The Fire

I cannot keep up with myself.

This morning, while driving my Amazon Flex route, my mind was running wild. One thought followed another so quickly that I could barely hold on to the first before the second arrived. One idea turned into three more. A phrase appeared. Then an image, along with a book title. And then things began connecting and the outline of a reflection was born. By the time I reached for a way to capture one, two more had already appeared, and I was struggling to hang on to the first.

This continued through the afternoon. It followed me home. Ideas arrived while I was trying to complete other tasks, while walking from one room to another, while driving to a home to test water. More things were passing through my mind than I had the ability to preserve. Some of them came back. Some of them, I think, are simply gone.

My brain is on fire.

I do not mean that I am merely busy. I have been busy for most of my life. Nor do I mean that I have a long list of things I would like to accomplish. Lists can be written down. Tasks can be ordered. Projects can be assigned a place and a deadline. “Can” is the operative word here, because I have never been particularly good at organization. But this is different.

It is as though something has been kindled and now refuses to stop burning. The fire leaps from one part of my life to another: from a memory to a book, from a word to an encounter, from the arrangement of a room to the formation of a human being. A tire becomes a backyard project. A delivery route becomes a meditation on carrying words. An old sales call becomes a reflection on anger, dignity, and repentance. A yellow notepad becomes part of a larger vision for how a person might practice becoming. Nothing remains a singular thought or idea for long. Everything seems to point beyond itself.

The Treasury

This did not begin yesterday. I have been reading intensely since the second grade. I can still remember sleepovers with my friend Thomas Stanga when we would read through the entire night—mostly Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books. But that was forty-five years ago, and the reading did not stop. Which means that today I have almost five decades of reading and study, work and travel, teaching and institution-building, failures and endurance—not merely facts stored in my mind, but knowledge accumulated in the mind and body.

I now possess a rich treasury I could not have assembled all at once: books marked and remembered, notes and lectures, things written and taught, the immense body of work gathered through Eighth Day Institute, and the wisdom that can come only from having lived through what one once merely studied. The resources were there, but they did not yet form a coherent and integrated whole.

Now they are rushing toward one another. The fire is not creating something from nothing; it is drawing from the treasury and revealing unsuspected relationships within it. I am not suddenly receiving an entirely new life. I am seeing the life I have already lived begin to disclose its shape.