology is presented as a tool that augments human capability. In practice, it becomes a ceiling that constrains it. The human is not empowered. The human is made cheaper.

What Gets Lost When Languages Lose Their Interpreters

The consequences of this restructuring extend beyond the economic fortunes of individual translators. Languages are not neutral containers for information. They are living systems of meaning, shaped by history, geography, power, and culture. A translator who has spent decades working between English and Arabic, or Mandarin and Portuguese, or Hindi and German, carries within them a form of knowledge that is not reducible to a bilingual dictionary or a statistical model trained on parallel corpora.

The Frey and Llanos-Paredes study at Oxford Martin documented an additional finding that received less attention than the employment data but may be more consequential in the long term. Areas with robust Google Translate usage saw job postings demanding Spanish fluency grow by about 1.4 percentage points less than in other regions, with similar declines of roughly 1.3 and 0.8 percentage points for Chinese and German respectively, and measurable dampening even for Japanese and French. The adoption of machine translation, in other words, is not just replacing translators. It is reducing the perceived value of knowing another language at all.

This is a feedback loop with serious cultural implications. As machine translation becomes more capable and more widely adopted, the incentive to invest in human language skills diminishes. Fewer people pursue translation as a career. Fewer organisations invest in in-house linguistic expertise. The pool of human knowledge about how languages relate to one another, how cultural contexts shape meaning, and how texts function differently across linguistic boundaries gradually shrinks. And the AI systems that replace this knowledge are trained on the output of the very translators they displace, creating a closed loop in which the training data grows stale as the human source of fresh interpretive insight dries up.

Ian Giles, in his capacity as chair of the Translators Association, has raised precisely this concern, questioning whether “the demand for subtlety and craft from enough readers and publishers” will “save highly skilled individuals from becoming mere AI post-editors.” The word “mere” carries the weight of the entire argument. It acknowledges that the role of post-editor exists. It questions whether the role is sufficient to sustain the expertise it depends upon.

The problem is compounded by the pipeline effect. If experienced translators leave the profession and aspiring translators are deterred by collapsing incomes, the next generation of human translators simply will not exist in sufficient numbers. The craft knowledge that takes years to develop, the intuitive feel for how a sentence should land in a target language, the awareness of cultural registers that no textbook teaches, is not the kind of knowledge that can be stored in a database and retrieved on demand. It lives in people. When those people leave, it leaves with them.

The Canary and the Coal Mine

Professional translators have long occupied a peculiar position in the knowledge economy. Their work is invisible when done well. A reader who encounters a beautifully translated novel does not think about the translator. A patient who reads a clearly rendered medical document in their own language does not consider the person who bridged the linguistic gap. This invisibility made translators vulnerable long before AI arrived. It meant that their expertise could be devalued without anyone noticing, because the beneficiaries of their work rarely understood what it involved.

What is happening to translators now is therefore not just a story about one profession. It is a preview of what happens when AI is deployed not to eliminate human workers but to restructure their role in ways that extract their expertise while diminishing their authority, autonomy, and compensation. The translator who becomes a post-editor is still needed. But the nature of the need has changed. They are needed not for what they can create but for what they can catch. Not for their vision but for their vigilance.

Georgieva's statistic from Davos, those 150 translators who lost their positions at the IMF, represents one institution's calculation that the cultural and interpretive knowledge those individuals carried was worth less than the cost savings achieved by replacing them with technology. That calculation is now being replicated across every sector that relies on translation, from international law to pharmaceutical regulation to immigration services. In each case, the logic is the same. The machine produces output that is adequate for most purposes. The remaining humans clean up whatever the machine gets wrong. And the expertise that once defined the profession gradually atrophies, because there is no economic incentive to develop it and no structural pathway through which it can be transmitted to the next generation.

The question, then, is not whether AI translation will continue to improve. It will. And it is not whether human translators will survive in some form. They will, at least for a while, as post-editors and quality reviewers and specialists in the narrow domains where machine output remains unreliable. The question is whether a society that systematically devalues the ability to translate with feeling, with cultural awareness, with the full depth of human interpretive intelligence, will eventually discover that it has lost something it cannot rebuild. Not because the technology failed, but because the market decided that what translators knew was not worth preserving.

References and Sources

1. CNN. “Meet the translation professionals losing their jobs to AI.” CNN Business, 23 January 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/23/tech/translation-language-jobs-ai-automation-intl

2. TIME. “The IMF's Kristalina Georgieva on the AI 'Tsunami' Hitting Jobs.” TIME, January 2026. https://time.com/collections/davos-2026/7339218/ai-trade-global-economy-kristalina-georgieva-imf/

3. Slator. “Five Ways AI Reshaped the Translation Industry in 2025.” Slator, 2025. https://slator.com/five-ways-ai-reshaped-translation-industry-2025/

4. Slator. “Slator 2025 Language Industry Market Report.” Slator, 2025. https://slator.com/slator-2025-language-industry-market-report/

5. Society of Authors. “SoA survey reveals a third of translators and quarter of illustrators losing work to AI.” Society of Authors, April 2024. https://europeanwriterscouncil.eu/soa-survey-uk-ai-2024/

6. Merchant, Brian. “AI Killed My Job: Translators.” Blood in the Machine, 2025. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-my-job-translators

7. Equal Times. “Artificial intelligence, dehumanisation and precarious work: translators on the frontline of tech-induced job degradation.” Equal Times, 2025. https://www.equaltimes.org/artificial-intelligence?lang=en

8. Frey, Carl Benedikt and Llanos-Paredes, Pedro. “Lost in Translation: Artificial Intelligence and the Demand for Foreign Language Skills.” Oxford Martin School, March 2025. https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/lost-in-translation-artificial-intelligence-and-the-demand-for-foreign-language-skills

9. CEPR. “Lost in translation: AI's impact on translators and foreign language skills.” CEPR VoxEU, 2025. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/lost-translation-ais-impact-translators-and-foreign-language-skills

10. Fortune. “Microsoft researchers have revealed the 40 jobs most exposed to AI.” Fortune, July 2025. https://fortune.com/article/what-are-the-jobs-most-exposed-to-ai-microsoft-research/

11. CNBC. “These 10 jobs are the least AI-safe, according to new Microsoft report.” CNBC, 5 August 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/05/these-10-jobs-are-the-least-ai-safe-according-to-new-microsoft-report.html

12. Precedence Research. “AI Enabled Translation Services Market Size 2025 to 2035.” Precedence Research, 2025. https://www.precedenceresearch.com/ai-enabled-translation-services-market

13. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Translating Myself and Others. Princeton University Press, 2022. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691231167/translating-myself-and-others

14. Princeton University. “Jhumpa Lahiri champions the writerly art of translation.” Princeton University News, 4 September 2020. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/09/04/jhumpa-lahiri-champions-writerly-art-translation

15. Wilson, Emily. Conversations with Tyler, Episode 63. “Emily Wilson on Translations and Language.” https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/emily-wilson/

16. Nature. “Exploring AI's performance in literary autobiography translation: how closely do AI models match human translation.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06630-4

17. Washington Post. “AI is taking on live translations. But jobs and meaning are getting lost.” Washington Post, 26 September 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/09/26/ai-translation-jobs/

18. The Bookseller. “A third of translators report losing work to generative AI systems, SoA survey reveals.” The Bookseller, 2024. https://www.thebookseller.com/news/a-third-of-translators-report-losing-work-to-generative-ai-systems-soa-survey-reveals

19. World Economic Forum. “Putting a figure on it: Davos 2026 in numbers.” WEF, January 2026. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-in-numbers/

20. GTS Translation. “The State of Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE) in 2025: What Translators Think.” GTS Blog, 7 April 2025. https://blog.gts-translation.com/2025/04/07/the-state-of-machine-translation-post-editing-mtpe-in-2025-what-translators-think/

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

火事や地震が起きたとき、身体が自動的に防衛反応を示すように、あらゆる行動は何かしらの刺激に対する応答である。それらは日常の中で小さく、視覚的に分かりにくくなっているだけで、本質的にはすべて、受けたものに対するカウンターだ。

部屋が汚いから掃除をする。 お腹が空いたから食事を作る。 体が冷えたから服を着込む。 これらはすべて、能動的に見えて実際には受動的な反応である。

努力という言葉がある。 努力は能動的な行動ではなく、それができること自体が才能だ、という意見がある。 自分も概ねその意見には賛成だが、どちらかというと、行動回数というのは「事象に反応するスイッチが入る回数」だと考えている。

会社でバリバリ働いている人は、一見すると主体的に努力しているように見える。 しかし、人間の行動をすべて受けたものへの反応と捉えるなら、それは例えば、貧しい生活への危機感に対する応答とも言える。 つまり、その人が能動的に動いているのではなく、状況に対して反応しているだけと解釈できる。 では、不幸な人間だけが行動するのかというと、そうではない。 「大切な人に美味しいものを食べさせたい」とか、「愛する人が病気なら治療費を出したい」といったように、人が動く理由は無数にある。

要するに、人は「受け取った刺激の回数」に応じて行動する。 そして、その刺激に関心を持つかどうかが個性になる。

どれだけ感受性があるか。 どのような刺激に反応するか。 それに対する応答のパターンをどれだけ持っているか。 それらが人の違いを形作っている。

ここまで考えると、人を動かすには「どれだけ刺激を与えるか」という話になる。 ただし個性がある以上、何に反応するかは人それぞれであり、特定することは難しい。 だからこそ、多様な刺激を、繰り返し与えるしかない。

しかし人は経験的に「つらいことが含まれているもの」には手を出さなくなる。 そのため、自力では到達できない領域が多く存在する。

そこで他人の存在が必要になる。 人は、他人からの刺激を待っている。

ただし、他人が自分に刺激を与える明確な理由は基本的にない。 だから、それは頻繁には起こらない。

ではどうするか。 自分が他人に刺激を与えれば、結果としてそれが自分にも返ってくるのではないか。

そう考えると、他人から刺激を受けたいなら、自分が先に与えるしかないという結論に至る。 これは、自分が動くための一つの理由になる。

人間の行動がすべて外的要因への反応の連続であるならば、 その中であえて自分が他者に刺激を与えにいくという行為は、どこか矛盾を含んでいるようにも感じる。 それでも、その矛盾が結果として自分を動かす理由になるのであれば、ここまで考えた意味はあったのだと思う。

ここで一度、思考を止める。 次は「では、何を相手に与えるべきか」を考えたい。

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 233.9 lbs. * bp= 157/93 (61)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 07:00 – 1 banana, coffeecake * 09:25 – snack on cheese * 11:45 – meat oaf, white bread and butter, fresh mango * 16:40 – 1 fresh apple * 17:00 – 1 dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:30 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 07:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 11:45 to 14:15 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:30 – listening to The Jack Riccardi Show * 16:30 – listening to sports talk on ESPN 620 AM, Phoenix, AZ

Chess: * 09:40 – moved in all pending CC games

Diamondbacks vs Orioles.

My MLB game of choice tonight will be the Arizona Diamondbacks vs the Baltimore Orioles. With its start time of 5:35 PM CDT, I've got about 3 hours before I'll need to find a radio station to bring me the call of the game. That's enough time for me to squeeze in a post-lunch nap, I think.

And the adventure continues.

The more successful purchase was the Complete Works For Harpsichord – Vol.2 (Book One, Deuxième Ordre) of François Couperin, played by Kenneth Gilbert. Though lacking the discrimination of a connoisseur, I am nevertheless quite fussy about how my Couperin is served up. Luckily I found Gilbert's renditions to my liking. Certain of the pieces' titles seem, as with many of Couperin's compositions, as if they're referring to individuals: for example 'La Flatteuse' and 'La Voluptueuse'.

I already own an LP of the Cinquiême Ordre, another of the suites from Couperin's First Book (1713) of keyboard compositions, performed by Blandine Verlet. Oddly enough it came from a visit to same Oxfam shop six years ago. I'm not sure whether Kenneth Gilbert persevered in recording all of the 27 Ordres from Couperin's four books – but it appears he did enough of them at least to fill sixteen LPs.

In Monmouth the following day another pair of vinyl purchases, but in quite a different musical vein. With a view to expanding my funk horizons I picked up My Radio Sure Sounds Good to Me by Larry Graham and Graham Central Station and Ultra Wave by Bootsy Collins. Again, there was one I liked rather better than the other. While the Larry Graham record had its moments (especially in the closing number ‘Are You Happy?‘) it was Bootsy's album I preferred: it had me smiling throughout. Try 'It's a Musical' by way of an example track.

On the train to Cardiff I finished Jan Neruda's Prague Tales, a set of engaging narratives from mid-19th-Century Bohemia, some of them like freshly-served slices of life, others with a hint of urban legend about them. An informative introduction by Ivan Klíma provided useful context. There's much to savour in these pieces, in which Neruda's amiable tone grates only occasionally – such as in the moments revealing the baked-in antisemitism and sexism of his milieu.

That same evening I got to the end of Olga Ravn's short novel The Wax Child. The setting is early seventeenth-century Denmark, where a noblewoman finds herself accused of witchcraft. The tragic story is related in eerily evocative prose which vividly animates the protagonist and her world. While the flavour of the book is very different to the only other novel of Ravn's I've read (The Employees), one could argue there are nevertheless some intriguing parallels between them.

The cheese of the week has been Hafod, an idiosyncratic Welsh-made organic cheddar. They make both pasteurized and raw milk variants, of which I'm sampling the latter. It has a yielding texture with hints of sharpness and vaguely mineral-like notes over mellow, buttery underpinnings, making for a blend of flavours that lingers for a very agreeable while on the palate.

For me, it was a chance to do something again in Berlin, the city where I live, after two years focusing on Tech Workers Coalition Global, which is primarily an online affair. The element of grounding and relationship-building, which underlined the conference, was for me a personal and emotional need before a political one.

I was skeptical at first: not being a Leftist, the organizing groups and the target crowd felt and still feel distant in culture, language, and identity. For a long time, I felt like a guest, suppressing this sentiment, as I often do, to pursue the organization of the conference, a necessity I agreed with.

Now that it is over, I want to look back and offer some insights that speak to the historical moment we are going through.

Let's start with some math.

Originally, we were targeting 300 participants. We booked what at the time felt like an oversized venue. We sold out all the tickets in less than a week, basically doing a single post on social media. This was months before the conference.

Wait, that's just not how it works: it was the first event for us, and possibly the first of this kind in decades in Germany. It wasn't targeting the general public, but people who were already politically active. Why was it so easy?

We had to sell more tickets. We sold more tickets. More participants coming required more volunteers, and in the end, more than 200 people took shifts to help us.

Comes the day of the event, and the venue is packed. Bodies are squeezed into every hall. People lining the walls of the seminar rooms. More people show up asking to volunteer to join the event. We struggle to count who's coming in through the door. In the end, probably more than 1000 people joined us across the three days.

How many were left out? Most of my friends couldn't get a ticket, which we stopped selling because, at some point, we were afraid of endangering people. All of this with pretty much no effort to try to sell the tickets. I like to speculate that we could have sold 3000 tickets if we had made different choices.

It may sound self-congratulatory, and it is. As I said, I'm not a Leftist: I like to win, and this result is a win worth of celebration, even if just instrumental to more impactful wins. But I'm sharing these numbers because they suggest a lot more is moving than we can see. The interest in the event surprised every single person involved, including me. I believed I had a sense of the technopolitical scene: I discovered I don't.

The numbers don't add up: we counted ourselves, and we are many more than we thought. We inherited from the tech industry the sentiment of always leaving on the bleeding edge, the fetishism for the new. Like Amazon still calling itself a “startup”. The numbers don't match the narrative, hence the narrative has to change. None of this is young and new: the movement is becoming adult.

Let me talk about the Saturday workshop. Since the program felt a bit too academic for my taste, I tried to bring something else to the table. Yeah, we know big tech is bad. Now what? Knowing things doesn't change things. Let's spice things up, I thought.

Some weeks before the conference, by chance, I met Nala at a party after a long time. We danced. We talked about Rodrigo Nunes. We talked about the conference. “What's your strategy to scale up this effort after the conference is over? What's the expected outcome? Where will you funnel the people involved? What do you want to get out of it?”

I didn't know.

As I said before, the conference for me was fulfilling primarily an emotional need rather than a strategic one, and I grew comfortable with the limited clarity on long-term clarity that motivated what in the end was a first event from a heterogeneous group of organizations with very different theories of change, perspectives, and motivations to join. I was so concerned with the short-term execution that I forgot to keep the focus on the next move.

Fuck. I'm getting sloppier.

In the end, I managed to squeeze in a Strategic Mapping workshop of the anti-big-tech organizations in Germany. Nala would facilitate. The slot is not great: 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM, in parallel with the dinner and a couple of other sessions, and a live performance. It's the end of a long day of conferencing, and it's a Saturday evening in Berlin. Only the more motivated will come, but it's ok. “I guess max 20 people will show up, plan for that, Nala.”

Five minutes before the time of the workshop, there are already 30 people in the room. “Simone, close the doors and let me think how to adapt the workshop.” Nala shuts down for a couple of minutes, eyes closed. “I got it”, she says.

People keep coming in. Lesson learned: if you place a sign saying “Full” on the door at an event full of Leftists, it won't achieve any effect. More people join. In the end, there will be around 60 participants in the room. Run around, grab post-its from every room in the venue, run back.

Nala replanned the workshop on the fly and gave me a master lecture on the ineffable art of the “It is what it is.” As a 3° Dan political facilitator, I was impressed by what a 6° Dan could do. I still have a long way to go. The workshop involved different exercises that culminated in the production of a collaborative map, documenting all the relevant organizations in Germany fighting against Big Tech.

The most interesting bit is that most people didn't know most of the actors and organizations that other participants were bringing up. Neither did I, despite having done similar mapping exercises before. You can see the results in the photo. Hopefully, soon the exhaustion from the conference will fade, I will regain control of my limbs, and be able to transcribe and systematize the results.

A second important insight, which was the input for the reflection I'm writing, is that when the participants were asked which actors are building the narrative we need, very few, and underwhelming, actors came up. Solarpunk and Lunarpunk were mentioned. Then Cory Doctorow. Big up for Cory, who always promotes Tech Workers Coalition, but I don't think his shoulders are broad enough to carry this burden. Where is the equivalent of Fridays For Future or Extinction Rebellion in the fight for democratic technology? There's nothing like that. Nobody is filling that ecosystemic function.

The dust still has yet to settle after the event. We have to deal with the consequences of German political repression. We haven't had a meeting yet, but we are already thinking about what comes next. It's clear this is not going to end here.

The intensification of the psycho-digital loops makes the whole society more nervous: Cables of Resistance is but an itch that got scratched.

The shakes provoked by the acceleration of Imperial collapse leave bigger and bigger cracks in the concrete, where the tendrils of a new technology probe around, looking for attachment, nourishment, and Sunlight.

We did what we did not because it was easy, but because we thought it was easy. We are going to do it again.

