I’m publishing this much later than intended because, since last time, I’ve been back in the UK seeing family, and no sooner did we return to Taiwan when we moved house, down to the lovely city of Pingtung. What with arranging the move, scouring the second-hand furniture shops, and settling in, it’s taken longer than usual to get this newsletter out.

I’ll write more about Pingtung next time, but for now, let’s get started on these thoughts about why divination is worthwhile, even if you don’t believe in it, and how it can help you with choosing well, even if it doesn’t help you make better choices…

Happy reading, and—as ever—if you want to say hello, just drop me an email!

In the Mazu Temple…

The Mazu temple in Anping is one of the busiest in Taiwan’s southern city of Tainan. Particularly at weekends, the atmosphere is—as they say in Taiwanese Hokkien—lāu-jia̍t, or ‘hot and noisy.’ People bustle round the space of the temple, the air heavy with the fragrance of incense. Outside there are firecrackers, the raucous sound of music, street performers. And throughout the day and long into the evening, people come in and out to consult the goddess Mazu (or, in Taiwanese, Má-chó͘) about the big choices they face in their lives. They seek answers by throwing poe, or moon-blocks: red bamboo divination blocks, shaped like bananas cut in half lengthwise. Depending on how the poe fall, the answer is either that the goddess approves your question, or disapproves, or—more ambiguously—that she laughs.

You don’t need to spend long in Taiwan to realise that divination is everywhere. It is on the corner of the pedestrian street, where queues of students wait to consult a palmist whose advice has gone viral for its efficacy. It is on the TV, as well-dressed astrologers or Yijing (I Ching) diviners dish out help to people calling in from across the island. It is there in the hand-crafted Tarot cards sold in the craft markets that pop up in cities across the island nation every weekend.

In this very public enthusiasm for divination, Taiwanese culture may seem an outlier. But, in one form or another, divination is close to a human universal. As the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero claimed, there is no ‘people so civilised and educated, or so savage,’ as to fail to recognise the value of divination.1 Even today, this is still the case. Despite protests that divination is the sign of a culture turning its back on reason and Enlightenment values, divination still not only persists, but flourishes—and not only in Taiwan. Whether in Taipei or London, in almost every bookstore you can find a section dedicated to tarot, astrology or to the Yijing. Divination pervades popular culture. Under lockdown, divination has proliferated, from East Asia to the USA, and from the Middle East to South America. And since the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, this new cultural wave of interest in divination has shown no sign of letting up. Divination often flourishes in marginalised communities for whom the stakes are so much higher, for whom uncertainty is a fact of life. Tarot is booming among queer Indian communities. But divination is also found closer to the centres of power as well: in politics, and in the business world, as global companies consult Feng Shui geomancers, and as water companies in the UK resort to water diviners to find burst pipes.

But why does divination persist? In a previous piece, I wrote about divination as a way of making hard choices, as a practice of ingenuity and tenacity that may genuinely help us choose when our choices are not easy ones. Here, I want to go further, and suggest that it may be fruitful to think of divination as a kind of gamification of hard choices, one that helps not with making better choices, but with (and this is not the same thing) better choosing.

Asking the Gods

In Taiwan, perhaps the most popular form of divination is poa̍h-poe divination, or divination by poe divination block. In every temple, you can find sets of poe on the shrine for the public to use. You can also buy them on Shopee, Taiwan’s foremost online shopping platform, to use at home, which is what I did. Here are my poe:

To use the poe, first you introduce yourself to the god, giving your full name and address, as well as your date of birth, zodiac sign, and information about your family and your ancestors. I’ve been told that the gods—like many folks in Taiwan, and not without justification—are often perplexed by foreigners, so if you are not Taiwanese, you may have to go to greater pains to explain who you are and what your business is. As well as introducing yourself properly, you should ideally make some offerings of incense, snacks, fruit and sweet things. The gods are notorious for having sweet tooths. After this, you put your question to the god, and throw the blocks to see if the god assents to the question you are asking.

How the blocks fall indicates the god’s response. One block flat side down and one block flat side up (siūⁿ-poe 聖筶) indicates that the god is granting their assent. Both blocks flat side down (im-poe 陰筶) means the god is refusing to answer. And if both blocks fall curved side down, it means the god is laughing at you (chhiò-poe 笑筶). Usually, if you are doing things properly, three siūⁿ-poe judgements are required before your question is approved (the chance of approval, therefore, is roughly one in eight). However, some people when pressed for time just ask once, and go with that, hoping that the gods will understand that they have busy lives (the gods may protest that they too have busy lives, and look upon you less kindly: but sometimes compromises have to be made).

Next, you draw a numbered bamboo stick called a chhiam 籤 at random from a container by the altar, place the chhiam on the altar, and ask three times whether the stick is the right one. If it is not, you draw another, and the whole procedure repeats. Eventually, you have a chhiam the god is happy with.

Finally, to get your judgement, you go to a nearby cabinet, check the number written on the chhiam, and open a little drawer marked with the corresponding number. You take out a divinatory verse as an answer, written in Chinese characters in classical style.

This slip requires considerable amounts of interpretation: some busy temples will have an official, on hand to help you out and to make sense of the divination judgement you have received. For example, in the Anping Kaitai Mazu temple, there’s a small office where a friendly man in late middle-age—neatly dressed as if he has come to work in the tax office or some other bureaucratic organ of government—will invite you to sit down, and talk you through your question. In other temples, there may be a handy photocopied guide hanging nearby that you can consult.

By way of example, here is a divination I received from the Anping Kaitai Mazu temple (安平開台天后宮). The top gives the name of the temple, while beneath is the number of the chhiam (in this case 47), and the verse. At the bottom, there are more specific judgements that reflect various matters, such as fame and success, sickness, official positions, agriculture, marriage and so on.

The obvious question here is why you would bother with all this. It takes up a lot of time. The gods are not always helpful. You can spend a lot of time getting the right question, and then when you receive your answer, it may be obscure and difficult to make sense of. Why would you take the trouble of dedicating a significant part of your day to engaging in such a long-winded and complicated procedure?

The answer is that, for many people, divination is useful. It helps with the difficult human business of choosing when our choices are hard. And this is why in Taiwan, for many people, big life decisions don’t just involve consulting friends and family-members, or deep reflection, but also consulting the gods (mn̄g-sîn 問神 in Taiwanese) to see what light they can throw on the question.

