I have a longer article on nuclear families and systemic violence and units of care, but it's taking me a while. In the process of writing it though, I had a "ok, this is why I needed a break to get here" moment I wanted to share.

I've been spending the vast majority of my time reading, learning, writing, and thinking. I haven't sewn a single stitch. I have not planted anything. I have only cooked for sustenance. 

But books? I'm at the library regularly. I'm looking for free versions of papers. I'm asking AI "Who is writing about the connection between Idea A and Idea B" in an frenetic attempt to keep up with my brain.

I've also been thinking a lot about my family and our own ways of living, loving, and interacting with each other. It's given me a lot of understanding of what I value in all my relationships, and what I want to see in my institutions. 

I swear I can feel the electric currents flying across vast sections of my grey matter as I rifle through stored concepts and ideas from the last 49 years of life. For the first time in memory, my brain is happy. I am at play. Deeply and wholly. This is not just my hobby, but the source of my personal manna.

I know, Biblical term. In Exodus 16, manna is explained as something that doesn't last. It's the food Gd scatters in the desert for the Israelites to gather. It's their only source of sustenance, but they must collect it each night as it will spoil if they try to store it. To me, the energy you get from your thing that makes you whole is a form of manna. And the downside to it is that it doesn't keep. 

For me, that "thing" is learning. And not just reading a book and being happy that I gained a new perspective. No, my learning is finding the edges. It's learning about childhood nursery rhymes, and Shakespeare, and Ostrom's rules for the commons, and ancient, cooperative societies, and women's role in technology and asking "who has put these together? What are the truths that tie these things together?" This is what gives me life force.

In my personal life, Shawn and I often get told we are "so adorable" and "couple goals". It used to make us laugh. But after over a decade I think I figured out what people are seeing. This is the second marriage for both of us so when we decided to give this relationship a chance we made a deal – say what you mean, and mean what you say. No guessing. No hidden meanings. It sounds like such an obvious thing, but in practice it means you can't say "I'm fine" or "it's no big deal" if you are in fact not fine. If our nervous systems are making a big deal out of something, we talk about it. This foundation has created the best relationship I've ever had in my entire life. In turn, I'm more honest and open with my kids. I'm more honest and open with my friends. The shadow side of this is that I physically recoil at conversations that aren't entirely real. 

I don't yet know exactly what I will do with that knowledge, but I have a start: I need to give my brain space to play, and I need to have time with people who don't say shit like "I'm so pumped for our Q2 goals LFGGGGG!"

No matter where I go, I'm going to see the systems and the relationships. I'm going to see where they break. I'm going to see the people who talk around them instead of naming them. Spending my days laboring in a system where I have the ability to see the broken pieces but where I am discouraged from fixing them or even diagnosing them, is a kind of personal violence. I don't yet have the ability (or maybe the desire) to ignore it all. Besides, I do get hired because of my systems thinking and my pattern recognition. I'm asked to diagnose and fix systems, but most people don't want you to point out why the current system isn't working. They just want you to put a patch over it as cheaply as possible.

It costs me tremendous amounts of energy to build the patch and ignore the real reason things aren't working. The consequence is that I have no energy left for the kind of play I enjoy. It isn't the kind of thing I can pick up on a Saturday morning for a few hours. It takes days of disappearing into information without having to perform any sort of executive function. Without play, I never have a chance to gather manna.

I'm actually hoping that maybe this break is a chance to learn how to do this in shorter bursts of time. It will be a muscle and no doubt I can train it to be stronger. But information takes time to travel, to entwine, to alchemize into ideas. And then I need an outlet for it.

For now, I think this is this newsletter. Later? I really don't know. I would like to solve interesting problems. Maybe really huge ones like the problem about violence in families mirroring violence by the state and what we can do about it. But I also know that's not something that you just turn into a life in the course of a month or two. But naming what I need means that I can negotiate the terms of future employment around those needs. 

Have I found The Thing? I doubt it. This may be a practice round to figure out The Thing. And maybe there are multiple Things. Maybe that's what life is – being brave enough to follow a meandering path that makes zero sense in the moment. But what I do know about meandering paths is that when you turn around and look back, they look a lot less meandering and a lot more directional.