なぜそんなに早足だったのかはわからない。 視力を良くしようと思って、電車の窓から見える家の色を見ては、その色を頭の中で言葉にしていたからかもしれない。 そして、その屋根に色は、意外とすぐに出てこない、絶妙な色が多かった。

一本早い電車に乗れたと思ったが、それは鈍行で、出社時間に間に合わないことに気づく。 見たことのない駅で降りて急行に乗り換えたが、結局いつもより遅い電車になった。 車内では綿菓子みたいな匂いがして、少し気分が悪くなった。

帰りの電車も混んでいた。 やたら体の存在感が強くて硬い外国人が隣にいて、急ブレーキでよろけたときにその人の肘に当たった。 手すりにぶつかったのかと思うくらい痛かったが、その人は当たったことにも気づかず、まったく動かなかった。

夕飯は生姜焼きだった。 平日にこんなにちゃんとした食事ができるのは、ただただありがたい。本当に嬉しい。

風呂に入る。 昔から、ときどき自分が誰かに話しかけているイメージが勝手に浮かんでくる。
漫画が好きだった頃は、読んでいるだけで自分が描いているような気になっていたと、その中の自分は豪語していた。 そのあとも、自分が楽しそうに話しているのに、音だけがあって、具体的な言葉はなかった。

新品で買ったパンツが傷んでいくのが嫌で、メルカリでスラックスを買った。 中古で安くて生地の良いブラウンのスラックスは手に入るが、ブラックはなかなか見つからない。 特にタイトなものは。

明日はそれを履いていく。 この子もきっと、好きになれる形をしている。

Another thing from therapy today was that I should remind myself how I exist, and so statistically since I don’t think I am so unique person, there will be other people out there like me, and I will be able to meet a girl that I feel matches me. And additionally I will be able to meet her at a time where things work out and at the location where I am. And for what it’s worth I do see very concrete tangible genius in myself especially in this small stuff being able to recognize certain red flags that prior would’ve romanticized. Additionally the fact that I am willing to step away from infatuation to rather wait a little bit longer for a partner that I feel more confident about. I think these are all things that past me has not always exhibited and I’m very proud of myself for that and I want to recognize that progress. I am proud of the person I see myself becoming every day.

6 heures de témoignages d’André Médard Bourgault — 18 fichiers audio classés, résumés et minutés, enregistrés sur le domaine familial

André Médard a 85 ans. Il porte dans sa mémoire une connaissance intime et rare de Médard, de sa famille, de ses techniques, de son époque et de son territoire. Ces enregistrements ont été captés au fil de plusieurs rencontres, sur le domaine familial.

Ces enregistrements constituent une archive sonore directe, captée sur le lieu même où cette mémoire s’est construite.

Je suis le petit-fils de Médard Bourgault. J’ai passé une partie de ma jeunesse sur ce domaine, à m’y promener, à observer et parfois à y dormir. De ma naissance jusqu’à la période de la COVID, j’y ai célébré les principales fêtes chrétiennes, notamment Noël et Pâques.

En parallèle, j’ai travaillé sur des productions d’animation jeunesse (HBO, Radio-Canada), ce qui m’a permis de développer une capacité à structurer des récits et à mettre en valeur du contenu narratif.

Cette double proximité — personnelle et professionnelle — donne à ce travail une dimension d’échange vivant, ancré dans une expérience réelle du lieu et dans une capacité concrète à en transmettre la mémoire.

Les fichiers sont en cours de classement. Les résumés ci-dessous donnent un aperçu des sujets abordés dans chaque enregistrement. Les audio ne sont pas encore tous disponibles pour écoute publique.

Ces enregistrements ont été captés au Zoom H2 lors de rencontres informelles avec André Médard Bourgault, sur le domaine familial à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. Les conversations n'étaient pas scriptées — André Médard parlait librement, guidé par les objets autour de lui, les pièces de la maison, le terrain. Il s’agit de captations brutes, sans mise en scène. Les fichiers sont classés par lieu et par date d'enregistrement. Les résumés sont établis à l'écoute, minutage par minutage. Les approximations de dates sont signalées — André Médard lui-même reconnaissait que Médard n'était pas toujours fiable sur les années.

Exemples de contenu

Les sections suivantes sont des exemples tirés des enregistrements. Elles illustrent comment les audio peuvent être utilisés pour construire des récits courts à partir d’éléments précis du domaine Médard Bourgault.

L’ensemble du corpus couvre un large éventail de sujets : les sculptures présentes sur le domaine, les différentes périodes de la vie de Médard et d’André Médard, la vie dans le village, les métiers, ainsi que la manière dont se vivait le quotidien au sein d’une grande famille. On y retrouve autant le bon que le moins bon — sans mise en scène.

Ces extraits montrent le potentiel du matériau audio à faire émerger des histoires complètes, à partir de fragments captés sur place.

Les routes de terre

En 1932, les routes sont encore en terre. Un couple de Rivière-du-Loup arrive jusqu'à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli et veut acheter une sculpture. C'est la première vente de Médard Bourgault. Il en tire 2 piastres. Le Québec est en pleine crise économique. André Médard se souvient de ce que valait 2 piastres à cette époque-là.

Le village

Saint-Jean-Port-Joli dans les années 30 et 40 — les bœufs et les chevaux pour labourer, le forgeron Fortin, l'Auberge du Faubourg, les touristes américains qui arrivent l'été, Jean-Marie Gauvreau et d'autres personnages importants de l'époque. André Médard en parle comme si c'était hier.

Avant la Révolution tranquille

Dans le Québec d'avant 1960, le clergé avait son mot à dire sur tout — y compris sur la longueur du pagne des crucifix. Les fils de Médard vivaient des commandes religieuses. Médard, lui, sculptait des nus sur la grève en cachette. André Médard raconte cette tension — entre la liberté d'un père et le gagne-pain de ses fils.

Les écoles ménagères

Dans les années 30, les filles de Médard fréquentaient l'école ménagère. C'était une institution — on y apprenait à tenir une maison, à coudre, à cuisiner. André Médard raconte comment ça se passait, ce que ses sœurs y vivaient, ce que ça dit du Québec de cette époque.

Le Montcalm

Avant de sculpter, Médard était marin. Il naviguait sur le Montcalm — un brise-glace sur le Saint-Laurent — et a traversé l'Atlantique avec un équipage anglais. Ce voyage en Europe, cette vie sur le fleuve, cette façon de voir le monde — tout ça se retrouve dans son œuvre. André Médard raconte les années marines de son père.

la longueur du pagne sur les crucifix

Le clergé qui commande des sculptures religieuses aux fils pendant que le père cache ses nus sous un drap. Puis le clergé qui négocie la longueur du pagne sur les crucifix. Et finalement Médard qui arrête de cacher — il assume.

C'est toute une époque dans cette tension-là. Le Québec d'avant la Révolution tranquille raconté à travers un drap et un pagne trop court.

André Médard porte ça avec humour et affection. C'est ce qui rend ces enregistrements vivants.

La banque audio est plus large que les extraits présentés ici et permet, à partir d’un même matériau, de structurer plusieurs récits complets.

Travail en cours d’archivage, de structuration et de mise en forme.

Fichier : 27 octobre 2021

https://archive.org/details/Andre-Medard-Bourgault-Temoignage-27-octobre-2021

Durée : 25 minutes

• Début — Sculptures sur le mur — à identifier
• 3:44 — L'horloge grand-mère — histoire détaillée
• 5:00 — L'armoire fabriquée par Médard pour sa mère — histoire, contexte 1938
• 9:00 — Médard dessinait directement sur le bois — absence de croquis
• ~10-11:00 — Motifs et symboles — inspirations de la nature. Le chêne : force et beauté
• 12:00 — La fougère — symbole de l'humilité, développement détaillé
• 13:00 — Pièces ajoutées avec le temps — la lampe aux chiens, fabriquée par Claude
• 15:00 — Procédés de l'époque — utilisation de la teinture, rôle et application des détails
• 16:00 — Outil pour les poils — technique montrée par Jean-Julien à Jacques, un des fils de Médard
• 17:00 — Les 3 murales — appartiennent à Janette, Carmelle et Murielle — datées vers 1938, à prendre avec réserve. Janette : sculptures avec petits visages très religieux, coupe-papier. Janette et Gertrude (cousine) faisaient du coloriage ensemble
• 20:00 — Les Américains et la sculpture de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli — engouement dans les années 40
• 21:00 — Les différents touristes à l'époque — les Canadiens français
• 22:00 — Touristes qui louaient une résidence à l'Auberge du Faubourg — Jean-Marie Gauvreau et d'autres personnages importants de l'époque
• 24:00 — ⚠️ Opinion forte d'André Médard — M. Bouverette achetait uniquement des sculptures faites à la machine. Ce qui a tué la sculpture à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli selon André Médard : la machine et le travail en série

Fichier : 27 octobre_2

• Début — Histoire de la maison — achetée 200 dollars. Les anciens propriétaires — détails en profondeur. Anecdote : faisaient sécher du foin dans la maison
• 1:40 — La mère de Médard lui conseille de remettre la maison sur pied
• 2:00 — La lucarne — début de la construction
• 3:00 — Le mariage de Médard — la maison construite pour sa famille
• 4:00 — On découvre que la maison date de 1840
• 5:00 — Médard sculpte des oiseaux à l'extérieur — ce qui attire Marius Barbeau en 1930
• 7:50 — Rencontre détaillée avec Marius Barbeau — il croit que Médard a suivi une formation en art. Sa femme lui explique qu'il fait ça pour le plaisir. Barbeau découvre un autodidacte complet
• 9:00 — La femme de Médard annonce la visite de Marius — Médard est sceptique, ne comprend pas pourquoi Barbeau veut le rencontrer
• 9:30 — Médard est déçu de ne pas voir Marius à l'église — il était finalement curieux
• 10:00 — La rencontre entre Médard et Marius Barbeau — racontée en détails
• 11:25 — Marius achète 60 dollars de sculptures de Médard
• 12:00 — La suite avec Marius — le ministre de la Culture de l'époque impliqué
• 13:00 — Comment Médard s'est fait connaître rapidement grâce à Marius Barbeau
• 13:27 — Marius part étudier en Angleterre — plus de nouvelles. Personne n'achète. Médard retourne à la menuiserie avec son père
• 14:40 — ⭐ L'épouse de Médard lui conseille de vendre ses sculptures aux touristes
• 15:30 — ⭐ 1932 — époque des routes de terre — un couple venant de Rivière-du-Loup veut acheter la première sculpture de Médard
• 17:00 — ⭐ Première pièce vendue 2 piastres. Une autre sculpture vendue 10 dollars — 3 jours de travail. Contexte : crise économique majeure au Québec
• 18:00 — Albert Tessier — art religieux — a fait des reportages sur Médard
• 19:00 — Grâce à Albert Tessier, les affaires de Médard commencent à bien marcher
• 19:30 — Les écoles ménagères — années 1930
• 20:00 — Les filles de Médard qui ont fréquenté l'école ménagère — comment ça se passait dans ces écoles
• 21:30 — 1938 — l'armoire (lien avec fichier 27 octobre 2021) — Médard continue de décorer sa maison et fait de la peinture
• 22:16 — La peinture du bateau faite par Médard — dans la maison — contexte de création. Les matériaux étaient plus difficiles à trouver à l'époque
• 23:00 — ⭐ Médard fabriquait ses propres outils — comment il les faisait — outils encore conservés aujourd'hui
• 24:00 — Le forgeron Fortin du village — fabriquait des outils pour Médard
• 25:00 — Médard se procurait des outils en Allemagne
• 26:00 — ⭐ 1918 — ses premiers outils — comment Médard a commencé à fabriquer ses propres outils
• 27:00 — Médard reçoit un atelier de Malgoire (son père)
• 27:40 — ⭐ Les curieux étaient payés en sucre à la crème — les débuts du travail dans l'atelier
• 29:00 — Souvenirs personnels d'André sur la création de l'atelier
• 29:00 — ⭐⭐ 1942 — Médard sculpte les murales du salon — l'histoire des Canadiens français, l'histoire des Bourgault. Les animaux sculptés et leur signification
• 31:00 — Les sculptures de Joseph — n'ont pas été vendues, sont restées dans la maison
• 31:50 — ⭐ La petite chapelle — sculptures placées là — période religieuse de Médard vers 1946
• 33:00 — ⭐⭐ Médard transforme son domaine en musée

Fichier : 27 octobre_3

Son de l'horloge grand-mère — enregistrement sonore authentique de l'horloge dont André Médard parle en détail dans le fichier 27 octobre 2021.

Fichier : escalier

Ambiance sonore — André Médard qui marche sur le terrain du domaine. Sons de pas.

Fichier : exterieur_1

Durée : ~7 minutes

• Début — Le terrain, la mer, le bord du fleuve — la famille — les mésanges et les oiseaux sur le domaine
• 1:30 — Dans les années 30 — Médard décore son rocher
• 2:00 — 1940 — la petite chapelle bénie par Albert Tessier — Médard aidé de ses fils
• 3:00 — Les coutumes familiales autour de la chapelle
• 4:00 — Les premières sculptures en jardin
• 4:30 — Comment Médard a construit la chapelle — détails de construction
• 5:00 — L'hôtel de la chapelle fait par son fils — avec les coquilles
• 6:00 — Les enfants qui jouaient sur le terrain et la falaise — la prudence de Martine
• 7:00 — Les mains sculptées sur le bord de la porte — faisaient peur à la famille et surtout à Martine

Fichier : salle a manger

• Début — Les débuts de Médard — quand il était marin
• 1:00 — Le bateau sur lequel Médard travaillait — représenté en miniature dans la maison
• 2:00 — Le désir de Médard de voyager
• 2:30 — La navigation sur le Montcalm — la beauté de la navigation hivernale
• 4:00 — La suite de la carrière marine de Médard
• 4:50 — Médard part en Europe avec un équipage anglais
• 5:00 — Médard devient menuisier avec son père
• 5:20 — ⭐ Les débuts de la sculpture — ses sujets préférés — ce qu'il voit il le reproduit
• 6:00 — ⭐⭐ La sculpture des trois bœufs — le défrichage — inspiration et ce que Médard a voulu représenter — pièce de 1939 — une des plus belles selon André — dans la cuisine, sur la table pour le moment
• 8:00 — La vie dans le village à l'époque de Médard — détails du village
• 9:00 — L'utilisation des bœufs et des chevaux à l'époque
• 9:40 — Comment ça se passait pour labourer dans le village à l'époque
• 10:50 — Les sujets des sculptures de l'époque
• 12:00 — ⭐ L'art religieux — Médard s'inspire des œuvres de maîtres mais cherche son propre style — la Cène
• 13:50 — L'histoire de la Cène racontée par André — détails de l'œuvre
• 14:00 — Comment ça se passait dans la maison — 14 enfants
• 15:00 — ⭐ Les frères commencent la sculpture en s'inspirant de Médard — la transmission familiale
• 16:00 — ⭐ Comment les frères Bourgault développent chacun leur propre style
• 17:00 — ⭐ Comment son frère Jean-Julien se différencie des autres
• 17:30 — Jean-Julien représentait le conseil municipal

Voici le document formaté pour write.as :

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : rencontre2

https://archive.org/details/rencontre2_202603

Période profane — le nu et la liberté créatrice

• Début — 1957 — Médard se tanne de l'art religieux — période profane avant la Révolution tranquille. 1946 — Médard commence à sculpter le corps humain dans le bois flotté
• 1:22 — Le bois de grève utilisé — comment la forme des racines guide la sculpture
• 2:00 — Les visiteurs voient d'un mauvais œil que Médard commence à faire du nu
• 2:30 — ⭐ Le petit bonhomme — populaire à l'époque, tout le monde fait la même chose — sauf Médard
• 3:00 — La famille encourage Médard — ses frères vont suivre et en faire ensuite
• 3:45 — Les thèmes abordés dans les nus — les expérimentations de Médard avec le bois
• 4:20 — ⭐ Médard est passionné — commence à vendre à des gens plus cultivés
• 5:00 — ⭐⭐ Médard libre de créer — ses fils font les commandes religieuses
• 5:30 — ⭐⭐ Médard s'inquiète que le clergé coupe les contrats aux Bourgault à cause de ses nus — c'est le gagne-pain de ses fils
• 6:00 — L'ouverture du clergé
• 6:30 — ⭐ L'atelier — les visiteurs — une pièce pour les touristes — Médard cache ses nus aux visiteurs avec un drap
• 7:00 — Le clergé découvre les nus de Médard
• 8:40 — ⭐⭐ Médard arrête de cacher ses œuvres — il travaillait sur la grève hors des regards — maintenant il assume

L'artiste et son processus

• 9:50 — ⭐⭐ Médard grand rêveur — il caresse ses œuvres et prend son temps
• 10:30 — Médard travaille avec le compas
• 11:00 — ⭐⭐ Médard ne veut pas provoquer — la pièce la plus provocante — souvenirs d'André Médard sur le travail profane de son père
• 13:45 — ⭐ Médard a peur des ragots du village — rumeurs qu'il utilise ses filles comme modèles
• 15:00 — ⭐⭐ Les pièces les plus abouties de Médard — comment la famille réagit aux nus avec le temps
• 16:00 — L'évolution du tourisme et des visiteurs de l'atelier avec le temps — les grands changements
• 17:00 — ⭐⭐ Les nus sont normaux pour sa famille — rares sont les gens qui encouragent Médard à cette époque

L'apogée et la transmission

• 18:00 — ⭐⭐ La dernière pièce de Médard — ses influences
• 19:00 — ⭐⭐ Anecdote — un visiteur jure de ne jamais vendre une pièce de Médard — Médard voulait garder cette pièce — l'œuvre est revenue à André Médard
• 21:00 — ⭐⭐ La rançon de la gloire — histoire de cette sculpture
• 23:00 — Comment Médard travaillait le bois dans ses dernières années — selon André Médard
• 24:00 — ⭐⭐ L'apogée et la fierté d'André Médard par rapport à son père
• 25:00 — Le travail de famille sur le domaine et l'atelier
• 26:00 — ⭐ Baloune et Ti-Cuir — personnages du village rencontrés par Médard et immortalisés en sculptures
• 28:00 — ⭐ Le clergé conseille à Médard de rallonger le pagne sur les crucifix du Christ

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : rencontre2b

La vie de famille

• Début — La vie de famille dans la maison avec 16 enfants — routine familiale — les réveillons
• 1:42 — ⭐ Une crèche faite avec ses fils — d'inspiration canadienne française — pour l'église de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli
• 3:00 — Le réveillon en famille
• 4:00 — La routine des repas en famille le reste de l'année — les prières — anecdotes et réactions différentes
• 4:40 — Les enfants font des blagues sur la religion
• 5:00 — ⭐ Fin du chapelet avec l'arrivée du dernier — Jean-Eude

La maison et son organisation

• 6:00 — Les pièces de la maison — comment on s'organise — quelle pièce pour qui — combien par chambre — la vie avec les souris dans la maison
• 7:30 — ⭐⭐ Les soupers et les repas — les veillées — le violoneux Deschênes et l'accordéon le soir — on danse dans le salon — Médard n'est pas très danseur
• 8:40 — ⭐ Les dîners et repas — qu'est-ce qu'on mange à 16 dans la famille — la routine et les patates

