I had heard both amazing things and warnings about Mexico City. The consensus was that if I stayed within the DF boundaries it’s as safe as anywhere. They had more cops per capita than any city in the world I think. Gorgeous city with rich histories. It was amazing, indeed. Traffic was straight up insane - 30 minutes to get to dinner, 4 hours to get back.

We went for a tour of the Bimbo factory with one of the family owners. On our way to lunch, in his nondescript Jeep Grand Cherokee I was looking out the window at the city and noticed the window was much thicker than the Jeeps I was used to riding in. Then I realized it didn’t roll down….this was an armored car I was in. Lacking the decorum of people who usually find themselves in this situation I asked directly “ummm, is this an armored car?” The man who has to worry about being kidnapped on his drive to lunch answered “Yes, yes. Just a precaution. Everyone around here has one.” I guessed that wasn’t true, and, in fact, I dismissed it as something only the uber-wealthy worry about so I didn’t change my outlook on the city.

Later that night we were taken to this world-renowned speakeasy you enter through the back of a taqueria and exit through a reach-in refrigerator in a bodega. Very unique and amazing experience, but I yearned for the local hole-in-the-wall serving beers out of an ice trough, whiskey/coke about the fanciest cocktail, and music too loud for this spanglish-speaker to really understand anything being said to me.

My girlfriend and I broke free from the group and headed to some recommended spots. They were walkable, but not close so we weren’t entirely sure where we were. We danced and danced and when I went to the bar for a break and a refill I pulled up next to this native girl who’s smile I could understand but not much of what she was saying. We tried to talk for a few minutes and she led me back out to the dancefloor to find my girl.

She said there was an after-party and we should join them. Hell yeah! Now that sounded like the highlight of the trip - a locals after-party in Mexico City! I asked for directions she said we should just ride with them. Amazing. We drove for quite a while, made a pit stop at some garage where we met some others or someone switched cars or something. I wasn’t really paying attention, just jamming to music and occasionally trying to hear what people were saying and craft a spanish sentence to show I was trying.

We get to this apartment and it’s quite underwhelming. First red flag is that it’s empty. It’s small, maybe not the final destination, rather bare furniture, and kinda dingy. Oh well, having fun. I go to fridge to look for drinks and it’s empty save a couple of bottles of water. Kinda weird, but whatevs. “Let’s get the music going.” I say “where is everyone?” “Oh, they’re coming, parties don’t start til pretty late here.” Said a new big guy that joined. Nerves calmed.

My girlfriend and I take a seat on the couch and the lovely native brunette sits next to us and two rather large asian men sit across from us. Neither speaks a word of english. They talk to our lady friend in spanish, I catch about 20% of it, and the lady friend translates, speaking to us in decent english. They pull out a bong to smoke. Jeez, I hadn’t even seen a bong in 15 years. I was never much of a smoker and I had completely forgotten how to use one when it got passed to me. I didn’t cover the air hole, it didn’t really work, and everyone laughed at me. They showed me proper technique so of course I had to do it really well this time. Pulled in a massive hit or rip or whatever, exhaled, then breathed the whole thing in.

I immediately coughed it out and began coughing violently. They all laughed again. I excused myself and went into the hallway so at least they didn’t have to see it. There were three closed doors. I opened one and it was an empty bedroom. Weird. Coughing and barely catching my breath I opened the one on the other side, more quietly this time. Empty. Middle door bathroom with barely anything in it. I closed the bathroom door and started to assess my very confusing situation.

Ok, I’m about to be really, really high. What’s going on here? Is there such a thing as pre-high clarity?! Before the cannabinoids dull my senses did they activate a region of clarity? Or was I just being extremely slow-witted up to that point? Either way, it all came crashing in - long drive, no idea where we are, no after party, large men joining us, completely empty rooms, no phone signal - we’re in trouble. I wasn’t sure what kind of trouble yet, but I knew it was trouble.

I finished my coughing fit and deduced a plan. Now, weed has an interesting effect on me - it slows my body down, but not my mind. I can still think straight, but my body doesn’t react the way I want it to. I was soon to be in no shape to fight off two large Asian men. They probably knew karate. I needed to act as if nothing was wrong and gently get my girl and exit. But I had to act fast.

I come out from the bathroom, take a bow as they laugh, and sit down. I give my girl “let’s go” eyes and she ignores me. She’s having fun. Shit. Lady friend saddles up next to me, puts her leg across me, and says everyone’s taking Molly, “here take this.”

OH MY FUCKING GOD! I’m in pure panic mode now. I say it’s way too late for us to do that, luckily my girlfriend speaks up and says she’s not doing it. Lady friend starts trying to shove the pill in my mouth! Playfully, but forcefully. Another thing I notice in this moment as this very pretty girl is essentially on top of me is that she’s got a package between her legs. Honestly, the whole thing so fucking wild I have only ever told this story a couple of times because it’s barely believable. But I have a witness, who at this point in the night still thinks there’s nothing wrong.

She finally gives up forcing the pill down my throat and she confers with the Asians in what now sounds like latin to me. I’m trying so hard to understand them but can’t. I squeeze my girls leg and give her freaking-out eyes. She finally gets the message. She yawns and says she’s tired. “Awww, yeah, it’s late we should be getting going.” I say.

“No, no, no. Stay, you must stay.” she jumps back on top of me. I pick her up and put her next to me. “lo siento, tenemos que irnos” a bit more sternly. One Asian guy gets up and moves towards the door. Heart pounding. Weed hitting. Adrenaline pumping so hard my ears are ringing. Time slows down, all my senses on fire. We get up and I move decisively right at the asian guy between us and the door, who still has his back to me. I look for anything I could nonchalantly grab as a potential weapon. I just needed to get on the other side of that guy so I can face both of them to eliminate any surprises. The lady friend and other Asian get up and quickly follow us.

Shit. I’m flanked and can’t go right at the front guy. I turn sideways so I have both guys in my peripheral. I pretend like I’m talking to lady friend, but preparing for the worst. Guy in front looks at guy in back. Guy in back looks at me and I give him the strongest, sharpest “It’s cool…but I can get not cool real fast” look I can muster as the weed and the adrenaline battle for control of my limbs. Guy in back shrugs. I move my stare to guy in front. I can tell he’s not the aggressor, so I take a step at him. He turns to open the door, fuck yeah, and walks out, ugh!

“Oh, y’all don’t have to walk us out, we’ll find our way.” in an unfriendly tone. “I promise.” as in “I promise I will be the toughest kidnap you’ve ever had.” But they continue to flank us and walk down the hallway. I stay sideways, holding girlfriend’s hand, more concerned with guy in back than in front. I hold his stare as we walk towards elevator. I jump in elevator, finally able to get to one side of both guys. We’re standing at the elevator door staring at each other. I’m trapped, but between them and my girl and ready to bulldoze out of elevator if they try to come in. Door closes. I almost throw up.

“What was that about?!?” She asks me, completely unaware of what we just barely escaped. I’m still as open to new things as ever and still try to find the local hangouts when I travel. But now I count the exits. We were lucky. A different kind of luck than the prior post.

The internet has brought the world to our fingertips and AI is helping us filter and use it. I sometimes mistake watching the world go by with being a part of it. Online interactions lack a richness of the real world, like a CD - samples of reality that attempt to recreate the whole but somehow miss it.

See, I’ve been laid up, “healing,” for five weeks now. My shoulder bones are indeed knitting and reconstructing, though quite mangled compared to the original, evolutionarily-refined masterpiece. But the rest of me is deteriorating, physically at least. Emotionally it’s a roller-coaster where I do find joy and motivation and determination, but easily slide into depression, anxiety, and hermitry.

