There is something about a Saturday morning, when the sound of the city comes through the window without you asking for it, that makes you listen more carefully than on a weekday, because the day does not yet have a plan - only an opening.
And if you sit long enough in that opening, you risk something falling into place that has been moving for a long time.
It is some years ago now that I began to see the world differently, and I am quite aware how banal that sentence sounds, so let me be concrete.
It was not a decision, not yet another course, not a new book. I had at that point spent nearly two decades and a couple of million on the project called 'myself', and I had found most of what I was looking for. I was done with it.
I ended up finding myself quite uninteresting.
On the other hand, I had, in a peculiar way, found love for the Human Being - for its structure, its essence, its depth. And I found myself woken up in the middle of a mystery I could not explain, and no longer wanted to try.
So. I did not get up one morning and decide to begin. It just happened. I do not know why. A bit like the changing of seasons. One layer began to fall away from another layer. I went into a sentence and discovered that it did not mean what I had expected. The next day I stood before the next one, and it had it too - a hollowness beneath the surface, a distance between word and reality, which either had not been there before, or which had been there all along, and it was just me who had not seen it.
It turned out - naturally - that what I saw was not new. It had been there for a long time. It was just me who could not see it.
I saw that language had broken loose from reality, that words could mean the opposite of what they used to, and that most people no longer noticed. You could call something love, which was control. Inclusion, which was exclusion. Tolerance, which was compulsion. Diversity, which was a demand for the conformity of anyone who might think for themselves. It just kept going. And it grew dense. It became a fog that did not make noise, but which would not lift either. No matter where I looked. Fog. So close to the eye's lens that it became difficult not to experience it as natural. As reality itself.
I saw that most people were not living - they were performing roles. What they said, and what they did, were two often completely different things, and the peculiar part was that they had stopped noticing the distance between them.
I saw that narratives control people more than facts ever have, and that whoever can articulate the narrative clearly wins without having to be right.
And beneath all of it - further down, in a layer that does not make noise - I saw something else. Something I had no language for, the first time it appeared. Something that just stood there, as if reality itself had a voice that neither raised itself nor defended itself, but which was still there, even when everything around it was being pushed away.
I have since learned that this voice has a name.
But that is another conversation.
And then I began to write.
Not because I had planned it, not because it was a strategy and not because I wanted to be right. But because what I saw would not leave me alone. It kept following me. Wherever I went. And because staying silent became heavier than speaking. And because I have tried to stop, several times, and it did not work.
I am not a politician, and I have no interest in becoming one. Politics today does not answer to reality, but to the story about it, and I have no ambition to move myself 1-2 percent within a picture I fundamentally do not believe in.
I am not an activist. A movement that is always busy moving others rarely has time to look itself in the eye. And you move no one by shouting louder within a language where the words have stopped meaning what they say.
I am not a missionary. Even though I often write about Christianity, and consistently will do so again and again, I do not write to get you into a church, into a congregation, into a faith. I do not believe you can talk anyone into what they must see for themselves. I do not point to convert you. I point because what I have seen is worth pointing at.
I have no flock I want you to join. No campaign I am leading. No list I want you to mark your cross on.
I am an ordinary man who has seen something I cannot look away from again.
That is the entire description.
Therefore I do not write to win debates, but to crack small fissures in the picture that has been given to us. Recognition does not come from being told something. It comes from seeing it yourself. And if one person reads something I have written and feels a small jolt somewhere in their chest - a crack, a glimpse, a moment where the picture no longer quite fits the frame - where it flickers for a moment with interference - then that is enough. The rest of the way they must walk themselves.
What is it then, that I am pointing at, if I am to say it plainly.
I point at the Human Being.
Not abstractly, not as an idea, but as it actually is - carried by a spark that cannot be reduced by any system, cannot be owned by any state, cannot be dissolved in any ideology, and cannot be measured by any instrument. A spark that carries conscience, freedom, responsibility, love, courage, shame, joy, sorrow - the whole living thing we call being human.
I point at the fact that we have forgotten it.
That we have begun to talk about people as if they were numbers, about children as if they were challenges, about men and women as if they were problems to be solved, about culture as if it were a question of percentage adjustments. And that we have spoken so long in the third person that we have stopped seeing each other.
I point at the fact that the dignity you take for granted every morning did not come by itself. That the freedom you now hold to be the standard condition is one of the rarest things in human history. That the right you have to think what you think, and say it aloud without losing your family, your work or your life, is the exception, not the rule.
That all of it was fought for by people who knew what it cost, and that it ONLY remains, as long as someone still knows it. And stands on it.
I point at the fact that it is slipping.
Not with drama, not with noise, but quietly - one word at a time, one silence at a time, one person at a time, who chooses not to say what they know perfectly well is true.
What I have seen these last handful of years has not made me angry. It has made me quiet. Clear. And without a way back.
I have nothing to sell you. I have no plan for what should happen at the next election. I have no winning strategy.
I just have this.
A human being who gets up in the morning, opens an empty document, and tries to write a sentence so clean that it cannot be misunderstood.
And I will write so unflinchingly and directly that it strikes cracks, so the Light can slip in through the fog.
The rest must come after.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Saturday evening, friends.
How wonderful that the sun and the light are finally truly back ☀️
