Remembered, not erased · not a book club
Reading Journey
Conversations
Conversations, not reviews. Old wisdom. Modern life.
Despite all our progress, the same questions keep returning. What is a good life? How do we stay honest, brave and kind, as we move through our beautiful, ordinary lives, with all their hidden pressures?
In Conversations. I sit with books — old and new — and let them argue with my real life: illness and work, love and responsibility, fatigue and hope. The great books are part of a long chain of writers reading and answering one another; this is where I take my seat in that conversation and ask what still holds, and how to live it now.
Come read with me — and take your seat in the conversation.
Conversations is just beginning. New essays will be added here on Wednesdays.
Until then, you’re welcome to wander the Quite Archive or start in Notes from Becoming.
Browse the conversations
Start wherever you feel drawn — each essay stands alone, but they’re all part of the same reading journey
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When Pressure Raises the Price
Under pressure, agency doesn’t vanish — it becomes expensive. A reflection on responsibility, drift, and growth when action carries real cost.
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Who Decides Who Is Capable?
Two books on a table — a tradesman’s manual and a philosophy text — raise a quiet question: who is serious formation really for? If liberal education is reserved for the capable few, someone must decide who is capable.
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When Facts Don’t Tell You What To Do
Experimental science has given us extraordinary power, but it cannot answer every question that matters. This essay explores what it costs us if we mistake method for wisdom — and why thinking, judgement, and imagination must remain intact if we are to stay fully human.
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Choosing a Colour
A reflective Conversations essay on judgment, formation, and learning how to choose who we are — without erasing ourselves in the name of tolerance or certainty.
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Freedom Without Formation
A reflective essay on freedom, attention, and why choice collapses when we’re not
taught how to direct our own thinking. -
On the Pause Between Texts
A quiet year-end reflection on reading as orientation rather than accumulation — and the pause between texts where meaning continues to unfold.
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On Being Formed · A conversation with Adler
A quiet reflection on how life shapes us before we choose — and how leisure, pace, and attention form the kind of person we become.
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On Being Free
A quiet reflection on leisure, and the modern struggle to use our freedom well — what it asks of us as ordinary people living ordinary days.
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On Being Human Adler
From a farm table in 2025, with Mortimer Adler’s Great Conversation on my lap, I’m asking what it means to be a successful human being now — beyond outcomes, performance, and profiles — and how far I’m willing to develop my own humanity.
If you’d like support facing your own hard questions, visit Coaching with Jo-Anne.