Gamified Decision-making

Since moving to Taiwan, when faced with hard choices of my own, I’ve also sometimes found myself heading to the temple to mn̄g-sîn, to check in with the gods, and to see what light they can throw on the matter at hand. And I, too, have found this a surprisingly useful practice. That is not to say I believe in the gods. I don’t. But acting as if I do seems a curiously helpful way of navigating some of life’s trickier choices.

If divination does not necessarily imply belief, this is because it can be understood as analogous, in certain important respects, to a game. This is an idea that I take, in part, from the anthropologist Stéphanie Homola, who argues that in divination, belief is beside the point. For Homola, what is crucial to playing a game well is not belief, but instead, a commitment, or willingness to accept the game’s rules of engagement. Or, if belief is at stake, the only thing one needs to believe is that here is a game worth playing. Here, I also think of my friend the Taiwanese writer Naomi Sím,2 who told me recently that consulting the gods by means of divination is a way of “gamifying” her life. It is a way of opening up creative and strategic possibilities, in the face of hard choices.

Homola writes as follows:

The game-like structure of divinatory procedures explains why many practicing persons feel evident discomfort when questioned as to whether they truly “believe.” This unease stems from an essential component of play, namely that adherence to its performative aspect should be considered in terms of “entering the game” and not of belief (Hamayon 2016, 192–99). According to Hamayon, the performative nature of play requires a personal commitment from the player, but one that is customary rather than spontaneous. In the case of divinatory practices, I would rather qualify such commitment as “procedural.” A client may approach a consultation with skepticism, but their commitment is no less absolute. It is the act of performing the technical procedure—either directly when throwing divination blocks or indirectly through a diviner—that triggers the commitment: one is either in the game or out, there is no middle ground.3

This idea that divination is a kind of play is one that also finds sanction in many traditions. Think, for example, of the deep connection between dicing, games and divination (when playing board games, do you ever blow on the dice to help influence your throw, as if your breath might summon a helpful god, or a gust of good luck?). Or think of the way that Tarot has its origins in a Milanese courtly parlour game. And in the Chinese tradition, the Xici Zhuan (繫辭傳), or the Commentary on the Appended Phrases of the Yijing (I Ching 易經), makes this connection clear, when it argues that divination is a way of playing with prognostications.

Thus, the one skilled in the arts of living abides and contemplates [the Yijing’s] images, and plays with its explanations; they act and contemplate [the Yijing’s] changes, and play with its prognostications.4

To play is not to commit oneself to believing, but to act on the basis that the game is worth playing, that entering into the game is a reasonable way to spend one’s time. As philosopher Ian Bogost writes in his book Play Anything, ‘That’s what it means to play. To take something—anything—on its own terms, to treat it as if its existence were reasonable.’5

This subjunctive as if is everywhere in play. We play on the chessboard as if we are commanding great armies at war. Children play shop—endlessly trying to persuade their parents to come and buy nonexistent objects—as if they had real goods to sell, as if they themselves were really shopkeepers.6 We play the board game Monopoly as if we are rapacious capitalists buying up the entirety of the city for our own personal gain, even if we are not. In this way, play takes place in this under the sway of this subjunctive as if.

What this means is that believing in Má-chó͘ (or in any of the other gods) is in no way a requisite for going to the temple to mn̄g-sîn. All you need to believe is that practising poa̍h-poe may be fruitful, efficacious, or otherwise worthwhile.

Seeing divination as a form of play allows us to throw some light on some other aspects of this almost universal human practice. Bogost argues that what marks out play from non-play is the fact that play takes place somewhere: on a board, or on a playground, a place where play happens within a certain prescribed structure.

Playgrounds, Bogost says, have two properties: boundaries or constraints, and contents. To enter a playground entails a constraint upon our freedom. In playing, we are not free to do anything we like, but we have to largely accept the constraints and boundaries that are a part of this playground. Why would we accept this limitation on our freedom? Bogost writes that ‘Play is a way of operating a constrained system in a gratifying way.’7 We play because these constraints ultimately give rise to abundance. Constraints make things more interesting.

In the context of Taiwanese divination, the temple is the playground. It is a bounded, constrained space. The constraints this playground offers are partly physical, they are partly set by the rules of the game of divination, and they are also, in part, established by the particular set of histories of that particular temple, the individual forms of practice that have grown up there. No two temples are quite the same, and the playground of divination in Taiwan is never a well manicured lawn, but is instead an uneven, lumpy territory. But this adds to the possibilities, and to the fun: as one gets to know the playing field (the particular temple) better, one can find more and more possibilities for forms of gratifying play—ways of giving rise to new forms of abundance.

As well as having boundaries or constraints, Bogost writes, playgrounds have contents, objects we manipulate or with which we play. These may be playing cards, dice, cricket bats, juggling balls, or—again in the context of Taiwanese temples—the poe, the chhiam, the incense, snacks and fruit that you offer. To play requires that we take these contents seriously. For example, if we were to play tennis with somebody who high-mindedly proclaimed there was no purpose in hitting a luridly fluorescent yellow-green ball back and forth over a piece of netting (from one point of view, not an unreasonable claim), this would close off the possibilities of gratification and abundance that tennis might afford us. Similarly, if we were to engage in divination without taking the playground and its constraints seriously, we would close ourselves off to the possibilities of gratification and abundance afforded by divination. Seeing the manipulation of the poe and the chhiam as foolhardy and ridiculous, that is to say, it to risk missing out on all kinds of fun. Both tennis and divination can certainly make the world more interesting, but only to the extent that as players, we take what we are doing seriously.

However, play is not just about manipulating things. As the philosopher Sarah Mattice writes in her book Metaphor and Metaphilosophy: Philosophy as Combat, Play, and Aesthetic Experience, play also involves playmates. Play is not just personal; it is interpersonal. Mattice writes that, ‘Play has a built-in place of priority for playmates—“I play” is already “I play with others.”’8 When playing tennis, our potential playmates include not only our opponents, but also the umpire, the spectators who have a stake in the game, our sponsors (if we are playing at a certain level), the gods to whom we utter prayers of thanks and curses, depending on how well the play is going, and many others.

What makes a playmate a playmate is that they are not just acted upon, but they also act on us in turn (the umpire’s decisions affect us, so do the cries and chants of the crowd). Play is mutual affectation, mutual transformation. Our playmates have a stake in the game, just as we do. In the context of temple divination, our potential playmates may include other temple-goers, attendants, interpreters, friends with whom take an afternoon off to mn̄g-sîn.

