Plans Interrupted
When beginning anew, we resynthesize what we lived through, attempting to grasp meaning, forge purpose, and know for certain what we are meant to be this time.
Adapted from The Fire of Regret (2025)
Have you had no other choice but to wait at some point in your life? You know, a holding pattern, in limbo, on pause, at a standstill: a full stop. Everything. What feelings surfaced, and what thoughts came to meet them? What were your ultimate conclusions about the experience, or did you avoid making conclusions altogether? In this way, a certain complexity urges one’s consideration. When I am forced to stop, my thoughts become louder and demand that I tidy up.
Imagine for a moment a lateral line. At one extreme are those who engage deeply with these considerations; at the other, those who engage very little, if at all. In between: every possible degree of engagement. For our purposes, consider it a continuum of reflective engagement. By continuum, I mean variation along a single specified dimension; here, the degree to which one reflectively engages with an experience.
Where do you find yourself along this continuum? What can you conclude about the experience once it has passed? Can you specifically convey the complex struggles you faced and the thoughtful reasoning you utilized? Can you track the evolution of your reasoning incrementally over time, marking how information changed and, with it, your conclusions?
These thoughts set a kind of stage and we find ourselves front and center, revealing to ourselves and sometimes to those around us the genuine article within.
With the environment of this consideration reasonably established, I will speak to you, dear Reader, from within my own non-prescriptive human experience.
The Shape & Sound of Discomforting Thoughts
Avoidance. The comfort in forgetting, if only until reminded. The bliss of ignorance. Sometimes a celebrated human capability, sometimes a necessary one. I’ve seen all manner of reasoning for delaying acknowledgment of reality and, with it, all manner of time spent doing so, some lasting a lifetime. In times of my life when any manufactured reality would be preferable to the one presented to me, I understand the appeal of avoidance, escapism, even of an alternate reality.
As my experience with human life has grown, so too has my unwillingness to negotiate with my own bias, preference, or comfort. I instead choose as accurate an understanding as possible of the matter at hand, no matter how inconvenient, time-consuming, intensive, or out of my immediate educational reach it might be. In 2025, when I wrote The Fire of Regret, I reached such a point while reflecting on my life path up to that time and, consequently, the central nature of creativity within it.
From that time through June 2026, I set myself upon the messy path of self-accountability, evolving my own creative path in public along the way. I felt strongly that I had grasped meaning, forged purpose, and knew for certain what I was meant to be this time. Finally, I allowed myself the environment in which discovery and growth would remain at the forefront. ¹ Engineering, through trial and error, my own books has been, and continues to be, a source of great satisfaction.
Dissatisfaction upon review of one’s life course, subsequent regret, measurement of what one can control, and analysis of where reasonable, measurable changes to said course can be made: that’s the path I chose for myself. This was a response to the shape and sound of my own discomforting thoughts. The disparaging, all-knowing Prosecutor, his dark, vaguely human-like form. The kangaroo court that the forever-young version of me desperately attempts to navigate with honesty and genuine terror. No one sits with me at the Defense’s table, the Judge’s bench sits so high above me I barely see the top of his head, and the Prosecutor likely plays golf with the Judge on weekends.
In this place, it is presented as “fact” that my every intention is bad, that I’m an evil, selfish, lying little boy. In adulthood, the scale hasn’t changed. As I’ve grown, so too have the unreachable heights of the Judge’s pronouncements, the decadent and depraved lengths the Prosecutor will go to flaunt my hypocrisy before the court. Here, my opposition is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Here, everyone else is entitled to fallibility within human experience, in its brightest heights and dimmest depths.
Why go to these lengths? In part, to convince me that I am not who I present myself to be. That I’m a hypocrite. It is a relentless dialogue that I’ve learned to engage with through research, verified authority sources, corroborated facts, and an abundance of skepticism toward any claim without a body of data available for analysis. If the devil is in the details, I will become that very Devil: the Devil of Details.
Are any of us who we present ourselves to be, Reader? Are any of us above contradiction? Is contradiction, by itself, a valid measure of moral character? Intriguing thoughts for another time.