I haven’t left the house much. I have a cave of a room - I block out the light cause it warms up the room too much - where I work and eat and do all the things from a horizontal position. As a true extrovert this kills me. As an OCD engineer and technophile this has opened up a new set of abilities. I’m becoming more introverted by the day.

Not only do I miss the world, but my work feels less effective, somehow. Part of my role is evangelism, to be sure. I’m not talking to people. For a few weeks the pain was too distracting to hold a conversation. But now I feel the calling of the morning coffee meeting or a walk-and-talk. I have never initiated a walk-and-talk with someone, but think I might.

I’m reminded of Richard Wiseman’s ‘Luck Factor’ research. His main conclusion: “lucky” people are not simply blessed by fate; they tend to create, notice, and act on more chance opportunities. He also found that lucky people are generally more open, relaxed, socially connected, and resilient when things go badly. Luck can be quantified and it happens to people in motion.

I can get a lot of real work done in my cave, but I won’t find much luck. The Puzzle marches forward, every day we are placing pieces whether we realize it or not. Some are intentional. Some are sloppy. Some are forced. Some are handed to us by other people. The more we move through life with presence and intention, the more surface area our Puzzle has. More tabs. More edges. More connection points. That’s where luck finds us.

Those connection points might get a new piece down the line by someone we haven’t seen in years at that event we really wanted to skip. We might be reminded of it while in conversation days later, “out of nowhere.” That friend we’ve been meaning to call might bring it up. Chance opportunities to make our Puzzle richer, fuller, and luckier.

I hope to see you soon out in the real world, let’s find luck together.

I have been laid up for four weeks. Worst pain of my life and I’ve done some very painful things. I’m just now able to type without causing pain. All of my plans for the last four weeks gone. Most of my plans for the next three to six months gone. I’m told by humans and AI it’s a SIX TO TWELVE (6-12) MONTH recovery.

Intense. The other day someone asked me “So, does this accident make you realize maybe you’re too old for that kind of activity?”

“absolutely not!” I blurted out.

I don’t think I’ll ever be “too old” for intensity, I hope I’m living life to the fullest until my very last breath (or upload to the borg). But I’m old enough to know that intensity comes with a price.

The same brain circuits that bring luck, adventure, connection, and aliveness can also bring damage, depression, obsession, paranoia, and puzzle misalignment. I was having a blast one moment, the next unable to move without gasp-inducing pain.

And the consequence of that is a complete change of Puzzle orientation. All the same things are important to me, but the activities/pathways available to me are completely different. My Puzzle isn’t broken, but the pieces I need to use are very different.

I don’t believe the work is to do less-risky things, which feels like becoming more boring. The work is to apply resiliency and realign around the same vision with a different path. It’s been hard. The emotional roller coaster of forcing myself to not do anything is extreme. You can’t truly immobilize a shoulder so all movement aggravates it. I had so many plans - landscaping, health optimization, pushing business forward with a focus on operations and efficiency - that it seems like are at the best put off…at the worst derailed.

But a review of my Puzzle Vision reveals that nothing has really changed. How I impact those things has. I can still apply presence to all things:

• My health optimization is recovery and maintenance instead of gains

• I can still work on landscaping, but by tending, not planting

• Business can be pushed forward from my bean bag - I’m working a lot on finance and sales

I’m not defending recklessness and I don’t believe I’ve ever been that. I’m defending vitality. People used to say I was an adrenaline junkie. But it has never felt that way. I have never needed intoxication or ‘more, more, more.’ I just have always LOVED losing myself in the moment. I’ve always sought presence and eventually learned how to harness and practice it.

We can’t control the future, we can only influence it. That’s because we’re not alone in the creation of our future. Our future emerges from the application of ourselves to the world. And the world is a big place with unquantifiable energy. Your vision for the future almost certainly conflicts with other people’s vision of the future. Who’s comes true? Usually somewhere in between. A future emerges that nobody envisioned 100% because it’s a tension between everyone’s vision of it. Almost nobody’s 5-year plan turns out exactly right (I’m sure there are psychos who set a singular-focus 5-year plan and do achieve it). We usually point to parts of the plan that came true and say “We did it!” And survivorship bias says we only hear stories from people who achieved their big goals. But even then, did achieving the goal bring people what they want? Did they feel like they nourished all the important things in their life? Hopefully we’re growing daily and our understanding of what we need or want changes, too. No perfect goal today is also tomorrow’s perfect goal.

To be sure, zooming in, things like writing down specific goals have been studied and proven to increase the odds of them coming true…..by like 33%. 33% higher odds of coming true does not a guarantee make. And if we take NYE resolution odds as a marker, we’re improving 8% by 33%, making it 10.64% chance of achievement. Importantly, the mechanism is that writing down goals forces clarity and improves focus/prioritization. There’s no magic in the pen. It’s just accurately capturing the goal.

I write down specific professional goals for the month and quarter and they help guide my focus and prioritization while working. Connecting daily work with longer-term projects is, of course, valuable. I even write down specific goals for the year, but they don’t really guide my day to day. I use them to envision possible outcomes that are best-case scenarios. Anything beyond a year is a dream, to me, so I always dream very big. What I hold as my guide, my North Star, is my Puzzle Vision which distills down to “connection & meaning.” In my last post I showed an early Puzzle Vision I created, which looks like a bunch of vague goals. I think presence has created better outcomes across the board than if I had created specific goals. I think this is because I used to create specific goals for every part of my life and, even when I achieved them, upon reflection the joy and lessons were in the path, not the outcome (very cliche and seemingly obvious, but whatevs, I had to learn the hard way). I wondered if I had not had goal-blinders on I might have found more joy and growth. I didn’t have a framework for how to move through life without specific goals, though. Enter The Puzzle.

Envisioning the future is important, but then forsaking parts of our lives to achieve one specific vision of the future is counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst. What I find to be the best for me is to dream a future, dream the path, then be present in everything I do. Our subconscious mind, which really has the reigns of influence, can work with dreams.

“What is it you were thinking about as a child before someone told you you had to earn a living?”

Dreaming is easy for some, harder for others. The realities people are in can often be very hard to pivot from. Presence is the way through. The Puzzle shows the way. Holding what’s important to you actually guides your presence. While you’re immersed in the application of YOU to the world, your subconscious is constantly looking for ways to connect you to what’s important to you. That choice, what’s important to you, is what makes us all so unique and amazing. So, how do we create the Vision that our subconscious can use to guide us to the meaning we want?

I have tried all the things to organize my life and find meaning - purposes, values, BHAGs, Ikigai, etc, etc. I want to move towards the things I love, with ease, without putting blinders on and missing things I don’t know I love yet. Here’s how the Puzzle helped me.

Step 1 - What’s important to you, right now?

Make a list of all the things you have to do, want to do, and are doing in between. Which ones are important to you?

The first time I did this it included things like:

Supporting co-workers, creating value at my companies, spending time with close friends, taking care of parents, healthy sex life, intimacy with my wife, quality time with my kids, writing, art, meeting new people, exploring philosophy, and more.

We can’t remember all these things on a day-to-day basis, usually, so I started looking for common threads - a bunch of them are related to friends & family, so that could summarize a part of the list. Vocation could be used to describe work things. Self-expression is also a thread for me. But what is it I want out of ‘vocation?’ When I sit with these things I’m able to dig deeper and deeper to find the essence of what’s important to me. To make it all look kind of like a puzzle, which is the best way to see how connected many of the things are, here’s how I drew it (definitely not focused on the art or piece integrity haha) -

Anytime I feel lost or wonder if I’m focusing on the right things I’ll pull out my Puzzle Vision and check my activities against it. But on a day-to-day I’d only have to remember “fulfilling experiences & meaningful relationships.” Now, as my philosophy and experiences have evolved I’ve changed my center pieces some. My North Star, if you will, is:

“Connection & Meaning”

With those two words I’m able to apply presence in all my experiences and know that it’s pushing me in the direction I want. And direction is all I want. I don’t want a prescription of what to do. I don’t want a particular goal - “$100 million company!” “Kids going to great colleges” “Travel whenever I want” - all these things are land mines for becoming disconnected from ourselves and our path. Articulating a specific journey is a dangerous way to create your best journey. You will grow and change along the journey and your best journey will change. Our journeys are unique and they’re created as we apply ourselves to the world and reflecting on how that felt. Not by drawing a path and following it.