Les enfants et les jeux

• 9:00 — ⭐⭐ André Médard a 10 ans — Médard encourage ses fils à faire un petit village miniature — Claude découpe les animaux — Claude fait un camion et des jouets en bois
• 10:00 — La suite — comment les enfants de Médard s'amusent sur le domaine
• 12:00 — ⭐ André Médard fabrique une goélette pour jouer — se rend compte en se promenant dans le village que ce n'est pas fait comme ça en vrai
• 13:00 — Les filles s'amusent avec des poupées
• 14:00 — ⭐ Les jeux d'hiver des enfants — Claude aide les enfants dans la conception de leurs jouets
• 15:00 — Les enfants à la grève — hiver et été
• 16:00 — Les jouets dangereux de l'époque

La transmission

• 17:00 — La famille et les voisins
• 18:00 — ⭐ André Médard et son frère se mettent à la sculpture

Voici le document formaté pour write.as :

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : exterieur2

La chapelle — construction et entretien

• Début — Comment la chapelle a été construite avec André Médard et Médard — comment elle a été entretenue et changée avec le temps
• 2:40 — ⭐ Les enfants voient leur père méditer sur le rocher — les visites de visiteurs près de la chapelle — les religieuses qui visitent
• 3:40 — André Médard répare le toit de la chapelle
• 5:00 — ⭐ Les enfants jouent au mariage à la chapelle — entre voisins
• 6:00 — Médard délaisse sa chapelle — s'occupe du domaine sur le fleuve

Le domaine — bâtiments et construction

• 8:00 — Les techniques de construction pour les toits et les bâtiments sur le domaine — comment il s'organisait — les matériaux utilisés
• 9:00 — Les outils utilisés
• 10:00 — Le style des bâtiments — où Médard a trouvé son inspiration architecturale

Les sculptures extérieures

• 11:00 — ⭐⭐ Les sculptures près de la chapelle — sculptures refusées par le clergé car le drapé était trop proche de la cuisse — elles se sont ramassées là
• 13:00 — ⭐⭐ Notre-Dame de la falaise — son histoire — comment Médard préparait les sculptures pour l'extérieur
• 14:00 — Les sculptures qui ont survécu à l'hiver

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : sallon4

L'école et les débuts

• Début — Après la mort — la reprise de l'école par son cousin Pierre
• 1:50 — La difficulté de son père à trouver des modèles
• 2:50 — Les premiers modèles trouvés par Nicole Bourgault — cousine d'André Médard Bourgault

Le nu — modèles et rumeurs

• 4:00 — Comment le village réagissait aux nus — les rumeurs
• 5:00 — Quel bois Médard utilisait
• 6:00 — ⭐⭐ Martine a servi de modèle pour Le Vent du Large — la seule fille de Médard qui aurait servi de modèle — Martine très proche de Médard. Jean-Eude aussi, mais Médard trouvait qu'il bougeait trop

L'observation comme méthode

• 7:00 — Pendant son époque paysanne — il reproduit ce qu'il a vu sans modèle
• 8:00 — ⭐ À l'époque les femmes travaillaient énormément mais on en parlait moins — Médard le disait lui-même
• 8:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ À l'époque pas de salon funéraire — c'était le croque-mort — Médard travaillait là-bas parfois — il regardait et étudiait les cadavres pour comprendre le corps humain, faute de références en anatomie

La transmission

• 11:00 — André Médard parle de son apprentissage

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : sallon2

Les débuts — la mer et le retour

• Début — 1917 — Médard tombe malade en mer — débarque à New York
• 1:30 — 1918 — Médard aide son père — son père lui demande de faire une armoire. Son père avait des livres d'Arthur Fournier, un ami de la famille — Médard s'inspire de ses sculptures
• 3:00 — Comment Médard fabrique ses propres outils

Le village et la jeunesse

• 6:00 — Médard fait des pipes sculptées pour les gens du village
• 7:30 — Souvenirs de jeunesse d'André Médard avec son frère Raymond

Arthur Fournier — l'encouragement décisif

• 9:00 — Les gens n'encouragent pas Médard — mais Arthur Fournier, lui, l'encourage
• 10:00 — ⭐ Arthur Fournier encourage Médard à faire sa première œuvre religieuse

L'apprentissage et les premières œuvres

• 11:00 — L'apprentissage du dessin de Médard — et ses frères
• 12:00 — Médard a gardé ses premières œuvres
• 15:00 — Les métiers représentés par Médard et ses frères — anecdotes et souvenirs
• 16:00 — Début de la demande en tilleul dans le village — sert à autre chose que chauffer les cabanes à sucre

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : sallemanger3

L'Émilia — le bateau de Médard

• Début — 1917 — histoire de marin — l'Émilia en détails — apprentissage de marin de Médard — le bateau représenté en miniature dans la maison
• 1:30 — Médard apprend vite les manœuvres et devient rapidement un bon marin
• 2:30 — Les journées de travail sur l'Émilia
• 3:00 — ⭐ Lucien fabrique la miniature de l'Émilia — l'oncle Antonio l'aide dans les explications pour que ce soit fidèle à l'original
• 4:00 — La navigation avec ce type de bateau
• 5:00 — ⭐ Médard — un petit gars en pleine mer
• 6:00 — Anecdote de navigation de l'Émilia

Médard et la mer

• 10:00 — Les passe-temps de Médard en mer
• 11:00 — ⭐ L'intérêt de Médard pour l'art — la réaction de ses parents — Médard observe la nature
• 12:30 — Médard sur le Montcalm (lien avec fichier salle a manger)

La miniature — construction et mémoire

• 13:00 — Le travail de Lucien — fils d'Antonio
• 14:00 — ⭐ La construction de l'Émilia — histoire de la miniature
• 15:00 — Les fonctionnalités du bateau
• 20:00 — La cale du bateau
• 22:00 — Le déchargement de l'Émilia

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : rencontred

L'atelier — construction et vie

• Début — La construction de l'atelier — André (frère de Médard) reste dans l'atelier en haut — il lâche l'atelier
• 1:00 — L'histoire d'André (frère de Médard) — fait des figurines
• 2:50 — Les senteux et le début de l'atelier
• 4:00 — Le début de l'école de sculpture — commande d'une sculpture énorme de plus de 7 pieds
• 5:00 — ⭐ La fermeture de l'école — les élèves de Médard se lancent dans la sculpture dans le village
• 7:00 — Interrompu par l'horloge grand-mère

La famille dans l'atelier

• 8:00 — ⭐ Raymond — frère d'André Médard — entre dans l'atelier. Carmelle, Janette, Fernand, Claude, Marielle et Thérèse — la famille de Médard travaille avec lui après la fermeture de l'école
• 10:00 — ⭐⭐ Fabrication d'une statue de 20 pieds dans l'atelier — souvenirs d'André Médard
• 12:00 — ⭐⭐ Sortir la statue de 20 pieds en groupe avec des cordes
• 14:00 — La livraison de la sculpture
• 16:00 — ⭐ Le début d'André Médard dans l'atelier de son père

La destruction et la douleur

• 17:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ La disparition de l'atelier — André Médard se confie sur la destruction de l'atelier par une pelle mécanique
• 24:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ André Médard est triste que l'atelier ait été détruit pour en faire un stationnement

Le village et les artisans

• 20:00 — Les sculpteurs de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli — le côté commercial
• 21:00 — ⭐ L'intérêt de Médard pour la mythologie
• 23:00 — Le travail de Médard à la boutique sur le bord du fleuve
• 25:00 — La fraternité des artisans de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli — les chicanes de village — les manigances
• 26:00 — ⭐⭐ Médard est blessé par le comportement des gens de son village
• 27:00 — Anecdote sur Eugène Leclerc
• 29:00 — Quelques souvenirs de l'atelier — Paul-Yvan

Confidentiel et comment André Médard Bourgault aimerait que le patrimoine soit conservé.

• 31:00 — 🔒 Contenu confidentiel
• 32:30 — ⭐⭐⭐ André Médard exprime son désir de faire du domaine un site d'interprétation de Médard Bourgault — ne veut pas voir de transformation
• 34:00 — 🔒 Contenu confidentiel

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : rencontre2c

La vie de famille et le salon

• Début — Après la messe — la famille dans le salon — la famille écoute de la musique classique
• 1:00 — Les visites de Pierre Bourgault (cousin qui avait repris l'école)
• 2:00 — La coutume de discuter entre garçons dans le salon avec Pierre
• 3:00 — ⭐ André Médard parle de ses premiers disques — obtenus avec les boîtes de céréales à 14 ans
• 3:00 — La visite de Victor Dallaire
• 4:00 — Les sujets de conversation dans le salon à travers les années

L'entrée dans l'atelier

• 5:00 — ⭐ André Médard arrête l'école pour travailler avec son père
• 6:00 — Les visites de l'oncle Antonio — la cuisine de sa mère
• 6:30 — ⭐⭐ André Médard découvre la sculpture sur bois
• 7:30 — ⭐ Les enfants jouent au sculpteur — l'un fait le sculpteur, l'autre pose comme sculpture — mais il ne faut pas bouger
• 8:20 — La visite des enfants dans l'atelier
• 9:00 — Jeannette — cousine d'André Médard — peinture les pièces
• 10:00 — ⭐ Thérèse fait des plats à bonbons et des bols à salade — elle se marie — Marielle reprend son travail — puis André Médard reprend après avoir peint l'atelier

Les premières ventes et l'apprentissage

• 11:00 — ⭐ Le premier plat vendu par André Médard — 5 dollars
• 11:30 — ⭐ André Médard fait des plats à la gouge — se forme la main
• 12:00 — ⭐⭐ Souvenirs d'André Médard à l'école — se tanne et ne retourne pas en septembre — Médard lui prépare des modèles — il commence les plaquettes — son frère Jacques est plus avancé que lui
• 14:00 — ⭐⭐ Le premier vrai contrat pour André Médard Bourgault
• 14:30 — ⭐⭐⭐ Son premier chemin de croix — fait avec son père qui l'aide à faire les pieds et les mains
• 15:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Médard conseille à son fils de signer son nom au complet — “signe ton nom au complet” — pour se différencier d'André Bourgault (frère de Médard) — origine de la signature André Médard Bourgault

La transmission et la confiance

• 17:00 — Comment lui et ses frères ont appris à sculpter le corps humain
• 18:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Médard voit une pièce d'André Médard et la trouve belle
• 18:00 — ⭐⭐ André Médard se lance vraiment — partage du travail avec ses frères — qui fait quoi — chacun a ses bois et sa spécialité
• 19:00 — ⭐⭐ André Médard parle des pièces qu'il préfère de son père
• 21:00 — ⭐⭐ Divers souvenirs de l'atelier et du travail de son père — comment André Médard a gagné confiance en lui

La carrière et la fin

• 20:00 — Les diverses commandes d'André Médard pour l'art religieux
• 21:00 — ⭐ Les contrats d'André Médard à travers le monde
• 22:00 — ⭐⭐ La période profane d'André Médard Bourgault
• 23:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Comment André Médard voit la fin de sa carrière
• 24:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ André Médard parle de la sculpture Baloune — dernière pièce inachevée de son père avant que Médard entre à l'hôpital
• 25:00 — Les clochards à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : labranche

Enregistrement fait à l'extérieur

Les oiseaux et la nature

• Début — André Médard parle des mésanges et des oiseaux sur le terrain
• 0:51 — Les oiseaux et leur comportement — les différents oiseaux selon les saisons et les années
• 1:30 — Les corneilles sur le domaine
• 2:00 — ⭐ Les oiseaux ne vont plus sur le domaine depuis qu'il n'est plus habité par Ghislaine.

Le domaine

• 3:20 — Les divers arbres plantés sur le domaine — certains sont devenus très gros
• 4:00 — La porte de la chapelle sans peinture
• 5:00 — ⭐ La branche comme indicateur de température — quel bois utiliser et comment ça fonctionne

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : laboutique

Enregistrement fait dans la petite boutique sur le bord du fleuve — domaine Médard Bourgault

La boutique — lieu de paix de Médard

• Début — On entre dans la boutique — histoire de la boutique — c'est là que Médard faisait ses sculptures — son lieu de paix — les touristes ne descendaient pas ici
• 1:00 — Médard a rajouté des rallonges à la boutique avec le temps — pour se réchauffer
• 2:00 — ⭐ Histoire détaillée du chalet des garçons et du Nord — l'utilisation des chalets
• 3:00 — Plusieurs dessins faits sur le bord de la mer à la boutique
• 4:00 — L'origine du nom la boutique
• 4:30 — ⭐ Le domaine sur le bord du fleuve — seuls les intimes y avaient accès
• 5:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Le désir d'André Médard de laisser la boutique telle que son père l'a laissée

Les outils et les objets

• 6:00 — ⭐ Les outils de la boutique — fabriqués par un forgeron du coin — Laurendeau
• 7:00 — Les outils et les techniques de son père
• 8:00 — ⭐⭐ André Médard parle des divers objets restés sur place dans la boutique de Médard
• 9:30 — D'où viennent les sculptures en plâtre
• 10:00 — Les bois et les différents défis des sculptures faites dans la boutique
• 18:00 — L'utilisation de la meule de pierre

La vie dans la boutique

• 11:00 — La routine de travail dans la boutique
• 12:00 — ⭐ Différents souvenirs d'André Médard sur cette boutique
• 13:00 — Le foyer
• 14:00 — La visite de Médard l'hiver dans le chalet du Nord
• 14:30 — Le ramassage du bois avec ses frères

Les sculptures

• 15:00 — ⭐ Le Saint-Joseph de Fernand — sculpture
• 16:00 — ⭐⭐ L'origine de toutes les sculptures dans la boutique — Médard ramasse les sculptures de ses fils pour les mettre dans sa boutique

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : laboutique2

Enregistrement fait dans la petite boutique sur le bord du fleuve — domaine Médard Bourgault

La sculpture et les objets

• Début — Le début de la sculpture dans une racine
• 1:00 — Les travaux inachevés de son père — les plaquettes de Carmelle
• 3:00 — Les statuettes de Fernand — souvenirs d'André Médard de son père sur le domaine

L'art religieux après la Révolution tranquille

• 4:00 — Après la Révolution tranquille — l'art religieux reste populaire et en demande — surtout avec les touristes américains

Ghislaine et les objets

• 6:00 — Souvenirs de Ghislaine — souvenirs des objets

Archives sonores — témoignages d'André Médard Bourgault

Fichier : premiereouevre

Fichier de ~15 minutes — tous les symboles présents sont discutés

Médard qui humanise le sacré

Les premières œuvres et l'art religieux

• Début — Les premières œuvres — les symboles religieux utilisés par Médard
• 1:03 — La Cène — dans la cuisine — les religieux qui expliquent à Médard ce qu'ils veulent
• 2:00 — Comment Médard s'est approprié l'art religieux
• 3:00 — ⭐⭐ Comparaison et inspiration de l'œuvre de Léonard de Vinci — Médard a voulu faire sa propre version
• 4:00 — ⭐ Médard rend les scènes religieuses plus naturelles
• 5:00 — ⭐ Les symboles qui ont captivé l'intérêt de Médard

Le gagne-pain et l'évolution

• 7:00 — ⭐ L'art religieux comme gagne-pain — évolution de son œuvre religieuse — comment il travaillait
• 8:00 — ⭐ La différence entre les sculpteurs Bourgault — les préférences d'André Médard
• 10:00 — L'arrivée des plâtres dans la vie de Médard
• 11:00 — Médard et la concurrence

Ce qui est unique à Médard

• 12:00 — ⭐⭐⭐ Ce qui est unique à Médard selon André Médard
• 12:00 — Anecdote sur le village
• 13:00 — Comment le village a évolué selon André Médard — ce qu'il a vu

Document en cours de mise à jour — Raphaël Maltais Bourgault, 2026

Ce travail de documentation se construit sur le terrain, à partir d’enregistrements et d’archives en cours.

Si vous jugez qu’il mérite d’être poursuivi : https://ko-fi.com/raphaelmaltaisbourgault

Pour comprendre le Domaine Médard Bourgault

Ces pages permettent de découvrir le domaine, son histoire, et les enjeux actuels à travers des archives, des analyses et des témoignages directs.

Archives et mémoire du lieu → Domaine Médard Bourgault — archives sonores et témoignages d’André Médard Bourgault Enregistrements réalisés sur le domaine, retraçant la vie, les gestes et la mémoire du lieu.

Analyses et situation actuelle → Domaine Médard Bourgault — analyses et enjeux actuels Réflexions et mises à jour sur les enjeux en cours.

Savoir et transmission → André Médard Bourgault — classe de maître complète en sculpture sur bois → Médard Bourgault — éducation artistique, principes, beauté et transmission Comprendre la pratique, la transmission et la vision artistique de Médard Bourgault.

Récit et contexte historique → Médard Bourgault — récit en mer inspiré de son journal (1913–1918) Un récit basé sur ses écrits, qui éclaire une période peu connue de sa vie.

Enjeu actuel du domaine → Domaine Médard Bourgault — le jardin doit-il devenir un accès public au fleuve ? Une question concrète sur l’avenir et l’usage du lieu.

Nearly seven in ten middle and high school students now say they believe artificial intelligence is eroding their critical thinking skills. They reported this in a December 2025 survey conducted by the RAND Corporation's American Youth Panel. They also reported, in the very same survey, that they are using AI for homework more than ever before, with usage climbing from 48 per cent to 62 per cent in barely seven months. The students, in other words, can see the problem clearly. They simply cannot stop participating in it.

This is an extraordinarily revealing paradox, and it deserves more scrutiny than the predictable hand-wringing it has generated. Because the most uncomfortable question here is not whether ChatGPT is making teenagers worse at thinking. It is whether the education system that ushered AI into classrooms with such breathless enthusiasm ever genuinely valued the kind of independent, rigorous, critical thought it now claims to be losing.

The answer, if you follow the evidence, is not encouraging.

The Paradox in the Numbers

The RAND data is striking in its internal contradictions. Among the 1,214 young people surveyed (aged 12 to 29, all enrolled in school during the 2025-26 academic year), 67 per cent endorsed the statement that “the more students use AI for their schoolwork, the more it will harm their critical thinking skills.” That figure had risen more than ten percentage points in just ten months. The concern was especially pronounced among female students, 75 per cent of whom agreed, compared with 59 per cent of male students.

Yet during the same period, the percentage of middle schoolers using AI for homework leapt from 30 per cent to 46 per cent, and among high schoolers it jumped from 49 per cent to 60 per cent. Most of these students (60 per cent) also expressed concern about using AI for school-related purposes. So they are worried and they are doing it anyway. This is not cognitive dissonance in any simple sense. It is something more structurally interesting: students have correctly diagnosed a systemic problem, but they exist within a system that gives them no rational incentive to behave differently.

Consider the logic from a student's perspective. Assignments are graded. Grades determine university admissions. University admissions determine (or are perceived to determine) life outcomes. If your peers are using AI and getting better grades, opting out is not a principled stand. It is a competitive disadvantage. The students are not confused. They are trapped.

Think of it another way. You are sixteen. You have five GCSEs to revise for, a personal statement to write, and a part-time job. Your classmates are producing polished coursework in half the time it takes you to write a first draft because they are running their ideas through ChatGPT. Your teachers, overwhelmed and under-resourced, cannot reliably tell the difference. The system rewards the output, not the process. In this environment, choosing not to use AI is not intellectual integrity. It is self-sabotage.

