Headlines in the papers. Bills in our mailbox. Suffering on sidewalks and in our families. These daily dares challenge us to stay reasonable inside the unreasonable, calm while the house is on fire, and loving as love is mocked.

This particular kind of year has an additional texture. We are made to live inside an inordinate amount of information and the strange intimacy of AI. It’s not just “news,” but the constant, frictionless availability of explanations for everything. Synthetic confidence. The feeling that meaning is being produced for us faster than we can metabolize the experience.

So, I scroll at 11:47 pm, the ache at the top of my skull, and the sound of notifications landing like pebbles.

And yet.

New and better stories are being born in places invisible to us, like stars that are still too tender for our eyes to recognize. As our disoriented hearts grieve the myths that are dying away from our sight, new ways of being present to each other are being discovered and practiced in thousands of communities of young, old, divergent, and inexplicably good humans, in classrooms, back porches, and midnight phone calls.

If you can feel that at all, even as a faint signal, then you already know you’re part of it.

The Fire and the Screen

Let’s turn to something embarrassingly ordinary: the glow of your screen. You open one tab on your browser. Quietly, you open another. Then another. Soon, your mind is living in a crowded hallway of possibilities. One tab offers learning. Another, entertainment. Another danger. In this environment, we look for ways to process our fear, grief, and sorrow, three unmistakable signs of holy ground where being fully alive matters more than happiness.

With the screen casting light on my face, I notice my hand resting on the mouse, like it’s a steering wheel, realizing this isn’t steering, this is bracing.

Some evenings, I stare into the screen and feel like I’m splintering. Anxiety in the chest, a tightness behind the eyes, the urge to find one more video from someone who gets it, to give me some modicum of certainty about the future. Oh, screen, give me something, anything, please!

This whole experience of gathering around light started a long time ago. About a million years ago, we invented fire. 780,000 years ago, we began cooking. As a result, more food and energy became available just in time when our brains were growing and needed more energy to keep going.

The miracle of cooking was not only nutritional. It was existential. We were no longer required to chew all day, to live in a continuous state of procurement and urgency. We could sit. We could sit and stare into the flame. We could hear ourselves think. With the aroma of smoked meat, and hush after chewing stopped, and with enough protein, fat, and carbs in our systems, we could experience something that later civilizations would treat as a problem to be solved, but which was actually the first doorway to human creativity: boredom.

Blessed boredom.

Around the fire, boredom did what it always does when it’s not annihilated by noise. It made us perplexed. Give a human being enough time, and eventually, they will turn from grunting and scratching to asking questions. Who are we? Why are we here? What’s going to happen next?

According to our ancient texts, God didn’t scold the agony of human self-discovery. He put that tree of knowledge in the garden, fully expecting us to eat from it. God blessed us, “Perplexed, huh? That’s good. Go on. Enter the unknown.”

Around that fire, we discovered two powers that have never left us.

The first is presence, the plain, startling awareness of being here in a world that is happening right now.

The second is story, the equally plain, equally startling awareness that we can remember the past and imagine the future.

Presence and story.

The first two tabs we humans ever opened.

If you strip away the obscure and sometimes exhausting teachings about spiritual growth and complicated modern theories of human development, much of it comes down to learning to live within these two capacities without letting either become a prison.

Over time, civilizations turned these two capacities into two essential spiritual teachings. The Eastern tradition asks, “What is real?” It pursues direct experience, inviting us to pay attention to what is arriving through the five senses, thought, and emotion. Stories, on the other hand, are not really real.

It treats the meaning of existence as something communicated through practices such as sitting and breathing, and through the experience of whatever else happens to happen, rather than through explanations.

I discovered this about fifteen years ago when I signed up for an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction class. During those weeks, we spent a comical amount of time on tiny things, like feeling your hands on your knees, feeling the breath enter your nose, and noticing how your mind runs from silence, as if it were a predator. Later, I got apps and amassed what I can only describe as a ridiculous number of hours of meditation.

Time well spent.

It helped me learn something both simple and profound: I can return to being here. This was never a perfect practice, and sometimes it was dismal. That didn’t matter. I could always come back to the simple fact and the permission to speak to the intimidating God who famously said, “I am,” with my own “I am.”

By contrast, the Western tradition asks: “What is good?” This tradition seeks meaningful participation in a story, treating life as something that requires imagination, purpose, and continuity. We tell ourselves and each other stories—not out of sentimentality, but because, without stories, our days would be a mere collection of particles flying around. Story is how we make our lives cohere. Narrative is how we find our place in a larger whole.

When you renew your story, you renew reality.

There’s a reason these two “modes” feel so distinct. Our brains are wired with a polarity that echoes this historical split. There is circuitry for direct experience and circuitry for narrative explanation, and the two work inversely. Like a toggle. When one becomes active, the other quiets.

You don’t have to master the brain map to understand this. You feel it every time you try to listen to someone while simultaneously preparing your answer in your head. We can’t fully do both.

To listen, you have to trust the moment. And to trust the moment, you have to trust the world. And to trust the world, you have to have a story.

When One Tab Becomes a Trap

This is the part where presence becomes difficult for the exact reason it’s valuable. When you start practicing presence, it can be painfully boring. You sit down, you try to watch your breath, and your mind behaves like a small animal being cajoled into a cage.

The body grows restless. The jaw tightens. The mind tempts you with errands, memories, grievances, daydreams, and a sudden desire to reorganize your kitchen pantry. Anything but this.

And then, if you stay, things get worse. The silence stops being empty. It becomes crowded with everything you’ve been avoiding. The shamed part of you. The grieving part. The part without a plan.

Presence is contact with what is.

Presence is about honesty.

It’s why I love asking people I coach the simplest question with terrifying sincerity: How does it feel to be you?

I once asked my wife that while we were on a road trip, and she answered, “It just feels.”

Exactly.

There are no words for the raw feeling of being alive. Words arrive later, and when they arrive too fast, they interrupt. They turn life into a story about life. They replace the lived with the narrated. And since I can’t do both at the same time, the moment I engage with the story about me, I cannot be me. It’s akin to one of the ancient wise men’s sayings, “I know God, until you ask me about God.”

And here comes the twist: Presence is not enough. If presence becomes only an exercise in accepting your circumstances without allowing your imagination to attach itself to a story and alter your life, it becomes a security guard of the status quo. Since the Big Bang or since God’s water broke (depending on your story), reality is in motion. Presence can make you calmer but not necessarily more alive. It can shrink your cognitive pupil from living in what shamans call “the whole time” to the mere present.

There’s more to life than the present moment.

There’s a story, many stories actually, and they are not optional. We are part of a world that is made of stories.

Meditation will not move a mountain.

Story will.

