Editorial Note: This is an updated version published on March 13, 2025 with significant changes to the initial version, prematurely published without these edits on March 12, 2025.
Dearest reader,
Imagine with me for a moment that there’s a very large, very long wooden table in the middle of a quaint little garden. That garden glows gently in the cool radiance of late spring. There’s loads of food sprawled out across the table (I’m thinking charcuterie-to-the-max and scrumptious salads, but you can imagine whatever you like), and a group of your favorite humans on the planet are gathered around the table to enjoy a feast. You all talk, drink, make memories together, and then later on you look back on that gathering, and you think: Man, that’s what life is all about.
Our lives are often speckled with meaningful moments like these, though usually not as noticeable and grand. They’re more likely passing moments in our very ordinary days and weeks, unglamorous and otherwise forgettable. And yet, moments don’t have to be big to be meaningful. In fact, it’s often the smallest and most ordinary things in life that are the most beautiful. The meaningfulness that is speckled across our lives has nothing to do with the grandness of what we do or encounter.
And yet, the meaningfulness of the world around us is so often imperceptible to our eyes because we lack that inner stillness that gives birth to wonder and feral curiosity. We lack the quietness of soul that alone heals our eyes to see into the world and through the world to behold the sacred beauty that fills all things.
We’ve been inculcated into thinking and behaving more like machines than living persons and so have replaced the ancient virtues of stillness and quietude with modern industriousness, productivity, and amusement. And always moving, always working, always producing, we have become incapable of slowing down to think, or of stopping to gaze and wonder -— to be human. That’s no way to live.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. In fact, it shouldn’t be this way. But fostering the inner stillness and silence to live any other way is not an easy task. Not in this disordered Metropolis of a world.
And yet, my hope is that this place makes it a little bit easier for all of us. I intend for Catch Me If You Can to be a forested oasis of rest and stillness, a retreat far from the artificiality, superficiality, and noisome pestilence of a world that is working and amusing itself into oblivion. This is a gathering place for those of us who long to remember what it truly means to be human and recover that lost sense of our human-ness from the clutches of the Metropolis.
I do very much hope you’ll stay and join me.
Sincerely,
AugyRecommended Reads:
If you’re new around here, check out any of the pieces below. They’re all great places to begin your exploration of this Substack.
