The man who moves easily does not know he has a body. His limbs obey and he never thinks to be grateful. Only when something breaks does he discover he was a system all along.
So it is with the mind.
You probably already know when to rest.
You feel tired, you stop. You feel disconnected, you reach out. The transitions happen without your naming them. Some invisible mechanism tilts you back toward center before you notice you had drifted.
This is not virtue. This is firmware. Pre-installed. Inherited.
The easy mind runs its maintenance cycle the way the easy heart beats—without instruction, without effort, without awareness that anything is happening at all.
Some of us do not have this.
We discover we are systems only when the system fails.
We look down at our hands and they are trembling and we think: how long have I been here? We go weeks without rest and mistake the numbness for clarity. We sit with people we love and feel ourselves performing a simulation of presence—nodding at the right moments, asking the right questions—and afterward we cannot remember what was said.
We were never in the room. We were running a program called "being in the room."
The cycle exists for us too. We are simply not synced to it.
Three modes. The mind moves between them.
Slash: the machete. Forward motion. Results. The satisfaction of completion—instinctual, immediate, requiring no meaning. The blade feels good in the hand. Things needed cutting; you cut them.
Build: the cathedral. Deep work. Systems. The hours where you construct what did not exist before. It swallows days. You look up and a week has passed and something real stands before you and you cannot remember building it.
Nest: the burrow. Receiving. Integration. Sitting in the car after the store, not ready to go inside yet. The show you watch without needing to learn anything from it. Input settling without being converted to output. It resembles rest but it is not rest. It is the becoming-ready.
Every domain of life requires all three.
Work. Family. The self.
You cannot slash at your marriage and wonder why it feels like a transaction. You cannot build endlessly and wonder why you dream of burning it down. You cannot nest perpetually and wonder why nothing moves.
The cycle is the thing. Not the individual mode—the movement between them.
When something rots, look for the mode you have abandoned.
The man who runs on firmware does not know he is running on anything.
He feels off; he takes a walk. He feels disconnected; he calls a friend. He does not know why it works. The gyroscope tilts and he tilts with it, automatically, the way a bird finds the thermal without studying aerodynamics.
The man who runs on software must see the code.
This is not a flaw to be corrected. It is a condition to be understood.
Why does one man inherit firmware and another receive only source code?
The causes layer. They do not reduce to one. The reasons matter less than the recognition: some of us must run manually what others run without trying.
But there is one cause worth naming.
Some of us had our operating systems run by others.
Religion told me when to rest—Sabbath, mandatory, non-negotiable. Religion told me when to work—six days, dominion, building the kingdom. Religion told me when to be with others—church, fellowship, the structured week that made solitude nearly impossible.
The cycle was handled. I did not have to see it because I did not have to run it.
The walls were built by others. I walked between them.
This worked.
I must say this clearly: it worked. I did not burn out. I did not lose myself in the groove. The firmware was not mine but it was functional.
The cage was also a home.
Then I left.
The beliefs first, then the practices, then the people. And I stood in an open field with no walls, no paths, no one to tell me when to stop.
I had to build the scaffolding while standing on it.
The map everyone else was born holding—I had to draw mine in the dark.
A word on what helps.
The brain builds grooves. Repetition deepens them. You run the same loops, make the same transitions—or fail to make them—until the pattern feels like identity.
But the grooves are not permanent.
Psychedelics. Crisis. Conversation. The long walk where you finally permit yourself to think the thing you have been avoiding. These are pattern-breakers. They show you that the path you have been running is not the only path. The software can be rewritten.
The map is not fixed. But first you must see that you are running one at all.
I offer no program.
I have no method that will fix you in twelve weeks.
I have a framework I built in the dark because I needed to know where I was standing.
Slash. Build. Nest.
Work. Family. Self.
When something feels wrong, I ask: which mode have I abandoned? The answer is usually obvious once I consent to look.
It is harder than firmware.
Some days this feels like freedom. I built this. I know how it works. I can see the code.
Other days it feels like grief. I built this because I had to. Because the inherited system did not work for me. Because the institution that ran my operating system was a prison dressed as a home.
I am free now and I am also tired.
Both are true. I hold them both.
The man who moves easily does not know he has a body.
I know.
I have had to learn every system that others run without seeing. The cost is exhaustion. The gift is sight.
And I am learning, slowly, to stop fighting it—to let the machete rest when there is nothing to cut, to leave the cathedral before it becomes a tomb, to sit in the car a little longer without calling it weakness.
The map is not perfect. I drew it in the dark.
But I can see where I am.