However, our playmates may also include other, more curious kinds of agents: the gods with whom we engage in conversation (or ‘as if’ conversation), even inanimate objects. And the reason for this is that, precisely because of the subjunctive as if nature of play, all contents are potential playmates, and the boundary between content and playmate is therefore porous. Maybe, as you practise divination, a sparrow lands on the altar just so, and as you ask yourself ‘what does this mean?’ In this moment, the bird becomes an active playmate in the game you are playing. Or maybe (as is commonly reported), as you throw the divination blocks, in the flickering half-light, you sense the smile on the face of the statue of the goddess Mazu change slightly.

Children know this porosity well. On entering the playground, a cuddly toy, a stick, a stone, a chair, a god…. in fact, anything can become a friend, an adversary, an ally, a thing with its own agency, in short—a playmate. What this also means is that inherent to play is a kind of animism, or at least the possibility of an animism. To one who is alive to the game, anything is potentially an agent, or can move from being simply content to being a more active playmate. Sticks can become friends. Statues of the gods—mere blocks of wood—can smile or speak.9

From Better Choices to Better Choosing

So, what are people in Taiwan doing when they go to the temple to poa̍h-poe? What am I doing when I do the same? Although people may have all kinds of beliefs about what they are doing and why, belief isn’t really the point of divination. The point is playing the game with the necessary commitment, treating it as if it were a reasonable thing to do. One enters into the playground that is the temple, and thereby finds that there open up certain possibilities for thought, action and play, precisely because this playground is constrained. One engages with the contents of the space, and with the playmates one fines (the other agents, or ‘as if’ agents, at work), to see what may in this whole process be fruitful, or productive, or—at the very least—interesting.

But, you may ask, how does behaviour—weird and irrational though it may seem—help us make better choices? And here is the interesting thing: if divination really comes into its own when we are faced by hard choices, then it doesn’t help us make better choices. Why not? Because hard choices, by definition, are choices where neither choice is necessarily better (or worse) than the other. However we approach the choice, the problem remains: there is no obviously better (or worse) choice.

If there were an obviously better or worse choice, things would be easy. We could resort to other less peculiar forms of reflection and practice to resolve things. For most of our everyday practical choices, often the best choice is so obviously apparent, we don’t agonise too much. Even when it comes to our moral choices, for a larger proportion of these, we already know what the best thing to do. If we hesitate, it’s more often than not because we find the best thing to do inconvenient—we’d rather not make the more moral choice, or we’d rather find a way of getting ourselves off the hook. It’s not, of course, that there aren’t great ethical dilemmas in our lives. It is just that most of our everyday ethical choices are not of this order, and dilemmas are relatively few. The problem, more often than not, isn’t knowing what the best thing to do is, it’s the follow-through. I think this is why, incidentally, Confucius claims, ‘Is goodness remote? I wish for goodness, and it is there!’10 Ethics, in the sense of knowing what to do, is really not that hard—at least most of the time.

In situations such as these, divination is not particularly useful. It is when faced by genuinely hard choices that divination comes into its own. And when we understand divination as play, we can see more clearly how it might be useful: not as a way of making our choices better (we can’t do that, precisely because the choices are hard, and ‘making our choices better’ makes no sense in this context), but as a way of making our choosing better.

In other words, divination can help us navigate hard choices, whatever we choose, in a way that is more satisfying, more interesting, more fun, more gratifying, more abundant. It allows us to inhabit our choosing more fully, to understand at last what it might mean to choose, and to give depth, shape and richness to our choosing, even when there is no best choice. And it allows us to be more alive to the adventure of a life we are constantly refashioning, without ever fully knowing what the future we are in the process of making will be.

A week ago, I flew back from Taiwan to the UK, where I’ve been seeing family and taking a short break over Christmas and New Year. I’m heading back to Taiwan next month, ready for a move down to the southern city of Pingtung (屏東). Just before leaving, we signed a lease on our new home, bang in the centre of town and two minutes’ walk away from the morning vegetable market. It will be fun to be in a new place, making new connections.

But between the festivities here, I thought I’d squeeze in time to send a relatively short newsletter, to share some highlights from the past year.

My Favourite Project

It’s been a year of so many fun projects, it is difficult to choose a favourite. Early in the year, I was commissioned to write new, original fiction for an international research project on the impact of climate fiction from the University of Wrocław. I’ll post more about this in a future newsletter, but the stories I wrote went out to an audience of over 20,000 readers scattered across the world, to explore which is more effective in changing our attitudes to the future: stories of imagined dystopias, or stories of imagined utopias.

In January, I was with Hannah Stevens on a joint residency at the Taiwan Literature Base. We got a lot of writing done, and cooked up some new projects, both individually and together. Meanwhile, we were kept busy with our free public philosophy salon at the Wansha Performing Arts Centre in Tainan. Our topics this year ranged from the philosophy of ghosts, to the limits of philosophy.

I’ve also been translating, including comics from Mandarin, exhibition guides, and a new book about independent bookshops in Taiwan. And, of course, I’ve been busy working with students from Burma and beyond, on the faculty of Parami University.

But the thing that has probably been the most fun of all is the project I’ve been working on with Wind&Bones Books, bringing together the minoritised languages of Taiwan and Scotland, and translating between Gaelic and Taiwanese / Tâi-gí / 台語. Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic was published in June, with new, original fiction translated between Gaelic and Taiwanese, via English and Mandarin. It was a privilege to work with writers Kiú-kiong, Naomi Sím, Elissa Hunter-Dorans and Lisa MacDonald, alongside translator Shengchi Hsu.

The book was featured in a special issue of Taiwan Insight at the University of Nottingham, has been showcased at events in both Taiwan and Scotland, and has led to so many new and interesting connections. Oh, and the stories are brilliant as well. You can listen to them all on the companion website, in all four languages.

Buy a copy here

My Favourite Books

I always like to settle into big, fat philosophy books in the semester breaks, and give my mind the chance to grapple with something stretching, something that might open up new possibilities for how to think. So I’ve been spending the Christmas holidays reading Spinoza’s Ethics, which has been alternately illuminating and baffling. It’s one of those books that will repay repeated re-reading, and it will need to settle for a good while before I know what to do with it. I’d been intending to read Spinoza for a long time, and it’s good to have finally found the time.

In other books, I’ve particularly enjoyed Hunter School by Taiwanese indigenous writer Sakinu Ahronglong—a book that is both funny and wise, published in an exquisite edition by the brilliant Honford Star.