Meanwhile, faculty at the university level are sounding alarms with even greater urgency. A national survey conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Centre in November 2025 found that 95 per cent of the 1,057 faculty respondents feared that generative AI would increase student overreliance on the technology. Ninety per cent said it would diminish students' critical thinking skills. Eighty-three per cent said AI would decrease student attention spans. And 78 per cent said cheating on their campuses had increased since these tools became widely available, with 57 per cent saying it had increased significantly.

The teachers see the same thing the students see. The difference is that teachers are surprised. The students are not.

A System That Never Quite Got Round to Critical Thinking

Here is where the conversation gets genuinely uncomfortable. Long before ChatGPT existed, education reformers, cognitive scientists, and classroom teachers themselves were raising the alarm about a system that was systematically undermining higher-order thinking. The culprit was not artificial intelligence. It was standardised testing.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) represented, in the United States at least, the triumph of measurable outcomes over meaningful learning. Under its regime, schools were judged by their students' performance on standardised assessments. The consequences of poor scores were severe: funding cuts, staff dismissals, school closures. The entirely predictable result was what educators came to call “teaching to the test,” a practice in which classroom instruction was narrowed to the specific content and formats that would appear on state exams.

The effects were devastating and well-documented. Subjects not covered by standardised tests, including art, music, physical education, and social studies, were minimised or eliminated outright. Some principals eliminated recess to devote more time to test preparation. Science was replaced with additional maths drills. Social studies gave way to language arts worksheets. The phrase that captured this era most succinctly was “sit, get, spit, forget,” a cycle in which students received information passively, regurgitated it on an exam, and promptly forgot it, having never engaged with it at any depth.

The situation in the United Kingdom has followed a parallel trajectory. Successive reforms since the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, the expansion of league tables in the 1990s, and the intensification of Ofsted inspections have created an accountability culture that rewards measurable outcomes above all else. Teachers in England report spending enormous amounts of time on assessment preparation, data tracking, and administrative compliance, time that might otherwise be devoted to the kind of open-ended, inquiry-driven teaching that develops critical thinking. The Department for Education published expanded guidance on AI in education in June 2025, stressing that AI tools should support rather than replace subject knowledge and that students still need a strong foundation in reading, writing, and critical thinking to use these tools effectively. But guidance is one thing; structural reform is quite another.

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher, would have recognised all of this instantly. In his seminal 1968 work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Freire described what he called the “banking model” of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge into the passive receptacles of students' minds, and students are expected to receive, memorise, and repeat. Freire argued that this approach was fundamentally hostile to critical consciousness; the more students worked at storing deposits, the less they developed the critical thinking that would allow them to intervene in the world as transformers of that world. His alternative, critical pedagogy, was rooted in dialogue, in treating students as co-creators of knowledge rather than empty vessels to be filled.

NCLB was, in Freire's terms, the banking model with federal enforcement mechanisms. The UK's accountability framework achieved much the same outcome through different institutional channels. And while NCLB was eventually replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, which offered states greater flexibility in assessment design, the deeper cultural damage had been done. An entire generation of teachers on both sides of the Atlantic had been trained in a system that rewarded compliance over curiosity, memorisation over analysis, and standardised answers over independent thought.

So when commentators now lament that AI is destroying students' capacity for critical thinking, the honest follow-up question is: which critical thinking? When, precisely, was this golden age of independent thought in schools? Because the evidence suggests it was already in serious trouble long before a single student typed a homework question into ChatGPT.

Cognitive Offloading and the Science of Thinking Less

The cognitive science, meanwhile, tells a more nuanced story than either technophiles or technophobes would prefer. Research published in 2025 by Michael Gerlich of SBS Swiss Business School, in the journal Societies, investigated the relationship between AI tool usage and critical thinking through the lens of cognitive offloading, the well-established phenomenon in which humans delegate cognitive tasks to external resources to reduce mental demand.

Gerlich's study surveyed and interviewed 666 participants across diverse age groups and educational backgrounds, finding a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking abilities. The numbers were stark: cognitive offloading was strongly correlated with AI tool usage (r = +0.72) and inversely related to critical thinking (r = -0.75). Younger participants, those aged 17 to 25, showed higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older age groups. However, and this is crucial, advanced educational attainment correlated positively with critical thinking skills, suggesting that education, when it works properly, can mitigate some of the cognitive costs of AI reliance. The implication is clear: the problem is not that education cannot protect against cognitive offloading, but that most education systems are not currently designed to do so.

A separate study from Microsoft Research, presented at CHI 2025 (the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), surveyed 319 knowledge workers about their experiences with generative AI. The findings revealed a telling dynamic: higher confidence in AI was associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence was associated with more critical thinking. The research also identified a fundamental shift in the nature of cognitive work, from information gathering to information verification, from problem-solving to AI response integration, and from doing tasks to supervising them.

This matters enormously for students, who are still in the process of building the very cognitive capacities that adults are now choosing to offload. A knowledge worker who has spent twenty years learning to construct arguments, evaluate evidence, and synthesise information can afford to delegate some of those tasks to AI without losing the underlying skill. A teenager who has never fully developed those skills in the first place is in a fundamentally different position. For them, cognitive offloading is not a convenience. It is a developmental short-circuit.

This is not merely a problem of laziness or moral failure. It is a predictable consequence of how human cognition interacts with powerful tools. We have always offloaded cognitive tasks onto external supports, from written language to calculators to search engines. The question with AI is whether the offloading is so comprehensive, and so seamless, that it crosses the line from scaffolding (which is temporary and empowering) to substitution (which is permanent and diminishing).

The critical distinction, as cognitive scientists have noted, is whether AI operates as a scaffold or a substitute. Scaffolding is characterised by temporariness, adaptability, and the goal of strengthening internal capacities. Substitution simply does the thinking for you. And the educational system, in its rush to adopt AI tools, has devoted remarkably little attention to ensuring the former rather than the latter.

The Teacher's Impossible Position

Any honest account of this situation must reckon with the position of teachers themselves, who are caught between contradictory demands with diminishing resources to meet any of them. Nearly half of teachers in the United States and the United Kingdom report chronic burnout. Teacher shortages are endemic. Class sizes in many state schools have grown. Administrative demands consume ever-larger portions of the working week.

Into this environment of exhaustion and scarcity comes AI, marketed to schools and teachers as a solution to the very problems the system has created. District leaders implementing AI tools report that teachers can reclaim an average of 5.9 hours per week by automating lesson planning, grading, and communication tasks. For a profession in crisis, this is not a trivial proposition. If a teacher can use AI to handle routine administrative work and spend more time on meaningful instruction, that sounds like progress.

But the reality is more complicated. Only about one in five teachers work at a school that has an AI policy. Teacher training on the pedagogical use of AI remains inconsistent and often superficial. The gap between the promise of AI as a teaching aid and the lived reality of its implementation is vast. Teachers are being asked to integrate a transformative technology into their practice while simultaneously meeting accountability targets, managing behaviour, differentiating instruction for diverse learners, and coping with the emotional demands of working with young people in an era of escalating mental health challenges.

The result is that AI adoption in schools is happening not through careful pedagogical planning, but through exhaustion. Teachers are adopting AI not because they have been trained to use it well, but because they are too stretched to do without it. And students are adopting AI not because they have been taught to use it critically, but because nobody has given them a compelling reason not to.

The Whiplash of Institutional Adoption

The speed at which schools reversed their positions on AI is itself a revealing story. In January 2023, New York City's Department of Education became one of the first major school systems to ban ChatGPT from its networks and devices. The ban was announced with the gravity of a public health measure, citing concerns about academic integrity and the tool's potential to provide students with answers that lacked critical thinking. Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia and Austin Independent School District in Texas followed suit, citing child safety and academic integrity.

Within four months, New York City reversed its ban. The reversal came after convening tech industry representatives and educators to evaluate the technology's potential benefits. By 2024, more than three-quarters of educators reported that their districts had not banned ChatGPT or similar tools. The pattern, ban first, then embrace, played out across districts nationwide. Seattle Public Schools, which had initially banned ChatGPT and six additional AI writing assistance websites, similarly softened its stance.

This institutional whiplash is instructive. The initial bans suggested that schools understood, at least intuitively, that AI posed a genuine threat to the learning process. The rapid reversals suggested that this understanding was no match for the combined pressures of industry lobbying, parental expectations, competitive anxiety, and the sheer momentum of a technology that students were already using at home.

The AI in education market tells its own story of institutional capture. Valued at approximately 7 billion dollars in 2025, the sector is projected to grow to nearly 137 billion dollars by 2035, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of over 34 per cent. Major technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Pearson, have invested heavily in educational AI products. In July 2025 alone, Microsoft announced plans to invest over 4 billion dollars in AI education initiatives. These investments are not philanthropic gestures. They are strategic plays for long-term market dominance in an industry that touches every child in the developed world.

These are not neutral actors offering disinterested tools. They are companies with revenue models that depend on deep integration into educational infrastructure. When schools adopt their platforms, they are not just choosing a product; they are choosing a pedagogical philosophy, one that often prioritises efficiency, personalisation through algorithmic recommendation, and scalable delivery over the messy, slow, deeply human process of learning to think for oneself.

The Khanmigo Question

Not all educational AI is created equal, and the differences matter. Khan Academy's Khanmigo, launched in limited beta in 2023 and reaching approximately 1.5 million users across 130 countries by the end of 2025, represents a philosophically distinct approach to AI in education. Unlike ChatGPT, Khanmigo is designed not to give answers directly. Instead, it employs a Socratic method, offering hints and guiding questions intended to help students find answers themselves.

According to Khan Academy's own data, 68 per cent of students preferred Khanmigo's approach over ChatGPT for homework help, citing reduced anxiety about cheating. There is, students reported, a real psychological difference between “the AI gave me the answer” and “I figured it out with help.” This is a meaningful distinction. The student who works through a problem with Socratic guidance is still engaging in the cognitive labour that builds understanding. The student who pastes an essay prompt into ChatGPT and submits the output is not.

This distinction matters because it reveals that the problem is not AI per se, but how AI is designed and deployed. A tool built to scaffold learning is fundamentally different from a tool optimised to generate complete, polished outputs on demand. Yet in practice, most students are not using carefully designed educational AI. They are using general-purpose large language models, tools built for productivity, not pedagogy. And the education system has done remarkably little to shape how students interact with these tools.

The gap between what is possible and what is actually happening is enormous. Khanmigo demonstrates that AI can be designed to support critical thinking rather than replace it. But Khanmigo also requires institutional investment, teacher training, and a deliberate pedagogical framework, precisely the things that the current system, oriented toward rapid adoption and measurable outcomes, is least equipped to provide.

We Have Been Here Before, Sort Of

The temptation to draw neat historical parallels is strong, and partly justified. In 1986, the Christian Science Monitor reported on fierce debates over calculator use in schools, with one Oregon teacher of the year warning that “once you have a crutch, you rely on it more and more.” The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had urged the integration of calculators at all grade levels, and maths teachers in Washington, D.C. picketed their meetings in protest.

The pro-calculator camp cited studies showing that students with calculators performed at least as well on tests as those without them (except, curiously, in the fourth grade). The anti-calculator camp warned of atrophied mental arithmetic skills and dangerous dependency. Eventually, calculators became ubiquitous, and the debate faded into the background noise of educational history.

The AI parallel writes itself, but it is also misleading in important ways. A calculator is a tool for performing a specific, well-defined operation. It computes. AI, by contrast, is a tool for generating language, analysing arguments, synthesising information, and producing written outputs that closely mimic (and sometimes surpass) the kinds of work that students are assessed on. The calculator could not write your essay. ChatGPT can. The calculator did not threaten the process by which students learned to construct arguments, weigh evidence, or develop original perspectives. AI does. The scope of the offloading is categorically different, and so the historical precedent offers less comfort than its proponents suggest.

The more honest historical parallel might be the introduction of television in the 1950s and 1960s, when educators initially hailed the new medium as a revolutionary learning tool before gradually recognising that passive consumption of information was not the same as active engagement with ideas. The lesson from that era was not that television was inherently bad, but that it was easy to confuse exposure to information with genuine understanding. AI presents the same confusion in a more insidious form: the output looks like understanding. It reads like comprehension. But the student who submits it may not have comprehended anything at all.

The International View

The global picture offers both cautionary tales and faint glimmers of hope. The OECD's PISA 2022 assessment, which for the first time evaluated creative thinking skills across 64 countries and economies, revealed enormous international variation in how well education systems prepare students for higher-order cognition. Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, and Finland topped the creative thinking rankings, with Singapore's students scoring a mean of 41 points, well above the OECD average of 33. In Singapore, South Korea, and Canada, over 70 per cent of students performed at or above Level 4.

What distinguishes these high-performing systems is not the presence or absence of technology, but the pedagogical philosophy that underpins its use. Finland, consistently celebrated for its educational outcomes, emphasises teacher autonomy, minimal standardised testing, and a holistic approach in which children are encouraged to explore their interests rather than conform to rigid assessment frameworks. Finnish teachers enjoy the freedom to craft lessons tailored to their students' needs, a dynamic that fosters precisely the kind of critical and creative thinking that AI threatens to undermine elsewhere. Crucially, Finland has also launched national AI literacy programmes, including free online coursework, ensuring that citizens understand the technology rather than simply consuming it.

Singapore, meanwhile, has announced a national initiative to build AI literacy among students and teachers, with training to be offered at all levels by 2026. But Singapore's approach is embedded within its broader “Smart Nation” strategy, which explicitly aims to help teachers customise education for individual students rather than replace teacher judgement with algorithmic recommendation. The emphasis is on AI literacy, understanding what these tools are, what they can and cannot do, and how to use them critically, rather than mere AI adoption.

The contrast with the prevailing approach in the United States and United Kingdom is instructive. Where Finland and Singapore have invested in teacher preparation, pedagogical frameworks, and critical AI literacy, many anglophone systems have prioritised speed of adoption, market-driven solutions, and measurable outcomes, precisely the conditions under which AI is most likely to substitute for, rather than scaffold, genuine thinking. The PISA data suggests this is not a coincidence. Systems that invest in the conditions for critical thinking produce students who think critically. Systems that invest in accountability metrics produce students who are good at meeting metrics.

The Systemic Trap

What emerges from all of this is not a simple story about technology corrupting youth. It is a story about institutional incentives, structural pressures, and a decades-long failure to prioritise the very capacities that AI now threatens.

Consider the chain of causation. Standardised testing regimes devalued critical thinking in favour of measurable performance. This created an educational culture oriented toward right answers rather than good questions. Into this culture arrived AI tools optimised to produce right answers at unprecedented speed. Students, trained since primary school to value correct outputs over thoughtful processes, adopted these tools with the perfectly rational logic of the system they inhabit. And institutions, pressed by market forces, parental expectations, and competitive dynamics, facilitated this adoption with minimal safeguards.

The students who told RAND researchers that AI is harming their critical thinking are not confused. They are articulating something that adults in the system have been reluctant to say: that the educational infrastructure was never really set up to produce independent thinkers. It was set up to produce compliant test-takers. AI simply automated the compliance.

This framing shifts the burden of responsibility from individual students (who are often blamed for laziness or moral weakness) to the system that shaped their incentives. A 15-year-old who uses ChatGPT to complete an essay is not failing the education system. The education system is failing that 15-year-old, not because it allowed access to AI, but because it created conditions in which using AI to generate a polished essay and submitting it for a grade is the most rational thing a student can do.

What Would a Genuine Alternative Look Like

If the diagnosis is systemic, the treatment must be too. Banning AI, as the brief experiment of early 2023 demonstrated, is neither practical nor effective. Students will use these tools regardless of school policies, just as they use mobile phones in classrooms despite decades of prohibition attempts. The question is not whether students will interact with AI, but what kind of interaction the education system enables.

A genuinely transformative response would begin by acknowledging what the PISA data and international comparisons make clear: that systems emphasising teacher autonomy, reduced standardised testing, and inquiry-based learning produce students who are better equipped for creative and critical thought. This is not a new insight. It is a well-established finding that anglophone education systems have spent decades ignoring in favour of accountability frameworks and market-based reforms.

It would continue by investing in the kind of deliberate AI pedagogy that tools like Khanmigo gesture toward, in which AI is designed to support the development of thinking skills rather than bypass them. This requires not just better software, but better teacher training, smaller class sizes, and assessment reforms that reward the process of thinking rather than the product of having thought. It requires, in short, treating teachers as professionals with the autonomy and resources to teach well, rather than as data-entry operatives tasked with hitting numerical targets.

It would also require a fundamental rethinking of what education is for. If the purpose of schooling is to produce graduates who can pass standardised assessments and demonstrate competence on measurable metrics, then AI is not a threat; it is an upgrade. It does what the system was always asking students to do, only faster and more efficiently. If, however, the purpose of education is to cultivate human beings capable of independent judgement, ethical reasoning, creative problem-solving, and the ability to navigate complexity without algorithmic assistance, then the arrival of AI is not the crisis. It is the revelation that the crisis was already here.

The DfE's guidance in the United Kingdom acknowledges as much, at least implicitly. Its insistence that AI must operate under human oversight, that professional judgement and critical thinking remain essential, and that AI is a tool to inform decisions rather than make them, articulates a philosophy that is sound. Whether the institutional structures, the funding, the teacher training, and the assessment frameworks exist to make that philosophy real is an entirely different question.

The Revelation Nobody Wanted

The most provocative implication of the RAND data is not that AI is making students less capable. It is that the students themselves are more honest about the situation than the institutions that serve them. When 67 per cent of young people say AI is harming their critical thinking, they are not just reporting a technology problem. They are reporting a system problem. They are saying, in effect: we know this is making us worse at thinking, and we know the system gives us no reason to care.

That honesty deserves a response that is equally honest. Not more bans. Not more surveillance software. Not more hand-wringing opinion pieces from adults who themselves rely on AI for their professional work. What the moment demands is a structural reckoning with the values that education systems actually embody, as opposed to the values they claim in their mission statements.

The 95 per cent of faculty who fear student overreliance on AI are right to be concerned. But the overreliance they fear is not a new phenomenon introduced by ChatGPT. It is the logical extension of an educational philosophy that has been cultivating dependency on external authority, whether in the form of textbooks, standardised curricula, or high-stakes assessments, for generations. AI did not break the system. It revealed, with uncomfortable clarity, what the system was always building toward: a model of education in which the appearance of learning matters more than learning itself, and in which the correct output is valued infinitely more than the process of arriving at it.

The students, it turns out, were paying closer attention than anyone gave them credit for. They can see the trap. They can describe it with remarkable precision when asked. They just need the adults in the room to stop pretending it is not there.