If enough people tell a certain story, they will organize themselves, gather tools, dig, build, destroy, liberate, colonize, heal, and invent. Story creates reality. “In the beginning was the word,” the old text says.

Even if, like me, you’re not religious, you know what these texts pointing at: words don’t just describe the world. They summon a world.

And because the story is so powerful, the story we tell ourselves can become our captivity, an old, tired path we keep walking because we do not know how to step outside of it long enough to have a new experience.

That hat no-story space of presence, that moment of detachment, is precisely where a new story can be born. Presence is an always-available clearing in which the nervous system stops rehearsing the current story.

When we are constrained by our story and feel like there’s a wall between us and the world, presence makes us available again. For a larger store, or a smaller one, or the one that is more true.

Presence is a delightful boredom that allows us to imagine something different and to dare to change the world through art, revolution, discipline, and fierce love for ourselves, for another, or for our vocation.

Epic and Ordinary

Religion is a God-management system. Politics is an influence-management system. An economy is a stuff-management system. In reality, all systems are story-management systems.

We come together, whether in person or through our screens, to help each other be present to it all, to encounter ordinary life in the here and now, and to remember that there is a larger story in which we all belong to each other and to the world.

We come together to be enchanted with stories old and new, to give, to grow, to restrain ourselves, to learn how to know, to learn how to not know, to be astonished, to find ourselves in the stories of others and find them in ours.

Presence and story are AI-proof skills of the future. They are two human capacities that are unoutsourcable to AI or whatever comes next. No machine can do your living for you, and no stream of information can bring your new story to life.

Presence and story are how we become less capturable by outrage, less manipulable by propaganda, less lonely inside our own heads, and more capable of the kind of connection that can carry us through social, political, and relational trouble ahead.

“Do not be afraid of life,” William James wrote.

The question then arises, “Where do these two capacities meet?” Historically, traditions have named that overlap “mystical experience,” when the whole mind and body light up and both neural circuits fire--being fully in the here and now while in the ecstasy of a story.

We are often told that mystical experiences are for special people. You know, mystics. And that we mortals have access to those states about twenty seconds or—in the most generous estimate—twenty minutes per year.

This framing misses something.

It bypasses ordinary life.

It misses cooking the dinner, cleaning the house, paying the bills, playing with kids, talking with friends, rolling a cigarette, knitting, births, deaths, and every single experience in between. We are allowed—nay, invited—to be fully present to and enchanted with it all.

We are still around the fire, but this time it is not a tribe, but whole humanity, gathered around the internet, looking at our screens, wanting to tell each other, “I’m here now. This is my story. Tell me yours. Maybe we can find, or be found by, better stories in which we belong to each other.”

Does this seem too simple?

Allow yourself to be seduced.

The other world is in this world, and the ordinary is the secret of the divine.

Presence and story are not exotic techniques hidden in the ancient pages or captured and dispensed via techno-futurist apps. They are stem-cell capacities each one of us already has. We know them.

The question is whether we will use them until they become strong enough to carry us into a larger life together. We have done this before.

You don’t need a new personality to meet this difficult moment. You don’t need a perfect plan. You don’t need to be in control. You already have what you really need.

Presence and story—a warm mug of tea in your hands and a keyboard awaiting you to write something true and kind, and press send.

I always love to know what you think. Let me know below… 🙏🏼

Some mornings, it feels like walking on a cliff edge. Other mornings, like resting in a harbor and making up my mind about what this life is all about.

Into this mix of vertigo and gratitude, my daughter Leta has come home.

After a year in Italy studying gastronomy and six months in Amsterdam foraging for new professional experiences, the lil’ one is back in New York City, in our family kitchen, in my line of sight, where I can hug and kiss her to my heart’s delight.

She has brought something with her that I didn’t expect: language for a feeling I’ve carried my whole life.

In her Substack, Leta Selmanović: Nourishing, Questioning, Dreaming, she just published a piece called foraging, grief, nostalgia: part 2. This is not about making a please-like-her call to smash that subscribe button. This is just a sixty-year-old father saying: Read her, and if you like what she helps you find, follow her there. She is a great guide.

Diaspora and the lives we didn’t live

In her essay, Leta writes about the movie Past Lives and about the diaspora of our heart—grief for all the versions of our lives that could have been.

The life in Croatia that might have been hers if we had not stayed in the United States.

Then, there’s life in Italy that could have been. Perhaps meeting a democratic socialist guy named Paulo who lives in Perugia and makes polenta. Then there’s life in Amsterdam that could have been with great friends she met there.

Every choice, every “yes” to this life, she reminds me, is also a “no” to a thousand other lives. Some part of us grieves those no’s, even when we’re deeply glad for the yes.

My dad moved from Montenegro to Croatia. My mom moved from Slovenia to Croatia. I then moved to the United States. I also moved from one profession to another, and then to another. And from one religion to another, and then to another. Each migration held the ghosts of lives my parent, I, and my kids didn’t live.

At sixty, these ghosts are real presences in the room. Some feel like regrets, some feel like relief. It is tender work to nod at them all, and say: Thank you. You helped make me. And it is even more tender work to nod at yourself, and say: Through this life, I have lived them all.

Memory within a memory

In her piece, Leta retells a story I once told her: my memory of Bajram, the feast at the end of Ramadan, hosted every year in Zagreb at my aunt’s place.

She notices something I hadn’t quite named. As I remembered the feast—its smells, tastes, the feeling in the room—I was having a “memory within a memory.”

The food on the table in Zagreb once carried me back to my father’s childhood village, where I had visited when I was ten or so. Now, re-telling it to her, the story carried me back there again. Layers on layers. Plates on plates. Generations nested like bowls.

My parents fed me food and stories, and I fed my daughter food and stories. My daughter now feeds me back language for what the stories have been doing to me all along.

Food has been my way home. For decades, I have walked into kitchens to regather myself, to let chopping, stirring, and tasting reassemble my scattered attention. I like to think that the kitchen was the original temple, the first and constant school of human transformation.

Watching Leta move in the world—through kitchens in Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, and the Philippines, through forests with ramps (wild onion) and ramsons (wild garlic) in her hands—I realize she has taken my ancestral thread and woven it into her own life.

And into mine.

Foraging as remembering

In Amsterdam, Leta spent nights picking magnolia petals on her bike ride home, and days slipping into forests to forage tiny amounts of wild food. When she visited us in Harlem, she would take me to Central Park to show me a dozen plants we could eat, like a parent would take a child.

She writes that foraging isn’t really about what you collect—there’s not much in the bag. It’s more like getting to know your neighbors, both flora and fauna. Bending down. Watching. Touching bark and soil. Learning who grows where.

She calls it a way of tracing lost ancestry.

For her, foraging is another way of remembering—an embodied way of saying: I still belong to this earth. I still have a relationship with this place, even if my passport, accent, and rent contract say otherwise.