I’ve also been enjoying Return to the Motherland / 巴奈回家, by indigenous Taiwanese folk singer and activist Panai (who I’ve been lucky enough to see in two different, and equally exquisite, concerts). The book is only in Mandarin, but for those who can read the language, it has a lot to say about indigenous land rights in Taiwan, and the long struggle of Taiwan’s indigenous people for recognition and justice. Panai is a generally remarkable human being, and if you get a chance to see her perform live, you should. She’s funny, fierce and in every way a masterful performer.

More recently, like everyone else, I’ve been reading Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue. It is a fearsomely clever book, one that throws fascinating light on Taiwan’s colonial history. And although I didn’t love it as much as I’d hoped, it’s absolutely worth reading, and is a must for fans of Taiwanese literature, history and food.

My Favourite Music

I’ve shared this before, but really, I can’t recommend ‎Li-Sin Zeng 曾立馨 / Hug Muzik more highly. Based in Taiwan’s lovely city of Changhua (the kind of underdog city that I always like), genre-crossing Li-Sin Zeng mixes bossa, beiguan traditional Taiwanese music, elements of punk, and more, in intoxicatingly joyful bursts of sound. I went to Changhua to see the band play live at a Taiwanese language music festival, and it was the best gig of the year. Here they are performing Thiaⁿ-kóng 聽講 (“I’ve Heard it Said”), a tribute to the singer’s grandfather.

If you want to listen to the whole album, which came out a couple of years ago, you can find it on Apple Music and elsewhere.

My Favourite TV Show

Keeping on with the Taiwanese language theme, I’ve been binge-watching Taiwan’s PTS series Bô-sū chē bá-suh 無事坐巴士, or “If You’ve Got Nothing to Do, Catch the Bus”, a show in which the various hosts catch buses to obscure corners of Taiwan, to chat with boisterous aunties, hearty chicken farmers, grizzled artisans, artsy coffee-shop owners—in fact, to whomsoever they run into. It’s ridiculously wholesome, lots of fun, and great for learning spoken Taiwanese.

In Taiwan, you can watch whole episodes on the PTS public television website. If you are outside Taiwan, you can watch clips from the series on YouTube. The theme tune, incidentally, is by the band Tudi Voice (or 農村武裝青年: the name literally translates as “Armed Youth of the Countryside”). I’ve seen the band a couple of times this year, and they’re great performers. The song is very catchy too. You can listen here.

What’s Coming Up?

In the coming year, I’ve got a long list of fun things to write about here on Wayward Things. Next up—once 2026 is in full-swing—I’m going to be publishing the second post in my two-part series on divination and the art of choosing well. I’ve also got something brewing about Spinoza and Confucius, and philosophy’s fixation with death.

I have three books in the works, at various stages of proposal and or writing, and some more publishing projects in the works. There’s also a potential project on the cards with friends from the Tanimbar Islands of Indonesia, drawing together traditional philosophy, storytelling and weaving. I was back in Tanimbar three decades ago, so it has been incredibly exciting to reconnect.

Wishing everyone a happy new year! See you all in 2026.

All the best,

Will

A Busy Weekend in the Temple

If you go to any reasonable-sized Taiwanese temple at the weekend, you will see crowds of people kneeling before the shrines of the gods, asking for advice on the most pressing problems in their lives. There, in the incense-steeped half-light of the temple—among the gold leaf, the elaborate carvings, and the paintings—temple visitors throw small, red-coloured, croissant-shaped blocks of wood called poe. They ask questions about the big choices they face: whom to marry, which job to choose, whether to move overseas, or what to do with their troublesome relatives. The wooden blocks clatter to the ground, and on the basis of how the blocks fall, the gods provide answers to life’s most burning questions.

In Taiwanese, this asking the advice of the gods, is called mn̄g-sîn 問神 (Mandarin wènshén), and it is an accepted part of Taiwanese life. When faced by hard decisions, the temple is often the first port of call. And when I come up against some particularly tricky life choice, Taiwanese friends will often be ready to offer advice on which god I should seek guidance from, and how.

The kinds of choices the gods are believed to be particularly useful in helping us resolve are those choices that are not, on the surface, obvious (why bother the gods with something the answer to which is obvious?), and that are, at the same time, existentially charged, or that have high stakes (why bother going to the trouble of divination if the stakes are low?).

In this piece, and in the one that follows, I want to ask why, for many in Taiwan, divination is such a compelling response to these kinds of hard but existentially significant choices. But more than this, I also want to argue that divination may persist, in Taiwan and elsewhere because—however irrational and strange it may seem on the surface—it can contribute a lot to the art of choosing well.

The Difficulty of Choosing

Here, I’m going to look at what it means to face existentially significant hard choices, while a forthcoming piece, I’ll spend more time talking about divination itself. I take the idea of hard choices from the philosopher Ruth Chang (the link goes to her paper on the topic, and if you are interested, you can also watch her very entertaining Ted Talk). Hard choices, for Chang, are choices that have the following three characteristics.

1. one alternative is better in some relevant respects

2. the other alternative is better in other relevant respects, and yet

3. neither seems to be at least as good as the other overall—that is, in all relevant respects.1

Hard choices might include, for example, big existential choices like, ‘Do I become a hermit, or do I train as a pastry chef?’ Or they might include smaller, but equally hard choices, such as whether to go for the starter or the dessert.2 In either case, the choices are hard because each option seems better than the other in some relevant respects, and yet neither seems to be at least as good as the other in all relevant respects.

For Chang, smaller hard choices are illuminating in that they show us how we might navigate bigger hard choices. And her argument here is both fun and interesting. But my main interest here is in those hard choices that are big and existentially consequential: choices like ‘hermit or pastry chef?’, rather than choices like ‘starter or dessert?’ How do we navigate choices like this?

Maybe we start by imagining ourselves as mountain-dwelling hermits, sitting in the deep silence of solitude. The picture is undeniably attractive. But then we go on to imagine ourselves as pastry chefs, cooking up a storm in a flour-strewn kitchen, only to find that this picture is equally attractive. So we reflect some more. And the more we reflect, the more it becomes clear to us that being a hermit will be better in some respects, and being a pastry chef will be better in others, and the more it also becomes clear that neither is at least as good as the other overall.

So how do we decide? How do we make up our minds when both options seem to be on a par?

For Chang, the interesting thing about hard choices is that no amount of thinking can get us there. We can engage in deep thought, we can ask our friends, we can do our due diligence, we can engage in moral reflection, we can write endless ‘pros and cons’ lists, we can think about things from every which way. But still, we end up without having resolved anything. The central issue remains: here are two very different choices, leading to two very different forms of life, and, as far as we are concerned, neither one is obviously better or worse than the other.

