The Ritual of Writing.

Every year I try to read 52 books.

One of the best books I read last year was “ The Book of Alchemy” by Suleika Jaouad.

“The Book of Alchemy” is a unique compilation of essays on essential human concerns such as memory, love, fear, and rebuilding, by the book’s author, interspersed by short pieces on the topic by a range of artists, scientists, business leaders and more. Each short piece ends with a prompt encouraging the reader to think about and ideally write down their answers to the prompt.

Here are three prompts as an example:

What would you write if you were not afraid?

Today everywhere one senses fear. People are frozen doing jobs they dislike, working for people they do not respect, doing things they do not want to, all because of the very human emotion of fear. This prompt gets one thinking on the topic.

“You just have to be one percent more curious than afraid” Suleika Jaouad

“You don’t have to be particularly brave. You just have to be a tiny, tiny bit more interested in something than you are frightened of it” Elizabeth Gilbert.

Goodbyes make room for something new.

And

“And as an artist, it was my biggest epiphany-that the most civilized thing we can do as a human is to change the story. We can always, always, change the story.”

Think of an inherited story that needs your changing-in your own life, in your family, in your hometown, in your country. How was it told to you? How will you tell it differently?”

This is a prompt that reminds us that we all have agency. That we can determine how our stories are written and not let others take the wheel of our life’s journey. That the histories and traditions handed down over the centuries can be interrogated, questioned and changed.

We can change our own stories.

And

“How are you really?”

Next time when we ask someone how they are and they say they are fine, we might consider following up with the question above.

Or write down the answer on how we are feeling internally despite the external brave face and our answer that everything is okay.

The book is ostensibly one that encourages journalling. The ritual of writing every day on a topic or topics of our choice. The prompts help one overcome writers block and provide stimulus for writing.

It helps us create rituals and in the ritual often is the meaning.

“Writing is how I translate my life to myself. And I have given my life a voice by writing it down.” Ann Parsons Story.

But this book is about much more than writing or journaling.

It is about paying attention to life as it passes by. Of taking time to think and feel and consider versus respond. About seeing, noticing and observing.

One of the prompts asks us to remember the ten images that defined the day. If at the end of every day we knew we had to make such a list, would we not pay more attention?

For it is between the stimulus and the response that we are uniquely us.

‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom” Victor Frankl.

And here is another reason to get the book. You can ask your favorite Alien Intelligence to respond to each prompt. And the response makes you also think.

Here is one prompt in the book that I asked Claude 4.6 to respond to.

Write about a time when you had a pressing question and nature provided the answer?

Claude’s answer below also came with a title “What the River Knew.”

What the River Knew

There was a summer when I couldn’t stop asking the same question: Is it better to hold on, or to let go?

It sounds abstract now, stripped of context. But at the time it had weight and edges. I carried it the way you carry a stone in your pocket — always aware of it, fingers returning to it without thinking.

I had driven to a river without any particular intention. Just the vague instinct that moving water might unstick something in me. I sat on a flat rock at the bank and watched.

The river, I noticed, didn’t deliberate. It didn’t choose to release the leaf that had fallen onto its surface. It simply moved, and the leaf moved with it. But the rock I was sitting on — the river moved around that, reshaping itself, carving new paths, neither surrendering to the obstacle nor pretending it wasn’t there.

I watched this for a long time. Probably longer than anyone should sit watching a river, looking slightly unhinged from the bank’s perspective.

And something clarified: the question I’d been asking was wrong. It wasn’t hold on or let go — as if those were the only two dignified options. The river suggested a third way. You could be changed by what you meet. You could route around it. You could, over enormous time, wear it down entirely. But you didn’t have to resolve it into a single clean act of grasping or releasing.

I drove home still carrying the stone. But it felt different in my pocket — more like a keepsake than a burden. The river hadn’t answered my question. It had quietly replaced it with a better one.

Nature has a way of doing that — not solving our problems so much as reframing them until the original urgency loosens its grip.

A compelling answer from Claude 4.6

But now a little extract from a human, the late John Binkley who after losing his wife Sherrie after 46 years of marriage began writing letters to her after she had succumbed to a 3 year fight with cancer.

One of the pieces in Suleika’s book is an extract from a letter in a piece called “Across the Gulf of Space Time”.

He speaks about how they worked together over three years to fight together against her cancer…

“Damn the skeptics. Crush the fences. Transcend the static, whatever the interferences, to enable us to carry on the teamwork. The oneness. I don’t need to understand it to embrace it. To live by it. To profit from it. There are no rules. No tracks on the snow on this one.

Be patient, Sherrie, with my learning how to do this. Show me once more the tolerance that has marked our 46 years together, from the beginning.

I love you.

Pook.”