The Past Is Not Behind You

The Past Is Not Behind You

Jul 20, 2026 | Big Questions

When someone says they are putting the past behind them, notice the architecture of that sentence. Behind is a location. The past is not a duration from which one escaped — it is a place the speaker has repositioned in relation to the body.

Spatial imagination organizes the unseeable by borrowing from the seeable. Time has no shape of its own, so we lend it our spatial interpretation.

What the Aymara Know

The Aymara of the Andes place the past in front of them, because the past is known and therefore visible. The future sits behind them, unseen. Their grammar is not poetic. It is precise.

What the Aymara understand, and what English quietly obscures, is that spatial orientation toward time is a cultural choice — not a natural law. The English speaker who says, “I’ve put it behind me,” is not describing reality. They are inheriting a metaphor and mistaking it for geography.

The consequences of that inheritance are not small. In the English-speaking imagination, healing becomes a relocation. To move on is to walk away from a coordinate. To carry the past is to fail at geography — to be someone who has not yet achieved the correct repositioning of a difficult place.

Recovery, in this telling, is fundamentally a spatial achievement.

Space Is Not Empty

Spaciology holds that space is not neutral and not empty. Space is historical. Every room carries the memory of who stood there before, what was decided there, what was left unresolved.

The physical and relational spaces we inhabit are not blank containers waiting to be filled with present experience. These spaces arrive already shaped — by culture, power, and the accumulated weight of everything that preceded their arrival.

The past, then, is not a location one left. It is part of the structure of the location in which we stand.

The organization that cannot seem to change its culture is not suffering from a failure of will. It is inhabiting a space whose walls were built by decisions made before anyone currently working there arrived. The person who cannot “move on” is not geographically incompetent — they are standing in a space the past helped construct.

No amount of repositioning oneself within that space changes the nature of the space itself.

Looking Directly at What Is

To put the past behind you requires changing the space itself — not your position within it, which is a more honest project than the metaphor suggests, and a harder one.

The Aymara have something to teach here, although perhaps not what we expect. Their grammar does not promise escape from the past. It promises visibility. The past sits in front of them because it is what can be seen, examined, known.

They do not relocate it. They look at it directly.

The past is not behind you, asking to be left — rather, it is woven into the space around and inside you…

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RPL

Your story is your strategy.

RPL helps individuals, organizations, and teams turn narrative into infrastructure—aligning purpose, leadership, fundraising, culture, and communication around one coherent story.

Whether you are a person navigating a life transition, a leader seeking clarity, or an organization preparing for what is next, we help you move from scattered to strategic.

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About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

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The Space Between Words

The Space Between Words

Jul 18, 2026 | The Method

Much of what we call listening is really just waiting—waiting for the other person to finish so we can say what we have already decided to say, waiting for the pause where we can insert our story, our solution, our perspective that we believe will fix, complete, or redirect what they are sharing with us.

Listening Is Not Waiting

This is not listening. This is a performance of listening while we rehearse our response, and the people we love can feel the difference even when they cannot name it.

Listening as love is not a communication technique you can master in three steps or optimize with better questions. It is a practice of presence that asks you to set down the need to be right, to be helpful, to be seen as wise or caring or competent, and instead to simply be there in the space between their words and your own internal noise.

The disconnection we feel in our closest relationships often lives in this space—not because we do not care, but because we have confused caring with solving, understanding with agreeing, and presence with productivity. We listen for the problem we can fix instead of the person who is speaking, and in doing so, we miss the invitation to connect that exists in every conversation where someone trusts us enough to be vulnerable.

What Listening Actually Requires

Real listening requires you to notice when you have stopped paying attention to them and started managing your own discomfort with their pain, their uncertainty, their need to be heard without being fixed. It requires you to resist the urge to fill silence with advice, to redirect their experience toward a lesson you think they need to learn, to make their story about you by sharing a similar experience before they have finished speaking.

It requires you to trust that your presence matters more than your insights, that being with someone in their confusion, grief, or joy is more valuable than steering them toward clarity, comfort, or the next logical step. This feels counterintuitive because we have been taught that love is action, that caring means doing something, that listening without responding leaves the other person unsupported.

The people in your life do not need you to solve them. They need you to see them, stay with them in the uncertainty, and hold space for what they are experiencing without collapsing it into something easier for you to manage.

