The poet Allen Ginsberg said this before meals:

“We take now this food, the suffering of many forms of life, the pain of many people. May we be worthy.”

I learned it from David Breeden, a poet, former minister, and hospital chaplain I interviewed for Reclaiming Prayer. He learned it from Ginsberg himself.

It resonated with me, because it’s so close to something I already do.

Years ago, as an exchange student in Japan, I learned that before every meal, everyone at the table puts their hands together, bows a little, and says itadakimasu. The literal translation is “I humbly receive.” Knowing the Japanese sensibility for nuance and flourish, I tend to think it’s actually closer to, “I now humbly partake of this food which has been so graciously prepared for my benefit.”

It’s offered to everyone and everything that made the meal possible: the cook, the farmer, the fish, and the sun and rain and soil that grew it all.

I brought it home with me, and I’ve said it before I eat ever since, or tried to. It isn’t a prayer the way I was raised to pray. It’s a single word. But it’s a way of acknowledging how much I depend on — and, I hope, of feeling some gratitude for — the countless things that combine, again and again, to keep me alive.

During my studies as an Asian Studies major, I learned that in a famine in China, some people grew so hungry they ate dirt. They died with dirt in their bellies.

That’s dark, I know. But whenever there’s food in front of me, I try to remember that I’m not in that place — and how many people have been.

I’ve spent time at the retreat center Sadhguru founded near McMinnville, Tennessee. By the dining hall there’s a sign. I captured those words.

“How food goes into you, from whose hands it comes to you, how you eat it, how you approach it, all these things are important. Above all, the food you eat is life. Other forms are giving up their life to sustain us. If we can eat with enormous gratitude for all the living things which give up their life to sustain our lives, food will behave in a very different way within you.”

I don’t know if what Sadhguru said is literally true. I like to think it is. What I can say for sure is that my experience of eating is different when I remain mindful and grateful than when I don’t. And I suspect that it’s true for you, too.

From the Commonplace Book

“What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us. What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.” — attributed to Albert Pine

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Veritasium is a YouTube channel run by Derek Muller, a science communicator with about twenty-one million subscribers who makes long, careful videos about how things actually work. One of his is called The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Technology — fifty-five minutes on a single device: the machine ASML builds in the Netherlands that prints the most advanced computer chips on earth. It costs $400 million. Only one company in the world can make it.

Roughly how it works: a droplet of molten tin the size of a blood cell is fired across a chamber and hit by a laser, fifty thousand times a second. Each hit produces a flash of light hotter than the surface of the sun, which bounces off the smoothest mirrors ever made and burns a pattern onto a silicon wafer. That pattern becomes the chip in your phone, your car, and the computer I used to write this newsletter.

I watched it thinking about that sign in Tennessee. From whose hands it comes to you. Thousands of engineers over thirty years, so that I can type this and you can read it.

Every one of us lives with things we could do, things we want to do, things we tell ourselves we’re going to do. We have limits — time, attention, energy, money — so some of it gets filed under someday. That’s human.

Even after I’d committed to Reclaiming Prayer — after the proposal, the plan, the question set, dozens of recorded interviews — even after I’d made what others might consider “significant progress,” one question kept needling me: Am I really writing this book, or am I trying to write it?

I set so many deadlines nobody else ever saw. How many books I’d read by when. How many interviews I’d finish by when. Personal prayer experiments I intended to try and write about. A podcast built from all those recorded conversations. I missed most of them.

But I kept going.

And along the way there were moments, conversations mostly, that felt like wind in my sails. One came from one of my best friends. He has a corporate job with a Fortune 500 company and works from home. He told me one of the things that keeps him effective is getting ready every morning as if he were going to the office. Pressed shirt. Belt. Shoes. In his own house. All his meetings are on video. Nobody would ever know if he skipped the pants.

He would know.

It reminded me of a conversation with my friend Britt Frank, psychotherapist and author of The Science of Stuck. She told me that to get her book finished, she dressed for every writing session as if she were meeting one of the clients the finished book would bring her. Jewelry. Even perfume. The clients she was writing for didn’t exist yet. Neither did the book. She dressed for them anyway.

There’s an old admonition: “Be now what thou prayest to be made.”

After that conversation with my friend, I committed to doing the same. I haven’t been perfect. But I’ve suited up more days than not.

And here’s what I can tell you this week: I just spent six weeks gathering feedback from the book’s first readers, and I’m about to sign with the company that will handle final edits, design, and distribution. So when I ask myself, Am I really doing this? — soon I’ll be able to answer, definitively: No. I’m not doing it.

