We all need to hold secrets. Samuel Johnson mused, “To keep your own secrets is wisdom; but to expect others to keep them is folly.” Franklin and Johnson were contemporaries and bookend the implications of secrets held personally and those given voice. It always amazes me when social media headlines claim access to “hidden secrets” and “unknown facts” How are these even possible?

Governments have classified files, corporations and celebrities use NDAs to protect their trade secrets, avoid liability or shield bad behavior. But secrecy is also frequently a multilayered curtain hiding incompetence. Sometimes that curtain is literally shrouded with levels of guards, barriers, and cameras. Other times, it’s a thirty-page legal document written in a font so small it’s legally classified as a vision test. And occasionally litigation filed just to stall and obfuscate disclosure.

Secrets are not going away. But that doesn’t mean that there is not truth to be discerned and discovered. As intentional disinformation and propaganda thrive as robust industries in our world, discerning the truth is an increasingly important skill.

I’m not a knight boldly hunting the Holy Grail of Truth. But I know our assertions or beliefs don’t magically become truth or knowledge just because they are decorated with bold font and a couple of exclamation points or an AI generated meme.

Truth today is a frightened cat under a sofa: it’s definitely under there, but it’s not coming out just because I ask nicely. Since facts are increasingly buried under layers of fear, greed, and jargon, I’ve settled on a different yardstick: authenticity.

Authenticity is the courage to be genuinely human—warts, awkward phrasing, and my shiny, ever-enlarging forehead included. It’s the opposite of a polished persona vetted by a focus group. As writers we face this daily. Even when I try to be a neutral instrument, I still end up smuggling in my biases and a suspicious number of adjectives.

But how do we actually “suss out” authenticity? There’s no blood test for it. In fact, if someone starts a sentence with, “Let me be totally honest with you,” I immediately check to see if my wallet is still in my pocket. True authenticity isn’t a performance; it’s a pattern. You look for the “admissions against interest”—when someone admits they were wrong, or says “I don’t know” without acting like the sky is falling. Authenticity is found in the people who show their work and represent their opponents fairly, even when it ruins a perfectly good zinger.

Fiction writers too have to be “authentic,” which sounds like a paradox since we are literally paid to create fictional worlds and embellish. I think a novelist is being authentic when they don’t cheat. They don’t use a deus ex machina because they wrote themselves into a corner, and they don’t make their characters act like idiots just to move the plot along.

An authentic fiction writer respects the internal logic of their world building more than they respect the reader’s desire for a happy ending. If the “truth” of the character requires them to be a disaster, the authentic writer lets them be a disaster. They aren’t trying to sell you a lifestyle; they’re trying to describe a being, even if that soul is imaginary.

Of course, I still get fooled. Clickbait still works on me because I apparently really need to know the “one trick” that will fix my life. The key is to move on before the next headline informs me I’ve been using a toaster incorrectly for forty years.

Attention is our most valuable and unique asset. We “invest” our time and attention whenever we read or watch. Our attention is targeted by everyone. Attention, like respect, must be earned. Authenticity is one of the few currencies left that can buy mine.

Take “fine.” It can mean excellent, acceptable, punished, or quietly furious while smiling through dinner. I want words to be precise, but words have other plans. They wander off, change clothes, acquire new meanings, and return without permission. “Viral” left the doctor’s office for marketing. “Content” became an endless conveyor belt of clips, captions, and people gesturing at floating text. “Product”, once describing something specific, now seems to include anything used to cleanse, soften, condition, or exfoliate nearly every inch of the body.

New media speeds up the chaos. A phrase can be invented at breakfast, repeated ironically by lunch, become a meme by dinner, and be embarrassing by morning. Choosing language that will last can feel like labeling fish in a river: everything is moving, including the definition of “fish.” Emojis are not helping.

I also worry about readers. Reading requires focus, patience, imagination, and the willingness to stay with an idea until it becomes clear—or at least interestingly complicated. But our world is designed to divide attention into tiny, profitable pieces. A podcast offers music, movement, voices, and the promise of an answer before the next stoplight. A paragraph offers silence. It asks readers to imagine the voices, colors, pacing, and patience.

We are all curators now, sorting through more words than anyone could read, plus videos, alerts, headlines, advertisements, and opinions delivered like fire alarms. Deciding what deserves our attention is exhausting. Deciding what is factual is harder still. “Who do you believe—me or your lying eyes?” once suggested that experience was evidence. Today, even our eyes may need fact-checking. Discerning reality has become both a scientific field and a growing industry.

I have no simple solution. I want to preserve language’s beauty, music, ambiguity, and fullness without leaving readers outside my sentences holding a map, a flashlight, and a snack. My goal is not to defeat distraction or make language perfectly precise. It is to keep seeking balance: clear without becoming flat, rich without becoming exhausting, and honest enough that a reader chooses, for a little while, to stay. The gift of attention is the greatest compliment a writer can receive.

Interdependence

I’ve learned that I thrive through close relationships. At first, that seemed to conflict with the spiritual traditions that warn against attachment. Over time I discovered they are talking about something different. Buddhism and Taoism encourage love and compassion while cautioning against clinging to people or possessions as the source of our identity or security.