Making Up Our Minds, Making Up Our Lives

Making up our minds when faced by hard choices may seem to be burdensome and difficult. However, Chang reminds us that hard choices are also pretty great. If, when faced by a hard choice, we cannot reason our way to an obvious outcome, this implies our life is not entirely bound by brute facts. If we find that all of our reasoning has run its course until there are no more reasons left, and if we still can’t decide, then we can get to do something pretty fun: we can get to create new reasons of our own. As Chang puts it, when you are faced with hard choices, you can ‘reflect on what you can put your agency behind, on what you can be for, and through hard choices, become that person.’3 In this way, hard choices make us what and who we are.

This account of hard choices is both persuasive and attractive. But I think it misses out on a couple of important things. The first thing is that, as Chang rightly notes, existentially significant hard choices are about becoming something or becoming a particular kind of person. But this means that hard choices are not just about making up our minds, but they are about making up our lives. This becoming is not something that can be accomplished in a single moment of choosing. Instead, it involves a commitment to a trajectory that will unfold far into the future. We launch ourselves onto this trajectory, and we plot a new path through the world—one that involves a myriad of further choices, diversions, side-quests, dead ends, setbacks, and moments of serendipity. In this process, what is crucial is not just the moment of initial choice, but how we hold to the choice we have made, as we go on cobbling together our new, emerging identity, our new idea of ‘what we can be for.’ Choice is not just a one-time thing. Instead, it involves the tenacity that keeps us on course, through all the vicissitudes of life.

The second thing this account misses is that our agency in choosing cannot be meaningfully reducible to rational agency. Chang’s argument about rational agency is pretty neat. She says that a good account of rational agency is one where we are not just ‘recognizing reasons and then responding to them appropriately’, but where we are also creating reasons. If we do not have the power to create or own reasons, after all, where is the agency? But while this argument does add something to the idea of rational agency, I’m not convinced that rational agency should be the gold-standard for an agency worth having. After all, when I look back over the past half century, and think of my own agency as I have steered an erratic course through the world—as when I think of the agency of people around me—I’m not sure I would characterise this agency as wholly rational. Nor would it have been obviously enhanced (or not all the time) by being more rational. So here, I want to propose that, when thinking about the hard but existentially significant choices we make, and the ways in which we tenaciously seek to bring them to fruition, what matters more than rationality is ingenuity. Our use of reason is, no doubt, a part of what makes us ingenious. But ‘ingenuity’ has a broader scope, and in this way, better reflects the spread of skills we need to realise those hard choices.

Imagine, for example, that I have two friends, May and Maisie. May is very rational, but she is unfortunately not very ingenious. Maisie, on the other hand, is very ingenious, even though she is not always rational. If they were both to embark upon the journey of becoming a hermit or a pastry chef, my money would be on Maisie as the one who would be most likely to attain to her eventual goal. Her ingenuity may involve the judicious deployment of reason when reason is called for, but reason is only one of the things in Maisie’s bag of ingenious tricks. May, on the other hand, has less to work with because in her bag there is only one thing: reason.

Navigating Hard Choices, with Tenacity and Ingenuity

So what I want to argue here is that when faced by hard choices, instead of momentary choosing, we should think more about tenacity. And instead of reason, we should think of ingenuity. And this is important for how we think about divination, because I’m going to go on to make the case that divination is a kind of tenacious practice of ingenuity—one that seriously augments our capacity to satisfyingly make hard choices.

Here, I am taking the idea of tenacity from the philosopher François Jullien. In his book From Being to Living: A Euro-Chinese lexicon of thought, Jullien contrasts Western and Chinese philosophical notions of choice. He argues that while Western traditions focus on the Will and the moment of choosing, in Chinese traditions it is ‘less a question of the heroic capacity of a moment than of that of persevering over time, without stopping or giving up, without allowing oneself to lose heart, this is a matter of what I would call—in the most literal sense—“tenacity”.’4

The Chinese term Jullien translates as ‘tenacity’ is 持 (pronounced chí in contemporary Mandarin), literally meaning ‘to grasp’ or ‘to hold.’ In bringing our existentially significant hard choices to fruition, we don’t just make our choice and find that—lo!—this choice is realised. Instead, we form and take hold of an intention, then we hold firm to this intention through all the slippery, changing vicissitudes of life, and step by step, we make real our intention. Whether it takes a month, a year, or a decade, what gets us there, what makes the choice something that is effectual and meaningful, is tenacity. As the Confucian philosopher Mencius (孟子) writes, ‘It is intention that is the utmost, and the spirit is secondary. And so it is said: hold firm to your intention, and do no violence to the spirit’ (夫志至焉，氣次焉。故曰：「持其志，無暴氣」).5

What this idea of tenacity does is externalise our existentially significant hard choices. Our hard choices are no longer things that are just happening in the black box of our minds. Instead, they are things that are happening—and go on happening—out there in the world. That is to say, for choosing to be effective, it must involve ongoing practices of tenacity, as we navigate through this uncertain world to bring our choices more into being.

This tenacious, ongoing process is also why ingenuity trumps rationality. Because for one who is tenaciously pursuing some end, reason, reasoning, and rationality are only some of the things we might have in our bag of ingenious tricks. There may be other things too, only obliquely related to reason, or even quite unrelated, that will help us get where we are going. Think about the bodily disciplines of becoming a pastry chef (you need strong arms) or becoming a hermit (you need to learn to endure the morning chill on the mountainside). Think about the cultivation of friendships, the webs of social connections and care, that can help bring our intentions to fruition. Think about the forms of play, or unreason, or curiosity, or invention, or artfulness we might need to cultivate if we are to become the person we intend to become. All of this is ingenuity, and although none of it is obviously unreasonable, not all of it is reducible to reason.

Ingenuity, perhaps, feels like a more ambivalent value than reason. It’s quite easy to say that reason is always a good thing. But this is less the case with ingenuity. So it is not surprising, perhaps, that in the Chinese philosophical tradition, the equivalent term—qiǎo (巧)—is far from being considered a wholly positive value. Confucius, for example, disapproves of those who are 巧言 (qiǎoyán), those who are ingeniously or glibly skilful with their words. Zhuangzi, too, is both admiring and suspicious of the ingenious and the skilful. Yet, at the same time, Mencius tells us that ‘wisdom may be compared to ingenuity’ (智，譬則巧也).6 That’s not to say that ingenuity is always wise, or that the two things are the same. But it is to say that wisdom can be compared to—and has some of the characteristics of—ingenuity.