I already did.

What are you telling yourself you’re going to do?

And what will you be wearing once you’ve finally done it?

From the Commonplace Book

“Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.”

― Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Years ago, I interviewed Stephen Cope for the School for Good Living podcast. Cope is the author of The Great Work of Your Life, a book about finding and doing the thing you’re here to do. He told me the key to actually finishing his books came down to a mantra he lived by: “Suit up and show up.” He did. The books exist. You can listen to our conversation here.

If something in this issue landed for you — or if you know exactly what you’ll be wearing — hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Wishing you every good thing,

Brilliant

A few years ago, I finished a 9,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It took me twenty-two months.
Almost every time I sat back down at that table, I’d find pieces that fit right away. Three, four, five of them in the first few minutes. And I’d think: why didn’t I place those last night? They were right there. They were easy.

Then I’d remember. Last night I was tired. I’d been staring at blue ocean and pieces of fish for more than an hour and my eyes had stopped seeing. Fatigue is real. But so is coming back fresh.

I’ve been thinking about that lately because of my desk. And my inbox. And a particular stack of paper that has sat around long enough to have its own mailing address. Clutter is something I’ve lived with for a long time. For most of that time I’ve treated it as just how I am.

But “just how I am” is a story. My training as a coach taught me that much: the stories we tell at the identity level are the ones we’ve stopped questioning. This was one of mine.

And not only mine. My mom saved things “in case they might be useful,” a habit she learned from her mother, who came through the Great Depression keeping newspaper clippings, fabric, anything that might one day serve someone.

Here’s what strikes me when I actually look at the stack: not one thing in it is hard. Same with my inbox and my task list: not one email, not one unanswered text, not one item would take more than a minute or two. They’re puzzle pieces sitting in plain sight. Clutter, someone once told me, is just decisions delayed.

There’s a story in Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled that particularly resonated with me. Peck, well into adulthood, had decided he was simply not a person who could fix things. One day he watched a neighbor repairing a lawn mower and said something admiring, something about how he’d never been able to do that kind of thing. The neighbor didn’t look up. “That’s because you don’t take the time.”

I started wondering what I thought I was bad at that I really just hadn’t given enough time to.

If clutter isn’t a defect, if it’s just decisions I haven’t sat with long enough to make, then the reason I haven’t made them isn’t mysterious either. It’s time. And time is the one thing you can’t declutter your way into more of. I like to believe some part of us is unlimited, outside of time and space entirely.

Maybe so. But here, in a body, with a calendar, I get the same number of hours in a day as everyone else, and every day I get to answer the same question again: what will I devote them to?

If you have a stack of your own, here’s what I want you to hear: there’s nothing wrong with you. If you have even a modicum of ambition or care, you’re going to die with things on your to-do list and emails in your inbox. Everyone who’s engaged with life does. The stack isn’t proof you’re failing. It’s proof you’re in the game — and it’s a gift: every day, you get to decide what the hours are actually for.

From the Commonplace Book

“Life is long if you know how to use it.” — Seneca

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

This week on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast, he released a conversation with David Sinclair, the Harvard geneticist and author of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, who thinks aging is a disease we’ll learn to treat. It’s a fascinating hour, and I’ll admit I want what he’s selling.

But somewhere in the middle I caught myself thinking: if someone handed me twenty more years tomorrow, would I spend them any differently than I’m spending this one? A long life and a good one aren’t the same thing. The first is his problem to solve. The second is still mine.

If any of this landed, hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if you think it might be worth someone else’s time, send it their way.

Wishing you every good thing, Brilliant

People sometimes ask how I remember so much — quotes, etymologies, who taught and influenced whom, which books and cities and cultures shaped others. Random tidbits, you name it. To be clear, I couldn’t hold a candle to Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings.

It’s not that I have some bear-trap memory for everything. My penchant is for recalling what others have said — especially about life, and how to live it well. And the honest answer isn’t a technique. It’s this: I remember what I love, what I’ve needed, and what I intend to give away.

Start with love. When I learn, I usually bring my whole self to it. The Japanese have a word for this — isshōkenmei, “with all one’s might.” The word descends from an old samurai phrase meaning to defend one’s single plot of land with one’s life. Wholeheartedness with survival stakes.

Learning science has a name for the state in which we learn best: arousal. When I learn, I’m often aroused. Make of that what you will.

