Another week to get after it. Get back in the grind. But before you do, remember: Mother Nature, biology, random acts of violence and blind bad luck are all trying to kill you.
I have lost count of the ways the earth has tried to end us recently.
A fault line has no god. A wildfire has no flag. The flood does not check your politics before it comes through the door.
Nature erases us without malice. And I will never forget standing in the streets of Pompeii. A whole city stopped where it stood, with no one to blame for it.
And don't get me started on Tanis. Or the next asteroid with our name on it.
And now I am reading the rest of the news.
Sam Neill, seventy-eight. The man who taught a generation to love dinosaurs, gone the same week I am writing about the rock that killed the real ones. He had only just beaten his cancer. Rest in peace, Sam.
And just across the river, five members of one family, from twenty-one to seventy-four, murdered in a single weekend.
Farther out, the same story at scale. Wars that will not stop. Bombs dropped over someone's god. Borders drawn in someone else's blood.
That part we choose. That is what I cannot reconcile.
The earth kills us by accident. Yet too often, we volunteer to do the job ourselves.
The same species that sends rescue crews, money, and prayers will, miles from my office and ten time zones away, pull the trigger itself.
I refuse to be numb to any of it.
Perspective is the one thing I try to carry into the work.
That a deal is someone's livelihood. That a company is people's whole lives stacked inside it. That almost nothing we will fight about on a Monday matters the way we think it does.
And that perspective is not detachment. It is caring about the right things, harder, while we still can.
The ground is already fragile. The time is already short.
Trying my best to help us be gentler with it. And gentler with each other.