Find what’s important to you, dig deeper. Why is that important to you? Money is currency, what do you want to DO with the money? What experiences bring you fulfillment? Do they feel hard or easy? Are they worth doing if hard or are there other parts of your puzzle where fulfillment comes easy? Try doing more of those, even if you only have time for a little. Then go apply yourself, fully, to everything, even the things you don’t want to do. Reflect, adjust, reapply. chop wood. carry water.

But where does the self come from? As philosophers searched their psyche and culture they emerged thinking ther eis no built-in meaning to life. Unless we want to fall back on prior, “easier,” paths like religion or tradition we must create our own meaning through our choices. Authenticity, at this level, means living consciously and recognizing the connection between what we do and how our life unfolds.

I never felt a built-in meaning to life. I tried on different roles, studied religion, but never found anything I could hang my identity on. I read about journeys to find yourself and they sounded really boring and useless. “I can’t find myself under a rock,” I thought, “I will find myself out in the world.” Luckily for me there was never a ton of pressure to belong to something. Many people are not so lucky and are forced into their identity. Western society, in general, has seen religion weaken, traditions broken, and individuality explode. Authenticity has evolved. It’s no longer just living consciously, it’s our moral compass. Are you being the real you or a fake version of you? The internet has accelerated this and bots have sent it to the moon. Perceived realness is actual currency and influencers are professionals.

I think The Puzzle is an evolution of true self. I don’t believe you can discover your true self on a retreat or through a workshop. I believe your true self is constructed through presence and connection. Self-reflection helps us see what we’re building and build in the right areas. Authenticity isn’t a state of yourself, it’s emergent. Being authentic isn’t a conscious action - you can’t say “I’m going to be authentic today.” Well, if you do, we know you’re being fake. Presence engages us with the world around us, it engages us with our unfolding Puzzle, and is the only way to reveal your current true self. And there’s very little authenticity in a vacuum. Engaging with the world around us requires two-way flow of energy. Authenticity is that flow of energy in a state of presence. Our true self should be constantly changing, if we’re engaged with the world.

Some people don’t evolve. They find the groundhog day they like and never try to change it, or themselves. I used to drive around in a car with a six foot banana on top of it. When I first showed the concept, on paper, to the people around me I got resounding laughs that were usually followed by “you’re not serious, are you?” Oh, I was. It did take three months to talk myself into because it would have to be not just a company vehicle, but my personal one, too. Anywho, everywhere I’d go people would smile at it; kids would chase me; strangers would wave. But about 25% of people would just have a blank stare. At first I told myself they were mentally busy at the time. But as it happened more I began to feel like these people were not really alive. They no longer had a curiosity about the world. There was no authenticity. Or they just hated bananas.

If you want to change your life, the only time to do it is now. If you want to improve yourself and the world around you, the only real mechanism is presence.

chop wood. carry water. my friends

Spoken language wasn’t our first language, though. Language is a tool to pass information from one thing to another. We know that our DNA stores the information that makes us who we are. We’ve learned recently that there are many species on the planet who can change their DNA in their lifetime and we’re starting to believe we can, too, both through natural processes and with science we can clip DNA into our genome. For millenia, perhaps, natural selection was the first ‘language,’ it just took generations to say much at all. Homo sapiens with certain traits encoded into DNA survived better, which ‘told’ the next generation that was a good thing. DNA stored the info, natural selection ‘read’ it, and the natural world was the ‘editor.’ And it’s looking like, with recent research, that it’s much more of a conversation than random mutations which guide change.

Spoken language compressed evolutionary timelines. The speed with which we could communicate what’s best for survival in the natural world increased dramatically. We shifted from genetic evolution, which we all learn about and wonder why it feels so different now, to ‘informational evolution’ where passage and incorporation of spoken information changed the survival dynamic from strength and endurance to cooperation, storytelling, and memory.

Our genome expanded from just the information in our DNA to the information in our DNA and the information we could remember and tell to our offspring - “That flower is poisonous, don’t eat it” - all by itself, at some point, changed the evolution of our species in an area with a lot of poisonous flowers. The people who could speak it, and the ones who could understand it, survived better.

Many animals have this capability, too. So.....that’s incomplete. The next big step, which maybe is even larger than spoken language, was written language. Now we could evolve faster than someone can tell people about poisonous flowers. If someone wrote it down, many more people could read it and know about the poisonous flower. We have not just the stories of the generations before us that are still alive, but the stories of every generation from that moment on. Data and information started to accumulate. Coordination, institutions, cities, laws began to select who was best suited to not just survive anymore, but thrive. And people who thrived were able to procreate more than people who didnt. Survival of the ‘fittest’ was not THE thing anymore. Theoretically, anyone could survive by reading the right passages. Thriving became the selector.

But people still had to find the right written language that suited their situation best to apply the tool for their benefit. Then came the internet. No longer did you “need” a library card. All of the information started to accumulate digitally, technically in the language of 1s and 0s, but the presented in our preferred language. Now the speed with which we could acquire the information was dramatically faster than the speed it took to learn it. Narrative and virality dominated what gets absorbed by the brain and became the new selector. Not for individuals anymore, but for cultures. Culture became the new evolutionary unit. Time compressed again. We moved from informational evolution to communicative evolution.

An aside - our bodies have not adapted to this speed of evolution, but maybe our brain has...even though our brains consciously thinking we have is wrong...so who knows. We are navigating a battle between our conscious brain that thinks free will is guiding us and biological processes that happen way faster than conscious thought. Even something as simple as “I feel an itch, i shall scratch it,” which feels absolutely, totally, 100% consciously willed to happen actually starts subconsciously well before we think we made the decision to do that. Our conscious brain is best for planning and such. Our subconscious - this beautiful, complex, always on, always analyzing, always predicting the future, the most integrated brain on the planet - just maybe is either adapting just fine or actually guiding this time compression. Either way, our conscious mind needs real tools - presence, self-reflection, integration - as examples, to keep up with the speed of all these external tools. And The Puzzle is a great lens for all this...just saying.

Anyways, on to the new tool that we’re now scrambling to wrap our conscious thoughts around - Artificial Intelligence. Not only do we have all of the information of all of the generations before us at our fingertips, we now have help interpreting and applying all of it, at once, to our lives. This could be the dawn of ‘cognitive evolution.’ One could argue it is potentially moving us to the role of cogs in the wheel, like cells in our body, that are doing the things we normally do, but are now unconscious to the role we play in a larger evolutionary jump. In that case we still benefit from it, but not in the way we did prior. Humanity could become the new evolutionary unit. But also it could be the final freedom from competition as a guardrail for thriving. Buckminster Fuller dreamed of such a world:

“What is it you were thinking about as a child before someone told you you had to earn a living?”

What if AI compresses time so much that our concept of living changes. The homo sapien “f*ck it or kill it” competitive wiring becomes irrelevant. At the risk of getting too woo-woo, this could come as a great awakening, of sorts. Hellen Keller recounted living in a “no-world” without true awareness or abstract thought before language: “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world... I had neither will nor intellect.” The breakthrough came at age 6 or 7 when Sullivan spelled “w-a-t-e-r” into her hand under a pump, awakening her mind: “That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought.”