But this idea of ingenuity is also useful because it helps us answer a question that Chang doesn’t answer (or not that I can see). And the question is this: if hard choices are those choices where reasons run out, and where we get to make up our own reasons, how do we do this? How are these new reasons born? Out of what?

And this is where I think we need practices of ingenuity—big, capacious bags of ingenious tricks—because these help us in the production of new reasons, or candidates for new reasons. These practices may range from play to the cultivation of friendships, from the making of art to the practice of divination. While these practices may involve many things that are not in themselves rational, it is precisely these kinds of ingenious things, when our reasons and reasoning have run out, that can be richly productive of new reasons.7

Divination and the Gamification of Choosing

So what is happening when friends in Taiwan use divination as a way of navigating hard choices? They are mustering their tenacity and ingenuity to respond to hard choices so that they can not only make up their minds, but also make up their lives in new and worthwhile ways.

Next time, I’ll go more deeply into poe divination, and suggest that we can think of divination as a kind of gamification of choosing, one that (like all games that are more than just a matter of chance) requires both tenacity and ingenuity. Seeing divination like this—as gamified choice—may open us up to the possibility of finding new ways of navigating the hard choices we all sometimes face.

But that’s all for this time: it’s been a long one, and so I will end here. Besides, given that I’m currently also preoccupied with searching for a new place for us to live, I have an appointment at the temple with the earth god, thó͘-tī-kong 土地公 (Mandarin tǔdìgōng). I’m reliably told that he is the very best god to ask, if I want assistance with the hard choices of where to move to, and when, and how to best wrangle Taiwanese real estate agents.

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A few years back, I published a book about the art of dealing with strangers. In the book, Hello, Stranger (Granta 2021), I made the case that finding better ways of dealing with strangers is one of the central problems of human life. Given that there are eight billion people on the planet, and we only know a few thousand of these, strangers are everywhere. We are outnumbered. And, very often, this fact terrifies us.

This is a fear that can be exploited by the unscrupulous. I wrote the book in the wake of Brexit, with its fevered dreams of taking back control, and in response to what I saw as a rising culture of inhospitality, much of it politically motivated. Since the book was published, this spiral of anti-stranger rhetoric seems only to have got worse, driven by a desire to exclude those who are not like ourselves, on the spurious grounds that this will somehow keep us safe (spoiler: it won’t).

So in Hello, Stranger, I made the case for thinking more deeply about the double art of hospitality—the art of welcoming strangers into our world, and the art of being welcomed by others. This double art is one we sorely need to get better at, if only because, of all the problems in life, the problem posed by strangers is unlikely to go away soon.

Since the book came out, I’ve found myself involved in lots of conversations about strangers, and about the arts of hospitality. And in these conversations, I’ve repeatedly come up against several things that, I think, get in the way of us thinking through these issues clearly. So here, I want to share four things I think we get wrong about strangers.

First, we assume xenophobia is the whole story—that we are inherently disposed to mistrust strangers. Second, we treat this xenophobia as always and everywhere bad, a moral failing to be eradicated or at least corrected. Third, we reduce all our difficulties with strangers to the problem of how to talk to strangers. And fourth, we imagine that, to remedy the problems we have with strangers, we should seek to befriend them.

I think that all of these are mistakes. And I think that, if we want to get better at dealing with strangers, these are ideas we could do without.

Our First Error: Xenophobia is the Whole Story

First, then, xenophobia—literally the fear of the stranger. The word, as is well known, comes from the Greek roots xenos and phobia, but it was coined only in 1880, in an article in the London Daily News (where it was paired with ‘xenomania’, a word that sadly never caught on).

In Ancient Greece, the xenos was the guest who turned up from afar, the one who didn’t belong to your world, but whom—because they were on your doorstep—needed to be dealt with one way or the other. When somebody turns up unannounced like this, their arrival prompts all kinds of questions: Who is this person? What are they up to? What is going on in their head? What are their intentions? Can they be trusted? These questions go deep, and running through them is an unmistakable thread of fear. I feel this fear too. In all my encounters with strangers, however positive, I suspect there is always some undercurrent of anxiety, or awkwardness, or unease.

But fear is by no means the only primary response we have to strangers, nor is it necessarily the most dominant one. Because this fear of strangers is often tempered by something else: by curiosity. Let me give an example. The other day, I was in a coffee shop here in Taiwan. The coffee shop had a dog, a neat little Shiba Inu, who was dressed (this being Taiwan) in a very smart tunic. Here he is.

Who would not want to be friends with such a dapper little guy? So I ordered a latte and sat down, very much hoping the dog would come over to introduce himself. However, to my disappointment, he at first treated me with suspicion. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, sidled around out of reach, and clearly thought I was not to be trusted.

I was upset, of course, but I didn’t exactly blame him. This was his world, after all, and I was the xenos, the stranger. So I went back to my book and pretended to ignore him. But as I read and drank my coffee, I noticed that—little by little—he was taking an interest in me. He came over, gave me a tentative sniff. I let my hand fall, and he licked it. I scratched him behind the ears. He seemed to like this. Then he rested his head on my leg (see the photo above), and I knew we were on the way to being friends.

As with dogs, so with human beings. We are afraid of strangers. But we are also curious. We want to know what they are up to. We want to hear their stories. We want to know what new possibilities they might bring us because—as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked—strangers bring us futures we cannot anticipate. They offer us something other than the same old thing, endless repetition.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this attitude of openness to strangers. They called it philoxenia, or ‘friendship with the stranger.’ Hearteningly, the roots of this word go back much further in history and literature than do the roots of the term ‘xenophobia.’ If the latter was coined in the 19th Century, ‘philoxenia’ reaches all the way back through Biblical Greek (‘Forget not to show love unto strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’ — Hebrews 13:2) to Homer.

So, when I think of my own unease in encountering strangers and strangeness, and how fear, anxiety and awkwardness run through them, I find myself having to acknowledge that I, like everyone else, am in part a natural xenophobe.

But this is not the whole story, because this fear is mixed with other things: curiosity, a desire to find out more, a desire to connect, to befriend. Or, in other words, philoxenia. If xenophobia is that which pushes us away from strangers and causes us to keep our distance, philoxenia is that which draws us closer. Both may be deeply rooted in us, but neither one more fundamental than the other. As a result, in our relationships with strangers, we find ourselves having to navigate between the two, between fear and curiosity, caught somewhere between anxiety and hope, trying to work out what our next move should be.

