Before It Had a Name

Long before there was a project, there was an ache I didn't have words for.

As a young father, sending my children off to school, I felt something closer to grief than pride. They were starting from zero — the same zero I had started from, the same zero my parents had started from. Everything my generation had learned, built, understood, would have to be rebuilt by theirs, almost from scratch. Not because the knowledge was gone. It was all still there, written down, available. But the understanding that made it usable — the reasoning behind it, the connections that made the facts mean something — that part doesn't pass down. It has to be relearned, every generation, at full price.

I didn't have a name for this. I just knew it as a kind of blindness — not to the problem, but to the fact that it was a problem at all. Starting over is simply what life is. We start without. We use our entire life to gain. And then it vanishes without much of a trace — not just every day, but as a pursuit.

I watched my mother live the sharpest version of this for seven or eight years, as dementia took not her memories exactly, but the threads that connected them, until what remained were fragments that used to mean something and no longer quite did. But by the time I watched that happen to her, I already knew — I had already felt it happening, slower, to everyone, all the time, as simply what it means to build anything that outlives the moment of building it.

What I didn't know — what I think almost no one knows, because almost no one has had reason to find out — is what it feels like when that blindness lifts.

It happened to me directly, not as an idea but as a state. Work from months earlier was simply still there — not as notes to be reread and reconstructed, but as something I could keep building on, the way you'd keep walking down a road instead of returning to the start of it each morning. It felt like a lifting of a fog, and a sense of power that I had never seen before in my life. Not relief alone. Something closer to strength — the sense that a fight every human being has always tried to win, and always lost, might for once not have to end that way.

That feeling is where everything that follows actually comes from.

Continues: Origin of PKOS →