In my forties and fifties, I tried to think my way into belonging. At sixty, watching my daughter, I wonder if I could forage my way into belonging.

The Garden of Love (and a man with emerald eyes)

When Leta comes back to Harlem, she goes straight to a community garden in our neighborhood called the Garden of Love.

Other kids coming back to New York like to “hit the city.”

She?

She needs soil.
She needs neighbors.
She needs a place that smells like life.

She plants cucumbers, tends wine cap mushrooms, and gets to know the people who move through that little patch of earth in the Harlem country of black asphalt. That garden is not quite street, not quite home. It’s a konoba in New York drag. A room between inside and outside, where people and stories and land meet.

One day, as she and a neighbor stand outside the garden gate, a man stumbles into them. He has just been stabbed. There’s blood, panic, sirens on their way. And also, his eyes. Leta notices his eyes are a luminous, startling green.

Her neighbor compliments him on them as they wait for the ambulance. Maybe to distract him from the pain. Maybe because beauty has its own emergency.

They tuck his belongings into the plants, allowing the garden to hold his belongings while he rides away in the ambulance. He never comes back for them.

“Perhaps the land remembers us more than we remember it,” she writes.

I had to put the laptop down after that line.

I have spent so much of my life trying to remember where I come from—village, city, language, religion, past roles, future plans. I am now coaching people who are trying to remember (or discover) what their life is all about.

And here is my daughter suggesting that all along, the land has been doing the remembering for us. We are all held by meaning we don’t understand, don’t have to understand, and let alone invent.

A word for this: solastalgia

Leta introduces a word: solastalgia.

It’s the homesickness you feel, not because you are far from home, but because you are watching your home change in ways you cannot stop.

City storefronts closing.
Storms. Flooding.
ICE and AI.

You’re still, but the home is shifting. We have all become immigrants, not because we have moved, but because everything around us is moving. We are displaced and have to immigrate over and over again.

At sixty, solastalgia feels familiar.

(I wrote about this tug-of-war between home, displacement, and getting lost in an earlier New Glossary entry, What Heart Wants.)

The body changes. The city changes. The world changes. The internet eats entire parts of our lives (years of my work disappeared in a hacked LinkedIn account). Systems we trust crack and fall apart, or attack, showing their teeth.

There is grief in realizing that the place you love will not stay as it is.

But if the land remembers us, then we are not the only ones doing the holding. If the soil keeps traces of our footsteps, maybe we don’t have to keep all of our stories straight in our heads. Maybe belonging is not a performance we must constantly maintain, but a relationship we keep returning to.

Glossary gains (for you, dear reader)

Let me end with an invitation.

What might learning about solastalgia mean for you?

1. Let the land remember you.
   You don’t have to hold all your history perfectly. Let a park bench, a kitchen table, a stretch of sidewalk, a community garden do some remembering for you. Visit them. Touch them. Say hello.

2. Notice your unlived lives with kindness.
   When you feel that ache for the life you didn’t live, treat it not as a mistake but as a kind of ancestor. It stood watch while you chose this one. You can honor it without abandoning yourself.

3. Practice tiny acts of foraging.
   You don’t need a forest. Pick herbs from a windowsill. Learn the names of two street trees on your block. Step into your kitchen and let chopping an onion from a local bodega be an act of “knowing your neighbors.”

4. Create a konoba corner.
   A threshold place, like Leta’s Garden of Love. A porch step, a stoop, a Zoom room, a recurring dinner. A place that is yours—and also belongs to others. A place where the door (literal or figurative) regularly stays open.

5. Apprentice yourself across generations.
   If you’re older, let yourself be taught by someone younger. If you’re younger, receive the stories coming your way—then give them back altered, deepened, made more true. That’s how memory within memory works.

If this resonates with you, I would love for you to read her full piece, foraging, grief, nostalgia: part 2, and, if you feel like it, subscribe to Leta on Substack.

From one Ordinary Mystic to another: Notice how meaning travels between generations—and how, somehow, the land knows all our names.

Thanks for reading The New Glossary. This post is public, so feel free to share it.

— Samir

👉🏼 Leta on Substack!

👇🏾 I love to hear from you in the comments. Where in your life do you feel solastalgia—and what places, people, or practices help you remember that you still belong?

When the holy days of All Saints, All Souls, and Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) roll around, I put fingers of one hand on the wrist of another and my pulsating artery reminds me not only of my mortality but also of my opportunity to live an eternal kind of life. The beat that we feel beneath our skin is the palpitating life of our ancestors, who lived and loved back then, and are now living and loving through us.

This is when I recall my favorite aunt, Ferzata Čengić, who was a mystic if I’ve ever known one. One of the things she taught me about was hunger.

I remember the month of Ramadan when I was 7. I wanted to be like her—strong, kind, and raptured by joy. Most importantly to a boy, I aspired to self-control. Ever since I saw Bruce Lee stand so still and so focused, I knew I needed it. My first test, I imagined, was being able to fast during the month of Ramadan.

Fasting sounded awesome to me, something akin to wielding a sword as a Jedi or meditating as Siddhartha (although I did not know about Jedis and Siddhartha at the time).

“If you want to fast,” she said, “I have a small patch of fabric.”

“What?”

“I can sew this patch to your shirt. It will be as if you are fasting. And even if you have to eat during Ramadan, because you are a child, you are, actually, fasting! Your fasting counts.”

“Nooo? Really?”

Then she added, “Prophet Muhammad said so.”

“Wow,” I thought, “Yeah, Auntie Ferzata, do it!”

“You can eat, but remember,” she said as she worked her needle, “Every day, take one moment and ::feel your hunger:: without rushing.”

Feel my hunger without rushing? Why?

For decades now, I have been a student of fasting. Fasting dramatically increased my free and focused time. It helped me understand my body. It expanded my imagination, helped me develop patience, and, of course, helped me lose weight. Leonard Cohen helped me link fasting to romantic passion. It grounded my sermons about Adam and Eve eating from the tree, or about the Eucharist’s bread and wine, teaching me what it means to live in the body on earth. I can also say that my little obsession with fasting has helped me become a better cook. Twice, I fasted for nine days, indulging in one of those spiritual extreme sports that teenagers need to grow up.

Yet, my aunt’s words, “feel your hunger without rushing,” have been more than just about fasting.

Hunger equips our hearts with empathy and instigates action.

Hunger awakens.

There’s a bigger world out there with other human beings like me, in need of my help, and me in need of theirs. When hungry, we have a bodily experience of the other.

