The places that have not known love

Writing every day, for 90 days. How did I get here?

A few months ago I went to one of many regional meetups for Sam Harris’ Waking Up app. The organiser mentioned a talk by Francis Weller that had changed her life. It took me a few months to watch it, but I was transfixed.

I bought his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which talks a lot about loss:

We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our very being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain.

Weller says there are 5 gates to grief. The first gate is familiar to most of us: “Everything We Love, We Will Lose.” The second gate is less recognised—”The Places That Have Not Known Love.”

Of this gate, Weller says:

We do not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and we thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community… What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss.

These words stirred something in me and I started journalling. I found it interesting to reframe what we deem unacceptable as a kind of loss. What do I hide or feel is defective?

There were several themes for me: feeling politically homeless, my daily sensory sensitivity, my philosophical passions, my anger and frustration, my reluctance to be exuberant and excitable in case people exploit it or I turn out to be the fool, my contemplative orientation…

The next question was: how do I give these parts of me a voice?

For unrelated reasons, I’d started listening to interviews with Tyler Cowen, one half of Marginal Revolution. Both interviews were part of the the How I Write podcast. The first was on AI, and the second was a three-way conversation about blogging.

I had a strong reaction to watching Tyler talk. It wasn’t just his ideas—it was his uninhibited intellectualism. And the fact that he’d built a hugely popular blog, largely through sharing what was interesting to him.

I thought: why am I writing cruft when I could be exploring the kinds of ideas these two are pushing out daily? This all felt at some distance from the daily LinkedIn grind I’d consigned myself to.

After reviewing Q1, I wanted to ramp up my writing. Here was an opportunity to do just that, whilst doubling down on things that matter to me.

So here I am.

See you tomorrow.