Thomas Ibarra

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

The Hyperactivity in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is NOT about being physically hyperactive, it's about having a "hyperactive central nervous system" because it's a form of inheritable dysautonomia. The problem with disautonomia, especially the ADHD kind, is that it makes boredom flag to your nervous system as a THREAT, triggering hyperactive and maladaptive central nervous system processes like fight or flight.

But dysautonomia kills you that way. Literally, part of the reason our average life spand increase on stimulents is that it helps manage risk-taking impulsivity that can get us killed by accident, but the other part is that stimulents can regulate a hyperactive CNS such that it is functionally (while impacted by the stimulent) NOT dysregulated anymore. And PHYSIOLOGICALLY that is essential because the physical outcomes of dysautonomia can reduce your life span by YEARS if not decades through self-perpetuating hypervigelence, endocrine disruption, and adrenal fatigue.

So when the ADHD brain goes stimulation-seeking and a doctor tells you to practice mindfulness, it feels like being told "hey go stand in a functioning boiler until you can stop thinking" rather than WHAT IT IS which is the process of re-teaching your body what is and isn't safe.

Standing outside making mindful, non-interpretive/moralized observation of the world helps your brain and body re-acclimate to the idea that absence of that frantic "busy" feeling isn't a threat or a risk to your safety, and gradually reduces the level of distress that just hanging out somewhere triggers for you.

Learning WHY this stuff was being suggested and understanding what it was actually supposed to do went a long way towards changing my relationship with my ADHD. I am FAR more functional now, far less prone to shame spirals and rejection sensitivity, hell, I can **sit physically still for near on an hour at a time** now without feeling like I'm going to crawl out of my skin.

So yeah. Go outside. Let the world narrow around you and take deep breaths until it stops feeling claustrophobic or like you need to climb walls. Learn how to let little sensations become big ones like the way the heat of the sun on your skin starts as a gentle warming and be omes a unique collection of sensory moments depending on how it lands on you. Listen for sounds under sounds and let them fade in and out as you move your focus from one sound to the next. Enjoy. Move on. Rinse and repeat.

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

You literally have to collect rare stones from remote locations, put them into specific formations to work. All of this gets written down in symbols which don't make sense to the uninformed. It gets powered by energy which can not be seen in most cases.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

This is the axe

My knuckle rests exactly in the triangular plane just above the orange intrusion, and my thumb on the plane with the white patches.

How many hands held it just like that? How many generations was this passed down? Were you lost? or did you fall into disuse when technology improved?

It has now felt 3 generations of human species hands, it's smooth but still sharp except where the very tip has been broken off, but it shows that this axe was loved and taken care of. And it is still being taken care of! It was used to teach archaic children to build, to carve meat, to break bones, and now it is being used to teach us about all those people who came before us and put their hands right where we put ours.

Turn ON the sound

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."