The Practice Begins With Noticing

You can start this practice today by noticing when you are waiting instead of listening—when you are composing your response while they are still speaking, when you are scanning their words for the point where you can jump in, when you are measuring their experience against your own instead of receiving it as it is. Notice without judgment, because this habit is not a personal failing but a learned behavior that most of us have been performing for decades.

Then practice staying present for one more sentence than feels comfortable, for one more pause before you speak, for one more moment of being with them instead of fixing them. This is how listening becomes love—not through grand gestures or perfect execution, but through the small, repeated choice to prioritize their experience over your need to respond.

Spaciology Learning Commons

Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.

Membership is free and gives you access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Spaciology Field Guide.

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RPL

Your story is your strategy.

RPL helps individuals, organizations, and teams turn narrative into infrastructure—aligning purpose, leadership, fundraising, culture, and communication around one coherent story.

Whether you are a person navigating a life transition, a leader seeking clarity, or an organization preparing for what is next, we help you move from scattered to strategic.

Work With Us

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

Learn More

Stay in Touch

Contact Me
The Meaning of Words in an AI World

The Meaning of Words in an AI World

Jul 11, 2026 | Big Questions

All my life, I have grappled with words in an effort to not just communicate something but to understand the very nature of myself, the universe, space, and time. To a great extent, words represent the essence of my work today at RPL, where I use narrative strategy to help individuals and organizations develop a deeper understanding of themselves AND how to communicate with various stakeholders.

The Meaning of Words

In an AI-saturated world, however, words no longer must come from our bodies. We can prompt ‘agents’ who arguably produce prose better than most people can generate on their own. In turn, we can take these words, edit them slightly, and pass them off as our own without engaging in any of the proverbial soul-searching that had always been previously required to produce them.

Words, however, are not just letters on a screen or page; rather, they are evidence of a very fundamental experience, one in which we search the spaces within ourselves to discover (and communicate) meaning. Words have always meant something—and yet meaning is now often mediated by AI, which is subtly altering our ability to think deeply.

Feeling the Words

Thinking deeply, however, is not merely a cognitive exercise, but one connected to feeling. ‘I think, therefore I am,’ is a seemingly simple notion, except it implies a separation between mind and body.

This separation is not real, but a construct through which it has become possible to somehow disentangle what we ‘think’ from what we ‘feel,’ and yet these are words that do not reflect the experience of what it means to be a human BEING. I emphasize BEING because this word is both process and result, each occurring at the same time in no time at all.

And so what do I mean here? Precisely. Each word, comma, sentence, paragraph, period represents a choice, and it feels right. It is in the search for these words that I find myself—and I can only find you, the reader, if I know where I am and am not. Perhaps I only know myself if I know where you are and where you are not, and this is what I mean.

The Experience of Words

Until recently, the idea that humans could engage in an experience in which words could be created by an artificial intelligence would not have made sense. We, humans, created the words that guide our experience of reality, and yet that is no longer the case.

Universities and colleges certainly recognize the implications of this technology, as I am now bombarded with messaging that makes it clear I need certifications and degrees in AI, prompting, and how to meaningfully coordinate the activities of ‘agents.’

As far as I am concerned, the advent of AI represents a crossroads in which we are being asked to experience reality differently. We no longer need to experience an experience to produce words.

No, we can now prompt technology, while scrolling on our phones in video calls with humans who are no longer BEING encouraged to engage in deep reflection or dream-like reveries that may or may not produce tangible outcomes. And yet, is meaning only found in the outcome?

The Outcome

If life ends in death, is the meaning of life only found in our death? If so, what is the point of life? Is not life a process, an experience?

When we choose outcomes over process, scale over experience, efficiency over cups of coffee with friends and strangers alike, I fear we may lose the ability to find the words that help us express ourselves in a universe nearly 14 billion light-years across, expanding, dying, blinking, darkening, absorbing, and the countless other words I cannot remember and simply never knew.

Will I find these words I have never heard in myself or in a dictionary full of words in my native language? What of the thousands of other languages that exist that I will never know, hear, and understand?

The words on this digital page represent an active search for something—and I chose them. Perhaps, I may even love those words, because expressing them has brought tears to my eyes, and that is an outcome worth experiencing…

Spaciology Learning Commons

Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.

Membership is free and gives you access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Spaciology Field Guide.

Explore The Commons

RPL

Your story is your strategy.

RPL helps individuals, organizations, and teams turn narrative into infrastructure—aligning purpose, leadership, fundraising, culture, and communication around one coherent story.

