Truth
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Sweat. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
One kind of truth comes from outside—by rigorous observation and analysis. This is the kind of truth that my former colleagues at The New York Times and The Atlantic are after: They interview, research, witness, and describe. Another kind comes from inside, and here is a place where athletics and creativity intersect: because in rigorous and focused movement a whole dance of physiology unspools, a deep nourishment and stimulation of the organism, an activation of our supremely sophisticated motor and spatial intelligence, and ultimately a scene and a quiet for the entering in of revelation.
Some of the latter truths become the former kind, in time. Fiction is transmuted to reality, either by force of will (and charisma) or because the fiction merely anticipated what had not yet materialized but was inevitable. I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week. The future—of instability in climate and geopolitics and technology and who knows what else, and of human nature playing out as it always has, both deeply entrenched and supernaturally adaptive—might not be wholly good or wholly bad, but it will be wholly weird.
Personally, I suspect that the way machine intelligence enters the world in the coming years is the most important factor in how, and perhaps even how long, our lives and those of our kids will play out. And whereas other existentially important global forces are well in motion by now, the narrative on this one is, for now, squarely in the hands of its collective human author. But the weird future is no longer distant.
Our embodiment is so important right now because it is the place from which the truth about the future will come. The truth about the future will come from inside our bodies.
Coming Tuesday: Speed.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.