No Expiration Date

A reflection on Hannah Arendt, empathy, and the humans we choose to become There is a concept that has followed me for years, resurfacing every time I witness something I cannot explain away. Hannah Arendt called it the "banality of evil". She coined the phrase while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann (one of the chief architects of the Holocaust) in Jerusalem in 1961. She expected a monster. What she found was something far more disturbing: an ordinary man. Bureaucratic. Compliant. A man who claimed, repeatedly, that he was simply following orders. That he had not thought much about what those orders meant. That was Arendt's unsettling conclusion: that some of the greatest evils in history were not carried out by demons. They were carried out by people who simply stopped thinking. I keep coming back to that. Because I see it everywhere. Evil Doesn't Always Look Like Evil Most people will hurt others  (humans, animals, living things) without fully realizing it. Some...

I write often about what is. What exists, what is happening, what is being built or broken in the world around us. I write less often about what is no longer here. Today I want to write about that. The Illusion That Breaks There is a version of the world we are given when we are young. It is not a lie, exactly. It is more like a necessary shelter; a soft understanding that the people we love will be there, that life moves forward in a mostly predictable way, that the foundations beneath us are solid and permanent. And then loss arrives. Not loss in the abstract. Real loss. The specific, irreplaceable kind; a person who was not just loved but load-bearing. Someone whose presence shaped how you understood yourself and the world around you. When that happens, the illusion doesn't crack. It disappears. All at once, without warning, and with a clarity that is almost brutal. You see, perhaps for the first time, how fragile all of it is. How little time is guaranteed. How much you assumed...