Hi Friends-
I am currently:
- feeling immense gratitude for the bounty of blessings in my life — a home, a wonderful community, so much love, my dog guru Pablo, a warm hearth, running water, sunshine, and so much more...
- ramping up to share some new offerings with you and looking forward to diving back into my work after an extended period of deep undoing and integration
- reading a book that puts forth a clear-eyed (and fairly disturbing) vision of how climate change will impact earth in the next few decades and the sorrow that it will bring
- dipping into the news mindfully and still having trouble metabolizing the sheer volume, irrationality, destabilization, and cruelty of all that is unfolding
It's a mood!
And I'm guessing you can relate.
I am trying to understand how to synthesize these alternating waves of gratitude, grief, disorientation, and galvinization into something that resembles a coherent rhythm for daily living.
I don't have any answers yet, but as I reflect on it in real time as I'm writing, the pre-game chant from the TV show Friday Night Lights is floating into my mind: "clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."
I am wondering: How can I be clear-eyed and keep my heart full in the face of all this change and tumult?
—
Below, I share an essay on how to find your "home button", a fantastic reflection on exponential change from Douglas Rushkoff, my new favorite writing app, and a poem for spring.
Much love,
Jocelyn
Where is your "home button"?
—
Wherein I go on a road trip, try to create a "more livable consciousness," and extrapolate the disappearance of my iPhone's home button into an unnecessarily expansive existential question.
I like to joke that the universe communicates with me in a very literal way.
A few examples…
My consciousness: It's time to develop more awareness about how you carry your responsibilities & take care of your body.
Universe: Let's introduce a little shoulder injury that takes a long-ass time to heal & requires dedicated physical care and therapy.
(The shoulder is symbolic of how you carry your responsibilities.)
My consciousness: It's time for you to surrender to a period of not knowing.
Universe: Let's reduce her ability to hear things so it's harder to receive "knowing."
(My hearing has literally been muffled for the past 9 months.)
My consciousness: It's time for you to learn to have better boundaries and not be so "leaky" with your energy.
Universe: Let's introduce a series of leaks into her house over many years and see if she gets the message.
(Much later.)
Universe: She really doesn't seem to be getting the message. What if I introduced a leak into her jeep? 👹
—
It's no surprise then that in order to cultivate a deeper understanding of how to "come home," I had to quite literally leave home and go on a 2-month road trip where I lived out of my jeep, which was thankfully not yet leaking.
One never knows what will unfold on a long journey — and moving into that "not-knowing" is, of course, part of the point — but I did have some sense that I was going away in order to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be here.
I knew that by leaving home, and traveling for an extended period of time, I would be required to make a practice of coming home to myself, again and again.
I knew that as I moved from Texas to New Mexico to Colorado to Utah to Nevada to California to Arizona — with many stops along the way — it would be a repeated exercise in: Traveling, stopping, settling, and asking: What does it mean to be here?
How can I feel at home now —
when my dog Pablo is trembling with fear because there is an airforce base nearby and planes keep shaking the air and I can't relax because he can't relax?
— and now —
when I am wretching alone in my jeep at 2am in the morning because (oops!) I gave myself food poisoning by being a little too cavalier with my food prep?
— and now —
when I wake up with vertigo and convince myself that my portable propane tanks are leaking and I am being slowly poisoned?
— and now —
when it starts to get dark at 4:30pm and I have no reception and 3+ hours of darkness in which to sit with myself every night before bedtime
— and now —
when I become completely sick of all of this alone time and tired of engaging with all of my various I'm-on-a-deep-searching-journey activities like meditating, journaling, communing with crystals, and just want to veg out and watch TV?
—
If it's already not clear from the above: Anxiety has been an ongoing challenge for me throughout my adult life. Thus, my intention for this trip was to: Create a more livable consciousness. Which was essentially about learning to be more at home with myself — whatever the circumstances.
I was seeking to cultivate a deeper practice of presence — of not always wanting to be elsewhere, of not always wanting things to be different, of not always wanting more and more and more.
I've been reflecting on this idea of "coming home" since at least the Fall of 2022, when I devoted a season of Hurry Slowly to the topic, starting with an episode called "Archiving the Self."