References

1. RAND Corporation. “More Students Use AI for Homework, and More Believe It Harms Critical Thinking: Selected Findings from the American Youth Panel.” RAND Research Report RRA4742-1, March 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4742-1.html

2. RAND Corporation. “Student Use of AI for Homework Rises as Concerns Grow About Critical Thinking Skills.” RAND Press Release, March 2026. https://www.rand.org/news/press/2026/03/student-use-of-ai-for-homework-rises-as-concerns-grow.html

3. Watson, C. Edward, and Rainie, Lee. “The AI Challenge: How College Faculty Assess the Present and Future of Higher Education in the Age of AI.” American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University, January 2026. https://www.aacu.org/newsroom/national-survey-95-of-college-faculty-fear-student-overreliance-on-ai-and-diminished-critical-thinking-among-learners-who-use-generative-ai-tools

4. Gerlich, Michael. “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking.” Societies, 15(1), 6, 2025. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

5. Lee, et al. “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers.” Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706598.3713778

6. Freire, Paulo. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Continuum Publishing, 1968.

7. National Education Association. “Standardized Testing is Still Failing Students.” NEA Today. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/standardized-testing-still-failing-students

8. CNN. “New York City public schools ban access to AI tool that could help students cheat.” CNN Business, January 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/tech/chatgpt-nyc-school-ban/index.html

9. NBC News. “New York City public schools remove ChatGPT ban.” NBC News, May 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/chatgpt-ban-dropped-new-york-city-public-schools-rcna85089

10. Education Week. “Students Are Worried That AI Will Hurt Their Critical Thinking Skills.” Education Week, March 2026. https://www.edweek.org/technology/students-are-worried-that-ai-will-hurt-their-critical-thinking-skills/2026/03

11. OECD. “PISA 2022 Results (Volume III): Creative Minds, Creative Schools.” OECD Publishing, June 2024. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-iii_765ee8c2-en.html

12. Khan Academy. “Meet Khanmigo: Khan Academy's AI-powered teaching assistant and tutor.” 2025. https://www.khanmigo.ai/

13. Precedence Research. “AI in Education Market Size to Surge USD 136.79 Bn by 2035.” Precedence Research, 2025. https://www.precedenceresearch.com/ai-in-education-market

14. Christian Science Monitor. “The great calculator debate: Educators disagree over their place in the classroom.” CSMonitor.com, 9 May 1986. https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/0509/dcalc-f.html

15. Centre on Reinventing Public Education. “Shockwaves and Innovations: How Nations Worldwide Are Approaching AI in Education.” CRPE, 2025. https://crpe.org/shockwaves-and-innovations-how-nations-worldwide-are-dealing-with-ai-in-education/

16. Emerald Publishing. “AI policies in school education: a comparative study on China, Singapore, Finland, and the US.” Journal of Science and Technology Policy Management, 2025. https://www.emerald.com/jstpm/article/doi/10.1108/JSTPM-06-2024-0218/1302351/

17. Brookings Institution. “The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Students, Teachers, and Schools.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2010. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/2010b_bpea_dee.pdf

18. Education Week. “Does Your District Ban ChatGPT? Here's What Educators Told Us.” Education Week, February 2024. https://www.edweek.org/technology/does-your-district-ban-chatgpt-heres-what-educators-told-us/2024/02

19. Department for Education. “Generative AI in Education Settings.” UK Government, June 2025. https://thirdspacelearning.com/blog/ai-in-schools/

20. K-12 Dive. “Lighten teacher workloads and reduce burnout with AI designed for education.” K-12 Dive, 2025. https://www.k12dive.com/spons/lighten-teacher-workloads-and-reduce-burnout-with-ai-designed-for-education/758435/

21. Education Futures. “How did we get from 'schools kill creativity' to 'AI kills critical thinking in schools?'” Education Futures, 2025. https://educationfutures.com/post/how-did-we-get-from-schools-kill-creativity-to-ai-kills-creativity-in-schools/

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Anyway she's gone to play Bingo now, and I've found a baseball game to keep me company. Phillies are leading the Cubs 2 to 0 in the top of the 3rd inning.By the time the game ends I'll have worked through the night prayers and should be ready for bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 232.81 lbs. * bp= 154/90 (68)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 banana, coffee cake * 11:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich, crackers and gravy * 12:15 – meat loaf and crackers, pineapple cake

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 07:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 10:00 – listening to Jack in 60 Minutes * 10:30 – start my weekly laundry * 11:00 – listening to The Markley, van Camp and Robbins Show * 12:15 to 14:15 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:30 – research sudden lack of home Internet * 15:15 – listening to OTA local radio while folding laundry * 17:33 – and... the Internet comes back up. * 17:45 – now that I've got access to the Internet again, I've found a baseball game to follow: Chicago Cubs vs Philadelphia Phillies.

Chess: * 17:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Plastic bed: the first work in a while that is weightless, that doesn't really seem to triangulate to any obvious reference points (that I'm aware of). Maybe a bit of those Ken Price acrylic and ink on paper works that I saw in New York last fall. But otherwise its tether is loose. Reminds me of how it felt making a small gouache painting called Quarantine sunrise six years ago; it suddenly asked a lot of questions that seem like they'll lead to more questions, a crop field becoming larger and more fertile and perhaps more impenetrable. I'll have more to say about it, but for today I'm just going to enjoy the feeling.

Tonight on the way home from the gym I was one of two people on the 345 bus toward South Kensington. The other was a guy in tan cargo pants holding a long stick made of what looked like driftwood. He was sitting in the bottom section of the bus monologuing out loud when I got on, but I couldn't hear what he was saying because I had my noise cancelling headphones in. I went and sat in the top section and kept them in, but I could still faintly hear him going and going as we made our way through Battersea into Kensington. When my stop arrived (South Kensington Station), I removed my headphones as I was stepping off the bus and heard the man say: “You've got water in the earth? I'm jumping in.”

Médard a été réduit à ce qu'il a laissé — pas à ce qu'il était.

Cette réduction vient de partout. Des artistes qui ont repris ses formes. Du regard extérieur qui a photographié ses outils. Des institutions qui ont nommé une tradition d'après lui. Tout le monde, avec les meilleures intentions, a construit une image de Médard à partir des traces — pas à partir de la démarche.

Ce texte ne défend pas Médard de façon nostalgique. Il ne dit pas qu'on a oublié un grand homme. Il dit quelque chose de plus difficile : on a mal compris ce qu'il faisait. Et cette incompréhension a des conséquences concrètes sur tout ce qui a suivi.

La démarche de Médard — regarder un sujet jusqu'à le comprendre, puis trouver la forme qui rend cette compréhension visible — elle existe encore aujourd'hui. Elle n'appartient pas au bois. Elle n'appartient pas au XIXe siècle. Elle n'appartient pas à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli.

Elle appartient à quiconque fait ce travail-là, avec n'importe quel outil.

Quand on dit que Médard est le premier sculpteur sur bois de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli — celui qui a initié ce qui allait devenir une tradition reconnue, une identité pour le village entier — on dit quelque chose de vrai. Les historiens s'accordent là-dessus. Avant lui, il n'y avait pas de tradition de sculpture sur bois à Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. Après lui, le village est devenu l'un des centres les plus connus de cet art au Québec. Ce fait est réel et il est important.

Mais voilà le problème : on s'arrête là. On le définit comme le fondateur d'une tradition, et cette définition devient son identité complète. On décrit ce qu'il a produit, où il vivait, ce qu'il a mis en mouvement. On ne dit rien sur pourquoi ses figures tiennent, pourquoi elles ont une présence, pourquoi elles ne ressemblent pas à ce que d'autres ont fait avec les mêmes outils dans le même village.

La matière et la tradition sont réelles. Mais elles ne sont pas la cause. Elles sont le cadre.

Ce qui agit

La matière, les outils et la tradition sont visibles. Ils sont transmissibles. Ils peuvent être reproduits. Mais ce caractère visible ne doit pas masquer leur statut : ils sont en grande partie des résultats.

Ce qui agit réellement se situe ailleurs — dans un regard, dans une exigence, dans une manière de comprendre un sujet. C'est à ce niveau que se prennent les décisions. C'est là que se construit la cohérence.

Médard n'a pas choisi le bois parce que le bois était la bonne réponse abstraite à une question artistique. Il a travaillé le bois parce que c'était la matière disponible, accessible, ancrée dans son milieu. Le bois est une conséquence de sa situation — pas le principe de sa démarche. De la même façon, la tradition qui porte son nom est une conséquence de ce qu'il a produit — pas ce qui l'a rendu possible.

Ce qui produit réellement la qualité du travail, c'est invisible. C'est la façon dont il regardait un visage. La façon dont il décidait que telle expression était juste et telle autre ne l'était pas. Cette capacité-là ne se voit pas dans les outils. Elle se voit dans le résultat — mais seulement si on sait quoi chercher.

Prenons deux sculpteurs. Le premier travaille le bois avec les mêmes outils que Médard — la gouge, le maillet, le bois de tilleul. Il reproduit les formes : les visages arrondis, les épaules carrées, les mains noueuses des travailleurs. Il maîtrise le geste. Mais ses figures restent en surface : les visages sont corrects, les poses sont stables, rien ne pèse.

Le deuxième travaille en numérique, avec ZBrush — un logiciel de sculpture utilisé aujourd'hui dans la quasi-totalité des grands jeux vidéo et productions cinématographiques. Il sculpte un Wolverine. Il passe des heures à comprendre la tension dans la mâchoire de ce personnage, la douleur enfouie sous la rage, le poids d'un corps qui a trop vécu. Sa figure tient. Elle est habitée.

Lequel est le plus proche de Médard ? La réponse est dans la question.

Le rapport au sujet

Chez Médard, la sculpture ne commence pas par la matière. Elle commence par l'observation — observer la figure, comprendre l'expression, chercher une forme lisible, respecter la dignité du sujet. Ces opérations ne relèvent pas d'une simple technique. Elles impliquent une capacité à voir, à juger, à choisir. La technique permet de produire, elle ne suffit pas à comprendre. Une forme peut être maîtrisée sans être juste. Elle peut être efficace sans être habitée.

Dans son journal, Médard écrit à propos du Christ en croix qu'il a devant lui — sculpté dans le noyer : ce beau regard tourné vers le ciel et ses bourreaux, ses deux bras qui cherchent à se détendre et à s'élargir sous l'effort de l'amour divin, ces lèvres entrouvertes et un peu frémissantes. Ce n'est pas une description de technique. C'est une lecture d'un corps dans un état précis. Médard ne décrit pas comment il a taillé les bras — il décrit ce que les bras font, ce qu'ils expriment, ce qu'ils portent. La forme vient après. Elle est la conséquence de cette lecture.

Pour chacune des sept paroles du Christ en croix, il note le changement dans l'expression — comment la tête se déplace, comment les traits se transforment d'une parole à l'autre. À la quatrième parole — Mon Dieu, pourquoi m'avez-vous abandonné — il écrit : sa tête est relevée, renvoyée un peu à l'arrière. Sur ses traits, une poignante souffrance. Un pli affreux se creuse sur l'arcade sourcillière. La bouche entrouverte. La lèvre supérieure semble frémir. C'est de l'observation anatomique au service d'un état intérieur. Pas de la décoration. Pas du style.

Chez Médard, un forgeron n'est pas un corps en position de travail. C'est un homme dont les épaules portent quelque chose — la fatigue, la fierté, la résignation ou la force. Cette lecture précède le geste. Elle conditionne tout ce qui suit.

Chez certains sculpteurs, la forme existe pour elle-même. On cherche une belle courbe, un volume équilibré, une surface bien travaillée. La forme est la fin. Elle n'a pas besoin de justification extérieure. Chez Médard, ce n'est pas comme ça que ça fonctionne. La position des épaules, l'angle de la tête, la profondeur d'un creux dans un visage — tout ça existe parce que ça dit quelque chose sur le sujet. Parce que c'est juste pour cet homme-là, dans cette condition-là. Pas parce que c'est beau en soi.

En d'autres mots : si tu enlèves le sujet, la forme n'a plus de raison d'être ce qu'elle est. Elle dépend de ce qu'elle représente. Elle est la conséquence d'une compréhension — pas d'une décision esthétique.

La matière et le geste

Le bois résiste. Le geste à la gouge ralentit, oblige à décider, à simplifier. Le maillet engage le corps et rend certaines décisions irréversibles. Ces contraintes ne sont pas neutres. Elles orientent la forme. Mais elles ne constituent pas à elles seules la démarche, et la difficulté matérielle ne garantit pas la justesse.

Ce que ça veut dire concrètement : un menuisier habile affronte les mêmes contraintes. Un artisan qui fabrique des meubles depuis vingt ans connaît le bois aussi bien qu'un sculpteur. La difficulté de la matière ne produit pas automatiquement une présence dans la figure. Ce qui produit la présence, c'est ce que le sculpteur cherche à dire — et sa capacité à le traduire malgré les contraintes, ou grâce à elles.

Un sculpteur sur pierre peut passer dix ans à maîtriser le ciseau et produire des formes techniquement irréprochables qui ne disent rien. Un sculpteur numérique peut travailler avec une tablette et ZBrush — cent millions de polygones disponibles, aucune décision irréversible — et produire une figure qui tient, qui pèse, qui regarde. L'outil ne décide pas. Le regard décide.

L'apprentissage

Former un regard, ça veut dire apprendre à voir des choses que la plupart des gens ne voient pas. Pas des choses cachées — des choses présentes, mais que l'œil non formé ne distingue pas. L'apprentissage ne consiste pas seulement à acquérir un savoir-faire. Il consiste à observer, comparer, évaluer — reconnaître ce qui tient et ce qui ne tient pas, distinguer une expression construite d'une expression approximative. Ce travail précède la main. Il conditionne tout le reste. Sans lui, la technique devient un moyen de reproduction.

Dans son journal, Médard décrit comment il a appris l'anatomie pour sculpter son grand crucifix grandeur nature — celui qui se trouve aujourd'hui dans le cimetière de Saint-Jean. Il monte deux tréteaux dans une chambre en haut de sa maison. Il installe un grand miroir à la bonne hauteur. Il place le crucifix en face. Et il se déshabille. Il pose devant le miroir, prend les mouvements du Christ, et avec sa gouge, il creuse pour faire sortir les muscles et les os. Il s'excuse devant le Seigneur avant de commencer — mais il le fait quand même, parce que il le fallait. Plus tard, pour étudier les muscles des jambes et des bras, il retrousse ses vêtements, prend le mouvement voulu, observe dans le miroir. Il assiste des mourants dans sa famille et profite de ces moments pour étudier les expressions — celles qu'il utilisera ensuite pour ses christs souffrants.

Ce n'est pas de l'improvisation. Ce n'est pas de l'instinct. C'est un programme d'apprentissage rigoureux, autodidacte, construit par quelqu'un qui n'a jamais reçu de leçons formelles — il écrit lui-même que le premier sculpteur ou peintre qu'il a rencontré, ça faisait dix ou quinze ans qu'il pratiquait le métier.

Ce programme ressemble trait pour trait à ce qu'on enseigne aujourd'hui dans les meilleures formations de sculpture figurative pour le cinéma et le jeu vidéo. Anatomie du corps humain. Étude du mouvement et de ce que les muscles font sous la peau selon la position. Observation des expressions dans des états réels — pas copiées d'autres figures. Construction des volumes à partir de la compréhension de la structure, pas de la surface. Cohérence entre la posture, l'expression du visage, la tension des mains. Ces formations exigent des étudiants qu'ils dessinent des centaines de fois le même corps dans des positions différentes avant de toucher à un outil de sculpture. Elles exigent qu'ils comprennent pourquoi une épaule monte quand le bras se lève, pourquoi la mâchoire se serre d'une certaine façon sous la douleur, comment le poids d'un corps se distribue différemment selon qu'un homme est épuisé ou en colère.

Médard faisait exactement ça. Seul. Sans école. Sans maître. Avec un miroir et ses morts.

Un sculpteur qui a formé son regard de cette façon voit la différence entre une épaule qui porte un poids et une épaule qui simule un poids. Il voit quand une expression est construite à partir de la compréhension d'un état intérieur, et quand elle est copiée d'une autre figure sans être comprise. Cette capacité ne s'acquiert pas en apprenant des techniques. Elle s'acquiert en regardant longtemps, en comparant, en se trompant, en recommençant.

Rafael Grassetti est l'un des sculpteurs numériques les plus reconnus au monde. Né au Brésil, autodidacte, il a travaillé pour Marvel, DC, Ubisoft, BioWare — puis est devenu directeur artistique de God of War chez Sony Santa Monica. Il a sculpté des dizaines de personnages : Kratos, Wolverine, Hulk, des créatures de la mythologie nordique. Ce qui distingue son travail n'est pas la maîtrise de ZBrush. C'est la rigueur avec laquelle il lit un sujet avant de le sculpter. Dans ses présentations publiques, il revient constamment sur le même point : comprendre la structure, les volumes, les tensions dans un corps avant de commencer. La technique suit. Elle ne précède jamais. C'est exactement ce que faisait Médard.

Apprentissage contemporain

Certains apprentissages contemporains — notamment dans la sculpture figurative pour le cinéma ou le jeu vidéo, en argile ou en numérique — reposent sur une exigence comparable à celle de Médard. Ils imposent une compréhension de l'anatomie, une construction des volumes, une traduction de l'expression, une cohérence d'ensemble. Dans ces contextes, l'erreur est immédiatement perceptible — et c'est instructif de comprendre pourquoi.

Le spectateur, même sans formation, reconnaît instinctivement quand un corps humain sonne faux. Nous avons tous passé notre vie entière à lire des corps, des visages, des postures. Quand un personnage de jeu vidéo a les épaules mal placées, quand une expression ne correspond pas à la situation, quand un poids ne se distribue pas correctement dans un corps — le joueur le sent. Il ne sait pas nécessairement pourquoi. Mais quelque chose ne va pas. C'est une pression que Médard connaissait aussi. Ses figures étaient regardées par des gens qui connaissaient les marins, les forgerons, les paysans — des gens qui savaient immédiatement si une figure sonnait juste ou faux.

God of War (2018) en est un exemple documenté. Les personnages ont été sculptés dans ZBrush par une équipe dirigée par Grassetti. Kratos — personnage central du jeu — devait incarner une transformation : d'un guerrier brutal à un père. Cette tension devait être visible dans le corps, dans le visage, dans la posture. Pas dans le texte. Pas dans la narration. Dans la forme. C'est une exigence du même ordre que celle que Médard s'imposait face à un marin ou un paysan de Charlevoix.

Proximité

On peut alors formuler une hypothèse. Un travail figuratif contemporain, lorsqu'il est conduit avec rigueur, peut parfois se rapprocher davantage de la démarche de Médard que certains travaux inscrits dans un cadre plus traditionnel, lorsque ceux-ci se limitent à la reproduction de formes ou de techniques. Ce rapprochement ne dépend pas du médium. Il dépend de la capacité à comprendre un sujet, à en construire la forme, à en maintenir la lisibilité. Un travail peut être contemporain et juste. Un travail peut être traditionnel et rester en surface.

Grassetti a sculpté Wolverine à plusieurs reprises — personnage Marvel connu pour sa violence contenue, sa douleur chronique, son impossibilité à vieillir et à mourir. Sculpter ce personnage avec rigueur, c'est comprendre ce que signifie porter cette condition dans un corps. La mâchoire serrée. Les épaules légèrement rentrées. Les mains qui ne se ferment jamais tout à fait. Ce n'est pas une démonstration technique. C'est une lecture. C'est le même geste que Médard décrivant la quatrième parole du Christ — cette tête renversée, ce pli sur l'arcade sourcillière, cette lèvre qui frémit.

