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I’ve been thinking lately about how quickly life can change.
I’ve also been absent for a while. This whole summer, I’ve been in a coding boot camp, and it’s taken up most of my time. But during that time, I’ve gained perspective about writing, life, and where I’m at in both.
It’s cliché to say that the only constant in life is change, but clichés become clichés for a reason. They usually express a common truth that enough people have recognized in their own lives.
The strange thing is that change is much easier to identify after it’s already happened.
Looking back, we can assign a clear character to different periods of our lives. Some years feel stable, others feel chaotic, and some become meaningful only after they’re over. Hindsight gives each period a shape, a mood, and even a kind of weather. That weather is dynamic, always changing.
While you’re living through it, though, you usually don’t know what season you’re in.
You can sometimes feel the wind changing. You notice it in your routine, your work, your relationships, or your sense of what comes next. But most days don’t announce themselves as turning points. Only later do you realize that an ordinary day belonged to the final stretch before everything changed.
Today felt like one of those days when the emotional weather didn’t know what it wanted to be.
One second, it was spitting rain. The next, it was hot as a desert. Then a cold wind rushed in.
Within a few hours, I got good news about a new audiobook job. It’s my first repeat client, which feels like real progress for my business. These jobs aren’t guaranteed. Every new one feels like evidence that I’m building a sustainable body of work, developing mastery, and creating a business I can be proud of.
At the same time, I’m nearing the end of the coding boot camp. I can build software now that I couldn’t have built a few months ago. Parts of software development that once seemed completely inaccessible now feel within reach.
But there’s no guarantee that any of it turns into clients or that a cool cloud will cross overhead on a summer day.
I can build tools, repair applications, work with small businesses, and combine software with the other skills I’ve already developed.
Still, confidence isn’t a guarantee.
Then there’s the new novel.
I’m slowly chipping away at it. It’s getting better. I believe in it. But I also know that belief doesn’t guarantee the book will find an audience.
Nothing is guaranteed.
That can sound bleak, but I don’t think it has to be.
I actually like living a life where I’m participating actively. I’m learning new things, taking risks, writing books, building software, producing audiobooks, and doing work I couldn’t have imagined a few years ago.
I like living this way.
The hard part is that chosen change and imposed change aren’t the same.
It’s one thing to begin a project, learn a new skill, or take a risk because you decided to. It’s another when life transforms into a storm with no notice.
That’s when you realize how much of your stability was temporary—or maybe that it never existed at all.
Maybe that’s one reason I’ve been thinking about all the material I’ve accumulated.
I record thoughts like these almost every day. Occasionally, they become publish-worthy. Most of the time, they languish in my Google Drive or in ChatGPT.
But I know there’s good material in there.
I know that at least one other person would find my rants, self-imposed rules, and half-developed reflections resonant, entertaining, funny, or insightful.
Yet still, I hesitate.
Part of me believes that if I don’t personally curate every sentence, then the result won’t really be mine. Even after everything I’ve said and thought about AI and authorship, there’s still a voice in me that says: You didn’t write this.
I know the answer to that objection. I’ve said it many times before.
Authorship is more than typing words. I’m providing the originating thought, and I decide what stays, what goes, and what the piece ultimately means.
However, one final form of resistance remains. It gathers like bad weather at the point between constructed thoughts and releasing those thoughts.
For me, publication becomes an armed checkpoint, one that feels dangerous to cross.
The material has already passed through a robust cognitive process. Then it reaches the final question: Am I willing to let this exist outside of me?
That’s where my grip tightens.
At times, that grasp is useful. Standards matter. I don’t want to publish every passing thought or emotional reaction I have. I also don’t want to flood the internet with unfinished material simply because technology makes it easy.
But rigid standards can also become a way to disguise fear.
Dozens of essays sit unpublished on my website. Story ideas remain undeveloped even though they still occupy my thoughts. Reflections that could become worthwhile pieces stay buried in folders because I’m preserving the possibility of a better version.
Ultimately, an unpublished piece is safe.
Nobody can misunderstand it, criticize it, or ignore it. It remains untouched by public judgment and the internet mob.
But it’s also inert.
Writers throughout history would’ve killed for the ability to move this easily from mind to voice, from voice to words, and from words to readable prose.
I imagine Mark Twain going crazy with this technology. He would’ve dictated, talked too much, revised, and published as quickly as possible—probably before he’d finished interrogating, rearranging, or sharpening every line.
He would’ve made full use of it.
Meanwhile, the guards remain stationed at my checkpoint, and the storm continues to gather overhead.
We’re living in a moment when the distance between ideas and artifacts has compressed to a matter of seconds. “Creating at the speed of thought” sounds like a SaaS cliché, but it’s true.
And I’m still holding back.
What’s wrong with me?
It’s the human in me that refuses to say sayonara—to yield to the cyborg that wants to replace him.
The answer isn’t to abandon standards. It’s to establish a clearer release threshold.
If I can answer the following questions, the piece is ready:
Is the originating thought mine?
Do I recognize my voice and meaning in the finished piece?
Have I removed anything I wouldn’t naturally say or endorse?
Does the reader feel human resonance in it?
If the answer to those questions is yes, it’s ready.
The weather will change whether I publish or not. Eventually, the coding boot camp will come to an end. New work may come. Some projects will succeed, and others won’t. Stable periods will become memories whether the sun blazes overhead or winter frost seizes the trees.
The life I have now—and the life you have now—will eventually look different. We often can’t tell when we’ve entered a new season until we’ve already lived part of it.
So this is an experiment.
Instead of keeping another reflection hidden away, waiting for a version pure enough to deserve release, I’m letting this one go.
Because right now, I don’t know exactly what season I’m in. I only know that I’m here, sweating it out in the hundred-plus-degree desert heat and feeling every degree of it.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.