We humans are hungry beings. We cannot survive without life’s welcoming hand. Whoever said “There are no free lunches” has forgotten their uterine experience, mother’s nipples, and (easier to recall) thousands of free lunches ever since, including the one someone harvested, transported, and prepared this morning. Life has taken care of us, and it will continue to do so, and it is inviting us to be a part of its power in the world.

Most of us prefer not to discuss hunger. We mention it sometimes. We don’t want to be with it, let alone dwell on it. We regard it as a nuisance that must be obliterated, a colossal mistake, something to avoid discussing in parenting, politics, and everything in between.

I remember how it felt to walk into Auntie Ferzata’s kitchen, the moist warmth emanating from Trhana, a fermented dough soup. The seductive, pungent scent spreading from a big pan of Popara, and the calming aroma of freshly pulled carrots in the basket on the floor. And, sometimes, coming from playing outside with her boys and my cousins, a tiny spoon with rose jelly paired with a glass of cold water welcoming us in.

And no, Prophet Mohammad never said that thing.

But, if he were to stand next to my auntie, the gentle Prophet would say it right there and then, totally nodding his head and saying yes, yes, yes, you little fasting Jedi! Yes, I said that. Feel your hunger for a moment, and your fasting will be legit!

Before making any decisions about how to spend your time, energy, and money each day, week, or year, allow yourself to feel a sting of hunger. But, this time, don’t rush it. Feel another through your hunger. Let it press you and oppress you.

Let your hungry body guide you to find meaning, joy, justice, and beauty in the life that welcomes you. Think of all the powerful ways you can use your life force to send your love into the future.

Thank you, Auntie Ferzata.

The people I love the best 
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

That word almost matters.

Every summer in Croatia, I jump into the open sea headfirst for long-distance swims. One early morning as the sun was coming up, I found myself far from the shore. Suddenly, I felt fear of imaginary shark jaws, of being run over by a motorboat, of having leg cramps, and disappearing into the dark deep.

Walking into the kitchen that morning, I admitted to my mother-in-law that I was scared out there on the open sea, a bit shaken, actually. She was stirring a pot of polenta on the stove and, without lifting her head, said, “You are wise to be afraid.”

As a result, I have adopted the following rule: at any given time, I must be able to either touch solid ground with my feet or be within sight of another human being while swimming. And, and, and, I got myself a highly noticeable swim cap.

::Fear signals something real:: Remember how, when we were growing up, we would love it when an adult would tell us a scary story under the dark skies or a blanket?

“Tell it again. The scary story, tell it again.”

Why would children want to be scared?

And why are adults drawn to fear?

We intuitively know that fear signals an imminent encounter with something new. We have approached the end of what we know and are about to come in contact with something we don’t. This draws us in. A possibility of another world. Or, even more astonishing, a possibility of another world in this world.

Fear signals something real, something that’s hiding from the tiring light of merely wanting to be comfortable or happy.

Fear announces the future.

Fear announces the arrival of something our neural constellation has never met before. Something our previous self may survive or may not.

Our physical bodies sense it first. Skin tension. A tremble. Pressure in the chest. Fear takes residence in our bodies, awaiting our acknowledgment.

Only after we respect it are we given the courage we need to take the next step into the space or a conversation we have been avoiding.

Fear announces a change. Our future life is visiting us, sometimes knocking at the door as a messenger, sometimes crashing in as an impersonal force, sometimes seeping under the door like fresh air, and sometimes still, waiting for us down the street to come and meet it.

How do you know you are on the edge of what is about to become your new life? There is a measure of fear there. It signals not a danger, but the unknown.

Yes, this unknown could be dangerous. Crossing that line could take your life. And that’s why fear’s warning is so valuable. But this unknown you fear also holds your future.

Who you are going to become is waiting beyond that line.

Change is life itself, renewing itself. Life, larger than ours, is inviting us to be a part of it, to go a tad beyond our present identity, where a small step is often better than a large one.

This half-step into the unknown is as powerful as it is reluctant.

When you step over something, something unexpected happens: joy shows up, as unearned and uncalled as fear: fear and joy, the two sides of one primal emotion of encountering the unknown.

If it were not for the unknown’s joys, you would give up a thousand times. But you have not. You are here and awake because you are capable of being afraid, which makes you capable of experiencing joy.

Fear stands at the door and welcomes you into the life you want.

A lot to cover here.

Imagine this.

It’s a scorching summer afternoon at the Croatian coast. You’re sitting in the cool, under a cafe awning, sipping coffee, with a sea breeze caressing you. You’re too comfortable to move, think, or even blink too quickly.

You’re in what Croatians call fjaka [fya-kah].

It’s the art of being ::fully alive doing nothing::.

A lot’s happening there.

Let’s try some definitions of this state.

Fjaka is a particular psychophysical state in which a human realizes they don’t have to add anything to their lives. Fjaka is a higher state where body, mind, and imagination are inhabited simultaneously. Fjaka is a state of being caught and captured by the delight of being alive.

Why is fjaka impossible to translate?

First, because it’s not an achievement. Instead of being a result of years of mindfulness meditation, Dalmatian, jokingly, and I believe accurately, refer to it as a gift from God. Fjaka comes with life—every person’s inheritance, joy, and right.

It is also impossible to translate, because it’s not a concept. Fjaka must be experienced to be understood. You allow it, you experience it, you get it.

Also, because it’s not as simple as laziness. It’s elevated laziness. You have the capacity and will to move and get going, but you choose not to. It’s a deliberate allowing of the ease of being alive.

And because it is not, most definitely, a personal growth technique. Too much discipline ruins it.

And the best news about fjaka?

The very best news about fjaka is that you already have it and know it!

In an average life, there is no day without a moment of fjaka, as it lends meaning to life and brings happiness and solace to the soul. This moment could be an hour, or a minute, or a second of taking it all in.

Poets and philosophers from every culture have written about fjaka using their own words to describe this state of awakened dreaming.

Let’s take William Blake, a poet and painter from London at the turn of the 19th century, for example. In the Romantic era, artists and writers responded to the significant changes occurring in Europe, including the introduction of new machinery and large factories, which led to cities becoming much larger and more industrialized.

Blake was considered mad by his contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, but was later embraced for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents in his work.

Here’s William Blake’s line: “There is a time in the day where Satan cannot come.”

This is not about religion. Blake was fiercely anti-religious. This is the assertion that every human being, every day, can find a moment of freedom.

Nowadays, society venerates focus, achievement, disruption, and shrill ambition. I sometimes coach corporate executives who wonder why their growing children sometimes refuse to leave their rooms. This phenomenon, observed around the globe, is partly due to learned helplessness, but also serves as a pushback against the coercive tactics of the adult world, which has acquiesced to corporations, governments, and other institutions.

“Let me break it to you,” I tell them, “Your and my kids are using rest as resistance to the world you and I have pushing on them.”

Coerced no more.