If spoken (err, signed) language can immediately change the consciousness of an individual......maybe AI will quickly change our capacity for abundance leading our collective consciousness to one where our individual uniqueness provides the real value to the Collective Puzzle and we’re celebrated for it. A boy can dream.

When I first learned about nihility - nothing matters, nothing is real, everything eventually dissolves into meaninglessness - I had a typical response of “well, why do anything?” It seems like a very depressing dead end, but then I woke up the next morning with things to do and while those things hadn’t changed, something in me had. I didn’t realize it immediately and I couldn’t pinpoint it. Once my brain had processed a new reality of sorts, it felt like a new freedom. I could create my own meaning, however fleeting or naive, and I emerged from the depression of meaninglessness into a world of possibility again (the first of many cycles between the two).

This was a surface-level understanding and application of what one philisopher, Keiji Nishitani, called sunyata - emptiness.

Nihility says nothing has value.

Emptiness says nothing has value on it’s own.

For Nishitani, emptiness isn’t a void, it’s a relational field. Everything exists only in relation to everything else. We can start at the beginning with language. Language is the original tool that we built civilization on. And yet words don’t have meaning on their own. We are so trained on this tool, language is so engrained in our shared experience that we generally think ‘things’ have an essence to themselves. They don’t. A tree is not ‘a thing.’ It’s the vibrational resonance of soil, sun, fungus, air, time, and chance forming into a shared reality we attach the label ‘tree’ to.

This holds true all the way down to the thing we call ‘self.’ Self is relationships, memories, habits, suffering, love, biology, culture. If I ask you who you are, that’s what you use to describe it, and it’s ever changing. When we stop insisting that any ‘thing’ possesses an independent, fixed meaning, says Nishitani, we dont’ fall into despair - we fall into connection.

I first started applying The Puzzle to the actions of my life. Then I started applying it to my entire ontology, not as a metaphor or explanation of anything, but as a way of seeing everything. With this lens I can see Nishitani’s sunyata without spiraling into abstraction.

When I look at life as a Puzzle, I can better understand concepts like:

• No single puzzle piece means anything on it’s own

• Pieces only make sense in relation to their adjacent pieces - the tabs make sense in how they fit with others

• Unlike a traditional jigsaw the picture isn’t pre-determined, it’s formed as it’s built

• The Collective Puzzle is never finished

• We don’t ‘own’ our pieces - we find them, we create them, then they only contribute to meaning when we place them in the emptines

  

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Emptiness is not absence, it’s not nihilism, it’s relational meaning. The Puzzle helps me see a meaning that feels “grounded in the ungrounded.” Simplified it’s like waves in the ocean realizing the are the ocean. Meaning isn’t inside the pieces, it arises between them. So the connection point is where to focus presence. The application of presence to the world around us.

Sitting with nihility is realizing the picture we thought we were building isn’t real. Emptiness is realizing there never was one picture, and that’s ok. Once emptiness is seen clearly, individuality doesn’t disappear, we don’t lose ourselves. We realize we are contextual. My Puzzle does exist, and yours does to, but there are no edges. Everything is connected, interlocking, reshaping, borrowing pieces to build The Collective Puzzle. It’s not mystical or metaphorical grasping at the unknown. It’s just our shared reality when we stop pretending anything stands alone.

Helping each other with our puzzles isn’t applying our individual meaning to the outside world. Helping each other is meaning emerging through the interdependence of shared reality. And that kinda makes presence the language of meaning. We place pieces because placing pieces is the now, the current moment. If we don’t demand anything from the moment, down to there being no essence to the moment, we can still choose, we can build, we can care. Not because it matters but because every piece is the connection - the freedom on the other side of emptiness.

But I also beat myself up sometimes. “This should be, like, my thing. I should be practicing what I preach, always.” Which, of course, is ridiculous. But it’s also human nature.

We all set expectations of ourselves. “I am the type of person who practices presence on a daily basis.” Well, I shouldn’t strive to be a type of person. Just be. And be present. Tackle today head-on. You can plan for tomorrow when the day is over.

“The secret of life is getting today right. Everyone can get today right, and if you can do it once, you can do it repeatedly,” Stuart McRobert

Getting today right takes nothing more than presence. Be present, starting now. Bring all of your attention to these words. Hold that presence as long as possible. Find reminders, return to presence as often as possible and hold it as long as possible. But if it takes weeks before you remember to be present, that’s ok. Do it again. Find the presence when you remember, hold that presence as long as possible. But don’t skip it cause there’s no time to hold it. Just do it, again. Then again.

Time moves, inevitably. If you find a little bit of presence, for those moments, it moves in your direction. It moves where you take it. Don’t wait for meditation to find presence. Don’t plan it for that meeting in the future. Start now. Once you start it’s so much easier to do more. But starting is the biggest hurdle and the height of that hurdle is all in your head.

I’m quite active on LinkedIn, finding it to be more interesting as a social network with mostly business talk - a topic I love. There used to be a trend of people just hopping on to share good news about work - awards, promotions, etc. It’s fun to celebrate with people, but if it’s the only reason they show up I find it less interesting. I want to hear the struggles with the successes.

Now there seem to be many more people trying to be thought leaders. The unfortunate consequence is that they try to share advice and what you should/should not be doing. This chases me off the site faster than anything. Nobody knows what you “will regret” in ten years (run fast if you see these posts). Nobody knows what will bring you joy and fulfillment except you. Every Puzzle is unique and finding what works for us requires work.

The only shortcuts are finding tools that help you discover your own path. The Puzzle is one such tool and it has worked for me when all other tools eventually fail. Most tools for self-discovery that I have tried were processes that had a goal at the end. From the shallow “recipe for success” tools to the more rigorous spiritual and philosophical system they mostly claim you should arrive somewhere instead of continuing self-discovery. Some were meant to open the mind, but just kinda drop you in the void.

The Puzzle is a practice you can return to anytime. We Puzzlemakers never finish our work. Our Puzzles will not be complete until long past when we stop laying our own pieces - the memories of us still help create pieces for others, which deepen our own. Our Puzzles are connected to so many other Puzzles, it doesn’t take too many jumps to connect all of the Puzzles in the world into The Collective Puzzle. We’re all vibrations of the same energy. The same stuff, but unique iterations.

For me, self-expression is the North Star. The Puzzle is my map. Presence is my sail. Self-reflection is my rudder. I am the boat floating in an infinite sea with everyone. We’re all in our own boats. I don’t know how to steer yours and you don’t know how to steer mine. Be weary of people who say they know where you should go. You might end up helping them build their Puzzle instead of building your own.

Now, I certainly look for case studies anytime I’m unsure if I’m pointing in the right direction. “Who has done this before and gotten the result I want?” I want to hear their path. But my path is still my own and will be different than theirs. Discovering our own paths is never-ending because we’re always at the front of the path, looking out at an infinite sea.

We shouldn’t be chasing happiness, anyways. Western culture teaches us that happiness is the ultimate “you’ve made it!” signal. But success is always defined around things and achievements, which often leave us feeling empty, not internal peace or congruence with values. So we’re usually wanting the wrong things to achieve our future state.

Buddhism & Stoicism popularized the idea that maybe we shouldn’t want anything. It’s a wonderful thought exercise to try and see how you react. But in the real world it’s fighting against our biology. I think that’s never a great idea. Sure, we have a big fat neocortex that can over-ride our instinctual/emotional circuits. But logic without content & context is no path to the hyperbolic enlightenment. Our brains are hard-wired to ask questions, seek complexity, and build things. It’s in our DNA.

So we end up chasing goals that don’t fit our Puzzles - forcing pieces into it that damage our harmony, build nothing, and eventually force a reset.

