I spent part of yesterday sick, part of it thinking, and the rest of it writing this. Being ill has a way of clarifying things — the body asserts itself, and for a few hours you remember that you are not just a mind with errands.
But here's what I kept returning to: even flat on my back, something in me was still reaching. Still asking. That reaching is the most essentially human thing I know.
The questions that have no final answers are not a waste of time. They are the time. They are what the mind was built for.
Aristotle wanted to know what causes a thing — not just what made it, but what shaped it, what it was modeled on, what purpose drew it into being. Plato added a fifth cause: the pattern in the mind of the maker, the idea of the thing before the thing existed. I find that beautiful. Every made thing was first an intention. Every life is, in some sense, an attempt to close the distance between what we are and what we were patterned after.
I think about that in relation to you. Not who you were told to be — that's someone else's idea. The pattern I mean is deeper: the shape of the person you are when nothing is required of you, when no one is watching, when you're most fully yourself. That's the original. Everything else is the casting.
Seneca says the soul is cramped by the body, that philosophy is how it finds open sky. I know that sounds extreme, but I've felt it — the way a real question, genuinely pursued, lifts something. You stop being a person with problems and become a person in the presence of something large.
You were not born to be a chattel of your circumstances. You were born to a greater destiny than whatever is currently pressing down.
I believe that about you more than you do right now. Hold onto this letter until you catch up.
Yours, reaching —