That’s what my daughters Ena and Leta are saying, and living. They protect themselves from exhaustion. I come from a generation that gets quite nervous about this, but the sky is not falling.

Actual bodily, psychological, and spiritual experience of freedom is what gets dictators, institutions, and forces that maintain coercive societies all tied up in fear. Fjaka moments are subversive. They grant us a daily experience of freedom.

Martin Luther King had a plan, yes. He worked hard, yes, to death. But his power came from his dream. Blake’s power came from poetry. Where’s your power coming from? Let’s join thousands of revolutionaries, in my culture and yours, who had to be Ordinary Mystics (OMs) first.

Wondering how to practice fjaka?

Like other life’s best gifts, fjaka arrives when we don’t expect it.

So, don’t make it a chore. Let it come to you with ease. Ease matters. Treat fjaka like a wild animal. The more you chase it, the more shy fjaka becomes to come to you. Simply respect the wild.

Finally, fjaka can be disorienting. You can forget who you are, where you are, why you are, or even when you are. You re-finding yourself, instead.

Three words—pomalo, konoba, and fjaka—capture something universally human. Whether you're Croatian or not, it doesn’t matter. Somehow, you know what I’m talking about. These words, as strange as they are, are deeply familiar to you. Perhaps you have your own words for them, from your religious, philosophical, or family tradition?

In sum, here’s our glossary gain:

Pomalo is a practice of living a Life at Life’s Own Pace. Don’t push.

Konoba is a practice of creating Your Public Place. Let people in.

Fjaka is a practice of experiencing being Fully Alive Doing Nothing. Let it all in.

As I finish this three-part series, I realize that one word stands out and ties them all together. It’s perhaps the most essential word in today’s world, describing the most potent ability you have: Availability.

I am not talking here about giving yourself to others as a way of being moral, friendly, or generous. I am referring here to the skill, specifically the practice of expanding the time-space-heart capacity of your life—clean and care for your life to make room for experiencing yourself, others, and the world.

We OMs apprentice ourselves to our own lives. It turns out that the first life’s lesson, its last, and daily lesson every day in between, is “Alive and available. Learn to be alive and available.”

— Samir

👇🏾 I LOVE to hear from you.

Dalmatia is made of stone, sea, and sky. These elements made Dalmatians sturdy and gentle. They turned out to be hopelessly romantic with a rich heritage of a cappella singing groups called Klapas, crooning about stone, sea, and sky. And love, of course.

Their songs encompass romantic relationships, parental love, sibling love, affection for birds, the sea, and boats, as well as friendship and affection for nearly everything, which brings me to one of the most beloved Dalmatian romantic songs.

It’s an outlier. Deep, sensual, almost Freudian, this song is not about any one person but about a place.

My Konoba

…Candlelight, lavender scent
Diluted is life, like watered wine
With gossip and fake news
But we won't give up, we're still young

Let's do it together, my friends
Let's offer stools and chairs
Let's sing a song from our hearts
In the grind and hustle, we forget our cares

My konoba, my all joy
I have given my soul to you
My tavern, my home
I protect your song like I protect my life.

(transl. Samir Selmanović)

Do you feel it?

Konoba [pronounced: ko-no-bah] is a place unlike any other.

What is most exciting about a konoba, I believe, is that you, whoever you are, can create one.

It’s the place where the wine barrels and other precious resources, such as olive oil and dry figs, were kept. But it is not about the wine, the oil, and the figs.

In its beginnings, a konoba was a place where one could revel in hard work well done. After the working day, fishermen, farmers, and other laborers visited each other to talk and share a glass of wine.

Then people started to gather there quite spontaneously. It became the place of enjoyment. A new feature became a table on which to place food and drinks, as well as to entertain your friends. Not the living room, not the dining room, not the kitchen. The konoba.

One would think that wine should be kept in a cellar. A cellar is underground. In the north, it’s relatively easy to dig out an underground room. But in the south, houses were built on rock. As a result, the konoba found its life on the ground level, adjacent to the house, and as close as possible to the entrance where the goods were brought home.

In other words, a konoba became a room between the street and the house. You enter your home through it.

At the end of the working day, or at any time one feels like it, one has only to leave the konoba door open, and it becomes a signal that a friend, neighbor, or traveler can come in.

Nowadays, as a tourist, you will more likely encounter a konoba as a commercially operated tavern. But regular homes still have it. When in Croatia, when I roam outside of beaten paths, I sometimes enter a konoba when I see the door open. I ask about their wine or olives and if they are for sale. Or get intel about where fishermen arrive in the early morning so I can get fresh catch before it goes to the market.

Living in the West, particularly in the U.S., I noticed the way we divide space. This is mine. This is yours. Stepping into someone else's space is called trespassing.

I like to think of a konoba as a room that is neither private nor public, neither home nor street, or better yet, it is fully home and fully street. It is ::your public place:: where anyone, even a stranger, is welcome to enter, sit, and be.

Do you have a place, or time, in your life that is yours and public at the same time? A no-permission-necessary place marked with an open door. A place to which you don’t even have to invite people because they know, everybody knows, what the open door means. It means you are available.

Pomalo is about inner availability—konoba about the outer.

Your konoba, if you have one, is an easy place where people know they can be nourished by your presence and you by theirs. And that you will defend that availability with song, silence, conversation, humor, compassion, wine, food, anything and everything you've got.

I often think that a significant step in recognizing yourself as an Ordinary Mystic is to see whatever is inside your skin as you, and whatever is outside your skin as also you. And that inside of your home is where you belong, and that outside of your home is where you also belong.

Konoba is that space and time where we practice living between two worlds, or better yet, in both worlds. Or even better than that, in one world.

I am curious: where and how can you create konoba moments and places that are yours but also belong to others, and as the lyrics of My Konoba express it, “protect its song like you protect your life”?

— Samir

👇🏾 I LOVE to hear from you in the comments.

Three articles in this series:

Pomalo is a practice of living a Life at Life’s Own Pace. Don’t push.

Konoba is a practice of creating Your Public Place. Let people in.

Fjaka is a practice of experiencing being Fully Alive Doing Nothing. Let it all in.

In a literal sense, pomalo (pronounced poh-mah-lo) means "little by little.” It’s an invitation to live ::life at life’s own pace::.

This seductive word plays an outsized role in the way Croatians think of a good life.

Life gives you permission—and invitation—to treat yourself kindly. Pomalo is an invitation to ease into the great story you are a part of.

When you encounter sudden, inexplicable sadness or irritability and choose to let yourself feel it, and when you take a breath and a small step forward, you live pomalo.

When you face a complex challenge, a formidable obstacle, or an arduous journey, and you break it down into steps that you can actually do and enjoy, that’s pomalo.

