Now

The top 5 deathbed regrets, as recorded by palliative care worker Bronnie Ware:

1. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
2. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” 
3. “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
5. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Chesterton:

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

Lewis:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

Paul to the Ephesians:

Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.

James Sherman:

You can’t go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand new ending.

W. H. Auden's sonnet In the Time of War, XII:

And the age ended, and the last deliverer died.
In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
The sudden shadow of the giant's enormous calf
Would fall no more at dusk across the lawn outside.

They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt
A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,
But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath;
The kobold's knocking in the mountain petered out.

Only the sculptors and the poets were half sad,
And the pert retinue from the magician's house
Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanished powers were glad

To be invisible and free: without remorse
Struck down the sons who strayed their course,
And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.

Elsewhere, around the same time, he wrote this pseudonymously:

Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up. For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

GK Chesterton:

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

The narrator in CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength:

I remember thinking, "This is the sort of place which, as a child, one would have been rather afraid of or else would have liked very much indeed." A moment later I thought, "But when alone—really alone—everyone is a child: or no one?" Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.

Steinbeck once more, from Travels with Charley in Search of America:

It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this, they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap. Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy, and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

Via Jon Tyson's recent emails; file these under How You Affect Others.

From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck:

Men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust. The men were silent, and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men - to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men's faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained. The children stood nearby, drawing figures in the dust with bare toes, and the children sent exploring senses out to see whether men and women would break. The children peeked at the faces of the men and women, and then drew careful lines in the dust with their toes. Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while, the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard, angry, and resistant. Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break. Then they asked, what'll we do? And the men replied, I don't know. but it was all right. The women knew it was all right, and the watching children knew it was all right. Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole. The women went into the houses to their work, and the children began to play.

Weather
Linda Pastan

Because of the menace
your father opened
like a black umbrella
and held high
over your childhood
blocking the light,
your life now seems
to you exceptional
in its simplicities.
You speak of this,
throwing the window open
on a plain spring day,
dazzling
after such a winter.

After Work
Richard Tones

Coming up from the subway
into the cool Manhattan evening,
I feel rough hands on my heart-
women in the market yelling
over rows of tomatoes and peppers,
old men sitting on a stoop playing cards,
cabbies cursing each other with fists
while the music of church bells
sails over the street,
and the father, angry and tired
after working all day,
embracing his little girl,
kissing her,
mi vida, mi corazón,
brushing the hair out of her eyes
so she can see.

In the months leading up to our move from Maryland to Florida, I'd been warned with regularity about the oppressive summer heat of the Sunshine State. But so far, it doesn't feel substantively hotter or more humid than a Delmarva August.

This is an observation based, not on temperature charts, but on the subjective experience of a warm-blooded Eastern Shore boy.

See also: Long Hot Summer Days

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
By Galway Kinnell

For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,   
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,   
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

20 days 'til Lakeland.

Another reason to go walking (or rucking):

"Love has its speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks."

Kosuke Koyama in The Three Mile An Hour God

Value Select has a great metaphor:

"I liken GENERATIVE AI to STEROIDS…

1. Gets You Bigger Faster
2. Not a miracle solution, you still need to sweat like Hell.
3. You Develop a Vague Rotting Feeling Inside
4. Bad if you hide it

Here are the GENERATIVE AI tiers:

1. SKELETAL – lives in a cave.
2. PURE NATTY – All creative is self-generated. Uses modern tools (Google, YouTube, ChatGPT) as resources only. No outsourcing of actual creative generation. Research-only mindset.
3. NATTY + CREATINE – Starts using AI for cleanup or polish—grammar checkers, summarizers, or formatting tools—but all core ideation and execution is personal. Still lifting the heavy stuff solo.
4. JUICED – The artist begins outsourcing creative generation. AI writes drafts, generates images, even edits videos—but the human still guides everything, rewrites heavily, curates selectively. The AI is the intern. You’re the director.
5. GILLED UP – Full-on AI integration. Entire projects are AI-driven—scripts, visuals, edits, voices—maybe even auto-uploaded. The human is the brand manager at this point, making yes/no calls, but not sweating in the gym."
   

This is why I'm building on Ghost, not Substack.

So when you subscribe to my newsletter, all you have to do is enter your email addy and click the confirmation link in your inbox. That's it.

Unlike on Substack, where you're subjected to a half-dozen upsell screens out of the gate.

Finally getting back to it. This Braun theme is quality.

Building out thismortalportal.com...

It's a ton of fun