for free.
No, I am not on for Tuesday.
No, I don’t want another drink.
No, I don’t agree with you on that actually.
No, I can’t always snap out of it.
No, I wasn’t rude when I didn’t get back to a message I never saw.
No, if it’s okay I don’t want to collaborate with you.
No, I am not dumbing down.
No, I can’t do any dates in July.
No, I don’t want your leaflet.
No, I don’t want to continue watching.
No, my niceness is not weakness.
No, they aren’t the next Beatles.
No, I’m not going to take that crap.
No, my masculinity does not mean I shouldn’t cry.
No, I don’t need to buy what you are selling.
No, I am not ashamed to make time for myself.
No, I am not going to your school reunion when you never spoke to me at school.
No, I will no longer apologize for being myself.
No.
No is a good word. It keeps you sane. In an age of overload, no is really yes. It is yes to having the space you need to live.
Be humble because you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars.
Serbian proverb
The maze
It is rare to escape a maze on the first attempt. And when we are stuck in a maze, we can’t escape by following the same path that got us lost. We escape a maze by trying new routes. We don’t feel like we have failed when we hit a dead end. In fact, we appreciate the new knowledge. There is now a dead end we won’t try anymore. Every dead end and cul-de-sac helps us escape the maze. To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.
Knowledge and the forest
“Know your enemy.” In the classic Chinese military treatise The Art of War, Sun Tzu offered advice that echoed through the centuries.
It is timeless advice because of course it doesn’t just apply to war. If we fully understand, say, depression, or a physical disease, or the nature of climate change, or injustice, it helps us combat these things. Without knowledge of our difficulties, we would be in trouble.
For instance, the average person plunged into the middle of the Amazon rain forest would probably struggle to survive, because they wouldn’t understand all the threats they faced. But Juliane Koepcke wasn’t an average person. She was a person with knowledge.
On Christmas Eve 1971, aged seventeen, somewhere over Peru, Koepcke fell through the sky strapped to her seat after lightning struck her plane. All 91 of the other people on board died, including her own mother, but she survived the fall and managed to get out of her seat once it had fallen through the jungle canopy.
Koepcke was in pain. She was in shock. She had a broken collar bone and deep cuts on her legs. She was also in a state of fear for her own life. At the sight of other dead bodies she felt “paralyzed by panic.” She grabbed some provisions she found amid the debris and tried to find her way to civilization.
Koepcke knew a lot about the rain forest. Her parents were both zoologists. Before the crash, she had spent over a year living with them in a research station within the Peruvian rain forest. In her own words she knew that, armed with knowledge, it didn’t have to be the “green hell” people imagined.
So, for instance, she knew that snakes could be camouflaged to look like dried leaves. She knew the sounds of various bird calls. She knew which signs to look for in order to find water and she ended up finding a creek. Her dad had also once told her that if you followed the flow of running water you would eventually find civilization.
As described in her book When I Fell from the Sky, she passed vultures feeding on corpses. Snakes, mosquitoes, and deadly spiders were a continual threat. One of her wounds became infested with maggots. She suffered from the heat of the sun. But all the time she was aided by knowledge.
She decided to walk as much as possible in the water of the stream, in order to avoid snakes, spiders, and the poisonous plants of the jungle floor. She stayed in the middle of the stream in order to avoid piranhas, which she knew mainly swam in shallow water. She knew this would mean she would probably encounter alligators, but she also knew that, unlike snakes, alligators rarely attacked humans.
On and on she walked, as her infested wound grew ever more