For over two years, this newsletter has championed fighting the proverbial Poseidon. He is the abstract chaos giant, the mythical god over the dark seas, whom we all face. Maybe more.

Perhaps I’m not that great at translating abstractions into concrete examples and imagery. It’s also possible I’m indulgent of abstractions.

Abstractions are a way of letting one’s thoughts go without having to do much with them. Indulgence, which you could even call a positive spin on rumination, does come from an unwillingness to commit focus on one or two things and become effective at them.

There are times that bring a legitimate struggle to focus. Sometimes we need to just literally (or figuratively) flop out on the floor under the ceiling fan like I did last week after a hot and humid crucible of lawn mowing where I was already energy depleted from a fresh yellow jacket sting to the temple the night before. I tell you what.

An unorganized, unrestrained letting go, sprawling out beneath the downward movement of air, felt necessary.

As it turns out, sprawl is more places than post-yard work breath catching. Sprawl comes in the desire for more things. The desire for bigger barns to store our accumulated possessions. The desire for ideas. The desire for more knowledge. The desire for expansion. A hunger for conquest and just a little bit beyond what we already have. The inability or unwillingness to say, “Enough is enough,” and allow the various margins of our lives to disappear. Reach and influence and attention and more are the currency sprawl trades in. Sprawl gives a low return on investment when it comes to meaning. Contentedness is not in sprawl’s vocabulary.

I suppose it all has to do with what we put into it, or that which prompts the next step.

Lately, I’ve been evaluating the use and value of AI, which is where my reflections of the word sprawl began. The working definition of sprawl I’m using is the tendency of being unable to put a period on something. Whichever AI it is, the LLM frequently gives you a prompt in its response to keep you prompting it.

I see sprawl in AI chats where I read about .05% of its response before responding to it. I can’t be the only one who does that. It spreads out from there, though, because sprawl fights against being contained. We see sprawl in meetings that have a lot of great ideas but don’t commit any of those ideas to action. We see sprawl in activities and commitments that crowd out what’s important with what’s immediate. We see sprawl in the need for completion and wholeness, even after the signals to be done have shot into the sky like a flare from a drifting life raft. We see sprawl in an endless intake of books and articles and podcasts and TEDtalks that never exit our bodies, leaving our actions constipated. We see sprawl in endless collecting but never using, making us bloated with information and things without ever receiving the rich benefit they were intended to give. We expand and never stop to ask if what we’ve gained has served its purpose beyond the enjoyment it was supposed to deliver. Maybe the enjoyment was only the dopamine hit of the acquisition. I’ve fallen into that trap many times.

Which makes me wonder if our ability to enjoy aspects of life at a deep and meaningful level has been compromised?

These are questions I ask myself. If you have questions, this world is in no shortage of people with answers. They don’t even have to be good answers, just loud enough to appear significant in the clamor for a piece of the attention economy pie. The internet is full of influencers telling you what to do and buy and pay attention to. I don’t want to be another source of noise in the digital void. How am I going to dance around that?

Well, I’m going to try being real with you.

Real questions that get to the deep waters of the heart. Real journeys and exploration to seek out what’s been hidden. The real ups and the real downs with discernment for what’s appropriate in the journals versus face to face.

If proximity and safety allow and should you choose to accept, I’m also extending the genuine invitation into vulnerably relating face to face outside of these journals where we can connect on a deeper level.

That last connection is important. The prior chapter of this newsletter, Fightin’ Poseidon, taught me that not every thought needs to be a deliberate battle, even on the battlefield of the mind. You can’t stay in fight mode all the time lest ye discover burnout. When you slowly find yourself soap boxing about topics, entries that lean heavy on the word should, the relational exchange breaks down. Some days, we need space, time, and being able to see how other people approach the obstacles before them. I believe I had drifted into the brackish waters of influencer noise I didn’t want to be in.

Fightin’ Poseidon has run its course. It served its purpose, and to grasp onto what we feel like we’ve already sunk time and energy into because of what we feel like is a commitment is actually more of a fallacy. I want to be open-handed and not embrace stagnation. If we want to grow and change and become better versions of who we were yesterday in this sanctifying journey, closed-fisted clinging isn’t the way to get there.

Growth is never a straight line. It’s more like trying to connect the dots on a scatterplot diagram. There’s peaks, valleys, crests, breakers, setbacks, confusions, and long stretches of traveling in directions of people we wish we hadn’t followed. I’ve had some colossal losses over the last few years, but it would also be dishonest to say I haven’t had gracious wins, too. No way to move in all of that but forward, right?

So, dear reader, I don’t want to make an assumption to know where you’re at; however, we do live in an age of artificiality. That’s no accusation, just recognition. However the dots connect, this is part of my attempt to live out being faithfully human in a frantic world of brackish noise and lion-skinned façades.

I’ll give you the opportunity to respond today. What’s some thing, commitment, ideology, learned weakness, frame of mind, story you’ve been telling yourself, behavior or habit you’ve been clinging to that is no longer serving its purpose? As the question goes, “How’s that working out for you?”

Part of this Faithfully Human experiment is going to take some guiding documents. Two verses illuminated this charter, guiding lights if you will, but I’m already going long.

Keep an eye out for next journal where I can give those verses some proper space.

Thank you for joining me.

~ J.P. Simons