The Devil of Details
At the close of June 2026, I was confronted with such a detail, oh-so-easy to overlook. It took me exactly seven days to face the context it brought to the workbench according to the standard I had set forth for myself earlier. This time, it was not a matter of regret over one’s life course, missed opportunities, or exploration. Interestingly, as I reflect on it now, one perspective on my life’s work has been simply to keep living.
Now I turn to you, Reader, and present you with a detail: at this time, the evidence indicates that within you is an incurable disease. Now look at what your life consists of, spread across the workbench of your mind. Where do you find yourslef on the continuum of reflective engagement mentioned earlier? Or, put more simply, will you engage, or not, with the discomfort of this thought? If so, how?
I don’t want to linger on this point so long that it risks becoming a trope, a plot device repeated ad nauseam. But I will argue that the realness of this occurrence is palpable when it happens to you or someone you love. Its tropiness does not stave off the inevitable and eventual loss; it provides no comfort; it avoids nothing.
I’ve had an abundance of loss, particularly in the first third of my life. So many people I’ve known whose lives were shortened by the implausible or the preventable. How was I to know that I, too, carried a bullet, so to speak, unknowingly in my back pocket?
Research takes time. Waiting alongside potentialities, mortal fear, dread, the unanswerable, and the existential takes time. “Knowing…” she would remind me. “… knowing takes time. Gathering reliable evidence takes time.” When it was most difficult to employ my own frameworks, she did so on my behalf, with a delicacy and tenderness I could not summon for myself.
It’s taken me so long to stand upon my feet and to see with new eyes. Time, do not remove the elevation I earned standing on the embers of my regrets. Please, do not cut me down while I stand at the threshold of understanding. Entropy, do not instill equilibrium within me just yet, I have wells of resistance to uncover and put in place. Let me be seen a while longer. Let Sol shine on my face. Let the Pale Blue Dot’s breath fill my lungs. Do not number my days, I’ve only just learned I too can live. From Unreadiness, July 23, 2026
In closing this section, Reader, I invite you to read three dated excerpts from my journal. They were written at different points along the same experience, under different conditions of knowledge, fear, and understanding.
June 22, 2026 | Pre-surgery Reflection
Again, listen carefully to me. Set it down. Keep walking. Read old books. Live quietly. Setting it down, in our case, is to part with the weaponization of these experiences against ourselves, not the painful memory, not the lesson we learned, not the promise to ourselves, not the acceptance of consequences.
July 23, 2026 | Unreadiness
I had plans this year, to travel, to attend classes, to concentrate my efforts in combatting deathbed regret. Those plans have changed drastically, regret in this context instead became the simple desire to live just a little longer. To ensure my family was taken care of in the long term to the best of my ability. For my life to be cut short just when I was making measurable progress… I digress perhaps.
July 30, 2026 | Admission to Self
The time it takes is the time it takes. That’s different for all of us and, as far as I can tell, that’s how it will remain for a very long time. I knew it was there but acknowledging it can muddy the ambiguous waters of hope. Making the connection today could be because I felt strong enough to accept it without undermining hope. I’m also not one to ignore accurate data, at least for too long.
Plans Reinterpreted
Of all the things possible, these were, in part, a glimpse of mine: my possibilities made into finite reality, orchestrated by yours truly, my human experience laid bare unapologetically. As I write this section, the date falls on August 14, 2026, one day after more evidence was added to the growing body.
I recall mentioning to she early this year that 2026 would be a year of maintenance, not one in which we pushed frantically to force shapes into place. Little did I know what maintenance I myself would undergo.
On the matter of my prognosis, and first acknowledging the evidence-led path walked to this point, I can report with relative confidence that I do indeed have a future. To my abundant relief, an average one, in fact. One, at least, unhindered by what my physician has repeatedly described as “an annoyance.” It's not a stretch to say she too wishes to impart hope. I digress. Intensive, yes. A substantial recovery time, yes. I ask you to understand me, Reader, for not revealing more than that at this time.
But yes, the plans for this year changed completely. Honing my skills, taking those long trips to visit friends, planning classes for 2027 in Telluride, Colorado, as well as approaching a milestone I was proud of: offering my creations to my friends and the public.