I'm still trying to understand how to create a hospitable home for myself and in myself.
I'm also asking: What tools do I have that can help me "get back home" when I get lost?
This is a question that feels urgent for me personally but I think it's also an important question for the collective.
How can we find our way back to ourselves? And what are the tools that can help us on that journey?
We also might ask: What are the tools & technologies that tend to take us away from ourselves? That create a feeling of disembodiment and rootlessness?
—
Right before I left on my trip, I got an iPhone 15.
The important thing to know here is that: My old phone had a home button, and the new phone that I got right before my trip did not have a home button. (How's that for literal? 🙃)
The gestural habit of tapping the home button to return to the main screen was so ingrained in me it took awhile to adapt.
In the new paradigm, you just swipe up to get home. But you also swipe down to get somewhere else, you swipe up very slowly to access another thing, you swipe right for something else, you swipe from the middle for another menu, and so on.
It's a very swipe-y situation. And I find that this never-ending symphony of micro-gestures generates a rather frenetic energy in terms of how I relate to my phone. It's much less peaceful than when I had a home button.
Which got me thinking about the "home button" as a concept — and about how we get home and the tools we have (or don't have) to help us get there.
As a culture, we are more scattered, scared, anxious, riled up, wrung out, and just generally activated than ever. This is not because we choose to live this way or because we want to live this way.
It's because, sometimes, we simply do not have the mental and physical fortitude to systematically shield ourselves from the toxic objectives of the apps and tools that we use everyday. Which are literally designed to:
- Capture our attention because time is money
- Stoke our anxiety and fear because anxiety and fear are great for engagement
- Fragment and erode our connection to the collective because polarization and othering creates more anxiety and fear (see above)
- Encourage us to view ourselves as isolated individuals because then we will critique ourselves rather than critiquing the system, the platform, or the app
- Understand ourselves as unfulfilled and/or inadequate because then we'll read/click/buy more stuff to become our "best self"
So, unless we all give up technology and become a bunch of recluses, it's pretty much guaranteed that we will lose ourselves from time to time.
We will lose track of our attention.
We will lose our direction.
We will lose our momentum.
We may even, at times, feel like we are losing our hope, our compassion, our tempers, our tolerance, our minds.
Having scrolled and swiped our way deep into unknown territory, we will find ourselves scared and anxious and activated — unsure about how to find the way home.
And then we must ask:
How can I refocus my attention?
How can I realign with my values?
How can I come back into my heart?
How can I find my ground again?
What are the tools that help you soothe yourself, that help you find your center, that help you come back home?
What are the tools that help you remember who you are?
Where is your home button?
LINK ABOUT IT
A beautiful, contemplative interview with Jenny Slate who co-stars in the excellent new TV series Dying for Sex: "I don't wanna deal with a*ssholes anymore and that includes me." (Agreed!)
Worth a read: A handful of folks who have the real-world experience to accurately game it out wrote a story about what the world might look like in 2027 after AI has its way with us. (If you'd rather listen to an interview about it, start at minute 25:40 here.)
Douglas Rushkoff on living in a state of in-between-ness: "Exponential change creates the sensation that the only thing happening is change itself."
The bluetooth test and other keyholes to the soul: "Becoming kinder and gentler is mainly the act of noticing—realizing that some small decision has moral weight, acting accordingly, and repeating that pattern over and over again."
After I linked to Timothy Snyder in the last newsletter, a reader shared a talk he gave that uses history, literature, and the humanities to explain the "new paganism" of Trump, Musk, et al. Fascinating.
For the writers out there: I have been loving the Calmly Writer app for distraction-free writing. (And it only costs $20. Once! No subscription.)
I enjoyed Naomi Alderman's recent novel The Future, which examines how powerful the algorithms that underpin the Internet are and how they could influence us differently if we changed them.
An SNL skit you don't want to miss: The White Potus.
A poem for spring from Tony Hoagland.
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SHOUT-OUTS:
The artwork is from: Jason Hateart, who is based in Los Angeles, CA.
Link ideas from: Dense Discovery and The Garden of Forking Paths.
You can support me & my work by: Sharing this newsletter with someone, or taking my course, RESET.
Website: jkg.co
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