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.

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