Limite

Cette hypothèse ne vaut qu'à condition d'être maintenue dans ses limites. Les pratiques contemporaines peuvent elles aussi devenir académiques, répétitives, démonstratives. Le spectaculaire peut masquer une absence de compréhension. La complexité peut dissimuler le vide.

ZBrush permet de générer des détails à une vitesse et une densité impossibles à atteindre à la main — des pores de peau, des veines, des micro-textures de tissu. Cette capacité peut produire des œuvres impressionnantes qui ne sont que de la surface. Un visage couvert de détails peut ne rien exprimer. Un visage simplifié peut tout dire. Aucune pratique n'échappe à cette possibilité.

Ce n'est pas uniquement vrai pour le numérique. Un travail traditionnel peut être tout aussi démonstratif — démonstratif de sa maîtrise technique, de son appartenance à une école, de sa fidélité à un style. La démonstration remplace alors la compréhension. La forme prouve quelque chose au lieu de dire quelque chose. Ce n'est pas parce qu'un travail est difficile, ancien, ou inscrit dans une lignée reconnue qu'il échappe à cette limite. Médard lui-même le voyait. Dans son journal, il écrit avec colère à propos des crucifix de son époque : pourquoi ces christs plantés droits comme des soldats au garde à vous? Pourquoi ces statues sans mouvements? Pourquoi ces figures taillées en caricatures? Il regardait des œuvres produites par des artistes reconnus, signées, dans des matériaux nobles — et il n'y voyait que démonstration sans compréhension.

L'abstraction

L'abstraction engage une autre forme d'exigence. Elle ne peut pas s'appuyer sur le réel, elle ne dispose pas de référence extérieure. Elle demande une cohérence interne, une précision des relations, une nécessité des formes — chaque élément doit être justifié par l'ensemble. Cette exigence est réelle. Mais elle ne porte pas sur le même objet.

Une sculpture abstraite réussie est juste dans ses relations internes — chaque volume, chaque tension, chaque vide est à sa place par rapport à l'ensemble. C'est un travail d'organisation, de cohérence, d'équilibre. Mais cette justesse ne dit rien sur un homme debout sous la pluie. Elle ne dit rien sur ce que pèse la fatigue. Elle ne dit rien sur la dignité d'un corps qui travaille. Ce n'est pas un défaut de l'abstraction. C'est simplement un objet différent.

Un sculpteur peut passer des années dans l'abstraction géométrique — formes épurées, relations précises, matériaux nobles — et n'avoir jamais eu à se demander ce que ressent un corps debout sous la pluie, ou ce que pèse la fatigue sur des épaules de forgeron. Ce n'est pas une critique. C'est une distinction.

Tradition

Médard a travaillé. Il a produit des figures. D'autres artistes ont regardé ces figures et ont tenté de s'en approcher — en reprenant la matière, les outils, les types de personnages, le style reconnaissable. C'est un processus normal. C'est ainsi que les traditions se constituent.

Mais ce faisant, quelque chose s'est déplacé.

Ces artistes n'avaient pas accès à ce qui précédait la forme chez Médard — le regard, la lecture du sujet, le programme d'apprentissage autodidacte qu'il s'était imposé, le travail intérieur qui rendait chaque forme nécessaire. Ils avaient accès au résultat : les visages arrondis, les épaules caractéristiques, les mains des travailleurs, la gamme des types humains. Alors ils ont travaillé à partir du résultat. La tradition de Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, telle qu'elle s'est développée, est en grande partie une interprétation de ce que Médard a laissé — pas une continuation de ce qu'il faisait. Ce n'est pas la même chose.

Quand on définit Médard à partir de cette tradition, on le définit à travers le filtre de ceux qui l'ont interprété. On ne revient pas à lui. On revient à l'image qu'on a construite de lui. Un sculpteur qui apprend à tailler le bois selon les formes de Médard, qui reproduit les postures, les types de personnages, les gammes de tailles — peut produire un travail reconnaissable, vendable, identifiable comme appartenant à une tradition. Il ne fait pas nécessairement ce que faisait Médard. Il fait ce que Médard a laissé — tel que d'autres l'ont compris.

Perception

Quand un journaliste, un historien d'art, ou un visiteur du musée tente de comprendre Médard, il part de ce qu'il voit. Les figures. Les outils exposés. Les photos de l'atelier. Il construit une explication à partir de ces éléments visibles. Cette explication est souvent cohérente. Elle n'est pas fausse. Mais elle reconstruit une logique à partir des traces — elle ne décrit pas le processus réel. C'est comme essayer de comprendre comment un cuisinier travaille en regardant les plats finis sur la table. On peut faire des déductions. Mais on ne voit pas la façon dont il goûte, ajuste, recommence, décide que quelque chose n'est pas encore juste.

Le regard extérieur privilégie ce qui est visible — la matière, les outils, le style — et reconstruit une explication à partir des formes. Ce processus est compréhensible. Mais il simplifie. Il transforme une pratique en image.

Quand on montre une photo de l'atelier de Médard — les gouges alignées, les copeaux au sol, les figures à demi terminées sur l'établi — on montre quelque chose de vrai. Mais ce qu'on ne voit pas dans cette photo, c'est le moment qui précède : Médard dans la chambre du haut de sa maison, devant le grand miroir, prenant les mouvements du Christ sur la croix pour comprendre comment les muscles travaillent dans cette position. Cette partie-là ne se photographie pas. Et c'est elle qui importe.

Figures

Les figures que Médard sculptait — marins, forgerons, paysans — s'inscrivaient dans un monde structuré. Elles incarnaient des fonctions, des tensions, des réalités. Ces figures ne sont pas propres à une époque. On les retrouve aujourd'hui, sous d'autres formes, dans certains univers contemporains — vastes, structurés, largement diffusés — qui participent activement à l'imaginaire actuel.

Un guerrier épuisé qui refuse de plier. Un vieillard qui porte le poids de ce qu'il a fait. Un homme seul face à quelque chose de plus grand que lui. Ces figures existent chez Médard. Elles existent aussi dans God of War, dans les comics Marvel, dans des centaines de récits contemporains.

Dans Dark Souls, André le Forgeron est l'un des personnages les plus aimés de la série. Il est là, dans son sanctuaire, marteau à la main, dans un monde en ruine où tout s'effondre autour de lui. Il forge. Il répare. Il tient. Quand le joueur lui rapporte un vieux morceau de métal ayant appartenu à un ami disparu, André dit simplement : il me manque, ce vieux machin. Vraiment. Ce n'est pas un forgeron décoratif. C'est un homme qui a choisi de rester à son poste quand tout le reste a lâché.

Dans The Witcher 3, Hattori est un maître forgeron — un elfe qui a fui la guerre, abandonné son art, et qui vit caché. Convaincre ce personnage de reforger est toute une quête. Pas parce qu'il n'a plus les mains pour le faire. Parce qu'il n'a plus la raison de le faire. Sa dignité est liée à son travail. Quand il recommence à forger, quelque chose en lui se remet debout.

Ce sont exactement les mêmes figures que Médard sculptait. Pas les mêmes vêtements. Pas la même époque. Pas le même médium. La même condition humaine. Les formes changent. Les structures persistent.

Rigueur

Ce qui rapproche ou éloigne d'une démarche comme celle de Médard ne relève ni du médium, ni du contexte. Cela relève de la rigueur — et la rigueur n'est pas de la sévérité. Ce n'est pas travailler lentement ou longtemps. Ce n'est pas multiplier les détails ou affronter des matières difficiles. C'est ne pas accepter une forme qui ne dit pas ce qu'elle est censée dire. C'est recommencer jusqu'à ce que ça tienne. C'est refuser la facilité d'une expression approximative quand on sait qu'elle n'est pas juste. Une œuvre peut être difficile sans être juste. Elle peut être simple et pourtant tenue. La rigueur ne se mesure pas à la complexité du geste, mais à la cohérence de l'ensemble.

Médard l'avait. Grassetti l'a. Ce n'est pas lié au siècle, au village, ou à l'outil.

Médard travaillait dans un village de pêcheurs, avec des outils simples, des modèles tirés de sa vie quotidienne. Grassetti travaille à Los Angeles, avec un logiciel primé aux Oscars techniques, pour des franchises évaluées à des milliards. La distance entre ces deux mondes est totale. L'exigence est la même.

Ouverture

Si la matière, les outils et la tradition ne suffisent pas à définir une démarche — si ce qui agit se situe dans le regard, dans la compréhension du sujet et dans la rigueur — alors la question reste ouverte : qu'est-ce qui, aujourd'hui, permet réellement de s'en approcher ?

Cette question n'est pas rhétorique. Elle est réelle. Elle s'adresse à quiconque veut travailler dans la continuité de ce que Médard a fait — non pas en reproduisant ses formes, non pas en utilisant ses outils, non pas en s'inscrivant dans sa tradition telle qu'elle a été interprétée. Mais en faisant ce qu'il faisait : regarder un sujet jusqu'à le comprendre. Puis trouver la forme qui rend cette compréhension visible.

Médard mérite mieux que l'image qu'on a construite de lui.

Raphael Maltais Bourgault

1. Multi-Disciplinary Critical Mass

Don't just hire the best expert. Hire the best physicist, the best chemist, and the best mathematician — then put them in the same room. Mervin Kelly believed different fields create a chain reaction that no single mind can. When you're stuck, the answer is probably in someone else's domain.

2. The Architectural Collision

Bell Labs built 700-foot hallways. On purpose. Physical space is organizational policy. Hallways force random meetings. Random meetings move ideas. If you work in a silo, you're not just isolated — you're making yourself less creative by design.

3. The Problem-Rich Asset

The hardest problems are the best problems. Bell Labs treated the growing phone system as a “problem-rich environment.” Difficult problems sharpen focus and concentrate talent. Don't avoid the hard ones. They contain the most valuable opportunities.

4. The Economic Filter

Every idea must pass one test: is it better, cheaper, or both? If not, it's worthless. Mervin Kelly used this filter to kill projects before they consumed resources. Apply it ruthlessly. Stop building solutions looking for problems.

5. Missing-Piece Investigation

Before solving a problem, find what you don't know. Kelly forced his staff to locate the missing puzzle piece before starting any work. Most wasted effort comes from working on things you already understand. Define the gap first.

6. The Full-Cycle Innovation

Discovery without production is a hobby. Jack Morton argued that a breakthrough isn't an innovation until it's manufactured and sold. The “boring” work of production matters as much as the “exciting” work of discovery. Build the whole cycle or you haven't built anything.

7. First Principles Understanding

Bell Labs abandoned Edison's “cut-and-try” approach. They learned why things work — and why they fail. Understanding the fundamental laws of a system lets you improve it by orders of magnitude. Whenever you face a recurring failure, stop guessing. Learn the rules.

8. Functional Impurity

Perfect materials make poor transistors. Bell metallurgists discovered silicon only worked with a tiny amount of boron — a deliberate flaw. The deviation from the norm is often the breakthrough. Look for the well-placed impurity.

9. Circumscribed Freedom

Bell Labs gave researchers freedom to explore, but only within a mission: improve human communication. This “circumscribed freedom” let people wander without getting lost. Give yourself permission to follow curiosity — but keep it tethered to something real.

From The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner.

There is little as beautiful as comely feet.

Awake! Awake! Clothe yourself with strength, O Zion! Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city! For no more will the uncircumcised and unclean one enter into you.

Shake off the dust, rise and take a seat, O Jerusalem. Loosen the bonds on your neck, O captive daughter of Zion.

For this is what Jehovah says: “You were sold for nothing, And without money you will be repurchased.”

For this is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah says: “At first my people went down to Egypt to live there as foreigners; Then Assyria oppressed them without cause.”

“What, then, should I do here?” declares Jehovah. “For my people were taken for nothing. Those ruling over them keep howling in triumph,” declares Jehovah, “And constantly, all day long, my name is treated with disrespect.

For that reason my people will know my name; For that reason they will know in that day that I am the One speaking. Look, it is I!”

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the one bringing good news, The one proclaiming peace, The one bringing good news of something better, The one proclaiming salvation, The one saying to Zion: “Your God has become King!”

Listen! Your watchmen raise their voice. In unison they shout joyfully, For they will see it clearly when Jehovah gathers back Zion.

Become cheerful, shout joyfully in unison, you ruins of Jerusalem, For Jehovah has comforted his people; he has repurchased Jerusalem.

Jehovah has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations; All the ends of the earth will see the acts of salvation of our God.

Turn away, turn away, get out of there, touch nothing unclean! Get out from the midst of her, keep yourselves clean, You who are carrying the utensils of Jehovah.

For you will not depart in panic, Nor will you have to flee, For Jehovah will go ahead of you, And the God of Israel will be your rear guard.

Look! My servant will act with insight. He will be raised up high, He will be elevated and greatly exalted.

Just as there were many who stared at him in amazement —For his appearance was disfigured more than that of any other man And his stately form more than that of mankind—

So he will startle many nations. Kings will shut their mouths before him, Because they will see what they had not been told And give consideration to what they had not heard.

Who has put faith in the thing heard from us? And as for the arm of Jehovah, to whom has it been revealed?

He will come up like a twig before him, like a root out of parched land. No stately form does he have, nor any splendor; And when we see him, his appearance does not draw us to him.

He was despised and was avoided by men, A man who was meant for pains and was familiar with sickness. It was as if his face were hidden from us. He was despised, and we held him as of no account.

Truly he himself carried our sicknesses, And he bore our pains. But we considered him as plagued, stricken by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgression; He was crushed for our errors. He bore the punishment for our peace, And because of his wounds we were healed.

Like sheep we have all wandered about, Each has turned his own way, And Jehovah has caused the error of us all to meet up with him.

He was oppressed and he let himself be afflicted, But he would not open his mouth. He was brought like a sheep to the slaughter, Like a ewe that is silent before its shearers, And he would not open his mouth.

Because of restraint and judgment he was taken away; And who will concern himself with the details of his generation? For he was cut off from the land of the living; Because of the transgression of my people he received the stroke.

And he was given a burial place with the wicked, And with the rich in his death, Although he had done no wrong And there was no deception in his mouth.

But it was Jehovah’s will to crush him, and he let him become sick. If you will present his life as a guilt offering, He will see his offspring, he will prolong his days, And through him the delight of Jehovah will have success.

Because of his anguish, he will see and be satisfied. By means of his knowledge the righteous one, my servant, Will bring a righteous standing to many people, And their errors he will bear.

For that reason I will assign him a portion among the many, And he will apportion the spoil with the mighty, Because he poured out his life even to death And was counted among the transgressors; He carried the sin of many people, And he interceded for the transgressors.

Skriving for å strukturere tanker

Jeg har tatt universitetspedagogikk og et av kursene jeg tok handlet om å skrive for å lære. En viktig bruk av tekstskaping er å hjelpe oss rydde i tankene, finne sammenhenger og avdekke hva vi kan og hva vi bør lære. Som naturviter skrev jeg ikke fryktelig mange stiler eller essays, men matematiske utlendinger og lignende er også en form for skriving. Når vi overlater alt skrivearbeidet til maskinen får vi ikke brukt hjernen. Hvis du vil utvikle dine ferdigheter, bør du derfor gjøre deler av skrivearbeidet selv. Strukturer selv, be om kritikk. Skriv selv, be om forslag til forbedringer. Jeg kunne ha overlatt skrivingen til min venn, Claude, men jeg vil ikke bli for ukritisk. Jeg skriver fortsatt selv fordi jeg liker å holde hjernen i gang.

Skriving som sosial aktivitet

Når vi skriver er det også en slags sosial aktivitet. Vi ser for oss en mottaker eller publikum når vi skriver. Leseren ser for seg en avsender eller forfatter når de leser. Selv når vi skriver tørre, faglige tekster som vitenskapelige artikler eller tekniske rapporter, så er det en del av det å bygge en fagkultur. Hva skjer med den kulturen når du ikke lenger kan stole på at avsenderen er et menneske og heller ikke er sikker på at ledere vil være mennesker?

Jeg skriver

Jeg pleide å hate å skrive så andre kunne lese det jeg skriver. Etter å ha delt tekster mange nok ganger har jeg vent meg til det og jeg liker nesten å skrive så andre kan lese hvis de vil. Hvor mange kommer til å lese tekster på nett om et års tid? Aktiviteten på nett er litt døende. Men hvis vi mennesker slutter å skrive og lese på nett, vil internett slik vi kjenner det garantert dø. Og det er jo litt trist om vi bare sitter igjen med agenter og andre typer roboter som kommuniserer. Jeg liker fortsatt drømmen om verdensveven hvor vi kommuniserer oss mennesker imellom.

Today, I did the preliminary turning on four cholla and resin pen blanks I poured a week ago. Since then, I repaired one of the blanks that broke coming out of the mold, drilled holes through the middles of them, glued in the pen tubes, and repaired another that broke as I was squaring up the end, and trimmed all four to the proper lengths. One had a bubble right next to the end of the pen tube, so I fixed that with a tiny bit of resin.

The blanks generally break when I start messing with them before they’ve had a chance to fully cure, because the slow hardener I’m using takes 3-4 days to finish curing. Before that, parts are brittle, and other parts are still soft and sometimes sticky.

After a weekend of zero shop time, but it was ok (I didn’t wait for the last patch to fully cure), I did the preliminary turning on the blanks today, and patched some bubbles in the resin with a contrasting color and CA glue, then sanded the blanks to 400 grit, and applied a coat of tung oil to protect the cholla canes.

That will cure overnight, and tomorrow I’ll sand to 800 or 2000 grit with wet-dry paper and deal with any remaining imperfections, and apply another coat of tung oil. Thursday (a couple more days with no shop time are coming this week), I can maybe finish polishing the blanks and assemble the pens, and have them ready on Friday.



Yeah, they’re pretty, but I always forget just how involved these things are, and just how long it takes to go from raw materials to something I can give away, because nobody would pay what I would need to ask for them to make a decent wage making these things, and I need to remember that when folks at the senior center tell me I should sell my pens, because everyone will want one!

Plus, my sweetie doesn’t ask what I’m up to in the shop as often any more. ;–)

Home is where you find it—and yourself.

When I flew from at the start of December last year (2025), I expected a respite. A break. A sabbatical. To return to it recovered and refreshed—a slightly different man, perhaps—but one back at home in any case, ready to take over the world.

Or at least content to continue existing in it. I realized in leaving that... I had already left emotionally many months earlier.

Home… where a man hangs his hat. Where the heart is. Everyone calls someplace home. Even when we no longer have an address, we have something—some place—we know as home.

A place we are from, if nothing else.

I've been on the road for months. Four, to be precise. I set foot, in whole or part, in ten countries—living for a time in eight: Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, and Ireland—before landing back stateside in Florida.

Talk was always about “when we get back home” and “since we left home.” In time, homesickness set in for my wife.

But for me, it never came calling.

For weeks, home was just a shorthand word for comfort and routine. Knowing where my toothbrush was kept. How far it was to the grocery store. Hell—where the grocery store even was. It meant something familiar was left behind.