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Our Second Error: Xenophobia is Bad

The second thing we get wrong is we imagine that xenophobia, this fear and trembling in the face of the unfamiliar, is necessarily and always a bad thing. It is easy to treat xenophobia as an inherent flaw, as something we must eradicate. And there are certainly many manifestations of this fear that cause immense harm: exclusion, dehumanisation, hatred, or the rhetoric that seeks to diminish others on the grounds of them being different from ourselves. But, before our fear of strangers hardens into these things, a certain caution in the face of otherness is something we all possess, and it is not something to be entirely dismissed.

In Hello, Stranger, I wrote about my own experiments in hospitality over the years, as both host and guest: from giving strangers the keys to my house in the UK, to travelling alone as a teenager in Pakistan, to turning up in remote villages in Indonesia, in the hope of receiving the hospitality of strangers. After the book came out, some less attentive readers assumed my intention was to encourage readers to throw caution to the wind, opening their doors to all and any strangers. But that was never my aim. Indeed, in the book, I dedicated a whole chapter to the terrible things that can go wrong when strangers meet, from mass murder (Odysseus’s bad guests) to cannibalism (the Cyclops). And I drew on the work of the philosopher Onora O’Neill, who made the point that the demand that we should trust indiscriminately is pretty stupid.

Fear of the stranger can, in many cases, be useful. It is part of what keeps us safe from Cyclopes and other malefactors. As Odysseus knew, it makes sense to listen to our fear in the face of the unfamiliar. This fear may be telling us something, and this may be something on which our lives depend. All this is true. And yet, if we respond to strangers only on the basis of fear, we end up not more safe, but less. When travelling in remote parts of Pakistan as a skinny and vulnerable eighteen-year-old, staying in the cheapest hotels for a few rupees a night, I quickly discovered that universal mistrust was a terrible strategy. If you mistrust people, they can’t help you. They can’t offer you protection. Universal mistrust leaves you more isolated, and more open to being abused, exploited or harmed. So I learned to trust. Not indiscriminately, to be sure, but to trust all the same. And as I learned more how to trust, I found that people invited me into their homes, they helped me out, they looked after me, they protected me.

Trusting, I came to realise, may always be difficult and fraught, and may always come with risks, but ultimately, it kept me safer. In other words, while xenophobia may keep us safe to some extent, when this is our only response to strangers, we cut ourselves off from these networks of trust, and we thus undermine this safety we are seeking. And if trusting indiscriminately, as O’Neill writes, is stupid, so too is mistrusting indiscriminately.1 Of course, we need a justified and provisional caution. But we also need the curiosity that allows us to remain open to others. In this way, we can trust more judiciously, acknowledging both our fear and our curiosity, our xenophobia and our philoxenia: because this is where our best hope for safety and security lies.

Our Third Error: t’s All About the Talking

The third problem in how we think about strangers is our weird contemporary obsession with the problem of talking to strangers. Over recent years, there has been a rash of books and articles about how we need to get better at talking to strangers. I’m not sure where this obsession has come from, but it really is everywhere. See, for example, this piece from the Guardian, this article on Harvard research on happiness, this piece on Swedish hellos and the Säg hej! campaign, and Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers.

However, this obsession with talking gets in the way of the bigger picture. Yes, sometimes we might need to get better at talking to strangers. But the problem with strangers is not, first and foremost, a talking problem. That is to say, talking is neither the first and last word when it comes to finding better ways of managing our relationships with strangers. And, of course, it’s also a pretty exhausting solution to the problem: eight billion people makes for a hell of a lot of talking.

Besides talking, as we navigate our mutual claims to a shared world, there are all kinds of other ways we can relate to strangers. We can cook for them, eat with them, open doors for them in the shopping mall. We can give them space, smile at them, sleep with them, dance with them, trade with them. We can share conspiratorial glances with them as the train rolls into the station three hours late. We can do them the courtesy of ignoring them.

And all of this, one way or another, involves ritual. If, in Hello, Stranger, I don’t talk much about talking, I talk a lot about ritual. Borrowing from the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, I argue that ritual is the craft of building trust. Even simple rituals—opening the door for somebody, shaking hands, the polite awkwardness of goodbyes in the UK, and so on—help us manage the challenges of existing in the same space as strangers. Ritual helps us find out who we are dealing with. And good ritual, as Humphrey’s work on the ritual codes of Mongolia demonstrates, is a powerful way of offsetting the risks that strangers bring.

Ritual may involve talking. But to my mind, many of the questions we have about talking to strangers can be subsumed under bigger questions of ritual. And ritual doesn’t need to involve talking at all. Take, for example, my coffee-shop canine friend. You could see our interaction—ignoring him, letting my hand fall so that he could lick it, politely tickling him behind the ears—as part of a shared ritual that aimed at building trust.

So, while many of us have sometimes found ourselves tongue-tied when meeting strangers, and talking with strangers can sometimes be a problem, the bigger and more interesting question is this: what are the rituals—whether small and informal, or large and formal—that we need to help us get by with people we don’t know?

Our Fourth Error: Strangers Are Friends We Haven’t Met Yet

The final error I want to talk about is the stubbornly persistent idea that strangers are friends we haven’t met yet. You hear this a lot, but it is unhelpful. It suggests that, when we meet with strangers, our ultimate aim should be to make them less strange, to domesticate them, to make them friends.

And, of course, it’s fun to make friends. I was delighted when the coffee shop Shiba Inu and I started to become good pals. Nevertheless, the idea that we can or should seek to turn strangers into friends, allies, buddies or sidekicks seems a peculiar one. For one thing, the claim that strangers are friends we haven’t met yet is obviously untrue. Strangers, alas, are sometimes enemies we haven’t met yet (this is necessarily true: to the extent that we have enemies, there was once a time that they were strangers to us). The sheer ambivalence of the stranger is one reason that our mix of caution and curiosity, xenophobia and philoxenia, is so very useful to us. This cocktail helps us work out whether the person we are encountering is a potential friend or a potential enemy—or whether they are, more likely, just another person who happens to be kicking around in our vicinity, and who will, in time, wander off.

Pragmatically speaking, of course, the idea that we should seek to befriend strangers—or that the inevitable trajectory leads from stranger to friend—is clearly unworkable. We can’t befriend all eight billion people on the planet, or even all the people we run into on our morning commute. Any attempt to do so is to court exhaustion, and to be an annoyance to others.

