There’s an old adage — okay, actually it’s not that old, to me at least — about offering help. To help someone or something else will ultimately help yourself, too, if you keep your eyes open. Not too eagerly. Not in charging credit against your karma. You approach the offer selflessly. And while maybe not right away, there will be a form of reciprocating.
In clearing out old shelves in the closet, in those deep recesses of the upper reaches of the attic, I excavated a few sheets of paper from a few decades earlier, sandwiched between my old binders. I read them with the fresh eyes of an archaeologist re-discovering his own past life.
Only vaguely could I remember this letter from a friend. But I remembered the period — mid-adolescence, early-high school, still-early-internet. When we were eager to learn about mysteries but the world hadn’t quite yet shifted to let everything fall through into microcosms of rehearsals of false beliefs.
I remembered the domain name I wrote down at the bottom of the sheet, like a second signature. Something prescient and important but surprisingly antiquated (the domain was defunct and for sale).