For me, learning is mostly play. I think of it like being a kid on a beach collecting sea glass — beautiful shells, odd treasures, whatever the ocean washed up that day. It’s also a puzzle. Someone once asked me my life goals, and I was surprised to hear myself say, “I want to be omniscient.” But I knew it was true. I want to know everything. (Never to be a know-it-all — just to keep finding out.) It’s the phrase Richard Feynman lived by, the one that titles a collection of his talks: the pleasure of finding things out.

And here’s the thing about recall: it’s effortless when the learning didn’t take effort in the first place. We don’t strain to remember what delighted us.

But play is only part of my answer. For much of my life, I experienced the universe as a vast, dark, cold, indifferent place — a vacuum devoid of meaning. And I desperately wanted meaning. The things I learned became beacons. Guideposts. Sometimes the path itself. The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. If you can say it or think it, it’s not true. I returned to these again and again, and navigated by them. Some days I just needed a reason to live one more day. It didn’t have to be a good one. It just had to be something.

Here’s what I discovered: it’s easy to remember things that are essential to your survival.

And finally — whenever I learn something, I’m already thinking about who I can share it with. That intention changes everything. It’s why I built systems to save what I find, and every time I revisit a quote or a fact to pass it along, it settles deeper into memory. Generosity, it turns out, is a mnemonic device.

When Isaac Asimov — who wrote or edited more than 500 books — was reportedly asked what he’d do if told he had only six months to live, he answered: “Type faster.”

That’s what love, need, and generosity look like when they’ve fused into one motion. We don’t remember what we memorize. We remember what we treasure, what has saved us, and what we can’t wait to give away.

From the Commonplace Book

“Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” — Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Recently I stumbled onto splode.co — a live leaderboard of what the internet is paying attention to right now. It pulls trending data from Google, YouTube, Spotify, Reddit, and more into a single page, refreshed every few minutes.

It’s like peering through keyholes throughout the universe. A meta-feed: instead of whatever the algorithms are serving me, I see what others are seeing and caring about. The beach at high tide, if the ocean were all of us. I never leave without picking something up.

If any of this landed, hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if you think it might be worth someone else’s time, send it their way.

Wishing you every good thing,

Brilliant

When I started researching — and then writing — a book about prayer, I followed a simple structure. Seven questions I wanted answers to: What is prayer? Why do it? Does it work? Who or what are we praying to? Is there a right way? How can we make prayer part of a busy life? And what else is good to know?

As an organizing framework, it was supremely useful. It shaped more than forty interviews. It worked — the way many things in our lives work. Habits, beliefs, relationships: they work until they don’t. Or until we outgrow them. (Or reinvent them.)

Because here’s what I eventually saw: I was writing the book for myself — those were my questions. But my readers are busy, and many are wrestling with heavy questions of their own. They didn’t want a curiosity tour of prayer. Cut to the chase, Brilliant. Give me value from page one.

So I restructured. “What are the benefits of prayer?” became Part 1. “What is prayer?” — the logical opener — moved to Part 3.

Then something interesting happened. I’ve now worked with three professional editors on this manuscript — and the last two, unprompted, made the same suggestion: open with “What is prayer?” Put it back. That got my attention. An editor’s whole job is to advocate for the reader, and here they were advising against the very change I’d made to serve the reader.

There’s an old proverb: if one person tells you you’re a horse, ignore them. If two people tell you, give it some thought. If three people tell you you’re a horse — go buy a saddle.

But there’s a well-worn piece of advice among writers that points nearly the opposite way: when people tell you something’s wrong, they’re almost always right. When they tell you exactly how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.

So which is it? The challenging thing about a choice like this is that there’s no right answer. There’s only what you do.

I’ve long believed the two hardest things in life are these: living in a way that lets you hear the still, small voice inside you offering guidance — and having the courage to follow it when you do.

And there’s a tension folded inside this one, because these editors are help I asked for. That’s its own art: asking for help, accepting it — and knowing when not to accept the “help” you’ve asked for.

Which might be the whole practice, for all of us: hearing that voice, finding the courage to follow it — and, when we ask for help, having the discernment to know when to take it and when to trust ourselves instead.

From the Commonplace Book

“This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.” — Augusten Burroughs, This Is How

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Recently I watched The Defiant Ones, the HBO docuseries about the unlikely partnership between producer Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. What I loved: watching Iovine believe in and support artists across every genre and message — Springsteen, Patti Smith, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, U2, N.W.A, Nine Inch Nails, Eminem, Dre.

It’s amazing what we can do when someone believes in us — and what we can do for others when we believe in them — and I came away inspired to continue my own creative work, which is really just another way of saying: keep speaking and sharing your truth.

If any of this landed, hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if you think it might be worth someone else's time, send it their way.

Wishing you every good thing, Brilliant