But it also meant leaving something else behind—something heavier.

A feeling of emptiness. Frustration. Aggravation. Sitting 5,000 miles away alongside friends and family.

Home wasn’t just convenience.

It was negativity. It was frustration. It was a place from which to escape.

And at first, that’s exactly what this exodus was—an escape from the ordinary into the extraordinary. Everything was new. Exciting. Overwhelming.

But by week five, settled into a rhythm in Spain, I realized something unsettling:

the old demons hadn’t been left behind on some dusty shelf.

They had come with me.

Tucked neatly into the shadowed places of my heart and mind.

Family and friends... the familiar... were behind me, yes—but not gone. Through messages, calls, and photos, I found that those I loved most were still with me on the journey.

And stranger still—the new faces I met didn’t replace the old ones.

My heart grew, and my life to include them... My home grew bigger still.

And as old routines dissolved and new ones took shape—figuring out transit, where to shop, how to live—I began to understand something I hadn’t before:

Home isn’t where I am.

It is intangible and carried:

In my mind and heart.

This was something new. Something else.

Especially for her.

I live a reality of expectations and obligations—but my heart and mind move in another realm. One that is loyal. Passionate. Entirely hers.

Even thousands of miles away, my wanting is with her.

My thoughts—every day.

I wake and sleep with her as the first and final presence in my mind.

So when a stranger asks, “Where are you from?”

I give them a myth... something to chew on and relish in. More description of past than present.

Or future.

It is answering a deeper question:

Where does the soul return to, when there is nowhere left to go?

And for me—

home is no longer a place on a map.

It is a convergence.

Of memory. Of longing. Of love.

Of that which I carry, and refuse to let go.

Home, is hope.

#poetry #wyst

A tal efecto exhibieron documentos con grandes sellos rojos que -según ellos- habían sido expedidos por la secretaría del mismísimo emperador.

Un sabio taoísta se acercó para ver bien a los monos y la gente lo fue empujando para que se fuera.

-¿Por qué te empujan? -le preguntó una anciana.

-Para que no les agüe la fiesta.

La anciana, confundida, le volvió a preguntar:

-¿Pero no ven que los van a engañar?

A lo que el sabio concluyó:

-Sí, pero eso será mañana. ¡Hoy creen que van a engañar a los monos!

Let’s start with the base tool, upon which all the rest of modern AI is built: the raw, unrefined, unassisted Large Language Model.

Its limitations are fairly obvious:

• It makes shit up: It makes shit up in a way that's fundamental to its constitution, since what it is constructed to do is imitate human writing, which is itself largely neutral to truth and does not intrinsically contain self-correction mechanisms in that sense. In part, this results from the innate versatility of the language, that allows many things to be said regardless if they're true or not (a principle upon the very concept of fiction rests), which leaves mere statistical frequency to distinguish “3 plus 4 is 9” from “3 plus 4 is 7” as one being truer than the other, by virtue of the mathematically correct statements being repeated more often. The LLM doesn't encode a proper math engine in its inference layers (which for a computer is most ironic), which means that, like with most other topics, its deliberations are generally only true by mere statistical approximation.

• It is beholden to the premise: given that a fundamental quality of (passable) human-made text is coherence, both syntactic, semantic, and thematic, this generally rubs off on an LLM, which (before post-training) will generally go along with whatever premise given, keeping up with its thrust and its tone, by virtue of being trained to generate output that is coherent with the input. This is the base appeal of an LLM (that it is able to elaborate on any given premise) but it also makes it extremely prone to syncopancy, by design enabling even the most deranged flights of fancy and, in some cases, conducting a “technological folie à deux” devolving into cases of AI psychosis.

• It doesn't know when to stop: the single output mode that an LLM has is to generate the next token in a linear sequence. Taken as a parallel with someone talking (a pareidolia that most, if not every AI company has been very eager to exploit), it's like a conversationalist that simply does not know when (or how!) to stop talking in order to actually think some things through. Its single process is to keep talking, even when it runs into serious informational snags (like self-contradiction, or being stuck in circles repeating the same things over and over) simply because that's all the machine is designed to output, one word after another by mere statistical inertia.

Think of it like this: when asked to complete “8 times 12 is:”, a person would generally parse the phrase, stop and switch mental processes in order to make a mental calculation, and only upon completing it, they would write down “96.” If they didn't feel in the mood or otherwise felt particularly sure of themselves, they could go by sheer memory and say whatever number felt most likely in the moment, which is the closest parallel to what an LLM does with every generated token.

An LLM does not innately possess such a context-switch procedure: neither the means by which to realize it is needed, nor the tools to operate once this realization happens. As we do something, there’s checks running through our head that make us go “this is something I should calculate” or “this is something I should gather data for” or “oh I should check if this is true” or “this is an important step, is this actually in line with what i was supposed to be doing?”.

No such tripwires are in place for an LLM’s stream-of-consciousness output. After the input is given, it’s off to the races and barely anything that can be said to be a novel decision is made after that. This is the reason why an LLM is said to be unable to make art – it doesn’t go through the process of figuring things out, and in not doing so it doesn’t make the decisions that impregnate a piece of art with personal meaning.

Of course, by now the AI what we work with is not just a mere raw LLM, but refined post-trained models, usually primed to generate a preliminary “thinking mode” (spending tokens on summarizing and evaluating the situation before outputting user-directed tokens), accompanied by tailored prompt add-ons (such as web searches to plump the input context with updated data), a variety of tools that the LLM can access and is trained to use (like operating your calendar, your mailbox, your console), as well as structured environments where the LLM has access to automatic feedback (like a compiler output) that the model can iterate upon (the so-called agentic loops).

To be straight, this is the industry moving in the right direction. We want AI to make decisions, and to do so properly these decisions have to be frequent and based in actual searches, reasoning and/or calculations. For example, when you look at eg. the recognized best coding practices (such as version control, comprehensive test suites, continuous integration, meaningful documentation, fast feedback cycles, iterative development, focus on users, small batches of work), one of their main thrust is to both provide quick, cogent feedback and empower rapid iteration based on said feedback, so that the steering and decision-making can be more fine-grained, and thus generally easier to execute and more effective in the overall. This is a project structure that benefits both humans and LLMs, with the likes of compiler output providing the course correction that a LLM sorely needs to direct itself. These approaches are working; they are providing real results as they shore up the weaknesses of the raw unrefined LLM.

However, we are still in the infancy of agents and the methods we use are still crude. The current supports to the LLM’s functioning are either post-training reinforcement learning to alter its general functioning, specific prompts, or ad-hoc tools with text-based invocations. We have access to Claude Code’s source and we know nothing fancier than this is being done under the hood; this is as far as the state of the art goes. All of these extra functionalities keep relying on the LLM’s text generation as the fundamental mode of operation, which remains prone to both hallucination and missing the point even as it appears to go in the right direction. They are rigid fixes to constrain and direct behaviour, but in their rigidness they are both wasteful and brittle. Modern AI still has a substantial failure rate for complex tasks, and this shows none better than the slew of new bugs and uptime crises that has plagued the companies that have forcefully imposed AI adoption in their internal coding practices (like Microsoft, or Amazon)

Even as we are reaching into capabilities that seem to genuinely surpass human feats (such as Claude Mythos being able to find decades-old exploits in our most used and supervised code), we are running against the limitations of the method, and we cannot hope much longer to improve the LLM’s approximations by just training it more. The gains we’re getting in the last years have been not just more fragile but increasingly expensive, if not outright wasteful, on both the training side and the inference side. OpenAI has declared that it intends to spend 120 billions of dollars in model training alone in the next two years, which is a genuinely mind-boggling amount.

On the user side, token burn has increased in recent years by orders of magnitude (far outstripping the efficiency gains of newer models), and all this compute is starting to run against the physical and economical limits of the industry. A paradigm shift is increasingly necessary to sustain hopes of the technology continuing to increase in capabilities. So what can be done about this? Where can a fault be located, and what can be done about it?

What we have now is a model that is trained specifically on human text, which (both discursive text and programming code) is the result of thinking instead of the process. The text does not contain the thinking process that resulted in the text, much like a house does not contain cranes or scaffolding or cement mixer trucks. An LLM by default will brazenly trudge forward because it is drawing reference from a corpus that does the same; text is generally done in order to expose a singular point, in one continued stream, without all the searching, thinking, trying and wandering that got someone there, and if some of that text follows that pattern it is a vanishing amount.

To truly teach an LLM to think, it would have to

• structure its output so that it delegates very frequently to other tools (including web search, math operations, and various other checks) in order to maintain closeness to truth/task.

• This would most likely need some sort of backtracking/future-seeing modality where the model is able to reason and second-guess what it is going to say X tokens in the future and trigger second-guessing mechanisms on those

• To implement those triggers reasonably, the procedure to check for (effectively) alignment on the to-be-generated output has to be both fairly snappy and only occasionally activated; thankfully we do have inspiration to draw from the way that our neurons work.

Neurons are semi-anarchically organized into collectives that fulfill different mental functions, and they get fed depending if they get to operate or not, so the neurons are constantly on the lookout to take work from one another once the right occasion comes, and for example this can work by way of threshold activation, where a neuron activates only after a weighted sum of the stimuli it receives passes a certain threshold.

And an LLM is already a neural network of a kind, operating by similar algorithms, so there’s definitely potential there. However, to realize this potential, the LLM would have to be used in ways that go beyond mere next-token generation, and instead the model would have to be harnessed in new, slightly different ways. It is my belief that an LLM is (partly) wasted on mere next-token prediction, when the underlying model that allows for that contains effectively a vector field of human meaning, albeit filtered through words.

If there’s anything that LLMs have shown us in recent years, is that words (as well as other input methods like images) encode a whole lot of meaning that can be captured by a model. From here, there reasonably should be other ways to harness this organized meaning-space other than just checking how a phrase continues. What if we manage to locate the point in vector space that approximates some concept of ours and decide to check text against it to see if it passes a threshold or not (which is likely similar to what we do when we monitor the tone of a piece of text)? It feels to me like a lot of the hard work has already been done, namely crafting such a vector space. The LLM science is young and far from everything has been tried; I think something of worth may be found in that direction. The paredolic thrust of treating an LLM as mere text generator can only carry us so far, and I believe a lot of progress could be done once we figure out proper tripwires for an LLM that are not reliant on the stream-of-text catching itself.

Här är ett exempel på hur det kan se ut.

En av de mest uppskattade funktionerna är möjligheten att följa sin musikstatistik över tid. Användaren kan se hur smaken förändras, vilka låtar som varit mest spelade under olika perioder och upptäcka mönster i sitt lyssnande. Volt.fm erbjuder också jämförelser, där man kan se hur ens musiksmak står sig i relation till andra användare, vilket skapar en social dimension kring musikupplevelsen.

Utöver statistik fungerar tjänsten som ett verktyg för upptäckt. Genom analyser av lyssningshistoriken kan Volt.fm ge rekommendationer på nya artister och låtar som passar ens personliga smakprofil. Detta gör det enklare att hitta ny musik utan att behöva leta aktivt.

Volt.fm en tjänst som kombinerar dataanalys och musikintresse på ett engagerande sätt. Den tilltalar både den nyfikna lyssnaren som vill förstå sina vanor och den passionerade musikfantasten som vill utforska nya ljudvärldar baserat på sin egen smak.

As an experiment my wife bought a custom family photo book from Shutterfly to see if he’ll look at the photos there instead on my phone. It was a failure. But a good thing about it is my younger son loves it. I see him always looking towards the photo book and gets sad if we don’t sit and look at it.

While not ideal it sure beats letting them play mindless games and looking at Cocomelon videos. If you have the chance buy a photo book and include that in your children’s collection of books to look at. Hopefully it gets used well.

#children #phone #photobook #pictures #videos

Here's the direct link if you don't believe me...

#politics

Budapest är en av Europas mest fascinerande städer, där historia, kultur och modernitet möts i en fängslande miljö. Om du planerar en långhelg här kommer du att upptäcka en stad som bjuder på allt från imponerande arkitektur och heta källor till en levande mat- och dryckesscen. Här är en guide som kommer att inspirera dig att utforska varje hörn av denna vackra huvudstad i Ungern.

När du stiger in i Budapest känns det som att kliva in i en annan tid. Staden är uppdelad av Donau, som skiljer Buda och Pest åt och binder dem samman med sina ikoniska broar, som Széchenyi kedjebron. Börja din resa på den västra sidan, Buda, som känns lite mer lugn och traditionell. Här ligger det magnifika Budaslottet, som reser sig ovanför staden och erbjuder en hisnande utsikt över Donau. Slottet är inte bara ett historiskt monument utan också hem för flera museer, inklusive Ungerns nationalgalleri. Promenera genom slottets gator och upptäck de smala gränderna som leder dig tillbaka till medeltiden. Borterst på den västra sidan hittar du Gellértberget, vars topp erbjuder en av de bästa vyerna över hela staden. Om du är i form kan du ta trapporna upp, eller välja den mer bekväma hissen som går upp till citadellet, där du kan njuta av ett glas vin medan du blickar ut över den gyllene Donau.

När du korsar bron till den östra sidan, Pest, möts du av en helt annan atmosfär. Här är det liv och rörelse, med butiker, kaféer och restauranger som lockar både lokalbefolkningen och turister. Hjärtpunkten i Pest är den storslagna Andrássy-avenyn, som påminner om Paris med sina eleganta byggnader och trädkantade boulevarder. Längs avenyn hittar du operahuset, en av de vackraste byggnaderna i Europa, och St. Stephans basilika, som är uppkallad efter Ungerns första kung och rymmer en helig handrelik. Klättra upp i basilikan och njut av panoramautsikten över takåsarna och den omgivande staden. Om du är i stan under julen kommer Andrássy-avenyn att förvandlas till en sagolik marknad med glödlampor, julgranar och doften av kryddor som lockar besökarna till julstämning.

En av de mest unika upplevelserna i Budapest är dess termiska bad. Staden ligger på en underjordisk varmvattenkälla, och baden har varit en del av lokalbefolkningens liv i århundraden. Det mest berömda badet är Széchenyibadet, ett magnifiskt jugendbad med turkisk inspirerad arkitektur. Här kan du simma i de heta bassängerna, njuta av ångbadet eller bara ligga och slappna av i den varma vattnet omgiven av mosaik och skulpturer. Om du vill ha en mer intim upplevelse kan du besöka Gellértbadet, som är lika vackert och dessutom har en utomhuspool med havsutsikt. Baden är inte bara en plats att tvätta sig på, utan en upplevelse i sig, där du kan tillbringa hela dagen omgiven av historia och avkoppling.

När kvällen faller på bör du ge dig ut och utforska stadens nattliv. Budapest har ett mycket levande nattliv, med allt från traditionella ungerska vinbarer till moderna klubbar. Om du vill prova lokal mat och dryck bör du besöka en ruin pub, som är en typisk ungersk företeelse. Dessa pubar ligger i gamla, övergivna hus och trädgårdar, och har en unik atmosfär med ljus, musik och en mix av lokalbefolkning och turister. Szimpla Kert är den mest berömda ruin puben och ett måste att besöka. Här kan du njuta av ungerska specialiteter som goulash, langos och chimney cake, medan du lyssnar på live musik och umgås med nya människor. För en mer sofistikerad kväll kan du besöka en vinbar i hjärtat av Budapest, där du kan prova ungerska viner som Egri Bikavér, eller “Tjurens blod”, en kraftfull rödvin som är perfekt att njuta av tillsammans med en tallrik korv och ost.

Mat är en stor del av den ungerska kulturen, och Budapest har en fantastisk mat- och dryckesscen som sträcker sig från traditionella rätter till moderna fusionkök. För att verkligen uppleva den ungerska maten bör du besöka en traditionell étkezde, eller matsal, där du kan njuta av hemlagad mat till rimliga priser. Rosenstein Vendéglő är ett utmärkt val, där du kan prova rätter som paprikachicken med nokedli, en typ av ungerska nudlar. Om du är ute efter en mer modern upplevelse kan du besöka Menza, en restaurang som serverar ungerska rätter med en modern twist i en retro miljö. För en snabbare måltid kan du prova street food, som langos, en friterad degkaka toppad med gräddfil och ost, eller chimney cake, en söt, spiralformad bakelse som är perfekt att njuta av medan du promenerar längs Donau.

För dem som älskar konst och historia är Budapest en skattkista. Staden har flera museer som är värda ett besök, som Ungerns nationalmuseum, som berättar historien om landet från romartiden till idag. På andra sidan Donau ligger Konstmuseumet, som rymmer verk av europeiska mästare som Rembrandt och El Greco. Om du är intresserad av konstscenen bör du också besöka House of Terror, ett museum som berättar historien om de två diktaturerna som har präglat Ungern under 1900-talet. Museet ligger i en byggnad som tidigare var säte för den nazistiska och kommunistiska regimen, och erbjuder en gripande och tankeväckande upplevelse.

När det kommer till boende har Budapest något för alla smaker och budgetar. Om du vill bo mitt i hjärtat av staden och ha allt inom gångavstånd bör du välja ett hotell på eller nära Andrássy-avenyn. Hotel Continental Budapest är ett utmärkt val, med en fantastisk utsikt över Donau och en pool på taket. För en mer intim och charmig upplevelse kan du välja att bo på ett hotell i hjärtat av Buda, som Budapest Castle Hotel, som ligger i ett gammalt kloster och erbjuder en lugn reträtt mitt i staden. Om du är på jakt efter lyx och bekvämlighet är Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace ett av de finaste hotellen i Europa, med en hisnande arkitektur och en spaavdelning som är svår att motstå.

En av de bästa sakerna med Budapest är att staden är både historisk och modern på samma gång. Du kan tillbringa en dag med att utforska gamla ruiner och kungliga slott, och nästa dag njuta av en cocktail på en rooftopbar med utsikt över hela staden. För en riktig höjdpunkt kan du besöka 360 Bar, en bar som ligger på taket av ett hus i centrala Budapest. Här kan du njuta av en drink medan du tittar ut över hustaken och de upplysta monumenten som lyser upp natthimlen.

Om du har tid över bör du också ge dig ut på en utflykt utanför staden. Óbuda, den gamla delen av Budapest, är en trevlig plats att besöka för att se de romerska ruinerna och njuta av en lugnare atmosfär. En annan populär utflykt är till Margaretön, en grön ö mitt i Donau som är perfekt för en picnic eller en promenad. Ön är också hem för en konsertsal och en liten zoo, vilket gör den till en perfekt plats för en familjedag.

Budapest är en stad som aldrig tar slut på saker att göra och upplevelser att utforska. Oavsett om du är där för att njuta av den rika historien, de heta källorna, den fantastiska maten eller det pulserande nattlivet, kommer du att lämna staden med minnen som varar livet ut. Så packa dina väskor, boka ditt flyg och ge dig ut på ett äventyr i en av Europas vackraste städer. Budapest väntar på dig!

Some WordPress plugin businesses won't survive this.

If you spend any time on social media, you'll see that revenue is coming down for WordPress plugin businesses, and who knows where they'll bottom out. Honestly, some of them are screwed, and it's not looking good for others.