Instead of trying to guess at our perfect future, we should focus on the process of building it. In my post about AI and changing how we build out future, I talk about how we don’t need specific long-term goals if we focus on areas of life that are important to us and apply our attention/intention or presence/self-reflection cycles. We will naturally combine what our brains do well with the kind of person we want to be. We will usually find, in presence, that our brains reward us for cooperation, caring for others, and building things. These endorphin rewards are more powerful than any drug.

chop wood. carry water. Engaging with the reality in front of us, consistently, instead of focusing on a fantasy in the future, will show us what we want. It’s counter-intuitive - do, then want. But it’s magical. Do what’s in front of you. Do the damn thing. Do it better than you’ve ever done before. Do it better than it’s ever been done before. Every day we are placing Puzzle pieces, whether we’re paying attention or not. Doing with attention is the antidote to the wrong wanting.

But, we’re still mostly wrong. Lots of wrong wanting may have gotten us into situations where our Puzzles are chaotic or we’re building the wrong things. That’s why frequent check-ins, self-reflection, are crucial to building your best Puzzle. We must make micro-adjustments to our daily Doing, sometimes macro-adjustments. Our subconscious will build us through Doing and our conscious mind can help adjust our heading - move the needle closer to alignment with ourselves.

If you’re brand new to, shall we say Trusting the Build instead of Guessing the Future, check out the full series about The Puzzle, or for a summary of this topic - Zooming In and Out of the Puzzle. In it’s simplest form you can take 2-4 things you know are crucially important to you. Things you couldn’t live without. Buckets you want to fill with your time/attention. Focus your presence on those things as much as you can, within the bounds of your reality. They may quickly expand to more buckets with slightly more complexity. Or you may become laser focused on them. But spending time/attention on them will invariably get you those endorphin rewards and further build The Puzzle that, in retrospect, you realize you wanted all along.

For most of the history of science we had to use our senses to observe phenomena, propose hypothesis, and develop rules and laws the universe abides by. As we developed better tools to break things up into smaller pieces and measure forces something very strange happened.

Turns out the building blocks of our reality don’t behave like reality at all. They turn into probabilities and potentials. It’s honestly really hard to grasp - we can measure everything in our observable universe and it all behaves like observable things but the small things don’t. We can’t predict exactly what they’ll do and where they’ll be. We can only wave our hands at a general behavior set.

The best demonstration of this is the famous double-slit experiment. They threw electrons at an impenetrable wall with 2 slits in it they could pass through and something on the other side that showed where they landed after passing through the slits. Our rules of reality say we should be able to predict where they land by knowing the starting parameters - only electrons that arrive at the wall at the slits will pass and they’ll form a predictable pattern on the other side. And if we watch the experiment, that’s true. But if we run the experiment without determining which slit the electron goes through, the rules change. They exhibit wave-like interference patterns, behaving as if they passed through both slits simultaneously. Each electron behaving as if it’s multiple, the probability cloud remains in-tact.

It’s been proven over and over and birthed all kinds of theories including the multiverse. If you accept it as is, it makes sense. But to accept that you have to suspend everything we’ve been taught about solid objects. The wildest part is the act of measurement itself. To ‘see’ an electron we have to interact with it- bounce a photon off it or detect it’s charge. This interaction destroys the delicate wave pattern, collapsing it back into a particle.

A baseball isn’t a set of probabilities, we believe; it goes where you throw it. But the tiny ‘things’ that make up the baseball are a set of probabilities. The baseball doesn’t disappear when we blink and in physics this is called decoherence. A baseball is constantly being ‘observed’ by the environment. Air molecules hit it, light bounces off it. These billions of tiny interactions keep its quantum wave function collapsed, locking it into the reality we see. It’s too big and noisy to act like a wave.

Imagine, for a moment, that everything solid in this world is just a group of vibrations, vibrating so coherently that the vibrations get so tight together that it no longer looks like a vibration.

What the double-slit experiment tells us, however, is that if there weren’t observations happening, the baseball is in the first state…well, maybe second. Only when we look at it, or the sun does, or bird songs, do the quantum particles behave the way we expect and a baseball emerges. WTF?!

I’ll admit it can be very hard to imagine the baseball is not a baseball when we look away cause when we look back, it’s the same baseball. But at a quantum level it’s not. Nothing is ever actually the same. Time, itself, changes things and all those probabilities are interacting and changing each other, too, always towards disorganization. That’s called entropy and is a fundamental guiding principle of the universe that even quantum mechanics obey.

Back to the baseball and double-slit, this tells us reality is participatory. At the quantum level, the state of a system depends on the measurement. It is not a huge leap to extrapolate that how we think and focus also changes what our reality is. Our brain is a constantly firing electrical system. While neural signals are biological, the fundamental particles driving them operate on quantum rules, not solid object rules.

Now, if you’re still with me, let’s observe what happens when look at our future. There are so many possibilities for that future. Some are very hazy and we cannot truly see how we get there. Some are very clear and we know they’re coming. If we say “I want to be an astronaut” but then turn our focus to our daily tasks we only hold that path in our mind for a moment, the wave collapsed into an idea then it returns to a cloud of probabilities.

This is extremely intuitive, but what I’m exploring here is that maybe we’re not just affecting our own thoughts and behaviors. We very much could be interacting with the quantum field to bring about the things we think about. Perhaps if we don’t just say “I need to study to make good grades” but expand the thought to “the right things for the best grade will emerge for me to study and I will learn them in the right way” we not only narrow our focus, but perhaps, just perhaps, influence the book to fall open to the right page that happens to be most important for the upcoming test. I mean, why not???

And, to be sure, if you don’t believe that - it 100% will never happen to you. I, for one, have had layers of coincidences….coincide in ways that absolutely have astounded me. How could it possibly be true that so many things happen exactly perfect to bring out the thing I truly believed would happen?!? Further, I feel this way sometimes when learning about the universe and how improbable we all are. For SO many things to come together to create our world, our reality, right now, is so ridiculously mind-boggling that imagining I can help effect the world I want as I move through it seems simple in comparison.

Intention identifies sets of probabilities and our focus tries to turn them into reality. Of course we’re often up against forces far stronger than ourselves. It’s less manifestation and more about levels of influence. If we see the world as waves of probabilities that we try to surf we can better understand we don’t always catch the wave we want. Watching the surf is the best way to find the right wave.

Which brings me to our final parallel with quantum mechanics let’s think about observing the future, not the present. Not planning, not dreaming, but observing. Our brains are hard-wired for pattern recognition and probability calculations. Observing the baseball turns it into a baseball. Sensing where waves of probabilities are going and observing the outcome is not a huge stretch, for me. You '“know” a baseball will hit the ground before you drop it, but you’re already calculating how low the odds are a dog will run by and catch it before it hits the ground. We don’t call that quantum mechanics, but it’s a similar process of predicted outcomes from a set of variables.

If observing physical particle collapses it from a wave of possibilities into a single point of reality, perhaps our conscious attention does something similar with the future. We are observing the ‘quantum cloud’ of our future life and, by measuring and focusing, helping to crash that wave function into the reality we want. Somewhere between looking away from a baseball and dreaming of being in the world series, right?

Philosophy, in turn, developed well before any understanding of the brain. Without any kind of concepts to draw from, philosophers who even recognized some of the seemingly non-thinking parts of the brain had to kind of dismiss them. In the 17th century, Rene Descartes talked about the mind-body problem and how the mind housed consciousness and self-awareness completely separate from the physical brain. He proposed the mind as a immaterial, non-spatial substance. Talk about woo-woo. The Stoics approached emotions as judgements to be overcome through rational thought with passions (anger, fear, excessive joy, distress) being disturbances that the wise person should eliminate.

