I love people who have survived enough to become strange instead of cruel. Give me the person with peculiar rituals. Too many books. A bizarre sense of humor. Three different lives already lived. An oddly specific obsession. A softness they had every excuse to lose. Those are my people.
If you cannot sleep, do not fight it. get up and sit in the dark. dont turn on a light, dont touch your phone. sit in the darkness like its a person you came to visit, because it is. the darkness is where God put everything he was not finished with yet, and that includes you. sit with it, ask nothing, and watch what happens. thirty minutes of real darkness will teach you more than ten years of books, because books are men running from silence, and darkness is silence with its eyes open. and it will look at you, and you will want to run. and if you run, you lost the round. get back up tomorrow night, sit again, last longer. eventually it speaks.
i have a theory about God i talk about all the time
He knows He can’t reach everyone through the same methods, so He meets you in a way you can understand
if you’re naturally funny, He puts you in situations that, in hindsight, are so absurd you can’t help but laugh
if you’re analytical, He shows up as patterns. coincidences that line up too cleanly to ignore
if you’re emotional, He reaches you through love and loss. through people who break you open and show you what mattered
if you’re a skeptic, He lives in the questions that won’t leave you alone
God isn’t broadcasting on one frequency and blaming people for not tuning in
He’s speaking the language you already understand
and if you ever stop long enough to listen, you realize He’s been talking to you the entire time
If you’re a smart person, one day if you pay close attention you’ll meet someone who is soooo much slower at thinking than you, but has superior metacognitive skills, a mastery of system 2 thinking, and it will completely change how you think about intelligence