If you want to be a writer, you should be writing. Not tomorrow, today.

Ze is bang on here, as he so often is. It’s what’s prompting me to write on this moribund blog. I often think of myself as a writer, but I don’t write. It seems that I keep waiting for inspiration to strike, or a captivating topic, or, or, something. All the while, I know this is wrong, but the only way out of this trap is to write my way out.

There’s plenty of other great stuff in this video, like how at 4:24, Ze talks about how education towards a creative career doesn’t provide a clear path towards the creativity of learning to make money doing that thing. I really resonated with that too, as that was far harder to learn in my career compared with the actual technical skills of what I do.

I am God’s gift to the world.

It’s all a matter of tone. The first way—the way you likely read it—is laden with arrogant posturing, filling even the most most ardent pacifist with the desire to do violence.

The second tone is rarer, likely impossible. It is the sound of humility; of the sincere belief that all that you have been given is there to be shared with others.

Each inflection is fictitious: nobody is purely one or the other. We despise the former because we recognize something of it in ourselves, and feel the latter is so far from possibility that we lather ourselves in protective layers of cynicism and irony.

But in the second sense is the terrifying, liberating truth that we are not our own. Lose the cynicism, lose the self-loathing, and just for a second believe that maybe the world (and, paradoxically, also you) will be richer for spending yourself as a lavish gift to the world.

There are too many factors to tease out in a move like this, but one of the significant personal ones for me came down to values: I was dissatisfied with my attempts to find a work-life balance. Even when I wasn’t working, I was thinking about work too much, preventing me from being properly present to those around me. And it wasn’t getting any better.

Employment isn’t going to be a magic bullet, but I’m hopeful that this shift will help me to find a better balance so that I’m actually present to my wife, family, friends, and community when I’m not working. I also look forward to having colleagues, since the freelance life can feel pretty isolated at times. All in all, I’m really excited!

What disturbs me about Apple is the religion of it. It’s not just that their customers have attached transcendent meaning to Apple and its products, but that Apple actively cultivates veneration. When I spent three shame-faced hours in line for my iPad two years ago, the employees came out clapping and cheering as the Apple Store was about to open, trying to whip us up into a frenzy. I gritted my teeth, feeling as awkward as a Jew at a Pentecostal revival. I didn’t want to get saved, I just wanted to exchange money for a consumer good.

It’s not that I’m just blaming Apple, but us as well. We’re the ones lapping this up; the ones lining up the night before for the “privilege” of getting to drop $500+ on one of these things. We’re the people whose only commitment is to instant gratification, but we conjure long-suffering as we reverently await the availability of a consumer good.

And yet, here I see glimmers of hope; of people striving to connect with something transcendent and significant. They’re horribly misguided, but the underlying impulse is sound and good. I believe that following Jesus in self-giving love is the answer to this religious impulse, but I’d settle for anything that looks a little more like service or love or justice and a little less like conspicuous consumption.

My wife and my in-laws have been, of course, devastated. How do you even begin to grapple with this? A day at a time, with a steady supply of soup, hugs, and kleenex. Or, more simply, you don’t. There is no perspective in the middle of it, you just get by.

This is a moment where words—something I fancy myself good at—just fail. Thus my blog silence. I couldn’t start writing here again without try to grapple with this abberation; with this young, vital woman taken from this world far too soon. And yet every time I tried to assign words, to theologize or philosophize or spiritualize or find some type of life lesson in the void of this unthinkable thing, I’ve come up blank. Or just sworn, softly.

The thing itself cannot be spoken of, but I can begin to name how the world looks altered. One thing that is now perfectly clear is that every day is a gift; every single one. Today. Tomorrow. Yesterday. I would have assented to this idea before, but now it’s visceral.

Live today as though it were the only one you have, because it really is. Don’t let your plans for the future lull you into the notion that you’re owed tomorrow. Don’t forget to live today, the only day you’ve received.

Life is a gift.

Wherefore, though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For, stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and ointment emits a fragrant odor.