Pomalo requires you to put your trust in something beyond your own devices and resources. Life is full of allies. The nets can be repaired and the sea will be there tomorrow. The friends are here to help. Pomalo, life sorts itself out.

Underschedule yourself. Leave a margin in your calendar, budget, and energy. Don’t force things. Do what you can, when you can, and the way you can. Respond to life’s invitation to an experience.

In the world of productivity, pomalo restores both perspective and productivity.

Think how much we overestimate what we can accomplish in a week, and how much we underestimate what we can achieve in a year. Every year I find myself wondering how that could be, my 52 lame weeks resulting in a great year! Pomalo is how.

Most importantly to me, pomalo uncrowds my life from oppressive inner nagging to be busy. Instead, it makes me available. And availability is the greatest gift we can give to another and to ourselves.

If you live pomalo, you become available for a spur-of-the-moment call from a friend. You are available to write down your thoughts as they come. When you listen to your lover, acquaintance, or stranger, you can afford to be present. You have inner spaciousness. You can even afford to get lost when caught in the delight of nature, a work project, or a conversation.

Pomalo says: Operate at the speed of life. If you do so, great things will happen. In their time. When Jesus says, “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much,” in my heretical patriotic imagination, that's Jesus being Croatian.

Pomalo is the opposite of hacking. Life is grace, and we, Ordinary Mystics, don’t hack grace.

— Samir

👇🏾 I LOVE to hear from you in the comments.

Three articles in this series:

Pomalo is a practice of living a Life at Life’s Own Pace. Don’t push.

Konoba is a practice of creating Your Public Place. Let people in.

Fjaka is a practice of experiencing being Fully Alive Doing Nothing. Let it all in.

Goodness is not merely complicated. Goodness is complex. And there's a vast difference between the two.

A car, for example, is complicated. We can develop a finite number of rules and steps for creating one. There are a finite number of parts, all named and all in specs. Trained humans can take it apart and put it back together.

Garden, on the other hand, is complex. We have no known finite list of ingredients, no names for all the processes happening, and no specs. No science, religion, or even magic can ever hope to take apart even one leaf and put it back together.

Sometimes, goodness is like a car. Cause and effect are clear, and you know what to do. Fill up the gas tank and drive. When it breaks down or you have an accident, fix it. We can control cars.

But most of the time, and in ways that really matter, goodness is like a garden. We are never in control of a garden. It has a life of its own.

And yet, even though we cannot control a garden, we know how to care for it. There's pruning, fertilizing, and weeding. There are frosts, droughts, and dormancy periods. There are seasons tied to the hurling of our planet through the cosmos. There are losses, harvests, endings, and beginnings. We learn to nourish it. We learn to protect it. We learn to wait. To let go. All the while, we are out of control.

When we treat goodness merely as a complicated problem to solve, our caring for goodness can quickly turn bad, exhausting, and sometimes tragic. We overestimate our powers and force our understanding. When that fails, we pretend to be in control. And when that fails, we embrace a fantasy that someday we will turn the complexity we cannot control into something complicated that we will eventually control.

We need a better story of what being good means.

There are ways to transform ourselves and our world that are easier and, therefore, possible, as well as joyful and, thus, sustainable.

Complex does not have to be complicated. There's particular simplicity associated with being a gardener. In many ways, the complexity of a garden is inversely related to what it requires to care for it. Enjoy it, fertilize it, prune it, enjoy it, weed it, enjoy it, let it go dormant, enjoy it, harvest it, enjoy it, fertilize it…

Joy plus simple, obvious daily actions, big and small, difficult and easy, is all we need to do.

Goodness is something larger than any one of us can control. We simply participate in it.

The human mind is designed for simplicity; we are wired to look for solutions we can do with ease. Our general pattern is to simplify. That is how we have been deciding, getting things done, and evolving.

Nowadays, everywhere we turn, we are faced with warnings about all the ways we can go wrong with easy solutions. In the prescient words of American journalist HL Mencken, we are told, "For every problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Indeed, we cannot merely simplify our problems by shrinking them to what we already know.

We have discovered that a whole slew of biases run our lives. They have helped us survive for thousands of years. Times have changed; the biases that helped us survive are problematic now, and the stakes are much higher. Now, we must stop, think, question our intuition, think again, wait, and ask questions we avoid asking. That's all good; we all need to engage in the sometimes tedious and often necessary work of rechecking our perceptions and recalibrating our intuitions. Yet, an arms race with complexity will not succeed.

Humans need simplicity not only to survive but also to feel alive. Not any simplicity, but rather–and this matters immensely—the radical simplicity of participating in something greater than ourselves.

Science tells us that the rules in complex systems can be unexpectedly simple. Instead of trying to predict and control the future, we honor past lessons, examine present patterns, and allow ourselves to be engaged by something other than our own stories and thoughts.

We live in an era when everything changes everywhere and all at once. Even if we see change as exciting, the more we think about it, the more overwhelmed we become by our lack of control. Since this morning, our relational, professional, and planetary circumstances have already shifted. Tomorrow, we will wake up in a different world, and the person we see in the mirror will not be the same.

We are not change makers, change agents, or game changers. Those are the names we give ourselves as we play adult versions of the game of pretending.

We don't know, and when we don't know, we fear. Some nights, anxiety — a fear of being even more afraid — sits on our chests. Some days, it locks us in and does not let us walk out into the world. We realize, most often subconsciously, that rather than observing, instigating, or managing change, we are inhabiting change. There is no escape from our own lives. And since there's no escape, we may as well have compassion for ourselves and each other and learn to survive and delight in our lives together.

Yes, goodness is beyond our control.

But not beyond our participation.

When we let ourselves inhabit the goodness that holds us all, we find ourselves at the frontier of our freedom to participate in it or not.

When we participate, we continually arrive at the moments of undoing who we have been, in contact with the forces we don't understand, inviting us to a conversation we don't yet know how to have.

Goodness is oozing with hope.

(Originally published in Goodness, May 1, 2025)

When what we love disappears, or when we believe we cannot love or be loved, or when we become aware of the outrageously short time we get to live on this planet, we enter a physiological and psychological winter. We give rest to the way we have understood and participated in the world. When there's nowhere to go, despair takes us in.

Last year, in Croatia, the sea was azure, the breeze was caressing, and in the evenings, the voices of people in the lively tourist town eating ice cream were swaying to the music of a street band covering Eurovision classics. One late evening, our daughter Leta walked into our vacation apartment, lay on the couch, and started crying. Inexplicably.

All that she had to say was that she knew too much.

She has spent the last seven years studying the environment and food systems of the world, engaging in social protests, serving those in need, and conversing late into the night with bright and passionate individuals from all over the planet. She loved the world, but she knew she was losing it.