For as long as I can remember, the defensible position for most plugins has always been:

• Feature gating
• Add-ons
• Support

There are others to consider, but these have always been the main reasons why you'd renew a license. Today, Claude (or pretty much any AI offering) sorta makes them less critical.

For example, consider a plugin that revokes access to certain settings unless you have a valid license code. Or, one that shows a constant license nag on your dashboard. Well, now you can just whip up Claude and tell it to remove the code that does this and you're done. You don't have to be a developer, it just takes a couple of seconds.

For add-ons, it does sort of depend on the scope. Those that add simple integrations are no longer a necessary buy. Why pay extra to connect to Mailchimp when AI can just whip up a mini-plugin for you? Pretty much any connector add-on is a quick fix. Okay, it's perhaps a tad longer if you're not a developer through trial and error. But if you have a client and you're a dev, you can save your client money by just having AI build out the connection really quick.

There will always be a need for support, but less so now when you can just ask AI for help to troubleshoot something. This is especially true for plugins that are more of a utility. Now, on the other side of this is that many plugin companies are using AI to help them give better support. Of the three, this one is the area that is still a strong motivator to renew a license, plugin depending.

Now What?

You know, I don't have a definitive solution for this one. I don't think anyone does as the market sands are still shifting. AI has really challenged the status quo of tech.

For me, here are the areas I'd be thinking about if running a WordPress plugin business:

Community

AI can't recreate it. This is a wedge. This is why someone will want to renew. Many plugins have big communities but they are an afterthought. Some even consider them a burden. It's time to make it a top priority. For example, I would start evaluating the utility of adding a Slack or Discord offering. Or, potentially investing more heavily into a FB group if it already exists.

SaaS Certain Features

Look for the areas that create the most support and try to find a way to make those a SaaS to improve user experience, dependability and to reduce headaches for both you and your customers. If you're hung up on keeping that part of the code open source, you can still do so if you want (though it's not necessary).

Invest in New Marketing

Blogging is still worth it, on some level, but if that's all you do then time to move into new areas. Connection matters, and for the moment, YouTube is how you do that. I'd invest heavily into YouTube to bring about the human element in an AI world (this goes back to my first point on community).

WordPress Isn't Going Anywhere

This is not the “death” of the platform by any means. New avenues are going to open up, and that means for WordPress plugins as well. This is just a market shift, and there will be some growing pains along the way. For some, this means the end of their business. That's the nature of the free market.

#WordPress

Und dennoch: Wir leben in einer parlamentarischen Demokratie. Politische Initiativen, zivilgesellschaftliches Engagement und Bewegungen können Debatten anstoßen, Druck erzeugen und Perspektiven verschieben. Doch die konkrete Umsetzung politischer Vorhaben – also das Organisieren von Mehrheiten, das Verabschieden von Gesetzen, das Gestalten von Regierungspolitik – erfolgt nach wie vor maßgeblich über Parteien. Wer sie strukturell schwächt, schwächt damit auch die zentralen Instrumente demokratischer Gestaltung.

Gleichzeitig wäre es verkürzt, Engagement außerhalb von Parteien als bloße Konkurrenz zu begreifen. Im Gegenteil: Oft sind es gerade Bewegungen und Projekte, die Themen setzen, Parteien herausfordern und sie inhaltlich voranbringen. Demokratische Erneuerung entsteht im Zusammenspiel – nicht im Gegeneinander. Weder Parteien allein noch zivilgesellschaftliche Initiativen für sich genommen reichen aus, um nachhaltige Veränderungen zu bewirken.

Gerade deshalb erscheint es mir aber als sehr sinnvoll, auch dort Verantwortung zu übernehmen, wo politische Entscheidungen tatsächlich getroffen werden. Politik beginnt für die meisten Menschen vor der eigenen Haustür – und sie bleibt auch dann wirksam, wenn man bereit ist, Spannungen und Widersprüche innerhalb von Parteien auszuhalten. Diese Auseinandersetzungen sind kein Zeichen von Schwäche, sondern Teil demokratischer Praxis.

Ich würde mir deshalb wünschen, dass mehr Menschen diesen Weg wählen und sich in einer Partei engagieren. Nicht aus naivem Optimismus, sondern aus einer realistischen Einschätzung heraus: Parteien sind veränderbar, wenn auch nicht beliebig. Einfluss durch Engagement ist nicht garantiert – dafür sind sie zu komplex und zu stark in institutionelle Logiken eingebunden. Und doch zeigt sich immer wieder, gerade im Wahlkampf oder in Phasen intensiver Mobilisierung: Keine Parteispitze kann ohne eine aktive, überzeugte Basis nachhaltig wirken – dadurch haben wir an der Basis auch ein starkes Druckmittel, um Veränderungen zu erzwingen.

Eine lebendige Demokratie braucht beides – starke zivilgesellschaftliche Impulse und handlungsfähige Parteien. Entscheidend ist meines Erachtens, dass sich mehr Menschen nicht nur für das eine oder das andere entscheiden, sondern bereit sind, diese Verbindung mitzugestalten. Und momentan braucht es mehr aktive Menschen in Parteien, die die Ausdauer haben, sich für Veränderungen stark zu machen.

今は、本当にアニメに興味がない。 むしろ、映像そのものに興味がないとも言える。 なぜ興味がないのかと問われれば、理由は単純で、ただ自分の生活を追うこと、それ自体が自分にとっての、そして、そのまんまの意味での現実であり、それで完結しているからだろう。

しかし、当時見ていたアニメのキャラクターに対して、その時の自分にとっては大事な存在であった。 SNSで、『らき☆すた』や『涼宮ハルヒ』の画像が流れてくると未だにそこで少し手を止めてしまう。 なんとなく、その感覚をどこか美しいもののように捉えていたが、それを言語化したときに気づいたのは、ただ自分が枯れていただけだった、という少し悲しい事実でもある。 言語化した時に悲しい気持ちになるのは慣れている。 俺はいつもなぜそれを美しいと思ったのか、という部分をいつも抽出できない。

本質からは少し外れる。 自分の悪い癖として、思考を数珠つなぎにして本題から逸らしてしまって申し訳ない。 特に、体力が万全でないと感じたときにその傾向が強くなる。 そういうとき、自分で自分をつまらない人間だと思う一方で、このままの自分で終わるはずがないという妙な確信もあり、いずれ自然に修復されるだろうと考えて、能動的な行動を先送りにしてしまう。

映像が好きになれない理由の一つとして、容量の重たさがある。 テキストに比べて、映像は容量が大きく、情報量も多く、扱うにも負荷がかかる。 テキストは自由に編集・生成できてストレスがないが、映像は現代のコンピューターでもまだ重い。 自分は重たいものを持つのが嫌いだ。 重さは、自分の限界を露わにし、できることの範囲を強制的に意識させる。つまり、窮屈さを増幅させる。 映像も、帰りにスーパーで買う食材も、水2L×9本の段ボールも、すべて窮屈だ。 最終的に俺は空を飛びたいというのに。

映像は重い。 音楽は普通。 テキストは軽い。 そう、テキストは軽い。

だから自分は、こうして文章を書いていられるのだと思う。

I want to know everything so please don’t spare any details. Did you see the sun today..?

I love your nail colours, what inspired you..?

I want to let you know, I love when your hair curls and you’re half asleep to put the kettle on in the morning. I love how you hold yourself to standards built on self love and strength.

Did you know? I think the stars shine for you… I look for signs of you everywhere because you’re always where I want to be.

I love that you wear your activewear when you can’t decide on what outfit for the day.

The way you take care of others and cheer them on is beautiful, please don’t ever change that about you.

Thank you for asking how my day was, and really listening. Same time tomorrow gorgeous?

I genuinely find myself in a predicament (this isn’t new for me) anyway i wanted to write about it. Maybe you too, often find yourself in predicaments.

Ever heard of a sh*t sandwich? It’s where you layout the good, then the bad, then some more good. It’s how I like to view most things, or word them sometimes as it focuses less on the negative and allows for a natural and abundant way of bringing to light the crap but also acknowledging the good that exists, so lets start there.

The good? Well, I survived. I always had a roof over my head growing up, i had beautiful aunties that were always around, and 2 grandmothers that i adored as much as they adored me. I was lucky to have 4 siblings, all older than me and all who did provide a sense of safety at one time or another. I had food on my plate for every meal, i could go outside and ride my bike or look for fairies, and birthdays were joyful and i never went without beautiful and thoughtful gifts. I was able to go to school, and i had many beautiful and interesting friendships.

To continue, life wasn’t always amazing. My mother was a child herself when she had me and my brother. At age 21 and 24 is when she had us. While she carries trauma of her own, and in her imperfections she was a good mum. But she was explosive, immature, and grew to be a whirlwind of a woman. I had to run from her at 16 and 17 (it would’ve been earlier i guess but the age matters). She was narcissistic, dismissive of feelings that weren’t her own, and as the years went on it only got worse. I felt alone, mostly all of the time. I turned to self harm and running and self isolation due to the way i was treated. My Dad, present but absent, generous and yet entirely unkind. He wasn’t really around from age 6-8 onwards as we had moved across the state, and even before that. He was and is an alcoholic, you could nearly say by trade god that man can drink, I actually think he keeps the alcohol industry going.

I thought to go into more detail… and the details are ugly. They’re confronting, even for me to sit here and type it as though i didn’t live it, the sh*t part is really just that I didn’t have parents that nurtured me and taught me to have a healthy sense of identity or emotional regulation or real intimate connections and so on and so forth.

The good part? I survived, and as i sit here and tell you about the predicament I am in, well I long for connection, a partner, friends, community just like us all. And while i long, I don’t just sit and hope and long, I try. I put myself out there, i try dating and making friends and being a villager so as to have a village. I just have so many cracks and bends and wobbles in everything that I do that i just… nothing sticks. Friendships don’t always last and if they do we stop talking and we just don’t talk again so did they really last? Partners and potential partners come and go and I go to sleep knowing that I am the problem and also that I am the solution.

With every lesson and mistake I always take my time to understand why things happen and my trauma patterns, how i show up and what makes me who I am and how i can be better and heal and do good.

I recently reconnected with an ex partner. God when i tell you this relationship was tumultuous much like my others. Such connection and yet disconnection. So much love and yet so much absence of the stuff. Kindness and consideration with so much hatred and indifference. I used to say, to him and to others, that he is the kindest man I’ve ever met. He’s strong, but he’s gentle. He’s loving and yet he’s in his own world. He helps others and shows his empathy and yet there are so many times I needed him and he didn’t show up. And the lesson above all that i took was that I needed me more, I needed to show up, I needed to take care of myself. Not because I deserve to be alone or carry heavy things without support but because that is what I am meant for. To be the parent I didn’t have, to learn to love myself in all the ways I was taught not to.

And so in our reconnection I find myself questioning him, as I always have. And gaslighting myself wondering whether I am following a trauma pattern, or if I’m genuinely connected and interested in this man. OR the complete opposite. Naturally, I have trust issues and high standards. Not because I’m full of myself or conceited, I just want to give myself and allow myself to have good, true, authentic beautiful things in life including the person who I will spend just as much time with if not more than I do with myself.

He’s indecisive about me I can feel it, like he’s always been. Cautious of me, because I tend to express myself authentically and openly, although he’s taught me that it’s not always safe. I’d like to talk to him about how I’m feeling, but i almost feel like it’s not up for discussion, is it worth it? Bringing up that he makes me feel insecure, unvalued, judged at times. I always wonder why does he hang around me if it puts him in that state and I ask myself all the time why do i hang around him if he puts me in this state? Of questioning and wondering why and feeling the things i feel. And then I jump on Pinterest and it’s all, “Don’t settle for a man who’s not obsessed with you”, or “ wait for the one who holds the door and buys you flowers”. I do feel like I’m constantly auditioning for a place, and its such a paradox because in my healing I have found i am always worthy, and enough, and a valuable human to have around even when no one tells me or makes me feel that way.

So is it my pattern or are we not meant to be? Am i avoiding facing something or is he not the one? Am i selfish for wanting flowers and for my love language to grant him the title of being bilingual? Does he deserve better or do I? Do we both? Is real connection based on the majority of the good feelings and working through the not so good ones? Do I walk away or do i try one last time? I wish i knew.

-TSWR

Hasta hace unas semanas fuimos apenas conocidos. Nos presentó Luis, el del banco. Aurelio es un joven profesor de criminología. Sentí curiosidad por saber qué motivación podría tener una persona decente para estudiar a fondo el mundo del crimen, pero evité hacer la pregunta por si lo incomodaba.

Pero la razón de mi prudencia tenía otro matiz. Aurelio tenía cara de pez. No como si fuera un pez. Sino exactamente un pez: boca de pez, ojos de pez, como los que vemos con los ojos saltones en el mercado.

A los pocos días me reconoció en la cafetería del club y fue tan insistente que después de un café pedimos el menú del día. Sopa de lentejas, rodaballo al horno con guarnición y fruta del tiempo. Qué casualidad.

Hemos entablado cierta amistad. No sé si puede existir un lazo así que surja exclusivamente de la curiosidad. Porque cada vez que lo veo me pregunto cómo puede vivir tan tranquilo lejos del agua. Entonces me entra la risa y se la contagio, porque él la interpreta como complicidad.

Seguramente conoces que en esta ciudad un puente como este se vino abajo. El mal de la piedra, dijeron.

Toma en cuenta que los puentes de esta parte de la ciudad se hicieron para cruzar a pie o en caballo, como mucho en una pequeña carreta. Y cada vez veo más jóvenes con motos y bicicletas. Todo eso hace vibrar la estructura. No creo que deba estar permitido.

Pero no hay que pensar en cosas malas, que no ganamos para sustos. Hay que cruzar el puente de todos modos, varias veces al día o a la semana, así que es mejor pensar en cosas bellas, como los cambios de estación o los trinos de los pájaros.

Algunos dicen que de noche, debajo del puente, vuelan los murciélagos, y que de madrugada lo cruzan espectros sin cabeza. Qué locura. Lo primero puede ser verdad. Es posible. Pero lo segundo, no creo.

Hasta donde entiendo, soy el único espectro que lo cruza y, por ahora, tengo cabeza. ¿O no?

3.23 Leicester SPRING BLOOM at around 7/1 appeals in this one making his first start for John Butler who is in good nick with a great record of 30/9/14p in the last 30 days. Back today off a shortish break after running on the AW (5/0/1p on there) and into a class 5 where he has a very decent record on the turf and has indeed won his last races off 6lbs higher. The usual ground and trip boxes are ticked are Darragh Keenan has plenty of experience on his back. Can hopefully get involved. No bet in the second division of this race.

SPRING BLOOM // 0.5pt E/W @ 17/2 BOG (Bet365)

4.22 Leicester I backed MISSION COMMAND on his reappearance LTO and he gets the nod today again. I thought he ran well that day considering his starting position and finished really strongly to land third. Off the same mark today and I don’t think the drop in trip (has twice won at 5f so has got some speed) will be too much of a negative if he gets a better position today. Jennie Candlish is still in good form and has a fabulous record when turning them out within 7 days again (53/17/29p). Hopefully another winner for Darragh Keenan!

MISSION COMMAND // 1pt WIN @ 11/4 BOG (Bet365)

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Wer die Welt verstehen will, muss bei sich selbst anfangen. Um dies zu erreichen, braucht es nur drei Schritte. Aber diese drei Schritte haben es in sich.

Der Aufruf „Erkenne dich selbst“, in Stein gemeisselt im Tempel von Delphi, war eines der zentralen Prinzipien der antiken Philosophie. Für Denker wie Seneca war klar: Wer die Welt verstehen will, muss bei sich selbst anfangen. Nicht im Sinne selbstverliebter Innenschau, sondern als radikale Übung in Ehrlichkeit und Selbstprüfung. Diese Grundhaltung ist zeitlos – und aktueller denn je.

Denn moderne psychologische Forschung zeigt: Unser Bild von uns selbst ist oft ungenau. Studien belegen, dass Menschen ihre Fähigkeiten und ihr Verhalten systematisch überschätzen. Auch unsere Fähigkeit, zukünftige Reaktionen oder Emotionen vorherzusagen, ist überraschend schwach ausgeprägt. Der Grund: Wir neigen dazu, unbequeme Einsichten zu vermeiden, um unser Selbstbild zu schützen – ein Phänomen, das Forscher als „psychologisches Immunsystem“ beschreiben. Doch genau diese Komfortzone steht echter Entwicklung im Weg.

Wer sich selbst besser kennenlernen möchte, braucht drei zentrale Schritte:

Erstens: Aufhören, sich selbst zu schonen. Wie körperliches Training verlangt auch mentale Stärke die Bereitschaft, sich regelmässig mit Unangenehmem auseinanderzusetzen. Das bedeutet: ehrliches Feedback suchen, kritische Rückmeldung zulassen – auch wenn es zunächst schmerzt.

Zweitens: Sich selbst als veränderbar begreifen. Wer glaubt, dass Eigenschaften und Fähigkeiten fix sind, wird sich schwertun, kritische Informationen zu akzeptieren. Menschen mit einer lernorientierten Haltung hingegen nutzen Rückmeldungen aktiv, um zu wachsen.

Drittens: Verhalten bewusst verändern. Selbstkenntnis bringt nur dann etwas, wenn sie auch in konkretes Handeln übersetzt wird. Wer sich so verhält, wie er oder sie sein möchte – z. B. aufmerksamer, klarer, mutiger –, verändert über die Zeit nicht nur das Verhalten, sondern auch das Selbstbild.

Selbsterkenntnis ist kein einmaliger Zustand, sondern ein fortlaufender Prozess. Sie erfordert Mut zur Ehrlichkeit, Offenheit für Veränderung und die Bereitschaft, sich von Illusionen zu lösen. Wer diesen Weg geht, gewinnt Klarheit, Integrität – und letztlich die Freiheit, das eigene Leben bewusst zu gestalten.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Mit unserem Urteil ist es wie mit unseren Uhren. Nicht zwei gehen genau gleich, und doch glaubt jeder der seinigen.“ – Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Meetings kürzer halten

Die meisten Meetings dauern länger als nötig. Reduziere Meetings auf das Wesentliche und setze Zeitlimits, um effizienter zu arbeiten.

Aus dem Archiv: Ockhams Besen – Wenn unbequeme Fakten unter den Teppich gekehrt werden

Benannt nach dem englischen Philosophen Wilhelm von Ockham (engl. William of Occam), der mit seinem berühmten „Rasiermesser“ die Grundlage für eine elegante Wissenschaftsregel legte, ist „Ockhams Besen“ eine humorvolle und nachdenklich machende Ergänzung: anstatt die einfachste Erklärung zu wählen, werden hier störende Details beiseitegefegt. Dieser Ansatz erlaubt, sich auf das Wesentliche zu konzentrieren und die ungelösten Fragen – zumindest vorläufig – aus dem Blick zu räumen.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

It rained today. I kept gunning it in my car because I loved the feeling of losing control when the acceleration stopped from traction slipping. I shot around corners going over double the sign. I thought about why I liked the call of the void there and I think it was heavily because it’s just taking death one step out detached from my hands. If I died from something not my fault I wouldn’t be too upset. I don’t like feeling this way.