Whether you are a person navigating a life transition, a leader seeking clarity, or an organization preparing for what is next, we help you move from scattered to strategic.

Work With Us

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

Learn More

Stay in Touch

Contact Me
The Weight of Words and Names

The Weight of Words and Names

Jul 3, 2026 | Spoken Poetry

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Read

What’s in a name
or word
matters
because they point
to what’s in space
and what existed,
resisted,
persisted
through heartache
and pain
and other things
we struggle to explain
outside the word
or name,
because
love is
not hate,
early is not late,
and tomorrow
never arrives
because the past
is present,
and so what is fate
except a word
pregnant
with the hopes and fears
of men and women
navigating space
in bodies
that leave but a faint trace,
and they had names
because words can be gifts
that inspire
and uplift,
hold and set free
relationships
with what was, is,
and what might yet be.

What’s in a name
or word
is sometimes all we have,
and we can’t exactly take them back
although we may try
after the harm,
after they cry
and ask why,
and we don’t know
how we chose that name
or word,
and we are left with sadness and regret,
for the people we love the most
are often the ones we forget,
and we don’t know how we let
it get to this place,
this space
that feels so hard
and unforgiving,
the word is called living,
but it does no justice
to how it feels
and the places
we visit along the way
and what it felt like on a Wednesday
in a year we can no longer name
or remember.
It might have been September,
but I just can’t remember
except I was there
and now I’m here
for a blink
of an eye,
I
am I,
and the word is me,
which says so very little
about how I love
and what it means to be.

What’s in a name
or word
is everything
and nothing at the same time
because
space
has no map,
and experience is all we can tap
when we strike forth,
east, west, south, or north,
narrating our lives
with words
that may or may not belong,
in story and in song,
the names we choose
and the words we use
are the things we carry
and what we lose,
and the word is choice,
the space before and after
we find our voice,
we can choose
our choice,
because
I am
what we are,
and the word
for this
does not exist.

Spaciology Learning Commons

Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.

Membership is free and gives you access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Spaciology Field Guide.

Explore The Commons

RPL

Your story is your strategy.

RPL helps individuals, organizations, and teams turn narrative into infrastructure—aligning purpose, leadership, fundraising, culture, and communication around one coherent story.

Whether you are a person navigating a life transition, a leader seeking clarity, or an organization preparing for what is next, we help you move from scattered to strategic.

Work With Us

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

Learn More

Stay in Touch

Contact Me

I am Just a Man

I am Just a Man

Jun 26, 2026 | Spoken Poetry

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Read

It’s a sad world
when all we can do
is point fingers and blame,
criticize and shame
the things we know only
by name,
because without heart,
we cannot start
to heal,
recognize the real,
or share the pain
of a mother who lost a child or a boy who lost his way.
What can I say?
What can I do
for someone who is broken
and continues to break,
make choices
that hurt
themselves
and others
in a world full of pain,
loss,
and death,
each moment
a breath
of time
we can’t breathe back
or give as a gift
to uplift
the spirit
or soul
from
the gravity
and depth
of experiences
that flood
the heart
with tears
and fears
and hopes of what
might have been,
and the memories,
so dear,
clear,
so far,
the feelings
so near,
here
I am,
I say
on a Thursday
in a dark place,
unable
to see myself
in his face,
the joy erased,
the grief,
the sadness,
the words I write,
a respite,
a release
I take into the night,
a single instance
of a primordial plight,
man against man
against himself,
running out of time,
chasing space
and that thing
he sees beyond
the here
and now,
flashing
green,
then red,
and how
he reaches
for the neon stars
outside bars
when the day
is clearly gone,
yet he hangs on
and on
till dawn
when crescent moons
appear
and fear
returns
as anger
and right and wrong,
each a refrain
in the same song,
sung by men
afraid to feel
so they invent
the real
and the true,
leaving no space
for me and you,
the boy who was,
the dad who is,
and the mom
with a grief
neither can understand,
because after all,
I am just a man

Spaciology Learning Commons

Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.

Membership is free and gives you access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Spaciology Field Guide.

Explore The Commons

RPL

Your story is your strategy.

RPL helps individuals, organizations, and teams turn narrative into infrastructure—aligning purpose, leadership, fundraising, culture, and communication around one coherent story.

Whether you are a person navigating a life transition, a leader seeking clarity, or an organization preparing for what is next, we help you move from scattered to strategic.

Work With Us

About Spaciology

Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.

  • Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
  • Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
  • Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.

Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.

Learn More

Stay in Touch

Contact Me