Substrate

“emotional intelligence” has become an organizing principal for my moving through, and responding to the world. It’s become a prime characteristic by which I qualify who I want to be spending more time with.

And so the best ridgelines are not only in conversation with the past, they are embedded with that conversation — like paleolithic braille.

A sign of great hardware and software is in forgetting about it, smoothly allowing it to integrate with your life — drawing fluency from it. ​ Speed and reliability are often intuited hand-in-hand. Speed can be a good proxy for general engineering quality.

The biggest Koya Bound design challenge we faced was in transposing a time-bounded, linear series of photographs into a sequence unbounded from time but still connected to the emotional pulse of the eight days. Arriving at the next inn, we’d shed our soaked clothes, quickly slip into scalding waters, eat a sometimes lavish, sometimes spartan dinner, and sleep the sleep that well worn bodies sleep. Waking to do it all again the next day. This is why you must always give a book enough time to be made. A book must be allowed to sit still, set up shop in the back of your mind, hone your eyes so they’re receptive to the right inspirations at the right times. The goal of Koya Bound was just the opposite — to give physicality to a space without walls, being both bound for a place, and bounded by publishing. Is it possible to hold a walk in your hands?

Suddenly being forced to stay still

And so here we are: leaning on an open, beautifully staid, inert protocol. SMTP as our savior. ​ Mr. Chimero almost never writes but when he does makes the day a good day. ​ These newsletters are the most backed up pieces of writing in history, copies in millions of inboxes, on millions of hard drives and servers, far more than any blog post.

“For a ‘book’ is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year. The Future Book is here and continues to evolve. You’re holding it. It’s exciting. It’s boring. It’s more important than it has ever been.”

To leave something important to you unrefined — uniterated, firstdrafted — is the laziest safety net you can deploy.