I have a dream

"The lights are going out all over the world; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

I will not belabour the point, but I do need to set it up as background.

The world feels like it's on fire. The middle-east is the latest conflagration, and it does not feel like it will be the last; it feels more like a beginning than an end.

I avoid the news. I try to live in my little bubble, occupied by my daily worries, and I try to forget about the fact that the world is crumbling. I worry about earning money, about raising my kids, about finding time with my wife, about staying close to my mother and my sister. I think about writing and teaching and AI, about how to improve my backhand at squash, about how to sell the stuff I've been building.

In The Illiad, after great tragedy or great triumph, after massacre and murder, Homer describes how his heroes light fires and prepare dinner, how they sit down and eat, and how they then tumble tired into sleep.

That is life. We do not stop needing to eat or sleep; we do not stop caring about our daily struggle even when that struggle is inconsequential compared to what's going on in the world.

That is life, but that is not the end of life. Life is not just a little circle around me. The world exists, and it speaks, and it demands something from me. I do not know how to meet those demands but I must do something.

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Annika and I have been talking recently of a dream that many people have, in some version or another. It is the dream of a space somewhere beautiful, a space of refuge, a space that nourishes and heals. A space for philosophy retreats, for absorption in nature, for good food and better conversation. A space for human beings to meet, as human beings, a space for human beings to attend to the Good and The beautiful, to search for truths that matter, to live in community and love with others doing the same thing.

It is the dream of creating a little island of light in a world that is going dark.

It is a dream. But I once walked past a little room that had a phone number in the window, and 2 months later I had opened a restaurant. The point being, you can just do things. They may not work out the way you intend or want, but you can definitely do them.

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I spoke to a friend yesterday about this dream. It was a very helpful conversation, not necessarily in terms of specifics, but in terms of pushing something inside me, of making me move.

This little note is a direct result of that conversation. I am putting the dream out there (I haven't cleared it with Anni, but I think that's okay).

Such a thing can only be built together, because the dream is fundamentally (for me) a dream of community. And so I write to the community we have here, with no concrete ask, no practical demand. I simply put the dream out there, and I see what comes back.

Oh, wait. No ask, but certainly an invitation. If you have the same dream, if the dream makes something alive in you - write to me. Tell me what you felt and thought and why you're writing. Tell me about your dream.