Reflection on first-folio.demo.lobb.ie

Three Things I Learned from a Broken Compass

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I bought a compass at a market in Galway. It was brass, heavy, and completely unreliable. It pointed south-southwest regardless of where you stood. I kept it anyway.

Thing one: certainty is overrated

The compass was wrong, but it was consistently wrong. After a while, I learned to compensate. I knew that wherever it pointed, north was roughly 200 degrees the other way. A broken instrument you understand is more useful than a working one you don’t.

Thing two: all tools are extensions of intention

The compass didn’t find north. I found north, using the compass as a reference point. The tool didn’t do the work — it gave me something to push against. Most tools work this way, if you’re honest about it.

Thing three: keep the broken things

I still have the compass. It sits on a shelf next to a clock that runs fast and a pen that skips. These objects remind me that imperfection is not the same as uselessness.

Note
This piece exists to demonstrate the details and callout shortcodes. The compass is fictional. The sentiment is not.

Morning Routines

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There is a particular quality to the first hour of the day, before the world has fully arrived. The kettle. The notebook. The light that comes in low and long.

Morning routines are not about productivity. They are about the small rituals that make a person feel like themselves before the day asks them to be something else.

The French press takes four minutes. That is enough time to write three sentences. Three sentences, over a year, is a book.

On Walking

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular quality to ideas that arrive while walking. They come unbidden, fully formed, as though they’d been waiting for you to stop sitting still.

Nietzsche said it: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Kierkegaard walked the streets of Copenhagen for hours. Wordsworth logged an estimated 180,000 miles on foot. These are not coincidences.

The rhythm of walking does something that sitting cannot. It loosens the grip of the analytical mind and lets the associative mind wander. Step, step, step — and suddenly the solution to a problem you hadn’t been thinking about appears.