As we learned about the brain and began studying it, we finally saw the complex dance inside between rational thought, emotions, instincts, and patterns instilled through experience. Everything needed to be questioned - thought and free will up to the still hotly-debated theories of consciousness. I had this friend in my engineering program, who literally lived in a van down by the river, introduced me to what I call (tongue-in-cheek) ‘philosophy-of-doubt.’ He shared stories of f-MRIs debunking philosophical truisms and spiritual guidance. One example was when they put a master transcendental meditation practitioner in an f-MRI and learned what they did to achieve their “state of timelessness” was turn off the part of their brain that tracks time, our internal clock.

This friend was particularly skeptical of all things and didn’t believe anything he couldn’t understand. I have always tried to approach studies rationally with the acknowledgement that I am bound by my brain’s ability to perceive the world around me and it’s interpretations of such. Much of our neural processing capacity is dedicated to survival. We’re really just a few thousand years past a reality where we could be killed at any moment, so truly understanding mystical interactions between organisms and even the ever-present gravity (we can measure it, but we still don’t know what holds us down) is apparently still out of reach for our survival-wired brains.

Recent philosophers, like Patricia Churchland, who I learned about during a recent visit to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, have pioneered the application of neuroscience to philosophy. Applying neuroscience to philosophical questioning creates radical revisions to seemingly timeless arguments. When I had my traumatic brain injury in my twenties I was extremely worried some of my cognitive deficits would be permanent (including my memory loss) so I dug into any research I could find on healing the brain. I landed on the recently-discovered-but-now-universally-accepted concept of neuroplasticity and found Jill Bolte Taylor and her book My Stroke of Insight. Neuroplasticity proves our brain can reorganize itself structurally in response to experience, impacting how we undestand knowledge and learning (epistemology) and even the nature of mind and body, shattering the long-accepted duality of the two.

All this is to try and say that while philosophers seem like a pipe-smoking bunch in libraries full of leather-bound books that smell of rich mahogany the entire frameworks of philosophy itself are wide open for new interpretations and conclusions. We all have the opportunity to contribute to schools of philosophy, all the way up to Ontology (the study of being and existence). Nobody knows for sure what we’re all doing here and why. And just as neuroscience is truly opening a new door for philosophical direction, AI will barge in to influence and reshape all of it again. I love using The Puzzle framework to organize my thoughts on these things and apply deep and heavy concepts to my every day life for more joy and fulfillment. chop wood. carry water.

When I look back at all the times I was challenged to discover my purpose I’m saddened by the guidance on how I was supposed to do it, the guilt of failure, and the time wasted ‘trying on’ different purposes that felt like they were just kinda selected, not discovered. I believe there are processes to actually discover purpose and I’m sure there are others than the one I had to figure out on my own.

Most frameworks and gurus focus on purpose because if you find something appropriate and hold that in your mind, the pursuit of the purpose creates meaning. Meaning is the real goal, but it’s emergent, not a destination. It emerges from the intersection of your natural tendencies, your current station, and what the world needs from you in this moment. These three things are constantly shifting, which is why a static purpose statement can quickly feel hollow.

You can feel meaning by simply being fully present in what you’re doing. You can start anytime. Check out the presence exercises in The Puzzle. Building greater meaning is the secret in The Puzzle. You’re always placing new pieces and each piece you place changes what pieces could come next. The more present you are in placing them, the more options emerge after. Your upbringing and station in life aren’t obstacles to overcome or background to transcend; they’re simply the starting pieces on the board right now. The question isn’t “what should I dedicate my life to?” but rather “what feels right to do next (what piece feels right to place next), given where I actually am and where I want to go?”

The missing ingredient in most meaning-making conversations is the honest recognition that your brain has preferences, capabilities, and limitations that aren’t negotiable through willpower alone. You can’t purpose your way into loving something your neural architecture finds tedious. You can presence your way into doing a good job, but your self-reflection will show that it wasn’t natural. Your self-reflection can show you those moments when time disappeared, when the work truly felt like play, so you can build intentionally towards more of those moments.

That is meaning from the ground up. It’s not a destination that you’re marching toward, but a structure you’re assembling piece by piece, using materials you actually have, guided by what actually brings you alive.

When I started to truly apply presence, I found I could love even the mundane work in front of me. I found joy in mopping floors and cleaning equipment. But each night, upon reflection, my mind wanted to do more than that. Zen Buddhism says we should keep the meaning right in front of us, but that essentially paralyzes you at the moment you are awakened to the power of presence. Presence allowed me to access meaning with whatever I was doing, but the yearning for greater meaning persisted.

Being present in the day, reflecting on what worked best and what didn’t feel natural, then shifting the next day towards the things my brain loved to be doing…choosing the wood to chop and the water to carry…created the magic. Day after day I chose where to focus my energy and then summoned as much presence as my brain had the energy for. The days started to change, my productivity accelerated and opportunities opened up I never thought possible. I continued to be present and jump into opportunities and execute extremely well. Work became play.

Soon I realized I was living my dream. Meaning is described as the experience of doing what matters to you. I get to do that every day. Everything I do matters to me and I know tomorrow will present me with more opportunities for meaning. Presence and Self-reflection. Intention and Attention. chop wood/carry water and then choose the wood/water. That’s how I create my purpose instead of choosing one.

Sometimes I get on the self-improvement train for weeks at a time! Eat right, exercise, mental health, relationships, healthy fun, financial discipline, etc, etc. Sometimes I fall off for a day, a week, a month. Sometimes pushing through the universe’s twists and turns is all I have the energy for. And for sure grief can throw a wrench in the best-laid plans.

Time is a forcing function of the universe and The Puzzle abides - pieces get laid down in front of you and you move over them whether you choose them or not. You can take a break from caring and in a few weeks look back and you will see the values and factors of your life that have inertia - that are instilled in your actions without effort. When I take a break from thinking about my life, slide through it, and look back I see mostly things I want - I still care about family, I still want to do fulfilling work, and I’m still conscientious. But there are a lot of things that fall off when my effort falls off - self-care, exercise, diet, planning.

I spend a lot of my time in my bonds with my family. I can also find my flow at work and the whole world disappears - I skip meals and movement and planning and schedules. Both work and family are important to me, but the tension between the things that easily expand and the things that need our effort is where our work lies. If you’re happy with what shows up when you stop paying attention then you’ve got a well-aligned brain map for your Puzzle!

I have been nudged out of my routines recently and I believe it allowed me space for some grief I needed to process. The routines and discipline and self-management just push emotional processing down the road. The gurus might say I should have increased my self-work practice, but I’m at peace with the time off and will tell myself it’s healthy regardless of how different it has been than my normal life.

If you need to put it in a box you can explain, it’s this - intuition is our subconscious recognizing patterns and predicting the future far faster than conscious thought. Deja vu can also be connected - to process something faster than we’re consciously aware so it seems like it already happened. Another juicy tidbit is that a huge portion of our perceived reality is actually our brain predicting what’s going to happen next and serving it up to our sense to basically confirm or deny. It also fills in gaps, adds context to stimuli, filters it, and a host of other input processing. It’s quite possible our subconscious is smarter than we can even imagine and knows what’s going to happen.

Buttttt, we also have scientific evidence that our hearts & minds can become coupled, synchronizing, when engaged with each other and other wild phenomena that suggest our brains are reading far more than our five senses are perceiving.

That’s where the phrase ‘sixth sense’ comes from. We know there’s something very woo-woo going on, but we can’t fully explain it. My mom had two instances in my childhood of intuition so strong that it looked from the outside like she knew the future. She was a nurse and always told us to ‘walk it off’ when we got hurt. Tough love. But one weekend my parents were going out of town and my mom was freaking the fuck out about me getting hurt. There was no reason. There was no risky activity I was going to be doing. She freaked out so much that she literally called every hospital in town and sent over my stats and her contact information in case I landed in one.