The future was unsayable, and tears were all that was left. My wife, Vesna, our other daughter, Ena, her boyfriend, Samarth, and I surrounded and piled on her with our comforting weighted blanket of silence.

We need poets to help us with this sort of thing. David Whyte writes:

"Despair is a haven with its own temporary form of strange beauty and self-compassion; it is the invitation we accept when we want to remove ourselves from hurt. Despair is a last protection. To disappear through despair is to seek a temporary but necessary illusion, a place where we hope nothing can ever find us in the same way."

When we despair well, we let our bodies breathe fully and deeply. We come to know we will never be the same again.

Later in the night, I shared a story with her that offered both of us a thread we might be able to hold on to.

I heard that story from an anthropologist long ago and have used it and five follow-up questions as a tool in my consulting work with organizational leaders.

The New Tribe

Ten thousand years ago, a tribe lived in a circle around a fire, their source of heat and light.

Next to the fire were older people and children. Under the stars, the old would tell stories, and the young would dance.

Wood gatherers occupied the second ring around the fire. The tribe held wood gatherers and their never-ending task in great honor.

The outer ring of the tribe consisted of hunters and warriors admired for their strength and bravery.

One day, the wood gatherers said, "We should be the closest to the fire. If it weren't for us, there would be no fire." The tribe's council met, deliberated, and decided to do so.

Sometime after that, the hunters and warriors of the tribe said, "We should be the closest to the fire. If it weren't for us, there would be no tribe." The tribe's council met, deliberated, and decided to do so.

The elderly and the children were now in the outer circle. The fire's heat and light were there, but there were no stories of the old and dancing of the young.

This went on for a while.

One clear-sky summer night, an older woman stood up, walked through the crowd to the fire, took a piece of burning wood, and carried it outside the tribe's grounds.

She set the burning log down, sat beside it, and told a story. Then, the first child came.

The end.

Actually, the beginning.

--

My questions for leadership teams:

• What sensory experiences and images in this story stir you, and why?

• Write down memories of "stories" you have heard and "dances" you have experienced in your organization. Share them.

• Who are the wood gatherers, hunters, and warriors in your organization? Write down the words of gratitude to them.

• What would it be like to have an organization without stories and dancing?

• What "stories and dances" are essential to your community?

Leta and I reminded ourselves that indigenous tribes worldwide would put older people and children in the center when they had to make an important decision. "Is the decision we are about to make going to protect and nourish our old and our young?" they would ask.

Then we wondered, "Can you imagine bringing the elderly and children in the middle of a congressional decision in D.C.? Can you imagine our politicians accommodating a throng of elderly talking and children dancing in the middle of a Senate floor?

Imagine them saying, "We cannot decide about our budgets, wars, or priorities if no children and elders are present! No voting today!"

We couldn't imagine it. To us, the present state of the U.S. tribe, as well as the global tribe, is incapable of meeting our shared challenges. Our global civilization has stepped off the cliff and is in freefall. Our hopes for the best will not prevent the collapse. All empires end, and this latest, being a global one, will be cataclysmic.

To gain clarity and know what to do with our lives, we realized we needed to accept not the possibility, not the probability, but the certainty of our current human tribe's decline.

All of our life, from our daily actions, words, and prayers to our public work of resisting, creating, fighting, and healing, to the work of scientists, artists, politicians, and business people among us, along with the work of every ordinary mystic matters in one way only: to make that older woman's trip for the burning log a possibility. What we imagined was the first annunciation of a new human tribe, one that will live by a different way of seeing and being in the world.

We wondered if it could happen in a hundred or a thousand years. We settled on ten thousand years as a realistic timeframe.

Today, this Friday in Harlem, this morning, this moment, as I edit this before sending it, all I'm doing is making an infinitesimally small act of support for that old woman and that child.

We are no longer fighting for our personal futures, our family's future, or the future of the U.S. or Croatia, any country, any party, any cause we can think of, or any change we can fathom. We do excellent professional work, tell stories, dance, do dishes, pay taxes, serve others, engage in politics, and get up early to witness a sunrise, we do it all for that old woman and that child ten thousand years from now.

I told her, "Zero in on them."

That helped her. That's something.

Despair, well-experienced, is like sitting inside a cave. Its darkness holding you and caring for you. All the while, invisible to us, the cave has a forest of hope and a sky of joy above it.

Let's sit in it as long as we need.

But no longer than we need. Because despair has its appointed time.

Whyte again:

"We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. We let our bodies, and we let our world breathe again. In that breathing, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do from the beginning."

Despair is hard, beautiful, and necessary. It is how we allow ourselves and each other to experience this difficult world and send our love for this world into the future.

What story can you tell, and what dance move can you make today? Tell it, make it, send your love into the future.

Samir

P.S. Months after this, my daughter WhatsApp-ed me a song (after the experience of milking cows with an old man in Italy and hearing his stories):

In Ancient Greece, the word for “cook” and “priest” was the same — “mageiros” — sharing an etymological root with “magic.” The word appears again in the revealing 1814 anonymous Old English book, The School for Good Living, defining “magirist” as a “cook and an artist in good living.”

In Croatia, 50 years ago, I grew up on asphalt with a family heaven-bent on cooking. We huddled over lamb rotating on a makeshift spitfire at the riverbank, over a clay pot of braising saksija in our oven, over two barrels on our balcony, a smaller wooden one with fermenting peppers stuffed with cheese, and a large plastic one with 19 heads of white cabbage and one head of red cabbage (we elevated creating pink sauerkraut brine to the domain of art). Then there was winemaking in our garage, and meat smoking and vegetable gardening just out of the city. And not one, or two, but three socialist refrigerator/freezer combos. All of this in our apartment project building. We broke all the rules, and food was everything.

That’s how my journey to ::the kitchenhood:: began.

Every year we traveled to swim in the Mediterranean, ski in the Alps, and visit our family in Tuscany and Istanbul. Our sightseeing was all a ruse, however, a way to practice and perfect what connected us with each other, our family, friends, neighbors, strangers, the earth, and the cosmos. We talked, made ourselves busy, and invested most of what we had into cooking. The kitchen was the temple.

In seventh grade, I guest-hosted a cooking show on national TV. By the time I was 16, I had punched in 10,000 hours of cooking practice. I missed soccer games, school dances, and punk rock concerts because my mom and dad made me stay home. I was to clean, cut, simmer, roast, pickle, organize, sense, feel, and discuss food.

I remember one Saturday night, standing on the fourth-floor balcony of our big cement building, waving to my friends, who were all dressed up and ready to hit the city: “My dad needs me to butcher tonight! Sorry!” (Context: That afternoon, one of my dad’s workers, a mason, had stopped by in his van, unannounced, and dropped off a slab of half a cow for us, the meat still warm after the slaughter.) My friends would sadly shake their heads and walk away. But I wasn’t sad. I was excited!