For years I explored spiritual traditions that suited my independent nature. I found myself drawn to teachings that ask for understanding rather than belief. Buddhism and Taoism, with their emphasis on impermanence and interdependence, became lasting influences.

The more I understood interdependence, the more obvious it became that my life depends on countless others—from the people who grow my food to those who offer friendship, skill, care, and support. Gratitude follows naturally. Kindness doesn’t feel like self-sacrifice but simply the healthiest response to reality. Of course, kindness also needs boundaries. Becoming a doormat helps no one.

Fear and anger have their place. Fear sharpens awareness when danger is real. Anger can protect us or motivate needed action. Left unchecked, though, both cloud judgment and become emotional toxins.

Living at the edge of a Panamanian rainforest has reinforced that lesson. The jungle is beautiful, but it rewards awareness. Human relationships are much the same. They offer our greatest joys and, sometimes, our deepest wounds. We humans can harm one another in ways no other animal can—not only physically, but emotionally and psychologically.

Living with both compassion and caution requires attention. Whenever I’ve drifted through life on autopilot, I’ve usually paid for it later.

Science continues to reveal how deeply connected everything is. Beneath what we notice lies an intricate web of causes and conditions shaping every moment. Our senses reveal only a fraction of reality, while advances in computing, physics, and systems science continue to uncover patterns once invisible.

What fascinates me is that many Eastern traditions arrived at remarkably similar insights centuries ago through careful observation, meditation, and contemplation rather than technology. Different paths but often pointing toward the same landscape.

Impermanence

Impermanence is easier to understand because we live it every day. Our bodies change continuously. We age. Our eyesight fades, our hearing softens, our knees begin negotiating instead of cooperating. Everything we love changes as well.

Accepting this doesn’t make loss painless, but it makes life more honest. When we stop expecting permanence from an impermanent world, we suffer less from surprise.

Both Buddhism and Taoism suggest that wisdom comes not from belief but from recognizing reality as it is. Their teachings are invitations to observe and reflect, not commandments to obey.

I can’t claim to understand the Tao, the animating force connecting all, in any mystical sense. But I know what it feels like when life becomes less of a struggle. There are moments when striving quiets down and I feel less compelled to control every outcome. Instead of forcing life forward, I seem to move with it.

That doesn’t mean giving up or just drifting. My injured knees still appreciate exercise, and problems still need solving. It simply means choosing carefully where effort belongs. The Serenity Prayer captures it well: accepting what cannot be changed, changing what can, and learning the difference.

Family, friends, and even the familiar objects around me help shape the world I experience. Yet interdependence reminds me that I don’t have to earn my place in it. Connection isn’t something I achieve. It’s something I wake up to.

As I’ve grown older, my friendships have become less about security and more about affection. I value them deeply while knowing that separation and loss are inevitable.

Relationships need attention, generosity, and time. Awareness of their impermanence makes me appreciate them more, not less. Grief, when it comes, is simply love continuing after someone is gone. Remembering with gratitude honors both those we’ve lost and the life still before us.

The challenge, at least for me, has never been deciding whether to care. Caring comes naturally. The challenge is caring deeply while remembering that nothing stays the same—not relationships, not health, not certainty, not even the stories we tell ourselves.

I’ve learned that affection doesn’t weaken when it’s held lightly. In fact, it seems to grow stronger. Gratitude has become more reliable than certainty, and kindness more useful than being right.

So this is the path I keep trying to follow: stay awake, pay attention, laugh when I can, forgive when I can’t, and remember that we’re all walking each other home in some way.

For years I imagined I was searching for the path. Now I suspect the path was quietly following me all along, bending—whenever I gave it the chance—toward kindness.

An entrepreneur for decades. Happy to work with people but not for them. Willing to make mistakes, suffer failures and enjoy successes- doing so while engaging with an agressive business world, keeping an open heart to family and friends. Always alone but not lonely in a large group. Questioning to understand, when others are happy with consensus. Family, frequently by choice not biology, and a few dear friends keep me sane- or so I believe.

So what the hey? Not an introvert. Not an extrovert. Is a descriptor helpful? Will it help explain this life? Not to fit into a psychologist’s box of personality types. I would dread that. But something to help grok this neither fish nor fowl existence.

I recently came upon what is characterized as an “emerging” understanding of people with this personality- my personality. It is called an “otrovert”.

I can tune in and connect with another person’s mind one-on-one. But, I don’t understand how a group thinks collectively, even when immersed in that group. Group thought is uncomfortable; it’s frightening. Communal traditions, such as religious, national ceremonies and holidays feel uncomfortable and compelling. I am a friendly observer, not engaged.

So dear reader I thought I should explain. I am passionate about many things and just a keen observer of others (I think my observations are keen anyway.) My fiction and nonfiction posts come from the well of decades of this active otrovert life.

Substack embraces exploration and sublty as well as expression of insights that are compelling and immediate. Here I can subscribe and not ”follow” and hopefully be interesting enough to have subscribers. I look forward to engaging, meeting you here, where an otrovert fits so well.