But there’s something deeper that is wrong about this idea of strangers as friends we haven’t met yet. And that is in the refusal to allow strangers to be strange, even if this strangeness unsettles us. This brings me back to Levinas, who argues that there is something about the stranger that remains stubbornly strange, forever beyond our grasp.

Absence de patrie commune qui fait de l’Autre l’Etranger; l’Etranger qui trouble le chez soi. Mais Etranger veut dire aussi le libre. Sur lui je ne peux pouvoir. Il échappe à ma prise par un côté essentiel, même si je dispose de lui. Il n’est pas tout entier dans mon lieu.

It is the absence of a common homeland that makes the Other the Stranger; the Stranger who unsettles our being at home with ourselves. But ‘the Stranger’ also means ‘the free one.’ I can have no power over them. They escape my grasp in some essential way, even if I have them at my disposal. They are not entirely within my domain.2

The question, then, is not so much how we can tame this strangeness, but how we can find ways of relating to the stranger—managing our sense of being unsettled, while allowing the stranger to maintain their autonomy, their freedom. There is, to be sure, an ethics to seeking out friendship. But there is also an ethics, potentially a much more demanding one, to letting the coffee-shop Shiba Inu persist in his own way of being, without wanting to mould him into becoming a friend.

And this, it seems to me, is the true challenge: finding ways of living in a world of strangers without the restless desire to assimilate these strangers into the world as we envisage it. It is only when we recognise strangers as strangers, without trying to diminish their strangeness, that we see the real ethical challenges with which they present us. Only then—navigating between our justified caution and our curiosity, building trust where and how we can—can we start to invent new ways of thriving together, alive to the mystery of the fact we are surrounded by so many lives we can never fully understand.

Wayward Things is a free newsletter about philosophy, literature, culture, art, history, religion, and the big, bewildering business of human existence.

If you are receiving this newsletter, it is because once upon a time, perhaps in the dim and distant past, you signed up—either on my website willbuckingham.com, or via my earlier project Looking for Wisdom. If you want to continue receiving the newsletter, you don’t need to do anything special; but if you don’t, then just scroll down to the bottom and you can unsubscribe.

Taking Thoughts for A Walk

As this is a new start of sorts, I thought I’d say a bit about what I’m planning. I’ll be posting twice a month, (except during holiday periods). And most of what I’ll be doing is taking thoughts for a walk.

I’ve stolen this idea from a quote often attributed to the wonderful Swiss artist Paul Klee. I have loved Klee’s work since I was an art student in Northern England back in the 1990s. The quote, which you can find all over the internet, is this: ‘a drawing is a line going for a walk.’ While the quote is not entirely accurate, it certainly feels like something that Klee might have said. The closest source I can find is the first volume of Klee’s notebooks, The Thinking Eye, where the artist circles repeatedly around the connection between drawing and walking, describing a line that ‘goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.’1

So here, for the sheer fun of it, are some of Paul Klee’s lines, going for an aimless stroll.

I’ve stolen this idea here because I think that taking a thought for a walk seems like a good way of capturing something of my own approach to philosophy. There are lots of ways of imagining what philosophy is: rigorous critique, the clarification of concepts, a way of grappling with life’s fundamental questions, a grandiose quest to know the mind of God, or what have you. But for me, the kind of philosophy I like is the kind that takes thoughts for a walk, to see where it ends up.

In making use of this idea of taking a thought for a walk, I can’t claim any great originality. It’s an idea I’ve come across several times before. It was, for example, something the poet Andrew Motion talked about in an address at Manchester Cathedral in 2011. However, original or not, the idea of taking a thought for a walk not only captures well my own approach to philosophy, but it also taps into a longstanding connection between philosophy and walking. And it is a vision of philosophy that is fundamentally open-ended. When you take a thought for a walk, you never know quite where you are going, or what you will stumble upon. Going for a walk is not the same as walking somewhere. It is creativity, not transport. One of the philosophers I love, Michel Serres, writes in his book The Troubadour of Knowledge that philosophy is a kind of discovery, a process of finding. ‘Meaning,’ Serres insists, ‘is gained in walking.’2

And as you walk, this process of discovery happens in dialogue with the thoughts you bring along with you. Some of these may be admirably well-behaved and go wherever you lead them. Others are harder to manage, like big, unruly dogs—you leave the house thinking that you are taking them for a walk, but before too long, you realise it’s they who are taking you for a walk. As a result, you end up chasing them all over the place, finding yourself dragged here and there, and getting into all kinds of scrapes. And then there are those thoughts that, on the surface, look harmless and tame, trotting along beside you and lulling you into a false sense of security, but when you get them to the park and let them off the leash, they run riot, chasing the squirrels and causing havoc.

What all this means is that when taking thoughts for a walk, you never know what will happen, what you are going to find along the way, or where you are going to find yourself. And while this whole business can be sometimes perilous, it can also make the world much more interesting.

A Menagerie of Thoughts

All this is a way of saying that I have no clear destination for this newsletter: the business of taking thoughts for a walk is too unpredictable for that. But what I can share—here in my first post on this new platform—is a glimpse into the diverse menagerie of thoughts waiting patiently to be taken for a stroll. Here are some of them:

• Why, despite what we’re told, life really isn’t short (spoiler: it’s not long, either).

• How the obsession with talking to strangers (and advice about how we can get better at talking to strangers), is missing the point.

• What the revival of traditional weaving in Maluku, East Indonesia says about how stories, philosophies, and traditions are woven and re-woven.

• Why divination is unreasonable—but why sometimes being unreasonable is the most reasonable choice.

• Park-keepers, bureaucrats and the apocalypse: what the Moomins have to teach us about life’s greatest perils.

• How an offer to bake scones for a friend led to my accidentally joining a cult.

• Why there is no such thing as the “human condition”.

In the mix with all this will be bits and pieces about projects I’m working on, snippets of music, art, books, poems, translations… Because one of the things about taking thoughts for a walk is that, along the way, you pick up all kinds of detritus—all kinds of small treasures—to fill your pockets.

As for where this will all lead… As yet, there’s no way of telling. The Zhuangzi puts it best: 道行之而成. It is through walking that the path becomes a path. So who knows what new paths will open up? But I hope you join me on these small adventures, and if you know anybody who might like this newsletter, and who wants to come along for the ride, please share it with them as well.

All the best, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks,

Will