Saturday, 3rd October 2026

Losing the thread. Isn't that how it goes.

But who could blame us?

Is there a nook or cranny that isn't overflowing with useless crap?

If I tried to walk you back to the beginning, we'd get lost, so I'll just start where it makes sense to me now and trust that we'll get around to everything eventually.

There's a quote I heard probably twenty years ago that's stuck with me my entire adult life. I was watching a story on The Weather Channel about mountain biking. A guide started talking about taking first-time riders on slick rock trails and the advice she gave them was this: "Keep your eyes on where you want to go, not where you don't want to go." Meaning, look off the cliff, fall off the cliff; look at the road, stay on the road.

I'd heard similar advice from a state trooper, while watching a defensive driving segment on the news probably fifteen years before the slick rock guide.

He explained that, to keep control of your vehicle in a curve, you shouldn't watch the road immediately in front of your car, but the point outside the curve where you want your car to end up.

In other words, if you're constantly watching the point directly in front of you, you'll also constantly be correcting your course to keep up with the curve. By watching the end of the curve instead, you take the curve smoothly, without jerking.

If you've never tried driving this way, it can be a little nerve-wracking the first few times you do it. You'll worry it won't work (you're in trouble if it doesn't, right?), but it does, like a charm, and it allows you to maintain more control over the vehicle. Curves are taken smoothly, and you'll feel like Richard Petty (or Danica Patrick).

I'm sure neither the slick rock mountain bike guide nor the state trooper intended to give "instructions in life," but either way, that's what I took from it.

How can I expect to make smooth and steady progress in the direction I want to go if I'm constantly over-correcting my current position? The only thing I can expect to get from that is a jerky ride.

This work here at The Paper Abbey is like that. The idea for it came to me when I was in the middle of building another big, audacious project and hit a wall. I just didn't have it to give anymore. I didn't want complexity anymore. I didn't want to launch another thing. I'd been doing that my entire adult life for clients and myself, and I was just too tired.

I thought to myself, what would you do if it didn't matter?

I kept thinking how depleted I was, how I didn't have the energy or wherewithal to build more complexity.

Somehow in that moment, I was able to think of the simplest of practices, something I call "sitting at the door" or "spending time at the door." I'll tell you about that, too, sometime, but for now, the short of it is, I wanted something sacred and simple, something deep and simple.

I found an obscure little scribble in my notes, and the idea for the abbey was formed over the day or two that followed.

The gist is best summarized with a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh: "Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves."

I'll speak for myself here, but based on conversations I've had over the last several years, it seems many others feel the same—maybe you do, too. I spend more of my time, energy, and attention on the nooks and crannies of accumulated crap than I do on what I think matters, and while I don't know exactly what that means for me, I do have clues, and it's certainly not the nooks and crannies of accumulated crap.

But even as I worked on building a space and practice around meaning, connection, reverence, and the sacred, I was getting buried by the crap of even it. I came across a quote by Thomas Merton that summed it up nicely:

Exactly.

In trying to make sure I was communicating the essential things about this place, I was missing what was actually essential.

So I stopped and wrote you this letter.

It's not what I thought I'd say, and maybe it's not what I should have said to start, but it got me out of the nooks and crannies and at least trying to communicate with you about what I'm trying to say. If that all makes sense.

Watch where you want to go, not where you don't want to go.

As I wrote nearly twenty years ago when contemplating that slick rock biker quote, I'm sure, out of habit, I'll go back to what feels natural tomorrow, watching the road right in front of me and correcting course as I go, in a herky-jerky fashion. I learned a much better driving strategy more than three decades ago and still forget to use it, and that IT WORKS. It's a habit, and it takes work to keep good habits and not slip back into old and lazy ones.

The junk in the nooks and crannies will continue to accumulate, I have no doubt, especially if the monks are accumulating it, too. Maybe there's little hope for the rest of us. But—I am at the end of this letter to you. The crap is still there, but I was able to stop looking at it and obsessing over it long enough to get this far.

Tomorrow? Well, that's another day. But hopefully I'll be writing you again.

— A.
Founder & groundskeeper
The Paper Abbey

Reference notes:
Let's call this letter "Attention as direction" in the letter archive, and I'll file it under attention, simplicity, and meaningful living.