Two days later, while they were out of town, I had a car accident and landed in the hospital. The hospital had all of my info handy. We never doubted her intuition after that. Now, with some extra mental gymnastics, you could find some explanation for this outside of soothsayer stuff, but maybe we should just embrace and harness this patchouli-smelling concept.

And I’ve learned over the years that it’s actually a skill! Just like we use physical exercises to build skills with our senses we can use mental exercises to build our intuitive skills. And, rarely discussed, we can actually talk to our intuition and ask it questions. We can have conversations with our intuition about our life, our future, and even about other peoples’ futures. But there are some caveats.

Intuition is not emotion. Emotions are powerful forces in our mind, but they can be very complex and influenced by our environment, hormones, and even what we have eaten that day. Intuition is that background signal you have to turn everything else off to hear. You have to listen differently. and if you feel emotions rise up, you know it’s no longer your intuition talking. Intuition is a whisper.

Intuition is also like Mr Spock. Intuition is very literal and needs extreme precision. If we want to directly ask it things we have to ask clear, simple questions. Asking things like ‘will I succeed in my job?’ is so subjective - what’s the definition of success in this question? Financial success? Happiness? Career-advancing? Do you want one of those things more than the others? Intuition can’t give clear answers to complex questions. It can give you a gut feel that you can run with, but not in a conversation.

Intuition doesn’t speak english, or any other linguistic/semantic code. Written/spoken language is an agreed-upon social code that our brains can use, but the complex waves of neural firings are processing way too much information at once to slow it down to words. Dreams, flashes of memory, random imagery that only makes sense in larger context are all parts of the brain’s preferred language. You have to learn to interpret and look past the surface to try and understand what the images mean to you, based on your experiences.

It takes practice and analysis to understand our subconscious signals, but once we do it can start to feel like a crystal ball. When I was deep in intuitive practices I went to the horse tracks with friends (I have witnesses!) to test my skills. Calm and curious I picked six winners in a row and on race seven I decided to try a trifecta bet - picking first, second, and third, in order. I was a poor college kid and I knew it was super-risky so I only put $2 on the bet. I won $2,000 on that $2 and as my pick for third crossed the finish line in third I screamed something like “I’m king of the world!!” earning me skeptical side-eyes and weird looks from my friends. Then they all wanted to know my pick for race 8. I lost the last three races because my emotions were now tied up in it. I’ve only been back once and didn’t pick a single winner, I tell myself because of the pressure of that amazing day.

Either through age, exhaustive practice, or closely following brain science advancement to learn new natural treatment/coping mechanisms I feel like I have been well in control of my disorder for a few years now. As a refresher I was diagnosed as a kid but didn’t believe them cause they just talked to me for 30 minutes. I didn’t think a diagnoses was possible in that time. Six years ago a brain scan verified the diagnosis and, for me, that was actually the trigger that gave me greater control. I’m always walking along a cliff, of sorts, of my emotional well-being. Sometimes I’ll wander a bit too close to the edge and just a peek over the edge will remind me to find/practice one of my remedies to open the path away from the edge. From this place of greater awareness and control of my emotions I have been able to explore them and experience them from a place of curiosity, knowing that usually I can snap out of them, dissociating for safety, if needed.

By better controlling the negative ones, which only create a sad and lonely world, I’m able to experience more of the positive ones, which create a world of beauty and love. I also get to explore mystical emotions and plenty I still don’t understand. With a lifetime of experience evaluating my emotions when I come across something I don’t understand it’s especially interesting to me. As I said in my prior post we just don’t talk much about our complex emotions. I think unpacking them can lead to greater understanding of ourselves, greater presence, and a more enriched life.

Understanding the spectrum of emotions can help us better catalog our experiences and seek out ones that help us on our journey. But we jumble them all together all the time. Here’s the hierarchy as I see it to layers of emotions:

Many people would argue sensations are not part of emotions, but they’re the foundation for externally-provoked emotions. When the sun hits our skin, our body produces vitamin D (actually a hormone, but whatevs). That vitamin D is used in many processes in the body, including mood regulation, so it actually makes us feel good. Our brain remembers that and will give us some endorphins just for getting out is the sun, as a reward for providing the body/brain with essential nutrients/hormones. That’s one of many, many examples of how external stimuli unconsciously provoke emotions.

Complex emotions are a dialogue in our brain between emotional centers (the amygdala is one, but not the only) and higher-order thinking regions (our judgment centers, like the prefrontal cortex). A beautiful dialogue with layers and layers of feelings, thoughts, memories intertwined into a tapestry of emotion. Sometimes too complex to possibly explain. “You know, that feeling when….” Sometimes the best we can do is describe when it happens, not what it is.

When complex emotions emerge from seemingly nowhere, they may be sparked by hidden sensory cues, subconscious memories, or the brain’s own restless circuitry stitching together patterns. They can also be colored by the body’s unseen rhythms, or perhaps even by signals from the world we don’t yet fully understand. The result is a sudden flood of feeling, inexplicable yet undeniably real

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The important part, in our Puzzle building, is to pay attention to how the emotions color our experiences from the day. Within presence our brains are engaging so fully in the world that our judgement & emotional pathways are disrupted, being fully engulfed in the sensations of the present moment. They’re two very different pathways. Then in self-reflection our brain will rerun the day through those dialogue pathways to better understand the experience, connecting it with prior experiences that were similar, emotions that normally happen in those moments, etc. This will give us much deeper clues about whether the day was in-line with our highest path or not. Beyond the frustrations of our complex world and simple joys of presence there lies truly valuable information about how we can express ourselves in a way that honors our neural framework foundations, our station in life, and what kind of Puzzle we want to create.

The deeper I go into most classics and even modern/contemporary schools the more questions without answers start to multiply and that’s not where I want to go. I want to figure out what can be figured out (for me) and leave the rest in a bucket called unfigureoutable. The line between the two is hotly debated and I guess if I thought more about things that I don’t think I can figure out maybe I’d figure out some new things. And this is my torture.

One area of thought that I don’t see a lot of analysis about, in philosophy, is emotion. Some schools, like Stoicism or threads of Buddhism, treat emotions as things to overcome. Others like Romanticism, Existentialism, and maybe Pragmatism see emotion as the very material that makes up life, and they let it be. But everyone seems to think our own emotions are just that, our own.

What if they’re more than obstacles, more than part of life? What if they’re also signals and the language of the Collective Puzzle. I think our lexicon for emotions is deficient. Not too many people can actually describe what, specifically, emotions are beyond mad/sad/glad. We don’t talk about these things. We talk about why we are feeling an emotion. We don’t often stop to observe the emotion, how they can wash over us and vanish or fade away. We share what the emotion is making us want to do (like throw things) but not what’s happening in our body as the emotion waxes or wanes. Without observation we can’t then recall details of them. We’re left with just the strongest of the signals we receive from them because we don’t catalog the intricacies. You can’t speak well about wine until you learn what words are associated with what sensations.

From a brain structure and neurochemistry perspective our brains are wired to use emotions to give depth to experiences. Neuron firing goes through the amygdala before the frontal cortex, then back and forth. Sometimes we don’t even remember an event, just the emotion that’s left from it. That indicates emotions are substantial enough themselves to be what you might consider reserved for actual thoughts. If we think of emotions as more than “our lizard brain” saying “this make me feel bad, that make me feel good” I think the subtleties start to emerge.

