About These Posts

Each day I add a new journal entry to my social media feeds. Here, I take that day’s entry and expand it through the lens of my Good Life Creed, which you can read about in my book Going Alone (available for free on this website). These dissections aim to connect ordinary reflections with the enduring objectives and principles of the Creed.

Journal Entry (10/09/25)

It’s a strange thing to venture into the city on long walks in the middle of a weekday. Everyone moves with purpose—steady, coordinated, drawn along by the rhythm of work and routine. The whole world seems to turn like a great clock, each part moving precisely in time. I move through it at a gentler pace these days, close enough to feel its steady hum but no longer caught in its current. Twice yesterday I stopped—once beside a narrow stream running through a factory district, and again before an old apartment building that seemed to watch the street in silence. Each time, the flow of life went on around me while I stood still—like a figure in a film who pauses mid-scene as the world continues to move.

At the stream, I leaned over a weathered railing and watched clear water slip through the concrete channel below. Bicycles, cars, and pedestrians passed in an even, unbroken rhythm. I’d walked this same street many times in my working years, always on my way somewhere, never noticing the quiet thread of calm that had been running here all along.

Later, I stopped again before that apartment building—still sound but mostly empty now. The glass had a dull, gray look to it, like the calm eyes of an old man watching life drift past. The street was still in the afternoon heat, but from a few blocks away came the faint sounds of the busy world—work and conversation and motion—carrying through the air the way children’s voices drift from a park a few blocks over.

I was out there among it all, yet I was somewhere else. And it wasn’t just because I had the time to stop and study the stream and the building, but because I had the willingness too. It’s taken many months to get here—to this quieter place in life where I can move within the machine while no longer being a part of it. A stealthy form of living, hidden not from others, but from the busy and determined man I used to be.

Dissection

This reflection dwells in the stillness that follows a lifetime of motion—the calm that comes not from escape, but from harmony with the natural and rational order of things. The world moves as it must: trains run, workers hurry, streams flow. The shift lies not in the world, but in perception—the willingness to see life’s machinery and not be consumed by it.

Three principles of the Good Life Creed surface here:

#Apathy (A sub-objective of Limits): The author’s peace arises from his refusal to be swept back into the momentum of the crowd. Apathy here is not indifference, but composure—the emotional discipline to observe without reentering.

#Nature (The Principle of Nature): Even in a city of concrete and glass, natural rhythm endures. The stream, the heat, the sounds of distant life—all remind us that human industry is merely one expression of nature’s pulse.

#Reason (The Principle of Reason): The reflective awareness itself is a triumph of reason—a mind awake enough to study its own detachment and recognize the value of stillness over motion.

Takeaway

Peace after purpose is not retreat—it’s realignment. The mind learns to see without grasping, to think without reacting, and to walk among the busy without joining their hurry. In that moment, the noise of the city softens, and the natural rhythm returns—the quiet sound of life continuing exactly as it should.