For years, I took this in-house cooking school for granted. My interests moved on. When I left my parents’ place at the age of 20, I was keenly aware of how badly the world and I needed to change. I was determined to transform myself and the world for the better. First, I became a structural engineer, like my dad, determined to build bridges. Then, after moving to the United States, I became a psychologist; then an ordained Evangelical minister; then an executive coach; then a contemplative retreat facilitator. For decades, I obsessed over the riddle of human transformation.

Then one day, 10 years ago, when I was cooking in my apartment kitchen overlooking the busy streets of Harlem in New York City, I realized that transformation occurs whenever we step over the edge of what we know and become attentive to parts of ourselves, others, and the world that is unknown to us.

Instead of being a provenance of priests, coaches, meditation teachers, and motivational speakers, human transformation is , I realized over two pots boiling on my kitchen range , common and accessible, a natural tide and flow of regular human life. We don’t manage change. We inhabit change.

My kitchen epiphany might sound like, duh? A run-of-the-mill mystical experience. Not for me. I was surprised by my own life.

If you are like me, you probably feel overwhelmed with information about how to improve your life. Have you done your morning routine today? Have you made progress on that online course? Have you read those articles you saved on Medium? Have you listened to that podcast? You haven’t? Well, you should. You must. Why? Because you must be your best self.

That’s what happens when we turn life into a project. Instead of helping us on the way, this excess of awesome advice comes to be in the way.

I came to realize, to my disbelief, that transformation is much simpler than we make it out to be. Make soup. Vacuum the house. Repair the bike. Say sorry. Take a nap. Pay your bills. Thank people. Go for a walk. Sing. Cry. Sit quietly in your kitchen late at night with the lights off. Don’t solve problems.

Inhabit change. Just keep on moving into the unknown. The unknown within you and around you. There, transformation is not only possible but inevitable.

At crucial thresholds in our lives, we must want to change, and sometimes, change is an all-consuming and difficult step forward. Yet, our own transformation is a process that rarely, if ever, responds to our efforts to control it. It responds, however, to us asking questions that matter to us and that we don’t have answers to. It happens when we have one foot in the known and another in the unknown, in that sweet awkwardness of real change in real time.

We have the capacity — it is actually our species’ most difficult blessing — to deliberately step into the unknown, survive it, befriend it, and eventually, learn to delight in it. That is the practice of transformation.

I discovered something ancient. Every day of my life I have entered the original space of human transformation, where our bodies, minds, and stories find our home: the kitchen. For a while, anthropologists like Richard Wrangham, the author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, and his predecessors have been telling us this. It is around cooking that we have become the human race, human families, and human beings.

In other words, it takes a kitchen to be human. Those of you who cook to feel alive know what these anthropologists are talking about. This is where we, cooks, feel our bodily presence in the world. This is where, for us cooks, all human life intersects — art, science, history, economy, politics, relationships. This is where we share stories that give us meaning. This is where we come in touch with our beautiful human need to belong. This is where we practice joy, confidence, and freedom. This is how we serve the world.

And we, cooks, are all in this together, as brotherhood, or sisterhood, or knighthood, or neighborhood, ours is a hood of kitchens.

After my kitchen revelation, I had sleepless nights. I would wake up too happy to go back to sleep. What could I make for the next dinner? Who’s coming? What’s their story? What’s their beautiful need? How can I perform the alchemy of turning earthly matter into cosmic love? I can make them realize not “I am full,” nor “That was delicious,” but rather, “Life is wonderful!” I can wake people up!

How could I then sleep?

At first, I didn’t know what to do with this. Over the years, the culinary arts have been seized from peoples’ kitchens and assigned to labs of food corporations, TV studios, disjointed YouTube hits of dopamine, and the celebrity chef industry. On the other hand, there has been growing attention to in-life practices of housework, gardening, sewing, and cooking. These ancient transformational technologies have been hiding in plain sight, unclaimed by our ritual-hungry lives.

Is it possible, you might ask, to face the overwhelming complexity of life with something simple?

I began to experiment with helping people stop trying too hard. I asked them to stop chasing change (or escaping it) and pay attention to — crazy, I know — the colors in the produce aisle, the stories around their table, and soap water in their sinks.

I am not alone. We, cosmic cooks, are everywhere. We host the world. We are the priests of Big Bang and the scientists of the Great Spirit, saying to every human being what every human being needs to hear: “Life welcomes you.”

We are cross-generational. We operate with and beyond our five senses. We have a secret language of human connection. We are the kitchenhood.

We don’t merely practice cooking. We have taken cooking as practice. We are on Cook’s-Path-to-Total-Enlightenment-One-Way-Road-to-Full-Salvation kind of a trip.

We don’t offer explanations. We facilitate experiences. Sharing with children. Receiving from elders. Encounters with strangers. Connection with neighborhoods. Relationship with the planet. Self-understanding, self-compassion, and self-mastery. New experiences then provide an anchor for new explanations. In the safety of our homes, we can afford to release our grip on our defended identities. That is how we change. It is all much, much easier than we thought.

Is it really that simple?

I know: I did not believe it either. Thirty years of helping people transform came down to this?! I realized that growing up I was using the kitchen as my church, my yoga studio, my therapy room, my science lab, and my artist’s workshop. Since then, I have spent years traveling distances, buying information, to add spirituality, personal growth, and excitement to my life. I had a period when I worked hard on adding simplicity to my life. (Just think about that for a moment.)

What if we invest some of our money, time, and energy into paying attention to, participating, and collaborating with the change that is already underway in our lives?

We have been besieged by advice about oh so many things we need to change. And fast. Instead, we are realizing, we want the freedom to live lives we can each call our own. Let’s set out to restore people’s kitchens into what they have actually always been: potent, consistent, and eminently available places of human transformation.

I wish someone had taken me aside years ago and made it clear that being fully alive is not a goal, but a practice. Testifying to me that I can learn to live well, love well, and lead others well, as I go. That I can wayfind through the unknown, rather than cling to the GPS systems (or recipes) that keep my head down and my heart checked out.

If you have seen and experienced what I am describing here, you, my friend, are hooked. You can’t go back and unsee and un-experience the power of the kitchenhood. But you can move forward and learn to meditate, celebrate, and create life as you take care of life.

Here I am, at 60, inviting you, the cook, to embrace cooking as practice. Experiment with it, like you would with a dish. What would happen if you were to release the grip of made-up complexity and artificial urgency?

What would be possible if you lean into the radical simplicity of it all? If you double down on whatever faith in life that you have? If you allow for a possibility that everything you need is already in and around you? If you claim places in your life where you can find yourself by simply going about the business of being human? In that unknown, what could you discover?