The other day I was driving out of my neighborhood, as usual, and I was struck by an emotion. Just slapped in the face with it. My practices in The Puzzle have helped me slow down when that happens and be curious. I kinda paused (do not recommend, I was not likely a safe driver) and let the emotion talk to me. The emotion itself then created a visual in my mind, something in the future that hasn’t happened yet, and poured details into my brain.

I found that experience both novel and very exciting. Was this my brain doing it’s prediction thing and telling me high probability ideas about what’s to come? Wait, was it the Collective Puzzle showing me some pieces in the future? Pieces I could now grab and throw in my bag as a part of a vision I want to work towards. Was it just some hormones and neurotransmitters interacting at the wrong time? Even if that thing does come true in the future it will only eliminate one of the above options. And maybe not because what if a random firing of neurons through the amygdala showing me a story in the future is all it takes to drive me to that future?

So I was left with more questions than answers, yet again. After my Puzzle vision I have had to revisit the question of whether all of our thoughts are created by our brain/body or not. I just can’t reconcile the vision with a “creative burst” or other explanation confined to my body. It was coming from outside of me. This has led me to be more curious and pay closer attention to signals that don’t feel as “me” as the others. The best way, I have found, to try and make sense of these signals, to piece the signals together into coherent thoughts, is to use emotions as the flashlight. To sit inside of the emotion that comes with the signal and let it bring the disparate pieces together.

I don’t know how it works, but it feels smarter than my thoughts or analysis. Kinda like how we still don’t know how ant mounds exhibit complex behaviors-. Emergence is the word we use to describe this. Ants only have 10-20 pheromones they use as their language of communication. But ant mounds, the collection of all of the ants, exhibit behaviors far too complex to be any combination of pheromones. The mound itself is exhibiting the behavior, not the ants. Things like optimizing a route to food, building a mound in the right shape & position to create stable temperatures and CO2 levels are done without any architects or blueprints. We even know that mounds can become less aggressive and smarter about competition as they age.

Perhaps emotions are one language of the Collective Puzzle. Our alignment with those around us allow the signal to get stronger. We just gotta pay attention to the subtle signals beneath the louder self-preservation and procreation ones.

That’s the real danger. Ego, unmanaged, can sabotage you in the pursuit of self-expansion and self-glory.

Ego is a part of our operating system. It’s completely required, but incomplete in it’s perspective. It’s the source of our confidence and decision making. No, there’s no true self that can make decisions and have real confidence. Literally the brain pathways, that have been identified and studied, that allow us to make any decision at all, including to rise out of bed, to brush our teeth, to get dressed, are part of the ego. We must have a functioning ego to function in the world.

Some people narrowly define ego as only it’s negative excesses - pride, arrogance, selfishness. Don’t fall into this trap. Ego can be these villains, but it’s also the structure below us.

There is no self without ego. The only part of the brain active when saying ‘I’ is ego. I do believe in The Collective Puzzle and our connection with everything around us so we can wax philosophic about possibilities of existing without an ‘I.’ In the real world, however, we need that separation in our mental models to also recognize ‘others.’ Maintaining the boundary between me and not me is crucial to empathy and self-protection. Too much ego, though and again, crushes empathy in the pursuit of self-glory.

So the work is not to ‘kill the ego,’ but to ‘monitor the ego.’ Awareness of what parts of your thoughts are driven by ego and judgement on if those thoughts serve your Puzzle and the life you want.

Constructive ego thoughts:

• I can do this (confidence, self-efficacy)

• I want to contribute to that project (agency, initiative)

• I love what I built (satisfaction)

• I should apologize for that (self-image connected to integrity)

Destructive ego thoughts:

• I need to win so they know I’m better (comparison, dominance)

• I can’t be wrong here (rigidity, fear of embarrassment)

• I deserve more than them (entitlement, superiority)

• If I fail, I’m a failure (identity tied to outcome)

The underlying pattern is the same - ego attaches meaning to “me” and either builds or guards it. The good side of ego gives you a stable mental model of yourself to act from. The bad side warps everythign into validation-seeking or self-preservation at all costs.

When I first started learning about ego in my 20s, it was from spiritual literature that defined it as the enemy. There was a ton of guidance available on how to ‘destroy your ego!’ Recognizing that my ego was probably causing problems for me, at the time, and was probably over-developed I decided to embark on a journey to destroy it.

I forget which activities I chose, but in the course of a few weeks, maybe months, I felt like I had successfully destroyed my ego! I felt like I was at peace with the world and needed nothing from it. Everything was as it should be. Which felt serene at first, but also started to cause just as much trouble as my overactive ego. I was running a business, after all. Nothing seemed to matter anymore and boy did my business need me to think it mattered.

There’s a tension in entrepreneurship between the anxiety of failure and satisfaction of success that creates the space for continued action. And act we must. These ‘passive income’ businesses feel like deciding to not participate in one of the greatest endeavors of life - making a difference. Even if I never actually make a difference I still want to strive for it. And ‘making a difference’ is intentionally obtuse so as to not be attainable. And, of course, there are myriad ways to make a difference outside of business and I include those in my efforts. I’m just saying if I’m going to be in a business there’s nothing that will be passive about it.

People would ask me questions and I’d just say “I don’t know.” Then they’d say “well you’re the only one who can make this decision, so….” and I was paralyzed. I literally could not make this decision that my business absolutely needed. That’s when I realized I had gone too far. That’s when I dug deeper into the meaning and science of ego.

Since then I try to constantly walk the line between indecision and arrogance. I want a healthy vision of myself which includes caring for the people around me, caring for the planet, and always making decisions that benefit The Collective Puzzle.

I wonder if it’s common that when things start going well we are more inclined to allow more complexity in our lives and try to adjust and manage the new levels without really examining how much is there. For me sometimes the complexity passes quickly (15 minutes of fame), sometimes it crests on it’s own and fades, and sometimes it breaks me.

My first true complexity wave was when I sold my first company, a small and rather simple landscaping company, along with everything I owned in order to move to Spain to try and launch a chain of restaurants. I didn’t have any real or relevant experience in the industry, just had visited Spain in college and loved it and had an idea.

Aside - “Had an idea” is an all too common reason for failed ventures. Good ideas are not hard to come by, good execution is the secret sauce. You’re not the best person to launch your idea just cause you were first, and you probably weren’t anyways. But I digress.

I had was some potential investors and potential partners so I made the decision and didn’t look back. Making a decision is technically simple - do it or not? From there the complexity starts to build. Where it stops is based entirely on how much you let in. Even simple ideas can snowball into overwhelming complexity - Facebook started as ‘a digital Harvard yearbook’ and Zuck just wanting a date.

The complexity of launching a new business in a foreign country quickly overtook me. I was smart and a good problem-solver, which could spell success in simpler ideas. But in less than a year I had spent all of the money from selling prior business, my girlfriend had left me, and I contracted a parasite in Spain. I woke up back in the US, on my mom’s couch, broke, sick, and alone. It all came crashing down and my life was simple again.

This wave has happened to me several times and after each wave I try to reflect as deeply as I can on how I behaved in the wave and what I would do better next time. Simple plans have mobs of people trying them. It’s the complex ideas that more often are white space. There’s no guidebook and white space complexity rarely gets simpler when tackled. When the wave comes it’s extremely hard for me to maintain presence and self-reflection, it’s all I can do to manage the complexity.

Think about the times in your life you were overwhelmed through the lens of a complexity wave. How does it change your perspective on it? For me it helps me realize that there were many moments I could have said no to more complexity to reduce the overwhelm. The no wouldn’t have to reduce the business, just a no to ‘more.’ Saying no to complexity feels so much easier than saying no to an opportunity.

“I’m stressed, but managing, and with the stress comes a lot of opportunities cause I’m doing a lot. Is this next opportunity the one that will tie it all together and make everything work? Or will it just add complexity and push me closer to a breaking point?”