Photography, music, bookbinding, writing; all databases containing my human experience. From Unreadiness, July 23, 2026
On the matter of these interrupted plans, or rather the experience that took their place, there is synthesis that needs to be formalized which, up to now, I have not had the proper environment or context to undertake. Not even in my private writings.
Reinterpreting these interrupted plans is both appropriate and necessary. You see, while I was exposed to an unordinary amount of loss in the first third of my life, as I mentioned earlier, I cannot recall a serious time in which I feared the loss of my own life. And again, as I mentioned, one aspect of my life’s work was simply to keep convincing myself to continue living.
Finally, in 2025, with incredible difficulty, I was approaching my own interpretation of purpose and meaning, placing thoughts into realistic, measurable actions, well supported by she and by my colleagues. In 2026, I stood on the precipice of implementing even more daring actions, committing to what a past version of me would have considered audacious, unrealistic plans for indulgent self-improvement and “misrepresented enrichment."
As I write this now, I recall not so long ago entertaining skydiving, rock climbing, and other forms of death-defying activity. I remember concluding that perhaps what I was missing was a brush with my own mortality, or perhaps some confrontation with agency itself, with the right each of us carries: to choose. Little did I know what I would be faced with only months later.
What has my own brush with mortality meant to me?
What meaning do I derive from this? How does this inform my artistry, what is the life-long work demanding, will I change or will I be more of the same… From Unreadiness, July 23, 2026
The answer to that question will continue to evolve as I resonate outward from the point of impact, so to speak. I interpret my current obligation as that of a responsible custodian and archivist of my present condition and its most pertinent contexts, preserving them for analysis by a future self capable of extracting whatever meaning the evidence will eventually support.
Perhaps there is a more approachable way I can convey what I mean to you, Reader, by sharing a rule I made for myself for just such an occasion, and many more. Allow me to explain.
No Local Judgments
A local judgment is exactly what it sounds like: taking one event, one feeling, one reaction, one piece of work, one moment in time, and requiring it to tell me what the whole thing means. Was this good? Was this bad? Did it change me? Have I learned the lesson? Am I now a different person? Was the fear worthwhile? Did I emerge better for having experienced it? I don’t know. More importantly, I do not believe I am presently entitled to know.
When I committed to this type of reasoning and expected one data point to do all the work, my conclusions were often wrong or, at the very least, incomplete. Then, inevitably, I would chastise myself for failing to predict what followed. That, in turn, could lead to self-erasure, a defense mechanism I used when conflict felt unresolvable. A tool responsible for erasing too much of my life.
The No Local Judgments rule is just one way I attempt to redirect unproductive thought where it begins, upstream of erasure. Under this rule, I choose to view these moments first and foremost as data points. Preserve them, yes. Date them, absolutely. Record what's known at the time, the emotional landscape, what conclusions appeared reasonable, and how understanding evolved in response to what new information, big yes. Conclusions without due process, without verification? No.
This reinforces the importance of the records above dated June 22, July 23, and July 30. They preserve three different positions from which I occupied an evolving experience. What I knew changed. What I feared changed. What I could acknowledge changed. Even the questions I was capable of asking changed. It was exhausting to experience and, additively, to conjure the presence of mind necessary to document what a future self would need for later meaning-making to remain grounded in what I actually knew at the time.
I could easily have condensed all three into one retrospective story today, but I would rather preserve the honesty in the mess. This is the raw data, the human data. This is what makes me, what makes us, human. So, when change inevitably occurs, when plans are interrupted, I remind myself to resist the assignment of meaning where preservation will suffice.
Perhaps years from now I will know precisely what this interruption changed in me. Perhaps I will discover that some conclusions I currently find profound were temporary responses to strong emotion. Perhaps something I have not yet noticed will prove far more important. Evidence made possible by the lineage of records.
For now, the responsible thing I can do is leave myself an accurate record. This time, I’ve also chosen to leave it for you, too, Reader. In whatever place you occupy, at whatever time we might have missed one another.
¹ An abundance of gratitude goes to she, whose unwavering support, in word and deed, has made all these things and more a reality in which I could participate. I word the paragraph in this way because her support was always present, though within myself I refused to accept what she offered.
